hased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called
the necessaries of life. Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a
bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily
need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I
have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so
advantageous a price, that I _could_ not let it go; yet to buy it meant
pangs of famine. My Heyne's _Tibullus_ was grasped at such a moment. It
lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now
and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.
Sixpence was the price--sixpence! At that time I used to eat my mid-day
meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the
real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.
Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a
plate of meat and vegetables. But I did not dare to hope that the
_Tibullus_ would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due
to me. I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing
the stall, two appetites at combat within me. The book was bought and I
went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated
over the pages.

In this _Tibullus_ I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct. 4,
1792." Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago?
There was no other inscription. I like to imagine some poor scholar,
poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his
blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did. How much _that_ was
I could not easily say. Gentle-hearted Tibullus!--of whom there remains
to us a poet's portrait more delightful, I think, than anything of the
kind in Roman literature.

An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?

So with many another book on the thronged shelves. To take them down is
to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph. In those days money
represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think about, but the
acquisition of books. There were books of which I had passionate need,
books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment. I could see them, of
course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as
having and holding them, my own property, on my own shelf. Now and then
I have bought a volume of