292 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



freaks of iiisset tell of Montaigne ; these stripes of 

 crimson fire, of Shakespeare ; this sober gold, of Sir 

 Thomas Browne ; this purpling bloom, of Lamb ; in 

 such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of AlcinoUa 

 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 lialf-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 bibliothecarian 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 w^hen we made the first catalogue of our library, 

 in which "Bible, large, 1 vol.," and "Bible, small, 1 vol.," 

 asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the sole 

 ^s in our little hive, w^e have had a weakness even for 

 those checker-board volumes that only fill up ; we can- 

 not breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, 

 that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one book- 

 case, w^ould 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 in- 

 cumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, 

 how^ever dull; we live over again the author's lonely 

 labors and tremulous hopes ; we see him, on his first 

 appearance after parturition, " as w^ell as could be ex- 

 pected," a nervous s^^mpathy ^^et surviving between the 

 late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, 

 doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, 

 or the Coff'ee-house of Will or Button, blushing under 

 the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if thej^ must 

 needs know him for the author of the " Modest Enquiry 

 into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the 

 " Unities briefly considered by Philomusus," of which 

 they have never heard and never w^ill hear so much aa 



