An Autiimn Reverie 135 



kind of reader, who is afflicted with a devotion to some 

 favourite author, and reads and re-reads his Shake- 

 speare or his Goethe, his Sterne or his Walter Scott, 

 his Burns or his Tennyson, who, instead of a fresh, 

 crisp newspaper, has Edie Ochiltree to breakfast as 

 often as he has eggs and toast, who carries a pocket 

 Shandy when he takes an airing, and reads the ' Lotos 

 Eaters ' in his summer-house (when he might himself, 

 like an epicurean god, look down on the human 

 turmoil), is still more to be pitied. His analogue is 

 the habitual playgoer who weeps on the fiftieth night 

 exactly where he has wept forty-nine times before, or 

 the countryman who, if dowered with Ayesha's gift 

 of years, would still in his second thousand greet the 

 clown's ' Here we are again ' with the old burst oi 

 laughter. But we, nous autres the eclectic connoisseurs 

 suck but sparingly from these flowers. A book is 

 inferior to a circus horse in so far that it is a precisely 

 mechanical toy. Though the tricks and capers, the 

 gambols, stumbles, and falls of a circus horse are 

 severely regulated and occur time after time in the 

 same order, there is still, while he has life, the chance 

 of his accidental deviation into novelty. Not so with 

 a book. Turn over the leaves and you discover an 

 action of as cast-iron regularity as an automaton or a 

 musical box. People talk fondly of books as com- 

 panions, but fancy a friend who every time you met 

 him started in the same words, and pauses, and phrases, 

 to recite the same rigmarole he knew by heart ! But 



