with you. You had performed incredible pedestrian achievements, and were not hungry, but simply weary. It is of small use to try to be good with malice prepense. Nature is nothing, if not natural. If I am to read to any purpose, I must read with a relish, and browse at will with the bridle off. Sometimes I go into a library, the slow accretion of a couple of centuries, or perhaps the mushroom growth from a rich man's grave, a great collection magically convoked by the talisman of gold. At the threshold, as I ardently enter, the flaming sword of regulation is waving. Between me and the inviting shelves are fences of woven iron; the bibliographic Cerberus is at his sentryship; when I want a full draught, I must be content with driblets; and the impatient messengers are sworn to bring me only a single volume at a time. To read in such a hampered and limited way is not to read at all; and I go back, after the first fret and worry are over, to the little collection upon my garret-shelf, to greet again the old familiar pages. I leave the main army behind,—"the lordly band of mighty folios," "the well-ordered ranks of the quartos," "the light octavos," and "humbler duodecimos," for
"The last new play, and frittered magazine,"—
for the sutlers and camp-followers, "pioneers and all," of the grand army,—for the prizes, dirty, but curious, rescued from the street-stall, or unearthed in a Nassau-Street cellar,—for the books which I thumbed and dogs-eared in my youth.
I have, in my collection, a little Divinity, consisting mostly of quaint Quaker books bequeathed to me by my grandmother,—a little Philosophy, a little Physic, a little Law, a little History, a little Fiction, and a deal of Nondescript stuff. Once, when the res angusta domi had become angustissima, a child of Israel was, in my sore estate, summoned to inspect the dear, shabby colony, and to make his sordid aureat or argent bid therefor. Well do I remember how his nose, which he could not, if his worthless life had depended upon it, render retroussé, grew sublimely curvilinear in its contempt, as his hawk-eyes estimated my pitiful family. I will not name the sum which he offered, the ghoul, the vampire, the anthropophagous jackal, the sneaking would-be incendiary of my little Alexandrian, the circumcised Goth! He left me, like Churchill's Scotch lassie, "pleased, but hungry"; and I found, as Valentine did in Congreve's "Love for Love," "a page doubled down in Epictetus which was a feast for an emperor."
I own, my excellent Robert, that a bad book is, to my taste, sometimes vastly more refreshing than a good one. I do not wonder that Crabbe, after he had so sadly failed in his medical studies, should have anathematized the medical writers in this fine passage:—
"Ye frigid tribe, on whom I waited long
The tedious hours, and ne'er indulged in song!
Ye first seducers of my easy heart,
Who promised knowledge ye could not impart!
Ye dull deluders, Truth's destructive foes!
Ye Sons of Fiction, clad in stupid prose!
Ye treacherous leaders, who, yourselves in doubt,
Light up false fires, and send us far about!—
Still may yon spider round your pages spin,
Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin!
Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell!
Most potent, grave, and reverend friends,—farewell!"
I acknowledge the vigor of these lines, which nobody could have written who had not been compelled, in the sunny summer-days, to bray drugs in a mortar. Yet who does not like to read a medical book?—to pore over its jargon, to muddle himself into a hypo, and to imagine himself afflicted with the dreadful disease with the long Latin name, the meaning of which he does not by any means comprehend? And did not the poems of our friend Bavius Blunderbore, Esq., which were of "a low and moderate sort," cause you to giggle yourself wellnigh into an asphyxy,—calf and coxcomb as he was? Is not –'s last novel a better antidote against melancholy, stupendously absurd as it is, than foalfoot or plantain, featherfew or savin, agrimony or saxifrage, or any other herb in old Robert Burton's pharmacopoeia? I am afraid that we are a little wanting in gratitude, when we shake our sides at the flaying of Marsyas by some Quarterly of Apollo,—to the dis-cuticlcd, I mean. If he had not piped so stridently, we should not have had half so much sport; yet small largess does the miserable minstrel get for tooting tunelessly. Let us honor the brave who fall in the battle of print. 'Twas a noble ambition, after all, which caused our asinine friend to cloak himself in that cast leonine skin. Who would be always reciting from a hornbook to Mistress Minerva? What, I pray you, would become of the corn, if there were no scarecrows? All honor to you, then, my looped and windowed sentinel, standing upon the slope of Parnassus,—standing so patiently there, with your straw bowels, doing yeoman-service, spite of the flouts and gibes and cocked thumbs of Zoïlus and his sneering, snarling, verjuicy, captious crew,—standing there, as stood the saline helpmate of Lot, to fright our young men and virgins from the primrose-pitfalls of Poesy,—standing there to warn them against the seductions of Phoebus, and to teach them that it is better to hoe than to hum!
The truth is, that the good and clever and polyphloisboic writers have too long monopolized the attention of the world, so that the little, well-intentioned, humble, and stupid plebeians of the guild have been snubbed out of sight. Somebody—the name is not given, but I shrewdly suspect Canon Smith—wrote to Sir James Mackintosh,—"Why do you not write three volumes quarto? You only want this to be called the greatest man of your time. People are all disposed to admit anything we say of you, but I think it unsafe and indecent to put you so high without something in quarto." This was, of course, half fun and half truth. As there is, however, little need of setting the world on fire to demonstrate some chemical theory, so it is possible that the flame of culture may be cherished without kindling a conflagration, and truth transmitted from sire to son without the construction of edificial monsters too big for the knees, too abstruse for the brains, and too great for the lifetime of humanity. I am not a very constant reader of Mr. Robert Browning, but I own to many a pleasant grin over his Sibrandus Schafnabrugensis dropped into the crevice of the plum-tree, and afterward pitifully reclaimed, and carried to its snug niche with the promise,—
"A.'s book shall prop you up, B.'s shall cover you,
Here's C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay;
And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment Day!"
How often, when one is roving through a library in search of adventures, is he encountered by some inflated champion of huge proportions, who turns out to be no better than a barber, after all! Gazing upon
"That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid,
Those ample clasps, of solid metal made,
The close-pressed leaves, unloosed for many an age,
The dull red edging of the well-filled page,
On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled,
Where yet the title stands, in burnished gold,"—
what wisdom, what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in neglect,—as some fools pass for philosophers by preserving a close mouth and a grave countenance.
"Safe in themselves, the ponderous works remain."
It was a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half in jest and half in earnest, declares
