Such an incident must needs win pardon for Garrick’s churlishness in defending his possessions.  “The history of book-collecting,” says a caustic critic, “is a history relieved but rarely by acts of pure and undiluted unselfishness.”  This is true, but are there not virtues so heroic that plain human nature can ill aspire to compass them?

There is something piteous in the futile efforts of reluctant lenders to save their property from depredation.  They place their reliance upon artless devices which never yet were known to stay the marauder’s hand.  They have their names and addresses engraved on foolish little plates, which, riveted to their umbrellas, will, they think, suffice to insure the safety of these useful articles.  As well might the border farmer have engraved his name and address on the collars of his grazing herds, in the hope that the riever would respect this symbol of authority.  The history of book-plates is largely the history of borrower versus lender.  The orderly mind is wont to believe that a distinctive mark, irrevocably attached to every volume, will insure permanent possession.  Mr. Gosse, for example, has expressed a touching faith in the efficacy of the book-plate.  He has but to explain that he “makes it a rule” never to lend a volume thus decorated, and the would-be borrower bows to this rule as to a decree of fate.  “To have a book-plate,” he joyfully observes, “gives a collector great serenity and confidence.”

Is it possible that the world has grown virtuous without our observing it?  Can it be that the old stalwart race of book-borrowers, those “spoilers of the symmetry of shelves,” are foiled by so childish an expedient?  Imagine Dr. Johnson daunted by a scrap of pasted paper!  Or Coleridge, who seldom went through the formality of asking leave, but borrowed armfuls of books in the absence of their legitimate owners!  How are we to account for the presence of book-plates—­quite a pretty collection at times—­on the shelves of men who possess no such toys of their own?  When I was a girl I had access to a small and well-chosen library (not greatly exceeding Montaigne’s fourscore volumes), each book enriched with an appropriate device of scaly dragon guarding the apples of Hesperides.  Beneath the dragon was the motto (Johnsonian in form if not in substance), “Honour and Obligation demand the prompt return of borrowed Books.”  These words ate into my innocent soul, and lent a pang to the sweetness of possession.  Doubts as to the exact nature of “prompt return” made me painfully uncertain as to whether a month, a week, or a day were the limit which Honour and Obligation had set for me.  But other and older borrowers were less sensitive, and I have reason to believe that—­books being a rarity in that little Southern town—­most of the volumes were eventually absorbed by the gaping shelves of neighbours.  Perhaps even now (their generous owner long since dead) these worn copies of Boswell, of Elia, of Herrick, and Moore, may still stand forgotten in dark and dusty corners, like gems that magpies hide.