ts. At last
old Porson asked:

"Pri'thee, sir, whence comes that quotation?"

"From Sophocles," quoth the vain fellow.

"Be so kind as to find it for me?" asked Porson, producing a copy of
Sophocles from his pocket.

Then the coxcomb, not at all abashed, said that he meant not Sophocles,
but Euripides. Whereupon Porson drew from another pocket a copy of
Euripides and challenged the upstart to find the quotation in question.
Full of confusion, the fellow thrust his head out of the window of the
coach and cried to the driver:

"In heaven's name, put me down at once; for there is an old gentleman
in here that hath the Bodleian Library in his pocket!"

Porson himself was a veritable slave to the habit of reading in bed.
He would lie down with his books piled around him, then light his pipe
and start in upon some favorite volume. A jug of liquor was invariably
at hand, for Porson was a famous drinker. It is related that on one
occasion he fell into a boosy slumber, his pipe dropped out of his
mouth and set fire to the bed-clothes. But for the arrival of succor
the tipsy scholar would surely have been cremated.

Another very slovenly fellow was De Quincey, and he was devoted to
reading in bed. But De Quincey was a very vandal when it came to the
care and use of books. He never returned volumes he borrowed, and he
never hesitated to mutilate a rare book in order to save himself the
labor and trouble of writing out a quotation.

But perhaps the person who did most to bring reading in bed into evil
repute was Mrs. Charles Elstob, ward and sister of the Canon of
Canterbury (circa 1700). In his "Dissertation on Letter-Founders,"
Rowe Mores describes this woman as the "indefessa comes" of her
brother's studies, a female student in Oxford. She was, says Mores, a
northern lady of an ancient family and a genteel fortune, "but she
pursued too much the drug called learning, and in that pursuit failed
of being careful of any one thing necessary. In her latter years she
was tutoress in the family of the Duke of Portland, where we visited
her in her sleeping-room at Bulstrode, surrounded with books and
dirtiness, the usual appendages of folk of learning!"

There is another word which Cicero uses--for I have still somewhat more
to say of that passage from the oration "pro Archia poeta"--the word
"rusticantur," which indicates that civilization twenty centuries ago
made a practice of taking books out into the country for