To every ear and eye impart.
Yet who, of all who thus employ them,
Can, like the owner's self, enjoy them?"

The "gripple niggards" might have pleaded feebly in their own behalf
that they could not all afford to spend, like Heber, a hundred
thousand pounds in the purchase of books; and that an occasional
reluctance to part with some hard-earned, hard-won volume might be
pardonable in one who could not hope to replace it. Lamb's books were
the shabbiest in Christendom; yet how keen was his pang when Charles
Kemble carried off the letters of "that princely woman, the thrice
noble Margaret Newcastle," an "illustrious folio" which he well knew
Kemble would never read. How bitterly he bewailed his rashness in
extolling the beauties of Sir Thomas Browne's "Urn Burial" to a guest
who was so moved by this eloquence that he promptly borrowed the
volume. "But so," sighed Lamb, "have I known a foolish lover to praise
his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her
off than himself."

Johnson cherished a dim conviction that because he read, and Garrick
did not, the proper place for Garrick's books was on
his--Johnson's--bookshelves; a point which could never be settled
between the two friends, and which came near to wrecking their
friendship. Garrick loved books with the chilly yet imperative love
of the collector. Johnson loved them as he loved his soul. Garrick
took pride in their sumptuousness, in their immaculate, virginal
splendour. Johnson gathered them to his heart with scant regard for
outward magnificence, for the glories of calf and vellum. Garrick
bought books. Johnson borrowed them. Each considered that he had a
prior right to the objects of his legitimate affection. We, looking
back with softened hearts, are fain to think that we should have held
our volumes doubly dear if they had lain for a time by Johnson's
humble hearth, if he had pored over them at three o'clock in the
morning, and had left sundry tokens--grease-spots and spatterings
of snuff--upon many a spotless page. But it is hardly fair to censure
Garrick for not dilating with these emotions.

Johnson's habit of flinging the volumes which displeased him into
remote and dusty corners of the room was ill calculated to inspire
confidence, and his powers of procrastination were never more marked
than in the matter of restoring borrowed books. We know from
Cradock's "Memoirs" how that gentleman, having induced Lord
Harborough to l