Where ignorance is bliss
    ’Tis folly to be wise.

This is soberly quoted—­not meaning thereby to scratch the cuticle, or ruffle the temper, of a single Roxburgher.  And now, my friend, as we are about to quit this magnificent assemblage of books, I owe it to myself—­but much more to your own inextinguishable love of bibliographical history—­to say “one little word, or two”—­ere we quit the threshold—­respecting the Abbe MERCIER SAINT LEGER ... the head librarian, and great living ornament of the collection, some fifty years ago.  I am enabled to do this with the greater propriety, as my friend M. Barbier is in possession of a number of literary anecdotes and notices respecting the Abbe—­and has supplied me with a brochure, by Chardon De La Rochette, which contains a notice of the life and writings of the character in question.  I am sure you will be interested by the account, limited and partial as it must necessarily be:  especially as I have known those, to whose judgments I always defer with pleasure and profit, assert, that, of all BIBLIOGRAPHERS, the Abbe Mercier St. Leger was the FIRST, in eminence, which France possessed, I have said so myself a hundred times, and I repeat the asseveration.  Yet we must not forget Niceron.

Mercier Saint Leger was born on the 1st of April, 1734.  At fifteen years of age, he began to consider what line of life he should follow.  A love of knowledge, and a violent passion for study and retirement, inclined him to enter the congregation of the Chanoines Reguliers—­distinguished for men of literature; and, agreeably to form, he went through a course of rhetoric and philosophy, before he passed into divinity, as a resident in the Abbey de Chatrices in the diocese of Chalons sur Marne.  It was there that he laid the foundation of his future celebrity as a literary bibliographer.  He met there the venerable CAULET, who had voluntarily resigned the bishopric of Grenoble, to pass the remainder of his days in the abbey in question—­of which he was the titular head—­in the midst of books, solitude, and literary society.  Mercier Saint Leger quickly caught the old man’s eye, and entwined himself round his heart.  Approaching blindness induced the ex-bishop to confide the care of his library to St. Leger—­who was also instructed by him in the elements of bibliography and literary history.  He taught him also that love of order and of method which are so distinguishable in the productions of the pupil.  Death, however, in a little time separated the master from the scholar; and the latter scarcely ever mentioned the name, or dwelt upon the virtues, of the former, without emotions which knew of no relief but in a flood of tears.  The heart of Mercier St. Leger was yet more admirable than his head.