affected.  They have won fame by the elegance of their books, but their intention was to sell good books cheap, like Michel Lévy.  The small type was required to get plenty of “copy” into little bulk.  Nicholas Heinsius, the son of the editor of the ‘Virgil,’ when he came to correct his father’s edition, found that it contained so many coquilles, or misprints, as to be nearly the most incorrect copy in the world.  Heyne says, “Let the ‘Virgil’ be one of the rare Elzevirs, if you please, but within it has scarcely a trace of any good quality.”  Yet the first edition of this beautiful little book, with its two passages of red letters, is so desirable that, till he could possess it, Charles Nodier would not profane his shelves by any ‘Virgil’ at all.

Equally fine is the ‘Cæsar’ of 1635, which, with the ‘Virgil’ of 1636 and the ‘Imitation’ without date, M. Willems thinks the most successful works of the Elzevirs, “one of the most enviable jewels in the casket of the bibliophile.”  It may be recognised by the page 238, which is erroneously printed 248.  A good average height is from 125 to 128 millimetres.  The highest known is 130 millimetres.  This book, like the ‘Imitation,’ has one of the pretty and ingenious frontispieces which the Elzevirs prefixed to their books.  So farewell, and good speed in your sport, ye hunters of Elzevirs, and may you find perhaps the rarest Elzevir of all, ‘L’Aimable Mère de Jésus.’

BALLADE OF THE REAL AND IDEAL.
(DOUBLE REFRAIN.)

O visions of salmon tremendous,
Of trout of unusual weight,
Of waters that wander as Ken does,
Ye come through the Ivory Gate!
But the skies that bring never a “spate,”
But the flies that catch up in a thorn,
But the creel that is barren of freight,
Through the portals of horn!

O dreams of the Fates that attend us
With prints in the earliest state,
O bargains in books that they send us,
Ye come through the Ivory Gate!
But the tome that has never a mate,
But the quarto that’s tattered and torn,
And bereft of a title and date,
Through the portals of horn!

O dreams of the tongues that commend us,
Of crowns for the laureate pate,
Of a public to buy and befriend us,
Ye come through the Ivory Gate!
But the critics that slash us and slate, [19]
But the people that hold us in scorn,
But the sorrow, the scathe, and the hate,
Through the portals of horn!

ENVOY.

Fair dreams of things golden and great,
Ye come through the Ivory Gate;
But the facts that are bleak and forlorn,
Through the portals of horn!

CURIOSITIES OF PARISH REGISTERS.

There are three classes of persons who are deeply concerned with parish registers—namely, villains, antiquaries, and the sedulous readers, “parish clerks and others,” of the second or “agony” column of the Times.  Villains are probably the most numerous of these three classes.  The villain of fiction dearly loves a parish register: he cuts out pages, inserts others, intercalates remarks in a different coloured ink, and generally manipulates the register as a Greek manages his hand at écarté, or as a Hebrew dealer in Moabite bric-à-brac treats a synagogue roll.  We well remember one villain who had locked himself into the vestry (he was disguised as an archæologist), and who was enjoying his wicked pleasure with the register, when the vestry somehow caught fire, the rusty key would not turn in the door, and the villain was roasted alive, in spite of the disinterested efforts to save him made by all the virtuous characters in the story.  Let the fate of this bold, bad man be a warning to wicked earls, baronets, and all others who attempt to destroy the record of the marriage of a hero’s parents.  Fate will be too strong for them in the long run, though they bribe the parish clerk, or carry off in white wax an impression of the keys of the vestry and of the iron chest in which a register should repose.

There is another and more prosaic danger in the way of villains, if the new bill, entitled “The Parish Registers Preservation Act,” ever becomes law.  The bill provides that every register earlier than 1837 shall be committed to the care of the Master of the Rolls, and removed to the Record Office.  Now the common villain of fiction would feel sadly out of place in the Register Office, where a more watchful eye than that of a comic parish clerk would be kept on his proceedings.  Villains and local antiquaries will, therefore, use all their parliamentary influence to oppose and delay this bill, which is certainly hard on the parish archæologist.  The men who grub in their local registers, and slowly compile parish or county history, deserve to be encouraged rather than depressed.  Mr. Chester Waters, therefore, has suggested that copies of registers should be made, and the comparatively legible copy left in the parish, while the crabbed original is conveyed to the Record Office in London.  Thus the local antiquary would really have his work made more easy for him (though it may be doubted whether he would quite enjoy that condescension), while the villain of romance would be foiled; for it is useless (as a novel of Mr. Christie Murray’s proves) to alter the register in the keeping of the parish when the original document is safe in the Record Office.  But previous examples of enforced transcription (as in 1603) do not encourage us to suppose that the copies would be very scrupulously made.  Thus, after the Reformation, the prayers for the dead in the old registers were omitted by the copyist, who seemed to think (as the contractor for “sandwich men” said to the poor fellows who carried the letter H), “I don’t want you, and the public don’t want you, and you’re no use to nobody.”  Again, when Laurence Fletcher was buried in St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1608, the old register described him as “a player, the King’s servant.”  But the clerk, keeping a note-book, simply called Laurence Fletcher “a man,” and (in 1625) he also styled Mr. John Fletcher “a man.”  Now, the old register calls Mr. John Fletcher “a poet.”  To copy all the parish registers in England would be a very serious task, and would probably be but slovenly performed.  If they were reproduced, again, by any process of photography, the old difficult court hand would remain as hard as ever.  But this is a minor objection, for the local antiquary revels in the old court hand.

From the little volume by Mr. Chester Waters, already referred to (‘Parish Registers in England;’ printed for the author by F. J. Roberts, Little Britain, E.C.), we proceed to appropriate such matters of curiosity as may interest minds neither parochial nor doggedly antiquarian.  Parish registers among the civilised peoples of antiquity do not greatly concern us.  It seems certain that many Polynesian races have managed to record (in verse, or by some rude marks) the genealogies of their chiefs through many hundreds of years.  These oral registers are accepted as fairly truthful by some students, yet we must remember that Pindar supposed himself to possess knowledge of at least twenty-five generations before his own time, and that only brought him up to the birth of Jason.  Nobody believes in Jason and Medea, and possibly the genealogical records of Maoris and Fijians are as little trustworthy as those of Pindaric Greece.  However, to consider