latter connection, he does not forget to make frequent mention of his booksellers. One of them is located opposite the market-place of Cæsar. He was once a slave, I believe, and his name is Atrectus. The street, you will observe, is full of booksellers, private residences, temples of the deities, tailors and shoemakers. The house of Cicero's brother Quintus, is situated in some part of it. Perhaps you remember one of Martial's epigrams, into which he introduces Atrectus. It contains some useful hints on book-borrowing, and I will repeat it.

Every day Lupercus meets me,

Takes my hand and thus he greets me;
"Martial, it would give me joy,
Could I only send a boy

All your Epigrams to borrow:
I'll return them on the morrow,"
Pray, Lupercus, spare the lad:
Really, 't would be quite too bad,
Should you send him all the way
Up to Pirus, where I stay.
After this fatiguing ramble

Through three stories he must scramble,

O'er three tedious pairs of stairs

Think of it!-three tedious pairs.
It can be much nearer got;

I'll direct you to the spot.
Argiletum is a street,
Where we very often meet.

Opposite to Cæsar's forum

You will find a handsome store room:

Every post is written o'er

With a catalogue of more

Poets, than you ever deemed
In the Muses' temples dreamed.
When you reach this little shop,
Kept by one Atrectus-stop!
Ask for ME; he will himself
Take it from the second shelf,

Bound in purple, and the cover
With a pumice polished over;

Sold for five-pence-moderate, quite.

"I'm not worth it!"-Zounds, you are right!

Shall we enter the book-store of Atrectus? As Martial has warned us, all the poets are advertised on the door-posts. We ascend one pair of stairs or steps to reach the apartment. The room is filled from ceiling to floor with book-shelves, some of which evidently contain choice works, being fitted with doors and ornamented with inlayings of glass. The shelves are numbered and subdivided into what the Romans prettily call "nests." The books resemble leather cases, of gorgeous colors stamped with flaring titles and ornamented with ivory, ebony and citron wood clasps, You exclaim at once, they are rolls, not volumes. Think for a moment; what is a volumen or volume but a roll? Hither, the last popular work of the season is brought, not by hundreds of copies to satisfy large "orders," but one by one, as fast as the copyists can multiply them.

Would you like to buy? Remember that the Roman trader operates entirely on the one-price system, and an attempt to dicker will only provoke surprise. You may wonder a little at the formality required to clinch a bargain; but the Roman law requires, in order to complete a contract, that the seller should announce his willingness to sell and that you should express a readiness to buy. You can get credit, if you choose, and the debt will be charged on the books of that public accountant, who keeps a money-table in a portico not far off. But bear in mind the necessity of paying on the first day of the ensuing month. Roman creditors rarely grant "extensions." It is for this reason, that Horace calls the first day of the month a melancholy season, and Ovid speaks of it as "fleet," because it recurs so often with its sad account of debts contracted and unpaid. Books, as an article of merchandise, are certainly cheap. Martial's book of three hundred epigrams-which he calls small because it can be easily carried in the hand!-is sold for about fifteen or sixteen cents of American currency, although every line and letter is the work of a copyist; to say nothing of the cost of binding in purple parchment. It is really to be regretted, that I cannot inform you how many editions of popular works have been sold. It cannot even be conjectured.

You

Perhaps you are curious to know where books are made. must not confound things; you are now in a taberna or store, not in an officina or work-shop. By the way, there are no factories full of operatives in Rome. A work-shop usually contains one artisan, who, as no systematical division of labor is in vogue, undertakes all branches of his business. Unfortunately for your curiosity, there is no such thing as a book-bindery or shop for the manufacture of books in the city. The successful author keeps slaves, whose peculiar occupation it is to transcribe and "bind" copies of his works. (The mode of binding will be explained hereafter.) In fact, the author has the sole risk of publication, when he issues his volume; not a very startling risk it is true, as one copy makes an edition. To be sure, I have read somewhere, that, when Pliny the Elder was in Spain, he was offered about sixteen thousand dollars for his common-place books"-probably a desultory collection of facts by that miracle of learning. This work at the time of his death, amounted to one hundred and sixty volumes, but was not as large at the time of the offer. For what purpose the work was wanted by the would-be purchaser, can only be conjectured. It seems probable, however, that his design was to obtain the privilege of publication. If this was his object, he must have expected, in order to reap any advantage from the sale of the work at the cheap rate for which books are sold at Rome, to have disposed of several thousand copies! It is very confidently stated that the first copy-right was granted in Venice in 1469. Roman honor, however, is as good a safeguard against abuses of an author's right, as a statute. When a work passes the confines of Italy, it is not so safe. Copies are multiplied by other hands than those of the author's slaves. If England will but look minutely into her

own history, she may think it modest to cease her clamors for an International copy-right law, to protect the rights of British authors in foreign countries. Hear what Martial says:

'Tis not alone Rome's listless crowd
Who relish Martial's sparkling grace,
But where our eagles, fierce and proud,
Shine in the frosty air of Thrace,
The rough centurion, turning o'er
My pages, daily wears them more.
Nay, BRITAIN sings my lines, they say,—
Our Island conquest, far away.

And yet what boots it? this my purse
Is none the better; haply worse.

It is natural that you should desire to investigate the whole art and mystery of book-making. As I have mingled a little with our favorite Roman authors, perhaps I can explain the process.

The author, in his anxiety to have his compositions polished to the last degree, first writes his work on a tablet of white or colored wax, that is, a board covered with a thin layer of this material. This is done, for the facilities which it affords for correction. Some use a coarse sort of paper, from which erasures can be made without leaving the material too thin. But wax is preferable, because the writer can proceed faster, according to Quintilian, who estimates that considerable time is consumed by frequently dipping a split reed into ink, as is necessary when paper is Instead of scratching out or interlining as the Roman does who uses paper, the writer merely turns his iron (not steel) pen upside down and smoothes the wax, where the mistake is made, with the broad and flat end. It must not be supposed that waxen tablets must be written upon slowly. Some of the trained copyists can keep up with the most rapid dictation. Their iron pen is called a stile.

When the rough manuscript has been sufficiently revised, the book manufacture commences.

Books are made of paper or parchment. You cannot of course find in Rome a paper factory, where the whole operation of making paper can be observed. Yet there are work-shops here where it is polished, dressed, and in fact made over. That of Fannius is the most celebrated, but I am not familiar with its location. The plant papyrus, which grows in the stagnant pools of Egypt to the height of fifteen feet, has several delicate coats of bark. These are separated into as thin plates as possible with a needle. One membrane is then spread upon a table, having first been wet with the muddy and glutinous waters of the Nile. Another is then laid across it perpendicularly, so that the two "grains" represent the warp and woof of a web of cloth. The preparation is then trim

Our word "parchment" is derived from " pergamentum." When one of the Ptolemies prohibited the exportation of papyrus from Egypt, out of jeal ousy of Eumenes, king of Pergamus and a rival collector of magnificent libraries, the latter invented the use of sheep-skin for manuscripts. The skin thus used was called " pergamentum," in honor of the country of the inventor. Our "vellum" is a contraction of "vetulinum," calf-skin.

med, put under a press and dried in the sun. I suppose that the paper thus made may be called "hot-pressed."

But at Rome new processes of smoothing, drying, dressing, purifying and rendering it pliable have been discovered, and carried to various degrees of perfection. As religion or superstition has been the mother of all that is most elegant in art or beautiful in literature-of architecture, statuary and poetry-so it happened that the best paper was originally made and used solely for sacred volumes. For this reason it was called "sacred service" paper. But the use of fine paper gradually became more general, and the best quality was called, after Rome's second emperor, the "royal Augustan." The second quality was called from the queen consort, "Livia's paper:" just as other countries have since had "Prince Albert's own foolscap" and " Victoria's Imperial Letter." But times and emperors change, and since the "royal Augustan," which is thin and likely to blot, has been improved into a more unexceptionable quality, it has been named after the emperor Claudius. But this is not the only method of christening paper. The skill of Fannius in the manufacture has made that named after him celebrated and popular; as other countries have their "Hudson's" or "Butler's superfine." Various sorts of paper are named from the place where it is manufactured. We have in Rome, not the "Southwark Mills," but the " Amphitheatre Paper," so called from the district of Alexandria where it is made. The most superior paper is called from its size, "Long-Skin," corresponding perhaps to "folio-post" rather than foolscap. Some sheets of this are a foot and a half long, and a foot broad. It is highly expensive and was used by Cicero for documents of extraordinary value.

The instrument used in Rome for writing on paper is a reed, sharpened into the shape of a pen, and split at the point. This is dipped into what is called "blacking;" also called sepia. Sepia, you remember, is the naturalist's name for the cuttle-fish, which, when likely to be caught, envelops itself in an inky mist beneath the surface of the water, and escapes, like Juno, under the semblance of a cloud. Some have been wild enough to suppose that the cuttle-fish is itself used for ink here in Rome, but this is a vain tradition, no doubt.

The author's mysterious duties are now all performed and the book has been passed over to the slaves, who have copied it. Let us observe one of these literary servants, whom we shall find in Martial's third story room at Pirus. The book lies in scattered leaves before him. (The sheets are called "leaves" because leaves were the original materials for writing.) They are not written on both sides, as the voluminous Pliny's are generally filled. This servant is called a "paster" or "gluer," and there is a monument existing in one of the Roman cemeteries to the "paster" of Tiberius. He first sticks the leaves together with glue, making one long page of them. Although Roman books often consist of scveral volumes, (Pliny's Rhetoric is published in six, while all the works of the matchless Homer are in one!) a volume rarely con

sists of more than one page, and a page is never composed of more than twenty leaves, pasted together. Some books are, it is true, divided into separate leaves, after the invention of Julius Cæsarresembling a book of other and more modern nations. But these are rarely any thing more than memorandum books or public documents. The prolixity of the latter-a fault of theirs peculiar to all ages and countries-makes it necessary that they should be bound in this form. The memorandum books, which nearly all the Romans carry, are a set of ivory or box-wood tablets coated with wax. These are scratched with an iron pencil. Observe yonder young knight clasping the note-book, which his servant has just handed to him, to his breast. It contains a line from his mistress. The Roman lover, instead of notes written with a crowquill on perfumed paper and in a neat envelope, scratches on his memorandum book, gives it to his messenger and receives her answer beneath his own request or invitation. Vows, written in wax, can be little better than those in sand. By the way, do not laugh at that iron pencil as being unromantic. Let yonder Roman lordling be attacked, and his stilet will become a stiletto. It was with a stile that Julius Cæsar parried the thrusts of the regicide Cassius. It was a stile which the indignant Roman hurled at his emperor and judge, when the facile Claudius admitted a shameless woman to testify against him.

After the leaves are stuck together in one long leaf, the end of the latter is glued to a wand of wood, around which the sheet is rolled up. Then the covers of hide or parchinent are fastened around them. These are polished, not like paper with a boar's . tooth, but with a pumice-stone. In fact, the latter process seems merely to be the rubbing or scraping off of the hair or furze, and is not always performed. These covers are next dyed with purple-a custom not confined to Rome.

An ivory clasp, called a "navel," is then placed in the centre of the scroll ; or, if there are two, they are placed near to the ends. You may have been induced heretofore to believe that these ornaments were placed on the ends of the roller, and on that account called "horns." Perhaps you had forgotten for the moment what Tibullus sings in his elegy to his book:

"Between thy covers shine thy painted horns."

These bosses are generally of ivory, furnishing a fine contrast to the rich purple of the cover.

The next step is to mark on the side the title, commonly consisting merely of the name of the author, in vermilion or some other high color. Then the red ribbons are tied, one to each cover: the juice of cedar-wood is sprinkled over the whole, both inside and outside, to prevent the ravages of book-moths and worms. The work is done! It is neatly enveloped in "merchant's paper,"

A book thus bound was called a "Codex," whence comes our "code." †This sentence will explain the origin of the word "stiletto," which the Italians originated, and which we have adopted.