BOOKBINDING AND "HELIODORUS."

A rapture to the memory of Mathias Corvinus, king and bookbinder.-Bookbinding good and bad.-Ethiopics of Heliodorus.-Striking account of raising a dead body.

GLORY be to the memory of Mathias Corvinus, king of Hungary and Bohemia, son of the great Huniades, and binder of books in vellum and gold. He placed fifty thousand volumes, says Warton, "in a tower which he had erected in the metropolis of Buda: and in this library he established thirty amanuenses, skilled in painting, illuminating, and writing, who under the conduct of Felix Ragusinus, a Dalmatian, consummately learned in the Greek, Chaldaic, and Arabic languages, and an elegant designer and painter of ornaments on vellum, attended incessantly to the business of transcription and decoration. The librarian was Bartholomew Fontius, a learned Florentine, the writer of many philological books, and a professor of Greek and oratory at Florence. When Buda was taken by the Turks in the year 1526, Cardinal Bozmanni offered, for the redemption

of this inestimable collection, two hundred thousand pieces of the imperial money: yet without effect; for the barbarous besiegers defaced or destroyed most of the books, in the violence of seizing the splendid covers and the silver bosses and clasps with which they were enriched. The learned Obsopaeus relates, that a book was brought him by an Hungarian soldier, which he had picked up with many others, in the pillage of King Corvino's library, and had preserved as a prize, merely because the covering retained some marks of gold and rich workmanship. This proved to be a manuscript of the Ethiopics of Heliodorus; from which in the year 1534, Obsopaeus printed at Basil the first edition of that elegant Greek romance.'

Methinks we see this tower, doubtless in a garden,—the windows overlooking it, together with the vineyards which produced the Tokay that his majesty drank while reading, agreeably to the notions of his brother bookworm, the King of Arragon. The transcribers and binders are at work in various apartments below; midway is a bath, with an orangery; and up aloft, but not too high to be above the tops of the trees through which he looks over the vineyards towards' his beloved Greece and Italy, in a room tapestried with some fair story of Atalanta or the Golden Fleece, sits the king in a chair-couch, his legs thrown up and his face shaded from the sun, reading one of the passages we are History of English Poetry." Edition of 1840, Vol. ii. p. 552.

about to extract from the romance of Heliodorus,some illumination in which casts up a light on his manly beard, tinging its black with tawny.

What a fellow! Think of being king of the realms of Tokay, and having a library of fifty thousand volumes in vellum and gold, with thirty people constantly beneath you, copying, painting, and illuminating, and every day sending you up a fresh one to look at!

We were going to say, that Dr. Dibdin should have existed in those days, and been his majesty's chaplain, or his confessor. But we doubt whether he could have borne the bliss. (Vide his ecstacies, passim, on the charms of vellums, tall copies, and blind tooling.) Yet, as confessor and patron, they would admirably have suited. The doctor would have continually absolved the king from the sin of thinking of his next box of books during sermontime, or looking at the pictures in his missal instead of reading it; and the king would have been always bestowing benefices on the doctor, till the latter began to think he needed absolution himself.

Not being a king of Hungary, nor rich, nor having a confessor to absolve us from sins of expenditure, how lucky is it that we can take delight in books whose outsides are of the homeliest description! How willing are we to waive the grandeur of outlay! how contented to pay for some precious volume a shilling instead of two pounds ten! Bind we would, if we could:-there is no doubt of that.

We should have liked to challenge the majesty of Hungary to a bout at bookbinding, and seen which would have ordered the most intense and ravishing legatura; something, at which De Seuil, or Grollier himself, should have

"Sigh'd, and look'd, and sigh'd again;"

something which would have made him own, that there was nothing between it and an angel's wing. Meantime, nothing comes amiss to us but dirt, or tatters, or cold, plain, calf, school binding,—a thing which we hate for its insipidity and formality, and for its attempting to do the business as cheaply and usefully as possible, with no regard to the liberality and picturesqueness befitting the cultivators of the generous infant mind.

Keep from our sight all Selectas e Profanis, and Enfield's Speakers, bound in this manner; and especially all Ovids, and all Excerpta from the Greek. We would as lief see Ovid come to life in the dress of a quaker, or Theocritus serving in a stationer's shop. (See the horrid, impossible dreams, which such incoherences excite!) Arithmetical books are not so bad in it; and it does very well for the Gauger's Vade Mecum, or tall thin copies of Logarithms; but for anything poetical, or of a handsome universality like the grass or the skies, we would as soon see a flower whitewashed, or an arbour fit for an angel converted into a pew.

But to come to the book before us. See what an

advantage the poor reader of modern times possesses over the royal collector of those ages, who doubtless got his manuscript of Heliodorus's romance at a cost and trouble proportionate to the splendour he bestowed on its binding. An "argosie" brought it him from Greece or Italy, at a price rated by some Jew of Malta: or else his father got it with battle and murder out of some Greek ransom of a Turk; whereas we bought our copy at a bookstall in Little Chelsea for tenpence! To be sure it is not in the original language; nor did we ever read it in that language; neither is the translation, for the most part, a good one; and it is execrably printed. It is "done," half by a person of quality," and half by Nahum Tate. There are symptoms of its being translated from an Italian version; and perhaps the good bits come out of an older English one, mentioned by Warton.

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The Ethiopics or Ethiopian History of Heliodorus, otherwise called the Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea, is a romance written in the decline of the Roman empire by an Asiatic Greek of that name, who boasted to be descended from the sun (Heliodorus is sun-given), and who afterwards became Christian bishop of Tricca in Thessaly. It is said (but the story is apocryphal) that a synod, thinking the danger of a love romance aggravated by this elevation to the mitre, required of the author that he should give up either his book or his bishopric; and that he chose to do the latter;-a story so good,