While these matters engaged the attention of the other members of the Woodbourne family, Dominie Sampson was occupied, body and soul, in the arrangement of the late bishop’s library, which had been sent from Liverpool by sea, and conveyed by thirty or forty carts from the sea-port at which it was landed.  Sampson’s joy at beholding the ponderous contents of these chests arranged upon the floor of the large apartment, from whence he was to transfer them to the shelves, baffles all description.  He grinned like an ogre, swung his arms like the sails of a wind-mill, shouted ‘Prodigious’ till the roof rung to his raptures.  ‘He had never,’ he said, ’seen so many books together, except in the College Library’; and now his dignity and delight in being superintendent of the collection raised him, in his own opinion, almost to the rank of the academical librarian, whom he had always regarded as the greatest and happiest man on earth.  Neither were his transports diminished upon a hasty examination of the contents of these volumes.  Some, indeed, of Belles LETTRES, poems, plays, or memoirs he tossed indignantly aside, with the implied censure of ‘psha,’ or ‘frivolous’; but the greater and bulkier part of the collection bore a very different character.  The deceased prelate, a divine of the old and deeply-learned cast, had loaded his shelves with volumes which displayed the antique and venerable attributes so happily described by a modern poet:—­

     That weight of wood, with leathern coat o’erlaid,
     Those ample clasps of solid metal made,
     The close-press’d leaves unoped for many an age,
     The dull red edging of the well-fill’d page,
     On the broad back the stubborn ridges roll’d,
     Where yet the title stands in tarnish’d gold.

Books of theology and controversial divinity, commentaries, and polyglots, sets of the Fathers, and sermons which might each furnish forth ten brief discourses of modern date, books of science, ancient and modern, classical authors in their best and rarest forms—­such formed the late bishop’s venerable library, and over such the eye of Dominie Sampson gloated with rapture.  He entered them in the catalogue in his best running hand, forming each letter with the accuracy of a lover writing a valentine, and placed each individually on the destined shelf with all the reverence which I have seen a lady pay to a jar of old china.  With all this zeal his labours advanced slowly.  He often opened a volume when halfway up the library steps, fell upon some interesting passage, and, without shifting his inconvenient posture, continued immersed in the fascinating perusal until the servant pulled him by the skirts to assure him that dinner waited.  He then repaired to the parlour, bolted his food down his capacious throat in squares of three inches, answered ay and no at random to whatever question was asked at him, and again hurried back to the library, as soon as his napkin was removed, and sometimes with it hanging round his neck like a pinafore;—­