for

"The last new play, and frittered magazine,"--

for the sutlers and camp-followers, "pioneers and all," of the
grand army,--for the prizes, dirty, but curious, rescued from the
street-stall, or unearthed in a Nassau-Street cellar,--for the books
which I thumbed and dogs-eared in my youth.

I have, in my collection, a little Divinity, consisting mostly of quaint
Quaker books bequeathed to me by my grandmother,--a little Philosophy, a
little Physic, a little Law, a little History, a little Fiction, and a
deal of Nondescript stuff. Once, when the _res angusta domi_ had become
_angustissima_, a child of Israel was, in my sore estate, summoned to
inspect the dear, shabby colony, and to make his sordid aureat or argent
bid therefor. Well do I remember how his nose, which he could not,
if his worthless life had depended upon it, render _retroussé_, grew
sublimely curvilinear in its contempt, as his hawk-eyes estimated my
pitiful family. I will not name the sum which he offered, the ghoul, the
vampire, the anthropophagous jackal, the sneaking would-be incendiary
of my little Alexandrian, the circumcised Goth! He left me, like
Churchill's Scotch lassie, "pleased, but hungry"; and I found, as
Valentine did in Congreve's "Love for Love," "a page doubled down in
Epictetus which was a feast for an emperor."

I own, my excellent Robert, that a bad book is, to my taste, sometimes
vastly more refreshing than a good one. I do not wonder that Crabbe,
after he had so sadly failed in his medical studies, should have
anathematized the medical writers in this fine passage:--