Books and Bookmen | Page 4

is apropos. As he was to preside at a lecture I was delivering he had in his courtesy invited me to dinner, which was excellent, and as he proposed to take the role that night of a man who had been successful in business, but yet allowed himself in leisure moments to trifle with literature, he desired to create an atmosphere, and so he proposed with a certain imposing air that we should visit what he called "my library." Across the magnificence of the hall we went in stately procession, he first, with that kind of walk by which a surveyor of taxes could have at once assessed his income, and I, the humblest of the bookman tribe, following in the rear, trembling like a skiff in the wake of an ocean liner. "There," he said, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, "what do you think of that?" And THAT was without question a very large and ornate and costly mahogany bookcase with glass doors. Before I saw the doors I had no doubt about my host, but they were a seal upon my faith, for although a bookman is obliged to have one bit of glass in his garden for certain rare plants from Russia and Morocco, to say nothing of the gold and white vellum lily upon which the air must not be allowed to blow, especially when charged with gas and rich in dust, yet he hates this conservatory, just as much as he loves its contents. His contentment is to have the flowers laid out in open beds, where he can pluck a blossom at will. As often as one sees the books behind doors, and most of all when the doors are locked, then he knows that the owner is not their lover, who keeps tryst with them in the evening hours when the work of the day is done, but their jailer, who has bought them in the market-place for gold, and holds them in this foreign place by force. It has seemed to me as if certain old friends looked out from their prison with appealing glance, and one has been tempted to break the glass and let, for instance, Elia go free. It would be like the emancipation of a slave. Elia was not, good luck for him, within this particular prison, and I was brought back from every temptation to break the laws of property by my chairman, who was still pursuing his catechism. "What," was question two, "do you think I paid for THAT?" It was a hopeless catechism, for I had never possessed anything like THAT, and none of my friends had in their homes anything like THAT, and in my wildest moments I had never asked the price of such a thing as THAT. As it loomed up before me in its speckless respectability and insolence of solid wealth my English sense of reverence for money awoke, and I confessed that this matter was too high for me; but even then, casting a glance of deprecation in its direction, I noticed THAT was almost filled by a single work, and I wondered what it could be. "Cost 80 pounds if it cost a penny, and I bought it second-hand in perfect condition for 17 pounds, 5s., with the books thrown in-- All the Year Round from the beginning in half calf;" and then we returned in procession to the drawing-room, where my patron apologised for our absence, and explained that when two bookmen got together over books it was difficult to tear them away. He was an admirable chairman, for he occupied no time with a review of literature in his address, and he slept without being noticed through mine (which is all I ask of a chairman), and so it may seem ungrateful, but in spite of "THAT" and any books, even Spenser and Chaucer, which THAT might have contained, this Maecenas of an evening was not a bookman.
It is said, and now I am going to turn the application of a pleasant anecdote upside down, that a Colonial squatter having made his pile and bethinking himself of his soul, wrote home to an old friend to send him out some chests of books, as many as he thought fit, and the best that he could find. His friend was so touched by this sign of grace that he spent a month of love over the commission, and was vastly pleased when he sent off, in the best editions and in pleasant binding, the very essence of English literature. It was a disappointment that the only acknowledgment of his trouble came on a postcard, to say that the consignment had arrived in good condition. A year afterwards, so runs the story, he received a