The one room in my College which I always enter with a certain sense of desolation and sadness is the College library.  There used to be a story in my days at Cambridge of a book-collecting Don who was fond of discoursing in public of the various crosses he had to bear.  He was lamenting one day in Hall the unwieldy size of his library.  “I really don’t know what to do with my books,” he said, and looked round for sympathy.  “Why not read them?” said a sharp and caustic Fellow opposite.  It may be thought that I am in need of the same advice, but it is not the case.  There are, indeed, many books in our library; but most of them, as D. G. Rossetti used to say in his childhood of his father’s learned volumes, are “no good for reading.”  The books of the College library are delightful, indeed, to look at; rows upon rows of big irregular volumes, with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs.  What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled.  Take one down:  it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with a pleasant and leisurely mellowness.  But what do they tell one?  Very little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a positive mistake to believe.  That is the worst of erudition—­that the next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you are superseded.  You have handed on the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it.  Your errors, your patient explanations, were a necessary step in the progress of knowledge; but now the procession has turned the corner, and is out of sight.

Yet even here, it pleases me to think, some mute and unsuspected treasure may lurk unknown.  In a room like this, for over a couple of centuries, stood on one of the shelves an old rudely bound volume of blank paper, the pages covered with a curious straggling cipher; no one paid any heed to it, no one tried to spell its secrets.  But the day came when a Fellow who was both inquisitive and leisurely took up the old volume, and formed a resolve to decipher it.  Through many baffling delays, through many patient windings, he carried his purpose out; and the result was a celebrated Day-book, which cast much light upon the social conditions of a past age, as well as revealed one of the most simple and genial personalities that ever marched blithely through the pages of a Diary.