There is this old brown volume in the corner.  How it got there I cannot imagine, for it is one of those which I bought for threepence out of the remnant box in Edinburgh, and its weather-beaten comrades are up yonder in the back gallery, while this one has elbowed its way among the quality in the stalls.  But it is worth a word or two.  Take it out and handle it!  See how swarthy it is, how squat, with how bullet-proof a cover of scaling leather.  Now open the fly-leaf “Ex libris Guilielmi Whyte. 1672” in faded yellow ink.  I wonder who William Whyte may have been, and what he did upon earth in the reign of the merry monarch.  A pragmatical seventeenth-century lawyer, I should judge, by that hard, angular writing.  The date of issue is 1642, so it was printed just about the time when the Pilgrim Fathers were settling down into their new American home, and the first Charles’s head was still firm upon his shoulders, though a little puzzled, no doubt, at what was going on around it.  The book is in Latin—­though Cicero might not have admitted it—­and it treats of the laws of warfare.

I picture some pedantic Dugald Dalgetty bearing it about under his buff coat, or down in his holster, and turning up the reference for every fresh emergency which occurred.  “Hullo! here’s a well!” says he.  “I wonder if I may poison it?” Out comes the book, and he runs a dirty forefinger down the index.  “Ob fas est aquam hostis venere,” etc.  “Tut, tut, it’s not allowed.  But here are some of the enemy in a barn?  What about that?” “Ob fas est hostem incendio,” etc.  “Yes; he says we may.  Quick, Ambrose, up with the straw and the tinder box.”  Warfare was no child’s play about the time when Tilly sacked Magdeburg, and Cromwell turned his hand from the mash tub to the sword.  It might not be much better now in a long campaign, when men were hardened and embittered.  Many of these laws are unrepealed, and it is less than a century since highly disciplined British troops claimed their dreadful rights at Badajos and Rodrigo.  Recent European wars have been so short that discipline and humanity have not had time to go to pieces, but a long war would show that man is ever the same, and that civilization is the thinnest of veneers.

Now you see that whole row of books which takes you at one sweep nearly across the shelf?  I am rather proud of those, for they are my collection of Napoleonic military memoirs.  There is a story told of an illiterate millionaire who gave a wholesale dealer an order for a copy of all books in any language treating of any aspect of Napoleon’s career.  He thought it would fill a case in his library.  He was somewhat taken aback, however, when in a few weeks he received a message from the dealer that he had got 40,000 volumes, and awaited instructions as to whether he should send them on as an instalment, or wait for a complete set.  The figures may not be exact, but at least they bring home the impossibility of exhausting the subject, and the danger of losing one’s self for years in a huge labyrinth of reading, which may end by leaving no very definite impression upon your mind.  But one might, perhaps, take a corner of it, as I have done here in the military memoirs, and there one might hope to get some finality.