carries a grey crest, and the head low, bowed over the bosom; as to
his crowing noise, it comes of his clashing his wings against each
other with an incessant din." Thus far Mentzelius, and more to the
same purpose, as may be read in the "Memoirs of famous Foreign
Academies" (Dijon, 1755-59, 13 vol. in quarto). But, in our times,
the learned Mr. Blades having a desire to exhibit book-worms in the
body to the Caxtonians at the Caxton celebration, could find few men
that had so much as seen a book-worm, much less heard him utter his
native wood-notes wild. Yet, in his "Enemies of Books," he
describes some rare encounters with the worm. Dirty books, damp
books, dusty books, and books that the owner never opens, are most
exposed to the enemy; and "the worm, the proud worm, is the
conqueror still," as a didactic poet sings, in an ode on man's
mortality. As we have quoted Mentzelius, it may not be amiss to
give D'Alembert's theory of book-worms: "I believe," he says, "that
a little beetle lays her eggs in books in August, thence is hatched
a mite, like the cheese-mite, which devours books merely because it
is compelled to gnaw its way out into the air." Book-worms like the
paste which binders employ, but D'Alembert adds that they cannot
endure absinthe. Mr. Blades finds too that they disdain to devour
our adulterate modern paper.

"Say, shall I sing of rats," asked Grainger, when reading to Johnson
his epic, the "Sugar-cane." "No," said the Doctor; and though rats
are the foe of the bibliophile, at least as much as of the sugar-
planter, we do not propose to sing of them. M. Fertiault has done
so already in "Les Sonnets d'un Bibliophile," where the reader must
be pleased with the beautiful etchings of rats devouring an
illuminated MS., and battening on morocco bindings stamped with the
bees of De Thou. It is unnecessary and it would be undignified, to