in and then by a providence have met his wife coming out from buying that carpet, told her where her husband was, and saw her go to fetch him.  Among the touching incidents of life, none comes nearer me than to see the bookman’s wife pleading with him to remember his (once) prosperous home and his (almost) starving children.  And indeed if there be any other as entirely affecting in this province, it is the triumphant cunning with which the bookman will smuggle a suspicious brown paper parcel into his study at an hour when his wife is out, or the effrontery with which he will declare when caught, that the books have been sent unbeknown to him, and he supposes merely for his examination.  For, like drink, this fearsome disease eats into the very fibre of character, so that its victim will practise tricks to obtain books in advance of a rival collector, and will tell the most mendacious stories about what he paid for them.

Should he desire a book, and it be not a king’s ransom, there is no sacrifice he will not make to obtain it.  His modest glass of Burgundy he will cheerfully surrender, and if he ever travelled by any higher class, which is not likely, he will now go third, and his topcoat he will make to last another year, and I do not say he will not smoke, but a cigar will now leave him unmoved.  Yes, and if he gets a chance to do an extra piece of writing, between 12 and 2 A.M., he will clutch at the opportunity, and all that he saves, he will calculate shilling by shilling, and the book he purchases with the complete price—that is the price to which he has brought down the seller after two days’ negotiations—anxious yet joyful days—will be all the dearer to him for his self-denial.  He has also anodynes for his conscience when he seems to be wronging his afflicted family, for is he not gathering the best of legacies for his sons, something which will make their houses rich for ever, or if things come to the worst cannot his collection be sold and all he has expended be restored with usury, which in passing I may say is a vain dream?  But at any rate, if other men spend money on dinners and on sport, on carved furniture and gay clothing, may he not also have one luxury in life?  His conscience, however, does give painful twinges, and he will leave the Pines Horace, which he has been handling delicately for three weeks, in hopeless admiration of its marvellous typography, and be outside the door before a happy thought strikes him, and he returns to buy it, after thirty minutes’ bargaining, with perfect confidence and a sense of personal generosity.  What gave him this relief and now suffuses his very soul with charity?  It was a date which for the moment he had forgotten and which has occurred most fortunately.  To-morrow will be the birthday of a man whom he has known all his days and more intimately than any other person, and although he has not so high an idea of the man as the world is good enough to hold, and although he has often quarrelled with him and called him shocking names—which tomcats would be ashamed of—yet he has at the bottom a sneaking fondness for the fellow, and sometimes hopes he is not quite so bad after all.  One thing is certain, the rascal loves a good book and likes to have it when he can, and perhaps it will make him a better man to show that he has been remembered and that one person at least believes in him, and so the bookman orders that delightful treasure to be sent to his own address in order that next day he may present it—as a birthday present—to himself.

Concerning tastes in pleasure there can be no final judgment, but for the bookman it may be said, beyond any other sportsman, he has the most constant satisfaction, for to him there is no close season, except the spring cleaning which he furiously resents, and only allows once in five years, and his autumn holiday, when he takes some six handy volumes with him.  For him there are no hindrances of weather, for if the day be sunshine he taketh his pleasure in a garden, and if the day be sleet of March the fireside is the dearer, while there is a certain volume—Payne’s binding, red morocco, a favourite colour of his—and the bookman reads Don Quixote with the more relish because the snowdrift is beating on the window.  During the hours of the day when he is visiting patients, who tell their symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about corn, or composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is thinking of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and eighty minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a man can work or hope to get.  He will spend the time in the good company of people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with them.  Some of them of high estate and some extremely low; some of them learned persons and some of them simple, country men.  For while the bookman counteth it his chief honour and singular privilege to hold converse with Virgil and Dante, with Shakespeare and Bacon, and suchlike nobility, yet is he very happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Dandie Dinmont, with Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp; he is proud when Diana Vernon comes to his room, and he has a chair for Colonel Newcome; he likes to hear Coleridge preach, who, as Lamb said, “never did anything else,” and is much flattered when Browning tries to explain what he meant in Paracelsus.  It repays one for much worry when William Blake not only reads his Songs of Innocence but also shows his own illustrations, and he turns to his life of Michael Angelo with the better understanding after he has read what Michael Angelo wrote to Vittoria Colonna.  He that hath such friends, grave or gay, needeth not to care whether he be rich or poor, whether he know great folk or they pass him by, for he is independent of society and all its whims, and almost independent of circumstances.  His friends of this circle will never play him false nor ever take the pet.  If he does not wish their company they are silent, and then when he turns to them again there is no difference in the welcome, for they maintain an equal mind and are ever in good humour.  As he comes in tired and possibly upset by smaller people they receive him in a kindly fashion, and in the firelight their familiar faces make his heart glad.  Once I stood in Emerson’s room, and I saw the last words that he wrote, the pad on which he wrote them, and the pen with which they were written, and the words are these: “The Book is a sure friend, always ready at your first leisure, opens to the very page you desire, and shuts at your first fatigue.”

As the bookman grows old and many of his pleasures cease, he thanks God for one which grows the richer for the years and never fades.  He pities those who have not this retreat from the weariness of life, nor this quiet place in which to sit when the sun is setting.  By the mellow wisdom of his books and the immortal hope of the greater writers, he is kept from peevishness and discontent, from bigotry and despair.  Certain books grow dearer to him with the years, so that their pages are worn brown and thin, and he hopes with a Birmingham book-lover, Dr. Showell Rogers, whose dream has been fulfilled, that Heaven, having a place for each true man, may be “a bookman’s paradise, where early black-lettered tomes, rare and stately, first folios of Shakespeare, tall copies of the right editions of the Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, uncropped, uncut, and unfoxed in all their verdant pureness, fresh as when they left the presses of the Aldi, are to be had for the asking.”  Between this man at least and his books there will be no separation this side the grave, but his gratitude to them and his devotion will ever grow and their ministries to him be ever dearer, especially that Book of books which has been the surest guide of the human soul.  “While I live,” says one who both wrote and loved books and was numbered among our finest critics, “while I live and think, nothing can deprive me