swift poison would have been
the right remedy for such squalid ills.

XII.

As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb's "ragged
veterans." Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall; many
of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in
fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands. But so often have I
removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each
change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to
its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle
and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of
unfair usage. More than one has been foully injured by a great nail
driven into a packing-case--this but the extreme instance of the wrongs
they have undergone. Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find
myself growing more careful--an illustration of the great truth that
virtue is made easy by circumstance. But I confess that, so long as a
volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.

I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in
one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing,
I know every book of mine by its _scent_, and I have but to put my nose
between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for
example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and
read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but
the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of
that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great
Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back
in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old
enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a
treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn
the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and
what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand.
For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition. My eyes
being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when
such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I
regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from
sacrifice.

Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word. Dozens of my books were
purc