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"At Milan in the Ambrosian Library is a very ancient Catullus, part of Josephus in Latin, written upon bark; a Samaritan Pentateuch in octavo, part of the Syriac Bible in the ancient or Estrangele characters; divers Greek MSS. in capital letters, being parts of the Bible, with other books of great antiquity, both Greek and Latin. You may look upon them and send me some account.
Some false editions of the book, having an owl in their frontispiece, the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in his stead an ass laden with authors. Then another surreptitious one being printed with the same ass, the new edition in octavo returned for distinction to the owl again.
I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies.
The results of their labors are described in four octavo volumes Voyage dans la Russie méridionale, exécutée sous la direction de M. Anatole de Demidoff and inscribed to the emperor Nicholas. One reward of this labor was election to the Institute de France, his competitors being Parry and Sir John Franklin.
Keats has thoroughly appropriated the character, if not the name. His Endymion is not a Greek shepherd, love of a Grecian goddess; he is merely a young Cockney rhymster, dreaming a phantastic dream at the full of the moon. Costume, were it worth while to notice such a trifle, is violated in every page of this goodly octavo.
He was then twenty-three years of age. The Journal professed to be a "weekly register of criticism and belles lettres." It contained fourteen pages of royal octavo, and its price was sixpence. The motto of the Literary Journal it was often the custom in those days to select a motto for periodical publications was the following taken from Bruyere:
'I have only another remark to make, rejoined the gentleman with the sharp face: 'If Sydney Smith had lived, there would have been more wit and sarcasm levelled at this mixed Commission than would have filled an octavo volume.
Even poor Acton, whose smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the Jesuits. But who can either suffer from or accuse the Catholic bias of Mr. Belloc? He says to you frankly in every page: "I am a Catholic.
It is true that the child's beautiful life is a brief one, like that of the angel-insect, and may be told in a paragraph; yet if I were to write only as many of them as there are "Lives" in Plutarch it would still take an entire book an octavo of at least three hundred pages.
In June, 1834, appeared Cooper's "Letter to His Countrymen." Its publication was no sudden freak, for the year before he had announced the preparation of it. The work is a thin octavo of a little more than one hundred pages; but the damage it wrought him was out of all proportion to its size.
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