XII.

As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb’s “ragged veterans.”  Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall; many of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands.  But so often have I removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of unfair usage.  More than one has been foully injured by a great nail driven into a packing-case—­this but the extreme instance of the wrongs they have undergone.  Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find myself growing more careful—­an illustration of the great truth that virtue is made easy by circumstance.  But I confess that, so long as a volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.

I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf.  To me that is unintelligible.  For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.  My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years—­never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize.  Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare—­it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves.  The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand.  For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.  My eyes being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from sacrifice.

Sacrifice—­in no drawing-room sense of the word.  Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessaries of life.  Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller’s window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need.  At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I could not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine.  My Heyne’s Tibullus was grasped at such a moment.  It lay on the stall of the old book-shop