Kings, indeed!  What a sorry lot are they!  Said George III. to Nicol, his bookseller:  ``I would give this right hand if the same attention had been paid to my education which I pay to that of the prince.’’ Louis XIV. was as illiterate as the lowliest hedger and ditcher.  He could hardly write his name; at first, as Samuel Pegge tells us, he formed it out of six straight strokes and a line of beauty, thus:  | | | | | | S—­which he afterward perfected as best he could, and the result was Louis.

Still I find it hard to inveigh against kings when I recall the goodness of Alexander to Aristotle, for without Alexander we should hardly have known of Aristotle.  His royal patron provided the philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition of learning, dispatching couriers to all parts of the earth to gather books and manuscripts and every variety of curious thing likely to swell the store of Aristotle’s knowledge.

Yet set them up in a line and survey them—­these wearers of crowns and these wielders of scepters—­and how pitiable are they in the paucity and vanity of their accomplishments!  What knew they of the true happiness of human life?  They and their courtiers are dust and forgotten.

Judge Methuen and I shall in due time pass away, but our courtiers—­they who have ever contributed to our delight and solace—­our Horace, our Cervantes, our Shakespeare, and the rest of the innumerable train—­these shall never die.  And inspired and sustained by this immortal companionship we blithely walk the pathway illumined by its glory, and we sing, in season and out, the song ever dear to us and ever dear to thee, I hope, O gentle reader: 

  Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke,
      Eyther in doore or out,
  With the greene leaves whispering overhead,
      Or the streete cryes all about;
  Where I maie reade all at my ease
      Both of the newe and old,
  For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
      Is better to me than golde!

VI

MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA

My bookseller and I came nigh to blows some months ago over an edition of Boccaccio, which my bookseller tried to sell me.  This was a copy in the original, published at Antwerp in 1603, prettily rubricated, and elaborately adorned with some forty or fifty copperplates illustrative of the text.  I dare say the volume was cheap enough at thirty dollars, but I did not want it.

My reason for not wanting it gave rise to that discussion between my bookseller and myself, which became very heated before it ended.  I said very frankly that I did not care for the book in the original, because I had several translations done by the most competent hands.  Thereupon my bookseller ventured that aged and hackneyed argument which has for centuries done the book trade such effective service—­namely, that in every translation, no matter how good that translation may be, there is certain to be lost a share of the flavor and spirit of the meaning.