Page:Guy Mannering Vol 1.djvu/331

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GUY MANNERING.
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description. He grinned like an ogre, swung his arms like the sails of a windmill, 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 superintendant 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

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