For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless
burly, bearish, phrase-making old Tom Carlyle. ``Of all
things,'' quoth he, ``which men do or make here below by far the
most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call
books.'' And Judge Methuen's favorite quotation is from
Babington Macaulay to this effect: ``I would rather be a poor
man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love
reading.''

Kings, indeed! What a sorry lot are they! Said George III. to
Nicol, his bookseller: ``I would give this right hand if the
same attention had been paid to my education which I pay to that
of the prince.'' Louis XIV. was as illiterate as the lowliest
hedger and ditcher. He could hardly write his name; at first, as
Samuel Pegge tells us, he formed it out of six straight strokes
and a line of beauty, thus: | | | | | | S--which he afterward
perfected as best he could, and the result was LOUIS.

Still I find it hard to inveigh against kings when I recall the
goodness of Alexander to Aristotle, for without Alexander we
should hardly have known of Aristotle. His royal patron provided
the philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition of
learning, dispatching couriers to all parts of the earth to
gather books and manuscripts and every variety of curious thing
likely to swell the store of Aristotle's knowledge.

Yet set them up in a line and survey them--these wearers of
crowns and these wielders of scepters--and how pitiable are they
in the paucity and vanity of their accomplishments! What knew
they of the true happiness of human life? They and their