utrie;
But all be that I ben a philosopher
Yet have I but litel gold in cofre!

Books, books, books--give me ever more books, for they are the caskets
wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity--words, the only
things that live forever! I bow reverently to the bust in yonder
corner whenever I recall what Sir John Herschel (God rest his dear
soul!) said and wrote: "Were I to pay for a taste that should stand me
in stead under every variety of circumstances and be a source of
happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its
ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it
would be a taste for reading. Give a man this taste and a means of
gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man;
unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of
books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period
of history--with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest,
and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a
denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been
created for him."

For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless burly,
bearish, phrase-making old Tom Carlyle. "Of all things," quoth he,
"which men do or make here below by far the most momentous, wonderful,
and worthy are the things we call books." And Judge Methuen's favorite
quotation is from Babington Macaulay to this effect: "I would rather
be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not
love reading."

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 curi