Suckling's "Fragmenta Aurea" contain a good deal of dross, and most
of the gold has been gathered into Miscellanies, but the original
edition of 1646, "after his own copies," with the portrait of the
jolly cavalier who died aetatis suae 28, has its own allurement.
Theocritus is more easily read, perhaps, in Wordsworth's edition, or
Ziegler's; but that which Zacharias Calliergi printed in Rome
(1516), with an excommunication from Leo X. against infringement of
copyright, will always be a beautiful and desirable book, especially
when bound by Derome. The gist of the pious Prince Conti's
strictures on the wickedness of comedy may be read in various
literary histories, but it is natural to like his "Traite de la
Comedie selon la tradition de l'Eglise, Tiree des Conciles et des
saints Peres," published by Lovys Billaine in 1660, especially when
the tract is a clean copy, arrayed in a decorous black morocco.

These are but a few common examples, chosen from a meagre little
library, a "twopenny treasure-house," but they illustrate, on a
minute scale, the nature of the collector's passion,--the character
of his innocent pleasures. He occasionally lights on other literary
relics of a more personal character than mere first editions. A
lucky collector lately bought Shelley's copy of Ossian, with the
poet's signature on the title-page, in Booksellers' Row. Another
possesses a copy of Foppens's rare edition of Petrarch's "Le Sage
Resolu contre l'une et l'autre Fortune," which once belonged to Sir
Hudson Lowe, the gaoler of Napoleon, and may have fortified, by its
stoical maxims, the soul of one who knew the extremes of either
fortune, the captive of St. Helena. But the best example of a book,
which is also a relic, is the "Imitatio Christi," which belonged to
J. J. Rousseau. Let M. Tenant de Latour, lately the happy owner of
this possession, tell his own story of his treasure: It was in 1827