"1720. J. SWIFT."
"The author published a new edition in his older days, with many additions, upon the whole more insufferable than this. He lived several years after the Restoration, and some friends of mine knew him in Ireland. He seems to have been a coxcomb both ævi vitio et sui."
W. SNEYD.
Denton.
Joe Miller.
—The remains of this patriarch of puns and jokes, hitherto peaceably resting in the burial-ground in Portugal Street, will now be disturbed to make way for the new buildings of King's College Hospital. Surely "Old Joe" ought not to be carted away, and shot as rubbish. Some plain memorial of him might soon be raised, if an appeal were made to the public; and if every one whose conscience told him he had ever been indebted to Miller, would subscribe only a penny to the memorial fund, the requisite sum would soon be collected.
JAYDEE.
Hints to Book-buyers.
—Inquirers buy books on subjects which they have, at the time, no particular intention of closely investigating: when such intention afterwards arises, they begin to collect more extensively. But it often happens, I suspect, that it does not come into their heads to examine what they have already got, as to which their memory is not good, because their acquisitions were not made under any strong purpose of using them. The warning which suggests itself is as follows: Always remember to examine the old library as if it were that of a stranger, when you begin any new subject, and before you buy any new books.
Here is another warning, not wholly unconnected with the former: Never judge of a book, that is, of all which comes between the two boards, by the title-page, which may be only the first title-page, in spite of the lettering at the back. Persons who bind their books will not always be bound themselves, either by law of congruity or convenience. I once hunted shop and stall for a speech delivered in parliament a century ago, not knowing that I had long possessed it bound up at the end of a Latin summary of Leibnitzian philosophy. At the risk of posthumously revealing my real name, I will add that I wrote on the fly-leaf that I was not the blockhead who bound the book.