1831.] [ 391 ] 



THE PERPLEXITIES OF A BOOK-WORM. 



* 



BOOK-READING, as it may be termed, is in some people a mere vicious 

 habit ; just like sitting in a dream over the fire for hours together, or 

 moping through the house of a morning, when one ought to be dress- 

 ing, and hurrying out. I do not know a worse propensity except 

 opium-eating. It weakens and absorbs the whole intellectual sys- 

 tem : it brings a man to that sort of crisis, that his whole life becomes 

 an animal fidget in search of something which he can neither describe 

 nor discover: he is restless and craving; ever searching and never 

 satisfied : hunting for new pleasures in the track of exhausted enjoy- 

 ments, and returning fatigued and discontented. The appetite of a mere 

 book-reader resembles the dismal sensuality of the constrictor, who feeds 

 and sleeps to the end of the chapter. He ranges over every science with 

 that kind of imperfect perception one has of forms and changes in a 

 vision : he forgets, and confuses, and distorts, and confounds, and mis- 

 applies, and at last falls asleep again to try and recover the floating 

 images of the past. Such a man wants health, air, and bodily exercise : 

 he requires a vigorous regimen, a bracing mountain life, and should not 

 be permitted to see even the back of a book for a twelvemonth. When 

 his training is over, you may judge of the state of his disorder, as you do 

 of a man in hydrophobia, when he sees a cup of water, by placing sud- 

 denly before him an uncut volume of a new work. If, like Dominie 

 Sampson, he drops his head amongst the leaves, you had better leave 

 him there he is incurable. 



I will never read a book as long as I live. I have been dipped, chin- 

 deep, in the brine of books, and I am literally salted all over. I do 

 believe that there is not a book of any note, published within the last 

 twenty years, that I have not seen and opened : sometimes I went no far- 

 ther than the title-page: in other cases I ventured into the preface ; but not 

 unfrequently I opened the volume at an unlucky page, read two or three 

 lines, quarrelled with an opinion, or a word, or the punctuation, or the 

 printer, and closed the condemned work for ever. Yet I always gleaned 

 enough to talk of the book flippantly, and I passed, of course, as a man 

 deeply read ; while I was all the time in a secret fever lest my real 

 ignorance should be exposed. But my history is a series of impressions, 

 which shall be told as they arose. 



I was born in Staffordshire, not a mile from that humble range of 

 houses on the road-side, familiarly known by the name of Clock-row. 

 Who has not stood on a dark night on the coach-road that winds through 

 that district of furnaces, and looked across the low grounds with their 

 thousand illuminations, resembling fields of burning marl ? Who that 

 has witnessed the awful appearances presented to him in a sight so strange, 

 has turned away from the contemplation, without feeling a new sensation 

 thrill through his frame ? I have stood for hours at midnight gazing 

 upon that scene : it has transfixed me into marble at times, and deprived 

 me even of the power of ruminating upon its effect. When the wind 

 rushes over the fires, and you see the artificial doors of the potteries 

 choked up with bursting flames, and the universal blaze undulate and 

 heave like a sea of tossing brands close at your feet, and as far as your 

 eye can penetrate ; and when you hear the distant cracking and hissing, 

 and the suffocating sound of fire forcing its way through narrow or acci- 

 dental fissures, as if a thousand human beings were groaning upon beds 



