sale commits us bookish folk to the charge of sheer nincompoopry. Neither are my standards demoralized by the possession of many books without portraits, "preliminaries," title-pages, and portions of the text. Out upon it were they not thus a little lower than the angels or archangels a little damaged, I should never have snared them at all, nor been buoyed by the fallacious hope of one day making them complete. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that an imperfect book is the sign manual of a true (and impecunious) bibliophile. No folios of Philemon Holland's "Pliny" (1601), of Florio's "Montaigne" (1603), of Marvell (1681), of Ben Jonson (1640), of Sir Thomas Browne (1686), of Fuller's "Worthies" (1662), and others would have stood sentinel on the shelves. I had had no Donne's "Sermons" (1640), if one of its previous owners, finding a sermon short, had not with an almost incredible labour of love copied in manuscript the missing ewe lamb, making his letters, capitals, decorations and italics identical in every particular with those in print. There is no difference at all except that the written sermon is better done than the printed ones. Who would prefer a dull perfection to this lively monument of devotion? But for the prudish pornographer who tore out The Rapture" from my Carew, he had remained decorative furniture in the Long Island residence of a wooden-pellets-for-raspberry-jam-maker; but for the mouthing worm in my Sir Thomas More, he had mouldered in ignoble ease in a book-shop; but for the worm that navigates, alas, through the pages of Purchas, I should never have possessed it nor fetched you out this ditty.

TO A BOOK-WORM

"Worm i' the book! Now tell thou must why

Thou hatest sage antiquity

With Philistinish jealousy.

Is't envy, appetite or lusty

Futurist rage against the musty?

Truly I cannot diagnose

That a passion literary

Or love of learning urges thee

To drive thy forceps bellicose

Through Chaucer's beard, Josephus' nose.

Thou plough'st a metaphoric way
Into the lobe of Walton's ear,

Through Hackluyt to Cape Finistere.

From Demonologies, thy prey

To Thomas More's Utopia.

Not Drelincourt nor Baxter's sermons

Nor Herrick's hale Hesperides

Can stay thy gross voracities.

A fig for Arnold and the dons!

Thou plant'st an abscess in Shakespeare's bones.

Thy boldness passes all belief,

For like some earth-contemning Mage

Thou growest into Lilly's page;

Hold'st from some Imp the heavens in fief
A Cancer in the astral leaf.

Not valetudinarians,

Nor cannibals nor scavengers

Can be so cynically perverse.

Thou feed'st on Camden's last Remains,

Nor the Diet of Wormes thy tooth restrains.”

The acquisitiveness of the collector is, indeed, the enemy-he and his parasitic horde of middlemen booksellers. He might just as well collect old skulls as old books. The printer's devil prong him-he cares nothing for literature, for typography, for antiquity, for tradition, for the history of printing, for all the varied sentiments and amenities a library affords. I rack my mind for objurgation. I have it—he is only a few steps higher up than that nameless pestilence, that assassin of innocence, beauty, and freedom-the collector of dead birds. Two hundred years hence, he will assuredly be collecting books on Esperanto, written in simplified spelling. He wants a book, because there is no other specimen to be procured, because it is inexpensive, because it has some outlandish spice of bookishness about it that no rational person cares a paper-binding for, because it is printed upside down, because it has the arms of some king's concubine upon it, because it is garishly bound, because its author used to tame cockatrices, because he is a snob who would buy a vicarious reputation.

It is due to him that there are so many absurdities in the logic of prices. Why, for instance, should the first edition of Burton's "Anatomy" command a price of from £50 to £60 and the three folio editions (also printed at Oxford) which follow it of from £2 to £5? The first edition is an ugly, squat, obese and misshapen quarto,

published in 1621 without the famous engraved frontispiece of Le Blon. The fourth is a small and shapely folio, with the frontispiece and issued only eleven years later. Why should the first edition of Burns beat the first edition of "The Songs of Innocence" (supremely coloured by Blake for Flaxman) by £250? Both are of unique rarity. But is there any comparison between the two books qua books or the two poets qua poets? Blake has the bays but not the guineas. You cannot explain these things away by technicalities or degrees in rareness. I say they are absurdities, and the vested interest of the book trade is responsible for them. Let tradesman and collector be condemned to read Lucian on book collecting in Tartarus for a thousand ages. I have never been able to understand why pounds do not stick to the folio of that forthright old prelate, Dr. Joseph Hall (“Meditations and Vowes "), not because he is a man of wise saws and modern instances but because his book contains sixty-seven title-pages. Who is there who has been to a saleroom and seen the price of a book mounting to the roof simply because it has never been opened, will not agree with me?

Are there then any psychological milestones for the book-lover? Happily not. Each hunter must philosophize upon his own experience and each hunter, if that experience match the qualities of his mind, the secret fabric of his temper and character, is right. My own is too casual and untidy for any such deductions. When I first caught the afflatus, I used to buy pretty well any book with a calf covering upon it. My subsequent career has therefore been a progress in intensive repentance. I have been steadily eating my own books, or rather selling

them again. And I made innumerable false starts. I once had the idea of collecting one specimen of all the famous continental printers of the sixteenth century. But I had the sense to recognize that I was not an expert in the intricate perceptions of beautiful printing—even though I stumbled upon a truth shaking the pillars of the world in the process. That truth is that were all the printed matter in Great Britain set up in fine type, there would be an immediate revolution and the millennium be established.

So I discharged my continental printers, keeping only an early Froben in Latin (1527) with initials, headpieces, etc., designed in the Holbein manner and a typography that would set angels rubbing up their classics again. Quite innocently, I set a modern book of poems over against it. Parables exuded from the contrast. There was nothing shoddy or blatant about the representative of the modern; it was only that it reminded me of an official frock-coat-the frock-coat which de Musset called a symbol of Europe mourning for its lost illusions. Here, mourning for its lost individuality, its lost passion, and philosophy of work. Books, like the houses they ought to live in, have in an age devoted to commerce and its stimulus to the acquisitive rather than the creative spirit of man been planed down to a minimum level of dull mediocrity. But in this Froben I was looking at the handicraft of a period in which trade and art were synonymous terms. "I am not greatly affected to new books," said Montaigne, and Sir William Temple in his essay on ancient and modern learning, "whosoever conversed much among the old books will be something hard to please among the new."