T THE passion for collecting books, beginning with the Greeks, passed to the Roman senators and patriots, and thence to every corner of the civilized earth. A philosopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria, over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose survival embitters the thought of the lost volumes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh inaccessible tomes of Al Farabi of Farab ("who knew or wrote so much as he?"), of Berni, of Martorell; or of those princely libraries instanced by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away by Noah's flood! A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with illustrious figures, what else is that but a pres Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in gathering his treasures, the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they proclaim with startling fidelity so long as they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some benign shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances of trade. A second-hand book is verily Certain books, which we handle for the first time, we cannot for the life of us lay down again, without vehement infringements on that edict forbidding envy and covetousness. We yearn for such a bit of property. Our pocket seems predestined to filch it. We love it much better than its proprietor, who never had the spirit to give it cordial abuse. We would not endure that paper cover veiling its genial face. Uniform sets of any author, save a historian, are terrors to the discriminating eye. When we buy the Works even of one C. Dickens, we shall stipulate that the "Tale of Two Cities" (never to be named without reverence) shall get its just due of difference in size and hue, "A big book," said Myles Davis, "is a scarecrow to the head and pocket of author, student, buyer, and seller." That depends. The virile poets, like Burns, cannot be got into sylph-like draperies. Nobody could abide a prose Milton less than three and a half inches thick. Froissart, even, must be taken solid. We own up to loving our stumpy Don Quixote, with its print of beauteous Dorothea laving her impossible feet, The fashion of including the productions of two or three contemporaneous writers in one volume is happily past, and may not revive. What dreary comradeship! like that of the ghosts driven together on the blast, in Dante's wonderful fifth canto. Why should Coleridge the dreamer, and Campbell the planner, be lashed so, wrist to wrist; or Waller's sweet dallying verse classed with Denham's sagacious strophes? What joint mundane sin warranted this posthumous halving of their immortal fortunes? If the trade must economize, and readers must needs get their literature in bunches, let the coupling be done on a saner basis, and arise from the affiliations, not of time or place, but of genius solely. We confess we should like to see Sheridan and Farquhar amicably sharing applause, within the compass of one lively-colored quarto; some of the singing-birds of the second and third Stuart courts caged with Gay, Matt Prior, and a few modern bardlings; Keats close to Family traits, like murder, will out. Nature has but so many moulds; and however unique and quaint a writer may be to his own circle, look up his intellectual pedigree, and you shall recognize the ancestral quality astray in him, on an altered world; the voice of Jacob, indeed, appealing through all disguises. What should Poe be like,—Poe the one and only,—but a blended brief echo of Marlowe and of Dryden? Whence came Charles Lamb, even, in great part (and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt besides, in the collateral line), but from golden-hearted Sidney and Sir Thomas Browne? Pages and pages of his that recall them! every tone of their old sedater voices prophetic of his sweet laughter, his fine, grave reasonings to be! My young lord is spirited, but unlike his father or mother in feature, as in character: ah! go to the remotest corner of the portrait-gallery, and brush away the damp from the dark face of So much have books wrought, to the confusion of the proud. The child's early, unconscious preference for authors of his choosing, urges itself upon him when he, too, shall write, and softly hoodwinks his imagination. Has he a sensitive pen, jealous of its rectitude, true as the magnet-lured steel to what he believes to be his frank, unshared fancies? How shall that affect the immutable law? For the very blood in his veins is not all his own; and though, for honor's It was feelingly said by one of the gentle English essayists last named: "How pleasant is the thought that such lovers of books have themselves become books!" and do so become evermore, beginning and ending with a secluded library shelf, planting the seed of kindly influences close to the noble shade which sheltered them in youth, and under which they slumbered many a summer's day. footer header |