library in a garden!" It sounds like having a castle in Spain, or a
sheep-walk in Arcadia, and I suppose that merely to wish for it is to
be what indignant journalists call "a faddling hedonist."

In the meanwhile, my books are scattered about in cases in different
parts of a double sitting-room, where the cats carouse on one side,
and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend
of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green
marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick
Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when his
master's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot have cabinets of
ebony and cedar, I may just as well have plain deal, with common glass
doors to keep the dust out. I detest your Persian apparatus.

It is a curious reflection, that the ordinary private person who
collects objects of a modest luxury, has nothing about him so old as
his books. If a wave of the rod made everything around him disappear
that did not exist a century ago, he would suddenly find himself with
one or two sticks of furniture, perhaps, but otherwise alone with his
books. Let the work of another century pass, and certainly nothing
but these little brown volumes would be left, so many caskets full
of passion and tenderness, disappointed ambition, fruitless hope,
self-torturing envy, conceit aware, in maddening lucid moments, of its
own folly. I think if Mentzelius had been worth his salt, those ears
of his, which heard the book-worm crow, might have caught the echo of
a sigh from beneath many a pathetic vellum cover. There is something
awful to me, of nights, and when I am alone, in thinking of all the
souls imprisoned in the ancient books around me. Not one, I suppose,
but was ushered into the world with pride and glee, with a flushed
cheek and heightened pulse; not one enjoyed a career that in all