ature it becomes almost
surprising when we have taken the pains to winnow from literary
remains of real and permanent interest the preponderant mass, of which
the facilities for occasional examination at a public library ought to
suffice, how comparatively slender the residuum is.

CHAPTER VI

The safest course--Consideration of the relative value and
interest of books in libraries--The intrinsic and extrinsic
aspects--Consolation for the less wealthy buyer--The best books
among the cheapest--A few examples--Abundance of printed matter
in book-form--Schedule of Books which are Books--Remarks on
English translations of foreign literature.

WHEN we inspect a great library, filling three or four apartments
lined with cases, the first impression is that the possession of such
an assemblage of literary monuments is a privilege reserved for the
very wealthy; and to some extent so it is. But certain elements enter
into the constitution of all extensive accumulations of property of
any kind, whether it be books, prints, medals, or coins, which
inevitably swell the bulk and the cost without augmenting in anything
approaching an equal ratio the solid value. Not to wander from our
immediate field of inquiry and argument, the literary connoisseur,
starting perhaps with a fairly modest programme, acquires almost
insensibly an inclination to expand and diverge, until he becomes,
instead of the owner of a taste, the victim of an insatiable passion.
He not merely admits innumerable authors and works of whom or which he
originally knew nothing, but there are variant impressions, copies
with special readings or an unique _provenance_, bindings curious or
splendid; and nothing at last comes amiss, the means of purchase
presumed.

Yet, at the same time, he does not substantially possess, perhaps,
much more than the master of a _petite bibliotheque_, on which the
outlay has not been a hundredth part of his own. A considerable
proportion of his shelf-furniture are distant acquaintances, as it
were, and those acquisitions with which he is intimate are not
unlikely to prove less numerous than the belongings of his humbler and
less voracious contemporary.

Even where the object and ruling law are strict practical selections
of what pleases the buyer, the range of difference is very wide. One
man prefers the modern novelists, prose essayists, or verse writers; a
second, collections of caricatures and