Every library should try to be
complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads. I
don't mean that I buy all the trashy compilations on my special subjects,
but I try to have all the works of any real importance relating to them,
old as well as new. In the following compartment you will find the great
authors in all the languages I have mastered, from Homer and Hesiod
downward to the last great English name.
This division, you see, you can make almost as extensive or as limited as
you choose. You can crowd the great representative writers into a small
compass; or you can make a library consisting only of the different
editions of Horace, if you have space and money enough. Then comes the
Harem, the shelf or the bookcase of Delilahs, that you have paid wicked
prices for, that you love without pretending to be reasonable about it,
and would bag in case of fire before all the rest, just as Mr. Townley
took the Clytie to his carriage when the anti-Catholic mob threatened his
house in 1780. As for the foundlings like my Hedericus, they go among
their peers; it is a pleasure to take them, from the dusty stall where
they were elbowed by plebeian school-books and battered odd volumes, and
give them Alduses and Elzevirs for companions.
Nothing remains but the Infirmary.
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