one appreciates the fine Greek hyperbole.  The Greeks did not speak of “thumbing” but of “walking up and down” on a volume (πατεῖν).  To such fellows it matters not that they make a book dirty and greasy, cutting the pages with their fingers, and holding the boards over the fire till they crack.  All these slatternly practices, though they destroy a book as surely as the flames of Cæsar’s soldiers at Alexandria, seem fine manly acts to the grobians who use them.  What says Jules Janin, who has written “Contre l’indifference des Philistins,” “il faut à l’homme sage et studieux un tome honorable et digne de sa louange.”  The amateur, and all decent men, will beware of lending books to such rude workers; and this consideration brings us to these great foes of books, the borrowers and robbers.  The lending of books, and of other property, has been defended by some great authorities; thus Panurge himself says, “it would prove much more easy in nature to have fish entertained in the air, and bullocks fed in the bottom of the ocean, than to support or tolerate a rascally rabble of people that will not lend.”  Pirckheimer, too, for whom Albert Durer designed a book-plate, was a lender, and took for his device Sibi et Amicis; and Jo. Grolierii et amicorum, was the motto of the renowned Grolier, whom mistaken writers vainly but frequently report to have been a bookbinder.  But as Mr. Leicester Warren says, in his “Study of Book-plates” (Pearson, 1880), “Christian Charles de Savigny leaves all the rest behind, exclaiming non mihi sed aliis.”  But the majority of amateurs have chosen wiser, though more churlish devices, as “the ungodly borroweth and payeth not again,” or “go to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.”  David Garrick engraved on his book-plate, beside a bust of Shakspeare, these words of Ménage, “La première chose qu’on doit faire, quand on a emprunte’ un livre, c’est de le lire, afin de pouvoir le rendre plûtôt.”  But the borrower is so minded that the last thing he thinks of is to read a borrowed book, and the penultimate subject of his reflections is its restoration.  Ménage (Menagiana, Paris, 1729, vol. i. p. 265), mentions, as if it were a notable misdeed, this of Angelo Politian’s, “he borrowed a ‘Lucretius’ from Pomponius Laetus, and kept it for four years.”  Four years! in the sight of the borrower it is but a moment.  Ménage reports that a friend kept his “Pausanias” for three years, whereas four months was long enough.

“At quarto saltem mense redire decet.”