ns. His study-cap would upset a
judge's risibilities. Scrap books with droll caricatures and facetiae. An
odd stove, exciting your wonder as to where the coal is put in or the poker
thrust for a shaking. All the works of Douglass Jerrold, and Sydney Smith,
and Sterne, the scalawag ecclesiastic. India-rubber faces capable of being
squashed into anything. Puzzles that you cannot untangle. The four walls
covered with cuts and engravings sheared from weekly pictorials and
recklessly taken from parlor table books. Prints that put men and women
into hopeless satire.

We have a friend of many peculiarities. Entering his house, you find
nothing in the place where you expected it. "Don Quixote," with, all its
windmills mixed up with "Dr. Dick on the Sacraments," Mark Twain's "Jumping
Frog," and "Charnock on the Attributes." Passing across the room, you
stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a
piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake
his essay on the "Copernican System" for blotting paper. Many of his books
are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers,
Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to "Barnes on the Acts of the
Apostles." An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to
unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a
handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If,
some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is
absent, to "clear up," a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For
many days the question is, "Where is my pen? Who has the concordance? What
on earth has become of the dictionary? Where is the paper cutter?" Work is
impeded, patience lost, engagements are broken, because it was not
understood that the study is a part of the student's life, and that you
might as well try to change the knuckles to the inside of the hand, or to
set the eyes in the middle of the forehead, as to make the man of whom we
speak keep his pen on the rack, or his books off the floor, or the blotting
paper straight in the portfolio.

The study is a part of the mental development. Don't blame a man for the
style of his literary apartments any more than you would for the color of
his hair or the shape of his nose. If Hobbes carries his study with him,
and his pen and his inkstand in the top of his cane, so let him carry them.
If Lamartine can best compose while wal