LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 215 



whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who 

 substitute archaeologic perversity for fine-nerved scholarship, and 

 the worthless profusion of the curiosity-shop for the sifted ex- 

 clusiveness of the cabinet of Art. They forget, in their fanati 

 cism for antiquity, that the dust of never so many centuries is 

 impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that only good 

 books absorb mellowness of tone from age, and that a baptismal 

 register which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be 

 life) cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous 

 commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which have the 

 old age of Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and 

 wisdom, which seem to have sucked colour and ripeness from 

 the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that have 

 steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation: 

 these quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne ; these stripes of 

 crimson fire, of Shakspeare ; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas 

 Browne ; this purpling bloom, of Lamb ; in such fruits we 

 taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoiis and the orchards of 

 Atlas ; and there are volumes again which can claim only the 

 inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have 

 outlived their half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen 

 and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred 

 years ago. 



We confess a b ibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a 

 value in our eyes ; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the 

 phrase, A book is a book ; from the time when we made the 

 first catalogue of our library, in which * Bible, large, I vol./ and 

 * Bible, small, I vol./ asserted their alphabetic individuality and 

 xvere the sole J3s in our little hive ; we have had a weakness even 

 for those checker-board volumes that only fill up ; we cannot 

 breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan 

 selectness, which, content with one bookcase, would have no 

 tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, 

 making room for choicer new-comers by a continuous ostracism 

 to the garret of present incumbents. There is to us a sacred- 

 ness in a volume, however dull ; we live over again the author s 

 lonely labours and tremulous hopes ; we see him, on his first 

 appearance after parturition, as well as could be expected/ a 

 nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbi 

 lical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the 

 Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or 

 Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, 

 as if they must needs know him for the author of the Modest 



