you blame him?

It is a frequently debated point whether at home in Great Britain the
feeling for books, in the collector's sense, is not on the decline;
and, indeed, the causes of such a change are not far to seek. The
acute pressure of business among the wealthy mercantile class, which
principally contributes to the ranks of book-buyers, and the decrease
of resources for such luxuries among the nobility and clergy, might be
sufficient to explain a shrinkage in the demand for the older and
rarer literature in our own and other languages; but there is another
and even more powerful agency at work which operates in the same
direction, and is adverse to the investment of money in objects which
do not appeal directly to the eye. The _bibliophile_ discovers, when
he has expended a small fortune (or perhaps a large one) in the
formation of a library, that his friends evince no interest in it,
have no desire to enter the room where the cases are kept, do not
understand what they are told about this or that precious
acquisition, and turn on their heel to look at the pictures, the
antique furniture, or the china. This undoubtedly wide-spread
sentiment strikes a very serious blow at a pursuit in which the
enthusiast meets with slight sympathy or encouragement, unless it is
at the hands of the dealers, naturally bound for their own sakes to
keep him in heart by sympathy and flattery. Doubtless the present
aspect of the question might have become ere now more serious, had it
not been for the American market and the extension of the system of
public and free libraries.

But, on the other hand, while enormous numbers of books are sold under
the hammer year by year, there must be an approximately proportionate
demand and an inexhaustible market, or the book trade could not keep
pace with the auctioneers; and, moreover, we may be in a transitional
state in some respects, and may be succeeded by those whose appetite
for the older literature will be keener than it ever was.

The complaint of a superabundance of books of all kinds is not a new
one. It goes back at least to the reign of Elizabeth and the age of
Shakespeare, for in 1594, in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross, a
divine says:--

"There is no ende of making Bookes, and much reading is a
wearinesse to the flesh, and in our carelesse daies bookes may
rather seeme to want readers, than readers to want bookes."

No one should be too positive whether it is to