The Delicious Vice

The Delicious Vice

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Title: The Delicious Vice
Author: Young E. Allison
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THE DELICIOUS VICE
Pipe Dreams and Fond Adventures of an Habitual Novel-Reader
Among Some Great Books and Their People
By Young E. Allison
Second Edition (Revised and containing new material)
CHICAGO THE PRAIRIELAND PUBLISHING CO. 1918 Printed
originally in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Reprinted by courtesy.
First edition, Cleveland, Burrows Bros., 1907.
Copyright 1907-1918

I.
A RHAPSODY ON THE NOBLE PROFESSION OF NOVEL
READING
It must have been at about the good-bye age of forty that Thomas
Moore, that choleric and pompous yet genial little Irish gentleman,
turned a sigh into good marketable "copy" for Grub Street and with
shrewd economy got two full pecuniary bites out of one melancholy
apple of reflection:
"Kind friends around me fall Like leaves in wintry weather,"
--he sang of his own dead heart in the stilly night.
"Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves on the bed Where thy mates of the
garden lie scentless and dead."
--he sang to the dying rose. In the red month of October the rose is
forty years old, as roses go. How small the world has grown to a man

of forty, if he has put his eyes, his ears and his brain to the uses for
which they are adapted. And as for time--why, it is no longer than a
kite string. At about the age of forty everything that can happen to a
man, death excepted, has happened; happiness has gone to the devil or
is a mere habit; the blessing of poverty has been permanently secured
or you are exhausted with the cares of wealth; you can see around the
corner or you do not care to see around it; in a word--that is,
considering mental existence--the bell has rung on you and you are up
against a steady grind for the remainder of your life. It is then there
comes to the habitual novel reader the inevitable day when, in anguish
of heart, looking back over his life, he--wishes he hadn't; then he asks
himself the bitter question if there are not things he has done that he
wishes he hadn't. Melancholy marks him for its own. He sits in his
room some winter evening, the lamp swarming shadowy seductions,
the grate glowing with siren invitation, the cigar box within easy reach
for that moment when the pending sacrifice between his teeth shall be
burned out; his feet upon the familiar corner of the mantel at that
automatically calculated altitude which permits the weight of the upper
part of the body to fall exactly upon the second joint from the lower
end of the vertebral column as it rests in the comfortable depression
created by continuous wear in the cushion of that particular chair to
which every honest man who has acquired the library vice sooner or
later gets attached with a love no misfortune can destroy. As he sits
thus, having closed the lids of, say, some old favorite of his youth, he
will inevitably ask himself if it would not have been better for him if he
hadn't. And the question once asked must be answered; and it will be an
honest answer, too. For no scoundrel was ever addicted to the delicious
vice of novel-reading. It is too tame for him. "There is no money in it."
* * * * *
And every habitual novel-reader will answer that question he has asked
himself, after a sigh. A sigh that will echo from the tropic deserted
island