Death Duties, or some other extraneous subject, and leave their respective hobbies in the stable.  Never mind what your hobby is—­books, prints, drawings, china, scarabaei, lepidoptera—­keep it to yourself and for those like-minded with you.  Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless indifference.  Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and stare and go!  What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus!  Collecting is a secret sin—­the great pushing public must be kept out.  It is sheer madness to puff and praise your hobby, and to invite Dick, Tom, and Harry to inspect your stable:  such conduct is to invite rebuff, to expose yourself to just animadversion.  Keep the beast in its box.  This is my first advice to the hobby-hunter.

My second piece of advice is equally important, particularly at the present time, when the world is too much with us, and it is this—­never convert a taste into a trade.  The moment you become a tradesman you cease to be a hobbyist.  When the love of money comes in at the window the love of books runs out at the door.  There has been of late years a good deal of sham book-collecting.  The morals of the Stock Exchange have corrupted even the library.  Sordid souls have been induced by wily second-hand booksellers to buy books for no other reason than because the price demanded was a high one.  This is the very worst possible reason for buying a book.  Whether it is ever wise to buy a book, as Aulus Gellius used to do, simply because it is cheap, and regardless of its condition, is a debatable point, but to buy one dear at the mere bidding of a bookseller is to debase yourself.  The result of this ungodly traffic has been to enlarge for the moment the circle of book-buyers by including in it men with commercial instincts, sham hobbyists.  But these impostors have been lately punished in the only way they could be punished—­namely, in their pockets—­by a heavy fall of prices.  The stuff they were induced to buy has not, and could not, maintain its price, and the shops are now full of the volumes which, seven or ten years ago, fetched fancy sums.

If a young book-collector does but bear in mind the two bits of advice I have proffered him, he may safely be bidden godspeed and congratulated on his choice of a hobby, for it is, without a shadow of a doubt, the cheapest he could have chosen.  Even without means to acquire the treasures of a Quaritch or a Pickering, he may yet derive infinite delight from the perusal of the many hundreds of catalogues that now weekly issue from the second-hand booksellers in town and country.  He may write an imaginary letter, ordering the books he has previously selected from the catalogue, and then he has only to forget to post it to avoid all disagreeable consequences.