thout any hint
of his dimensions in length, breadth, and thickness.

But instead of laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of the
books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much humbler
task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young or old,
suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness,
book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or
indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or
Latin names if I thought it worth while.

I have a picture hanging in my library, a lithograph, of which many of my
readers may have seen copies. It represents a gray-haired old book-lover
at the top of a long flight of steps. He finds himself in clover, so to
speak, among rare old editions, books he has longed to look upon and
never seen before, rarities, precious old volumes, incunabula,
cradle-books, printed while the art was in its infancy,--its glorious
infancy, for it was born a giant. The old bookworm is so intoxicated
with the sight and handling of the priceless treasures that he cannot
bear to put one of the volumes back after he has taken it from the shelf.
So there he stands,--one book open in his hands, a volume under each arm,
and one or more between his legs,--loaded with as many as he can possibly
hold at the same time.

Now, that is just the way in which the extreme form of book-hunger shows
itself in the reader whose appetite has become over-developed. He wants
to read so many books that he over-crams himself with the crude materials
of knowledge, which become knowledge only when the mental digestion has
time to assimilate them. I never can go into that famous "Corner
Bookstore" and look over the new books in the row before me, as I enter
the door, without seeing half a dozen which I want to read, or at least
to know something about. I cannot empty my purse of its contents, and
crowd my bookshelves with all those volumes. The titles of many of them
interest me. I look into one or two, perhaps. I have sometimes picked
up a line or a sentence, in these momentary glances between the uncut
leaves of a new book, which I have never forgotten. As a trivial but
bona fide example, one day I opened a book on duelling. I remember only
these words: "Conservons-la, cette noble institution." I had never
before seen duelling called a noble institution, and I wish I had taken
the name of the book. Book-tasting is not necessarily profitle