Note 374 — The Drawing Room. (continued 3)

Notwithstanding Pope has called Theobald by an epithet which I have too much respect for the ears of my readers to repeat, I do not scruple to rank the latter in the list of bibliomaniacs. We have nothing here to do with his edition of Shakspeare; which, by the bye, was no despicable effort of editorial skill—as some of his notes, yet preserved in the recent editions of our bard, testify—but we may fairly allow Theobald to have been a lover of Caxtonian lore, as his curious extract in Mist's Journal, March 16, 1728, from our old printer's edition of Virgil's Æneid, 1490, sufficiently testifies. While his gothic library, composed in part of "Caxton, Wynkyn, and De Lyra," proves that he had something of the genuine blood of bibliomaniacism running in his veins. See Mr. Bowles's edition of Pope's Works, vol. v., 114, 257.