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ter more curious: Mr. West's, like a magnificent champagne, executed by the hand of Claude or Both, and enclosing mountains, meadows, and streams, presented to the eye of the beholder a scene at once luxuriant and fruitful: Mr. Ratcliffe's, like one of those delicious pieces of scenery, touched by the pencil of Rysdael or Hobbima, exhibited to the beholder's eye a spot equally interesting, but less varied and extensive: the judgment displayed in both was the same. The sweeping foliage and rich pasture of the former, could not, perhaps, afford greater gratification than the thatched cottage, abrupt declivities, and gushing streams of the latter. To change the metaphorMr. West's was a magnificent repository, Mr. Ratcliffe's a choice cabinet of gems.

Or some particulars of Mr. Ratcliffe's life, I had hoped to have found gleanings in Mr. Nichols's Anecdotes of Bowyer; but his name does not even appear in the index; being probably reserved for the second forth-coming enlarged

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edition. Meanwile it may not be uninteresting to remark, that, like another MAGLIABECHI*, he imbibed his love of reading and collecting from the accidental possession of scraps and leaves of books. The fact is, Mr. Ratcliffe once kept a chandler's shop in the Borough; and, as is the case with all retail traders,

* Magliabechi's parents were of so low and mean a rank, that they were very well satisfied when they had got him into the service of a man who sold herbs and fruit. He had never learned to read; and yet he was perpetually poring over the leaves of old books, that were used as waste paper in his master's shop. A bookseller, who lived in the neighbourhood, and who had often observed this, and knew the boy could not read, asked him one day, "What he meant by staring so much on printed paper?" He said, "that he did not know how it was, but that he loved it of all things that he was very uneasy in the business he was in, and should be the happiest creature in the world, if he could live with him, who had always so many books about him." See the life of this extraordinary man, printed at Strawberry Hill, in 1758, 8vo. A curious, and rather scarce, little volume. MAGLIABECHI lived to become librarian to the Grand Duke of FLORENCE, and had his fame extolled by such men as Crescembeni, Moreri, Lavocat, and Salvini. He was called The Universal Library? A Prodigy of Learning,' &c. &c.

had great quantities of old books brought to him to be purchased at so much per pound! Hence arose his passion for collecting the black letter, as well as Stilton cheeses; and hence, by unwearied assiduity and attention to business, he amassed a sufficiency to retire within the precincts of his library, instead of his shop; and to live, for the remainder of his days, on the luxury of old English literature.

Published by LONGMAN, HURST, REES, and ORME, Paternoster Row; J. HATCHARD, Bookseller to Her Majesty, 190, Piccadilly; and WILLIAM MILLER, Albemarle Street.

Printed by William Savage, Bedford Bury.

THE DIRECTOR.

No. 23. SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 1807.

To doubt

Is worse than to have lost: and to despair,

Is but to antedate those miseries

That must fall on us.

DUKE OF MILAN.

HAVING received the two following communications from quarters very capable of affording many more, I submit them to the perusal of the reader, as the didactic part of the present number; to the first, I have taken the liberty of prefixing the above motto from MAS

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