A wag answered, that it was not usual, in despoiling a house, to carry away any thing except the valuables.  Meantime, millions of blank Bibles filled the shelves of stationers, to be sold for day-books and ledgers, so that there seemed to be no more employment for the paper-makers in that direction for many years to come.  A friend, who used to mourn over the thought of palimpsest manuscripts,—­of portions of Livy and Cicero erased to make way for the nonsense of some old monkish chronicler, —­exclaimed, as he saw a tradesman trudging off with a handsome morocco-bound quarto for a day-book, “Only think of the pages once filled with the poetry of Isaiah, and the parables of Christ, sponged clean to make way for orders for silks and satins, muslins, cheese, and bacon!” The old authors, of course, were left to their mutilations; there was no way in which the confusion could be remedied.  But the living began to prepare new editions of their works, in which they endeavored to give a new turn to the thoughts which had been mutilated by erasure, and I was nor a little amused to see that many, having stolen from writers whose compositions were as much mutilated as their own, could not tell the meaning of their own pages.

It seemed at first to be a not unnatural impression, that even those who could recall the erased texts as they perused the injured books, —­who could mentally full up the imperfect clauses,—­were not at liberty to inscribe them; they seemed to fear that, if they did so, the characters would be as if written in invisible ink, or would surely fade away.  It was with trembling that some at length made the attempt, and to their unspeakable joy found the impression durable.  Day after day passed; still the characters remained; and the people length came to the conclusion, that God left them at liberty, if they could, to reconstruct the Bible for themselves out of their collective remembrances of its divine contents.  This led again to some curious results, all of them singularly indicative of the good and ill that is in human nature.  It was with incredible joy that men came to the conclusion that the book might be thus recovered nearly entire, and nearly in the very words of the original, by the combined effort of human memories.  Some of the obscurest of the species, who had studied nothing else but the Bible, but who had well studied that, came to be objects of reverence among Christians and booksellers; and the various texts they quoted were taken down with the utmost care.  He who could fill up a chasm by the restoration of words which were only partially remembered, or could contribute the least text that had been forgotten, was regarded as a sort of public benefactor.  At length, a great public movement amongst the divines of all denominations was projected, to collate the results of these partial recoveries of the sacred text.  It was curious, again, to see in how various ways human passions and prejudices came into play.  It was found that the