You observe, my friends, said I, softly, yonder active and keen-visaged
gentleman? 'Tis Lepidus. Like Magliabechi, content with frugal fare and
frugal clothing and preferring the riches of a library to those of
house-furniture, he is insatiable in his bibliomaniacal appetites. 'Long
experience has made him sage:' and it is not therefore without just
reason that his opinions are courted and considered as almost oracular.
You will find that he will take his old station, commanding the right or
left wing of the auctioneer; and that he will enliven, by the gaiety and
shrewdness of his remarks, the circle that more immediately surrounds
him. Some there are who will not bid till Lepidus bids; and who
surrender all discretion and opinion of their own to his universal
book-knowledge. The consequence is that Lepidus can, with difficulty,
make purchases for his own library, and a thousand dexterous and happy
manoeuvres are of necessity obliged to be practised by him, whenever a
rare or curious book turns up.... Justly respectable as are his
scholarship and good sense, he is not what you may call a _fashionable_
collector; for old chronicles and romances are most rigidly discarded
from his library. Talk to him of Hoffman, Schoettgenius, Rosenmuller,
and Michaelis, and he will listen courteously to your conversation; but
when you expatiate, however learnedly and rapturously, upon Froissart
and Prince Arthur, he will tell you that he has a heart of stone upon
the subject; and that even a clean uncut copy of an original impression
of each, by Verard or by Caxton, would not bring a single tear of
sympathetic transport to his eyes.--T. F. DIBDIN. _Bibliomania._