The Book-Hunter Part 8

On Tuesday, 9th August, there was a slight improvement, which continued throughout the night.

On Wednesday, 10th, the improvement seemed more marked till about ten A.M. About that time a change in the countenance was observed. On the doctor's visit about twelve he p.r.o.nounced the case all but hopeless, and five hours later life was extinct. Consciousness remained till almost the last moment. The illness was attended by no bodily pain, little even of uneasiness, and the mind was calm and placid throughout.

Since the beginning of illness, nine months before, the natural irritability, or impatience of temper, had been diminis.h.i.+ng. Dr Burton was by no means, as all his friends seemed to suppose, a fretful or unreasonable invalid. With but few exceptions he was gentle and grateful to his attendants, especially to his wife. He was perfectly aware of his own condition, though never directly told it. His friend Mr Belcombe, the clergyman of the Episcopal Chapel at Morningside, called for him on Tuesday, 9th August, was received by him with pleasure, and spent some time with him. Dr Burton had been brought up an Episcopalian, and continued attached to the Moderate party in that Church through life.

It can hardly be expected that the writer should offer a critical estimate of one so lately dead, and so nearly related to her. In the preceding sketch she has endeavoured to inform the public on all particulars in which they might be supposed interested in the life of a man who served them during life with considerable acceptance. His voluminous works may speak for themselves, or find a more competent exponent than the present writer. She has endeavoured to give a picture of himself.

John Hill Burton can never have been handsome, and he so determinedly neglected his person as to increase its natural defects. His greatest mental defect was an almost entire want of imagination. From this cause the characters of those nearest and dearest to him remained to his life's end a sealed book.

He was fond of talking, and still fonder of writing, about character; but even his liveliest pictures, such as that of De Quincey the opium-eater, are but a collection of external habits or peculiarities, not necessarily bearing at all on the real nature--the inner man. His was the sort of mind which more naturally cla.s.sifies than individualises, in this agreeing with the late Mr Buckle, who appreciated Dr Burton's historical labours, and was in his turn appreciated by him. To both, individual character seemed a small subject not worth study.

The characters of women, especially, were by Dr Burton all placed in the same category. He conceived of them all as baby-wors.h.i.+ppers, flower-lovers, &c.--all alike.

Dr Burton was excessively kind-hearted within the limits placed by this great want. To any sorrow or suffering which he could understand he craved with characteristic impatience to carry immediate relief; and the greatest enjoyment of his life, especially of its later years, was to give pleasure to children, poor people, or the lower animals. Many humble folks will remember the bunches of flowers he thrust silently into their hands, and the refreshment he never failed to press on their acceptance in his own peculiar manner.

He was liberal of money to a fault. He never refused any application even from a street beggar. He quite allowed that these ought not to be encouraged, but he urged that the munic.i.p.ality ought to take charge of them, and prevent their appealing to the compa.s.sion of the public, who could not, as he said, be expected to perform the disagreeable task of disciplining vagrants at the wages of a penny a case. No printer's devil or other chance messenger failed to receive his sixpence or s.h.i.+lling, besides a comfortable meal. It was his constant custom to ask his sons if any of their wants were unsupplied, if they required money for furnis.h.i.+ng their workshop or laboratory, or for any of their studies or amus.e.m.e.nts. It is but just to them to add that the question was almost always answered in the negative.

Many of the "motley crew" along with whom Dr Burton received his education fell into difficulties in the course of their lives. An application from one of them always met with a prompt response. To send double the amount asked on such occasions was his rule, if money was the object desired. In his earlier life he would also spare no trouble in endeavouring to help these unfortunates to help themselves. As he grew old he was less zealous, probably from being less sanguine of success, in this service.

On Sat.u.r.day the 13th of August the mortal remains of John Hill Burton were laid beside those of his infant child in the lovely little churchyard of Dalmeny. It had been at first intended that he should be buried in the Dean Cemetery, where his mother and his first wife were interred, and where his valued friend William Brodie[22] had erected a beautiful monument over their graves; but after orders had been given to this effect, his wife became strongly possessed by the wish to carry out his repeatedly expressed injunction to have him laid in Dalmeny.

[Footnote 22: Since deceased--October 30, 1881--and also buried there.]

KATHARINE BURTON.

MORTON, _20th September 1881_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Dalmeny Church._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Nook in the Author's Library.]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

THE BOOK-HUNTER.

_PART I.--HIS NATURE._

Introductory.

Of the t.i.tle under which the contents of the following pages are ranged I have no better justification to offer than that it appeared to suit their discursive tenor. If they laid any claim to a scientific character, or professed to contain an exposition of any established department of knowledge, it might have been their privilege to appear under a t.i.tle of Greek derivation, with all the dignities and immunities conceded by immemorial deference to this stamp of scientific rank. I not only, however, consider my own trifles unworthy of such a dignity, but am inclined to strip it from other productions which might appear to have a more appropriate claim to it. No doubt, the ductile inflections and wonderful facilities for decomposition and reconstruction make Greek an excellent vehicle of scientific precision, and the use of a dead language saves your nomenclature from being confounded with your common talk. The use of a Greek derivative gives notice that you are scientific. If you speak of an acanthopterygian, it is plain that you are not discussing perch in reference to its roasting or boiling merits; and if you make an allusion to monomyarian malacology, it will not naturally be supposed to have reference to the cooking of oyster sauce.

Like many other meritorious things, however, Greek nomenclature is much abused. The very reverence it is held in--the strong disinclination on the part of the public to question the accuracy of anything stated under the shadow of a Greek name, or to doubt the infallibility of the man who does it--makes this kind of nomenclature the frequent protector of fallacies and quackeries. It is an instrument for silencing inquiry and handing over the judgment to implicit belief. Get the pa.s.sive student once into palaeozoology, and he takes your other hard names--your ichthyodorulite, trogontherium, lepidodendron, and bothrodendron--for granted, contemplating them, indeed, with a kind of religious awe or devotional reverence. If it be a question whether a term is categorematic, or is of a quite opposite description, and ought to be described as _sun_categorematic, one may take up a very absolute positive position without finding many people prepared to a.s.sail it.

Antiquarianism, which used to be an easy-going slipshod sort of pursuit, has sought this all-powerful protection, and called itself Archaeology.

An obliterated ma.n.u.script written over again is called a palimpsest, and the man who can restore and read it a paleographist. The great erect stone on the moor, which has. .h.i.therto defied all learning to find the faintest trace of the age in which it was erected, its purpose, or the people who placed it there, seems as it were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished when the import of the term was fully explained to him. Should there be any remains of sculpture on such a stone, it becomes a lithoglyph or a hieroglyph; and if the nature and end of this sculpture be quite incomprehensible to the adepts, they may term it a cryptoglyph, and thus dignify, by a sort of t.i.tle of honour, the absoluteness of their ignorance. It were a pity if any more ingenious man should afterwards find a key to the mystery, and destroy the significance of the established nomenclature.

The vendors of quack medicines and cosmetics are aware of the power of Greek nomenclature, and apparently subsidise scholars of some kind or other to supply them with the article. A sort of shaving soap used frequently to be advertised under a t.i.tle which was as complexly adjusted a piece of mosaic work as the geologists or the conchologists ever turned out. But perhaps the confidence in the protective power of Greek designations lately reached its climax, in an attempt to save thieves from punishment by calling them kleptomaniacs.

It is possible that, were I to attempt to dignify the cla.s.s of men to whom the following sketches are devoted by an appropriate scientific t.i.tle, a difficulty would start up at the very beginning. As the reader will perhaps see, from the tenor of my discourse, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad--to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic.

On the whole, I am content with my first idea, and continue to stick to the t.i.tle of "The Book-Hunter," with all the more a.s.surance that it has been tolerated, and even liked, by readers of the kind I am most ambitious of pleasing.[23]

[Footnote 23: To afford the reader, however, an opportunity of noting at a glance the appropriate learned terms applicable to the different sets of persons who meddle with books, I subjoin the following definitions, as rendered in D'Israeli's Curiosities, from the Cha.s.se aux Bibliographes et aux Antiquaires mal avises of Jean Joseph Rive:--

"A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in t.i.tle-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book."--"A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements."--"A bibliomane is an indiscriminate acc.u.mulator, who blunders faster than he buys, c.o.c.k-brained and purse-heavy."--"A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the cla.s.s who appears to read them for his own pleasure."--"A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in gla.s.s-cases."

The accurate Peignot, after accepting of this cla.s.sification with high admiration of its simplicity and exhaustiveness, is seized in his supplementary volume with a misgiving in the matter of the bibliotaphe, explaining that it ought to be translated as a grave of books, and that the proper technical expression for the performer referred to by Rive, is bibliothapt. He adds to the nomenclature bibliolyte, as a destroyer of books; bibliologue, one who discourses about books; bibliotacte, a cla.s.sifier of books; and bibliopee, "_l'art d'ecrire ou de composer des livres_," or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author. Of the dignity with which this writer can invest the objects of his nomenclature, take the following specimen from his description of the bibliographe:--

"Nothing is rarer than to deserve the t.i.tle of bibliographe, and nothing more difficult and laborious than to attain a just t.i.tle to it.

"Bibliography being the most universal and extensive of all sciences, it would appear that all subjects should come under the consideration of the bibliographe; languages, logic, criticism, philosophy, eloquence, mathematics, geography, chronology, history, are no strangers to him; the history of printing and of celebrated printers is familiar to him, as well as all the operations of the typographic art. He is continually occupied with the works of the ancients and the moderns; he makes it his business to know books useful, rare, and curious, not only by their t.i.tles and form, but by their contents; he spends his life in a.n.a.lysing, cla.s.sifying, and describing them. He seeks out those which are recommended by talented authors; he runs through libraries and cabinets to increase the sum of his knowledge; he studies authors who have treated of the science of books, he points out their errors; he chooses from among new productions those which bear the stamp of genius, and which will live in men's memories; he ransacks periodicals to keep himself well up to the discoveries of his age, and compare them with those of ages past; he is greedy of all works which treat of libraries, particularly catalogues, when they are well constructed and well arranged, and their price adds to their value. Such is the genuine _Bibliographe_." This reminds one of the old Roman jurists, who briefly defined their own science as the knowledge of things human and divine.]

Few wiser things have ever been said than that remark of Byron's, that "man is an unfortunate fellow, and ever will be." Perhaps the originality of the fundamental idea it expresses may be questioned, on the ground that the same warning has been enounced in far more solemn language, and from a far more august authority. But there is originality in the vulgar everyday-world way of putting the idea, and this makes it suit the present purpose, in which, a human frailty having to be dealt with, there is no intention to be either devout or philosophical about it, but to treat it in a thoroughly worldly and practical tone, and in this temper to judge of its place among the defects and ills to which flesh is heir. It were better, perhaps, if we human creatures sometimes did this, and discussed our common frailties as each himself partaking of them, than that we should mount, as we are so apt to do, into the clouds of theology or of ethics, according as our temperament and training are of the serious or of the intellectual order. True, there are many of our brethren violently ready to proclaim themselves frail mortals, miserable sinners, and no better, in theological phraseology, than the greatest of criminals. But such has been my own unfortunate experience in life, that whenever I find a man coming forward with these self-denunciations on his lips, I am prepared for an exhibition of intolerance, spiritual pride, and envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, towards any poor fellow-creature who has floundered a little out of the straight path, and being all too conscious of his errors, is not prepared to proclaim them in those broad emphatic terms which come so readily to the lips of the censors, who at heart believe themselves spotless,--just as complaints about poverty, and inability to buy this and that, come from the fat lips of the millionaire, when he shows you his gallery of pictures, his stud, and his forcing-frames.

No; it is hard to choose between the two. The man who has no defect or crack in his character--no tinge of even the minor immoralities--no fantastic humour carrying him sometimes off his feet--no preposterous hobby--such a man, walking straight along the surface of this world in the arc of a circle, is a very dangerous character, no doubt; of such all children, dogs, simpletons, and other creatures that have the instinct of the odious in their nature, feel an innate loathing. And yet it is questionable if your perfectionised Sir Charles Grandison is quite so dangerous a character as your "miserable sinner," vociferously conscious that he is the frailest of the frail, and that he can do no good thing of himself. And indeed, in practice, the external symptoms of these two characteristics have been known so to alternate in one disposition as to render it evident that each is but the same moral nature under a different external aspect,--the mask, cowl, varnish, crust, or whatever you like to call it, having been adapted to the external conditions of the man--that is, to the society he mixes in, the set he belongs to, the habits of the age, and the way in which he proposes to get on in life. It is when the occasion arises for the mask being thrown aside, or when the internal pa.s.sions burst like a volcano through the crust, that terrible events take place, and the world throbs with the excitement of some wonderful criminal trial.[24]

[Footnote 24: It has often been observed that it is among the Society of Friends, who keep so tight a rein on the pa.s.sions and propensities, that these make the most terrible work when they break loose. De Quincey, in one of his essays on his contemporaries, giving a sketch of a man of great genius and high scholars.h.i.+p, whose life was early clouded by insanity, gives some curious statements about the effects of the system of rigid restraint exercised by the Society of Friends, which I am not prepared either to support or contradict. After describing the system of restraint itself, he says: "This is known, but it is not equally known that this unnatural restraint, falling into collision with two forces at once--the force of pa.s.sion and of youth--not unfrequently records its own injurious tendencies, and publishes the rebellious movements of nature by distinct and anomalous diseases. And, further, I have been a.s.sured, upon most excellent authority, that these diseases--strange and elaborate affections of the nervous system--are found _exclusively_ among the young men and women of the Quaker Society; that they are known and understood exclusively amongst physicians who have practised in great towns having a large Quaker population, such as Birmingham; that they a.s.sume a new type and a more inveterate character in the second or third generation, to whom this fatal inheritance is often transmitted; and, finally, that if this cla.s.s of nervous derangements does not increase so much as to attract public attention, it is simply because the community itself--the Quaker body--does not increase, but, on the contrary, is rather on the wane."

There exist many good stories which have for their point the pa.s.sions of the natural man breaking forth, in members of this persuasion, in a shape more droll than distressing. One of the best of these is a north-country anecdote preserved by Francis Douglas in his Description of the East Coast of Scotland. The hero was the first Quaker of that Barclay family which produced the apologist and the pugilist. He was a colonel in the great civil wars, and had seen wild work in his day; but in his old age a change came over him, and, becoming a follower of George Fox, he retired to spend his latter days on his ancestral estate in Kincardines.h.i.+re. Here it came to pa.s.s that a brother laird thought the old Quaker could be easily done, and began to encroach upon his marches. Barclay, a strong man, with the iron sinews of his race, and their fierce spirit still burning in his eyes, strode up to the encroacher, and, with a grim smile, spoke thus: "Friend, thou knowest that I have become a man of peace and have relinquished strife, and therefore thou art endeavouring to take what is not thine own, but mine, because thou believest that, having abjured the arm of the flesh, I cannot hinder thee. And yet, as thy friend, I advise thee to desist; for shouldst thou succeed in rousing the old Adam within me, perchance he may prove too strong, not only for me, but for _thee_." There was no use of attempting to answer such an argument.]

The present, however, is not an inquiry into the first principles either of ethics or of physiology. The object of this rambling preamble is to win from the reader a morsel of genial fellow-feeling towards the human frailty which I propose to examine and lay bare before him, trusting that he will treat it neither with the haughty disdain of the immaculate, nor the grim charity of the "miserable sinner:" that he may even, when sighing over it as a failing, yet kindly remember that, in comparison with many others, it is a failing that leans to virtue's side. It will not demand that breadth of charity which even rather rigid fathers are permitted to exercise by the licence of the existing school of French fiction.[25] Neither will it exact such extensive toleration as that of the old Aberdeen laird's wife, who, when her sister lairdesses were enriching the tea-table conversation with broad descriptions of the abominable vices of their several spouses, said her own "was just a gueed, weel-tempered, couthy, queat, innocent, daedlin, drucken body--wi' nae ill practices aboot him ava!" But all things in their own time and place. To understand the due weight and bearing of this feeling of optimism, it is necessary to remember that its happy owner had probably spent her youth in that golden age when it was deemed churlish to bottle the claret, and each guest filled his stoup at the fountain of the flowing hogshead; and if the darker days of dear claret came upon her times, there was still to fall back upon the silver age of smuggled usquebaugh, when the types of a really hospitable country-house were an anker of whisky always on the spigot, a caldron ever on the bubble with boiling water, and a cask of sugar with a spade in it,--all for the manufacture of toddy.

[Footnote 25: In the renowned Dame aux Camelias, the respectable, rigid, and rather indignant father, addresses his erring son thus: "Que vous ayez une maitresse, c'est fort bien; que vous la payiez comme un galant homme doit payer l'amour d'une fille entretenue, c'est on ne peut mieux; mais que vous...o...b..iez les choses les plus saintes pour elle, que vous permettiez que la bruit de votre vie scandaleuse arrive jusqu'au fond de ma province, et jette l'ombre d'une tache sur le nom honorable que je vous ai donne--voila ce qui ne peut etre, voila ce qui ne sera pas."

So even the French novelists draw the line "somewhere," and in other departments of morals they may be found drawing it closer than many good uncharitable Christians among us would wish. In one very popular novel the victim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to starve, lives with another woman, and, having committed forgery, plots with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains. It is told in a smothered whisper, by the faithful domestic, to the horrified family, that he has reason to suspect his master of having indulged, once at least, if not oftener, in brandy-and-water!]

The habits of that age have pa.s.sed away, and with them the drunken laird and the widely tolerant wife. The advancing civilisation which has nearly extinguished this cla.s.s of frailties among those who have the amplest means of indulgence in them, is, no doubt, doing for other frailties, and will come at last to the one in hand, leaving it an object of admiring and compa.s.sionate retrospect to an enlightened posterity. There are people, however, too impatient to wait for such results from the mellowing influence of progressive civilisation. Such a consideration suggests to me that I may be treading on dangerous ground--dangerous, I mean, to the frail but amiable cla.s.s to whom my exposition is devoted. Natural misgivings arise in one who professes to call attention to a special type of human frailty, since the world is full of people who will be prepared to deal with and cure it, provided only that they are to have their own way with the disease and the patient, and that they shall enjoy the simple privilege of locking him up, dieting him, and taking possession of his worldly goods and interests, as one who, by his irrational habits, or his outrages on the laws of physiology, or the fitness of things, or some other neology, has satisfactorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his own affairs. No! This is not a cruel age; the rack, the wheel, the boot, the thumbikins, even the pillory and the stocks, have disappeared; death-punishment is dwindling away; and if convicts have not their full rations of cooked meat, or get damaged coffee or sour milk, or are inadequately supplied with flannels and clean linen, there will be an outcry and an inquiry, and a Secretary of State will lose a percentage of his influence, and learn to look better after the administration of patronage. But, at the same time, the area of punishment--or of "treatment," as it is mildly termed--becomes alarmingly widened, and people require to look sharply into themselves lest they should be tainted with any little frailty or peculiarity which may transfer them from the cla.s.s of free self-regulators to that of persons under "treatment." In Owen's parallelograms there were to be no prisons: he admitted no power in one man to inflict punishment upon another for merely obeying the dictates of natural propensities which could not be resisted. But, at the same time, there were to be "hospitals" in which not only the physically diseased, but also the mentally and _morally_ diseased, were to be detained until they were cured; and when we reflect that the laws of the parallelogram were very stringent and minute, and required to be absolutely enforced to the letter, otherwise the whole machinery of society would come to pieces, like a watch with a broken spring,--it is clear that these hospitals would have contained a very large proportion of the unrationalised population.

There is rather an alarming amount of this sort of communism now among us, and it is therefore with some little misgiving that one sets down anything that may betray a brother's weakness, and lay bare the diagnosis of a human frailty. Indeed, the bad name that proverbially hangs the dog has already been given to the one under consideration, for bibliomania is older in the technology of this kind of nosology than dipsomania, which is now understood to be an almost established ground for seclusion, and deprivation of the management of one's own affairs.

There is one ground of consolation, however,--the people who, being all right themselves, have undertaken the duty of keeping in order the rest of the world, have far too serious a task in hand to afford time for idle reading. There is a good chance, therefore, that this little book may pa.s.s them unnoticed, and the harmless cla.s.s, on whose peculiar frailties the present occasion is taken for devoting a gentle and kindly exposition, may yet be permitted to go at large.

So having spoken, I now propose to make the reader acquainted with some characteristic specimens of the cla.s.s.

A Vision of Mighty Book-Hunters.

As the first case, let us summon from the shades my venerable friend Archdeacon Meadow, as he was in the body. You see him now--tall, straight, and meagre, but with a grim dignity in his air which warms into benignity as he inspects a pretty little clean Elzevir, or a tall portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a peculiar grunting chuckle, known by the initiated to be an important announcement. This is no doubt one of the milder and more inoffensive types, but still a thoroughly confirmed and obstinate case. Its parallel to the cla.s.ses who are to be taken charge of by their wiser neighbours is only too close and awful; for have not sometimes the female members of his household been known on occasion of some domestic emergency--or, it may be, for mere sake of keeping the lost man out of mischief--to have been searching for him on from bookstall unto bookstall, just as the mothers, wives, and daughters of other lost men hunt them through their favourite taverns or gambling-houses? Then, again, can one forget that occasion of his going to London to be examined by a committee of the House of Commons, when he suddenly disappeared with all his money in his pocket, and returned penniless, followed by a waggon containing 372 copies of rare editions of the Bible? All were fish that came to his net. At one time you might find him securing a minnow for sixpence at a stall--and presently afterwards he outbids some princely collector, and secures with frantic impetuosity, "at any price," a great fish he has been patiently watching year after year. His hunting-grounds were wide and distant, and there were mysterious rumours about the numbers of copies, all identically the same in edition and minor individualities, which he possessed of certain books. I have known him, indeed, when beaten at an auction, turn round resignedly and say, "Well, so be it--but I daresay I have ten or twelve copies at home, if I could lay hands on them."

It is a matter of extreme anxiety to his friends, and, if he have a well-const.i.tuted mind, of sad misgiving to himself, when the collector buys his first _duplicate_. It is like the first secret dram swallowed in the forenoon--the first p.a.w.ning of the silver spoons--or any other terrible first step downwards you may please to liken it to. There is no hope for the patient after this. It rends at once the veil of decorum spun out of the flimsy sophisms by which he has been deceiving his friends, and partially deceiving himself, into the belief that his previous purchases were necessary, or, at all events, serviceable for professional and literary purposes. He now becomes shameless and hardened; and it is observable in the career of this cla.s.s of unfortunates, that the first act of duplicity is immediately followed by an access of the disorder, and a reckless abandonment to its propensities. The Archdeacon had long pa.s.sed this stage ere he crossed my path, and had become thoroughly hardened. He was not remarkable for local attachment; and in moving from place to place, his spoil, packed in innumerable great boxes, sometimes followed him, to remain unreleased during the whole period of his tarrying in his new abode, so that they were removed to the next stage of his journey through life with modified inconvenience.

Cruel as it may seem, I must yet notice another and a peculiar vagary of his malady. He had resolved, at least once in his life, to part with a considerable proportion of his collection--better to suffer the anguish of such an act than endure the fretting of continued restraint. There was a wondrous sale by auction accordingly; it was something like what may have occurred on the dissolution of the monasteries at the Reformation, or when the contents of some time-honoured public library were realised at the period of the French Revolution. Before the affair was over, the Archdeacon himself made his appearance in the midst of the miscellaneous self-invited guests who were making free with his treasures,--he pretended, honest man, to be a mere casual spectator, who, having seen, in pa.s.sing, the announcement of a sale by auction, stepped in like the rest of the public. By degrees he got excited, gasped once or twice as if mastering some desperate impulse, and at length fairly bade. He could not brazen out the effect of this escapade, however, and disappeared from the scene. It was remarked by the observant, that an unusual number of lots were afterwards knocked down to a military gentleman, who seemed to have left portentously large orders with the auctioneer. Some curious suspicions began to arise, which were settled by that presiding genius bending over his rostrum, and explaining in a confidential whisper that the military hero was in reality a pillar of the Church so disguised.