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-90-ence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the temple of wisdom, more reverend than the altars of pallas? men have lived and died, like motes of the air, hovering about this hoarded preciousness of ages, and forgetful ever of the awakened world, with its exquisite outlook into the future. in the pathetic companionship of books lived southey, long after their beauty was shut out from him, passing his trembling hand up and down their ranks, and taking comfort in the certainty that they had not forsaken him.
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 a pitiful thing. it is broken down by adversity, and ready to meet your advances half-way. it appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that it is! lacking attention so long in the dingy precincts of a shop. nothing is more gratifying to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, like a shipwrecked sailor along the sands of a lonely island, than its curled edges, "bethumbed horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear to you. what a precious, homely tribute! what delicater flattery, than to catch sight of a modest volume, supposing you take some parental interest in it, in a condition which, à posteriori, does not suggest soap and water?
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.-92- we would scorn to divorce it from any dusty nook it chose to frequent. if we abduct it, it would be a great deal happier. on the same principle, it requires an impulse of spartan righteousness to return a book to the civic library with the proper dispositions. it is heart-rending to make over a used and shaken veteran to the custody of the public, anew. we know well enough that it shall collapse utterly ere we shall have the virtue to borrow it a second time. or we speculate on an inestimable octavo, readerless on the shelf for scores of years, till our mark is set over against it, and doomed to deeper than abyssinian solitude when we loosen its clinging hold; and wonder if what a townsman and a wit called "bookaneering" would not be a chivalric pursuit for us to follow.
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,-93- from any of its admirable kindred. who wants beaumont and fletcher in sombre cloth, or in anything out of folio, or jeremy taylor in red morocco and gilt? prefaces are not ill things in their places; but what has a preface got to do with jolly, self-explanatory pepys; or a table of notes with walton the angler; or a glossary—fancy the pert thing!—with philip sidney's sonnets? illustrations to some tales are insufferable. picture a menagerie let loose on the seventh or eighth page of rasselas, to bear out the diverting johnsonian description of the sprightly kid bounding on the rocks, the subtle monkey frolicking among the trees, the solemn elephant reposing in the shade!
"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,-94- although it be egregiously fat, and elbow its comelier neighbors right and left.
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 his loved spenser; and irving familiarly fixed by addison and goldsmith, the barriers of centuries between them broken down.
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 that henry who fell at crécy, and you shall read the mystery of transmission. a poet tries his morning lay, to a continent's delight, and after years of joy and triumph it shall be revealed to him how the self-same music fell from long-silent lips in a land across the sea. the unaltered radiance of an inspiration streams yesterday on one, to-morrow on another, as moving sunshine visits the hundred panes of a cathedral window; and that elusive thing which we name the originality of any artist resembles little else but the kaleidoscopic newness of color thrown hourly along the aisles.
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 sake, he would change the erect port, the persuasive speech, the innermost personal charm which was called his, and which he finds, later, to have been but a legacy,—yet, in places where his detecting conscience cannot follow, the hereditary principle will grow to blossom, and bespeak him, blamelessly, to be what the centuries have made him.
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.