As will be shown later, it is easy to be misled
in these matters, but I cannot help believing that this volume, which
looks as if it had been re-bound, is the one Thomas Bewick mentions in
his _Memoir_ as having been his companion in those speculative
wanderings over the Town Moor or the Elswick Fields, when, as an
apprentice, he planned his future _a la_ Franklin, and devised schemes
for his conduct in life. In attaining Cornaro's tale of years he did not
succeed; though he seems to have faithfully practised the periods of
abstinence enjoined (but probably not observed) by another of the "noble
Venetian's" professed admirers, Mr. Addison of the _Spectator_.
If I have admitted a momentary misgiving as to the authenticity of the
foregoing relic of the "father of white line," there can be none about
the next item to which I now come. Once, on a Westminster bookstall,
long since disappeared, I found a copy of a seventh edition of the
_Pursuits of Literature_ of T.J. Mathias, Queen Charlotte's Treasurer's
Clerk. Brutally cut down by the binder, that _durus arator_ had
unexpectedly spared a solitary page for its manuscript comment, which
was thoughtfully turned up and folded in. It was a note to this couplet
in Mathias, his Dialogue II.:--
From Bewick's magick wood throw borrow'd rays
O'er many a page in gorgeous Bulmer's blaze,--
"gorgeous Bulmer" (the epithet is over-coloured!) being the William
Bulmer who, in 1795, issued the _Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell_.
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