Hours in a Library, Volume I | Page 2

of the Deity!
COWLEY, Ode on the Bodleian.
This to a structure led well known to fame, And called, 'The Monument of Vanished Minds,' Where when they thought they saw in well-sought books The assembled souls of all that men thought wise, It bred such awful reverence in their looks, As if they saw the buried writers rise. Such heaps of written thought; gold of the dead, Which Time does still disperse but not devour, Made them presume all was from deluge freed Which long-lived authors writ ere Noah's shower.
DAVENANT, Gondibert.
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.--MILTON, Areopagitica.
Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end.--FIELDING, Tom Jones.
We whom the world is pleased to honour with the title of modern authors should never have been able to compass our great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the general good of mankind.--SWIFT, Tale of a Tub.
A good library always makes me melancholy, where the best author is as much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coronation.--SWIFT.
In my youth I never entered a great library but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind--not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some instruction and pleasure; and before I can have had time to extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive in all likelihood I shall be summoned away.--DE QUINCEY, Letter to a young man.
A man may be judged by his library.--BENTHAM.
I ever look upon a library with the reverence of a temple.--EVELYN, to Wotton.
'Father, I should like to learn to make gold.' 'And what would'st thou do if thou could'st make it?' 'Why, I would build a great house and fill it with books.'--SOUTHEY, Doctor.
What would you have more? A wife? That is none of the indispensable requisites of life. Books? That is one of them, and I have more than I can use.--DAVID HUME, Burton's 'Life.'
Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery! What is that to opening a box of books? The joy upon lifting up the cover must be something like that which we shall feel when Peter the porter opens the door upstairs, and says, 'Please to walk in, Sir.'--SOUTHEY, Life.
I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.--MACAULAY.
Our books ... do not our hearts hug them, and quiet themselves in them even more than in God?--BAXTER'S Saint's Rest.
It is our duty to live among books.--NEWMAN, Tracts for the Times, No. 2.
What lovely things books are!--BUCKLE, Life by Huth.
(Query) Whether the collected wisdom of all ages and nations be not found in books?--BERKELEY, Querist.
Read we must, be writers ever so indifferent.--SHAFTESBURY, Characteristics.
It's mighty hard to write nowadays without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume. The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.--O. W. HOLMES, Poet at the Breakfast Table.
I adopted the tolerating measure of the elder Pliny--'nullum esse librum tam malum ut non in aliqua parte prodesset.'--GIBBON, Autobiography.
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.--BYRON, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
While you converse with lords and dukes, I have their betters here, my books; Fixed in an elbow chair at ease I choose companions as I please. I'd rather have one single shelf Than all my friends, except yourself. For, after all that can be said, Our best companions are the dead.
SHERIDAN to Swift.
We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select