As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb's "ragged veterans." Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall;many of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands.But so often have I removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of unfair usage.More than one has been foully injured by a great nail driven into a packing-case--this but the extreme instance of the wrongs they have undergone.Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find myself growing more careful--an illustration of the great truth that virtue is made easy by circumstance.But I confess that, so long as a volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.
I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf.To me that is unintelligible.For one thing, I know every book of mine by its SCENT, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize.Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves.The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand.For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.My eyes being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from sacrifice.
Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word.Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessaries of life.Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need.At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I COULD not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine.My Heyne's Tibullus was grasped at such a moment.It lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.Sixpence was the price--sixpence! At that time I used to eat my midday meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a plate of meat and vegetables.But I did not dare to hope that the Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due to me.I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me.The book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated over the pages.
In this Tibullus I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct.
4, 1792." Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago? There was no other inscription.I like to imagine some poor scholar, poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did.
How much THAT was I could not easily say.Gentle-hearted Tibullus!--of whom there remains to us a poet's portrait more delightful, Ithink, than anything of the kind in Roman literature.
