ake
mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous commonplace entertaining.
There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering
experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and
ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that
have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;--these
quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson
fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this
purpling bloom, of Lamb;--in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens
of Alcinoues and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which
can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins,
which have outlived their half dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen
and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years
ago.

We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our
eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, "A book is a
book"; from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in
which "Bible, large, 1 vol.," and "Bible, small, 1 vol.," asserted their
alphabetic individuality and were the sole _B_s in our little hive, we
have had a weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill
up; we cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that
Himalayan selectness, which, content with one book-case, would have no
tomes in it but _porphyrogeniti_, books of the bluest blood, making room
for choicer newcomers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present
incumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we
live over again the author's lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see
him, on his first appearance after parturition, "as well as could be
expected," a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed
umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the
Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button,
blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must
needs know him for the author of the "Modest Enquiry into the Present
State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the "Unities briefly considered by
Philomusus," of which they have never heard and never will hear so much
as the names; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving
to our day) who buy it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete
without; we see the spend-thrift heir, whose ho