Should see her charms, but mine!''

In ``Dear Old London'' the poet wailed that ``a splendid Horace
cheap for cash'' laughed at his poverty, and in ``Dibdin's
Ghost'' he revelled in the delights that await the bibliomaniac
in the future state, where there is no admission to the women
folk who, ``wanting victuals, make a fuss if we buy books
instead''; while in ``Flail, Trask and Bisland'' is the very
essence of bibliomania, the unquenchable thirst for possession.
And yet, despite these self-accusations, bibliophily rather than
bibliomania would be the word to characterize his conscientious
purpose. If he purchased quaint and rare books it was to own
them to the full extent, inwardly as well as outwardly. The
mania for books kept him continually buying; the love of books
supervened to make them a part of himself and his life.

Toward the close of August of the present year my brother wrote
the first chapter of ``The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.''
At that time he was in an exhausted physical condition and
apparently unfit for any protracted literary labor. But the
prospect of gratifying a long-cherished ambition, the delight of
beginning the story he had planned so hopefully, seemed to give
him new strength, and he threw himself into the work with an
enthusiasm that was, alas, misleading to those who had noted
fearfully his declining vigor of body. For years no literary
occupation had seemed to give him equal pleasure, and in the
discussion of the progress of his writing from day to day his eye
would brighten, all of his old animation would return, and
everything would betray the lively interest he felt in the
creature of his imagination in whom he was living over the