curse the day when he was told it was the thing to buy
old books; and, if he must buy old books, why is he not content with
the works of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, and Flavius Josephus, that
learned Jew? But it is not the millionaire who set me thinking; it is
the harassed man of business; and what I am wondering is, whether, in
sober truth and earnestness, it is possible for him, as he shuts his
library door and finds himself inside, to forget his rebuffs and
anxieties--his maturing bills and overdue argosies--and to lose
himself over a favourite volume. The 'article' that wafts him welcome
I take to be his pipe. That he will put the 'article' into his mouth
and smoke it I have no manner of doubt; my dread is lest, in ten
minutes' time, the book should have dropt into his lap and the man's
eyes be staring into the fire. But for a' that, and a' that--great is
bookishness and the charm of books.

CONFIRMED READERS

Dr. Johnson is perhaps our best example of a confirmed reader. Malone
once found him sitting in his room roasting apples and reading a
history of Birmingham. This staggered even Malone, who was himself a
somewhat far-gone reader.

'Don't you find it rather dull?' he ventured to inquire.

'Yes,' replied the Sage, 'it is dull.'

Malone's eyes then rested on the apples, and he remarked he supposed
they were for medicine.

'Why, no,' said Johnson; 'I believe they are only there because I
wanted something to do. I have been confined to the house for a week,
and so you find me roasting apples and reading the history of
Birmingham.'

This anecdote pleasingly illustrates the habits of the confirmed
reader. Nor let the worldling sneer. Happy is the man who, in the
hours of solitude and depression, can read a history of Birmingham.
How terrible is the story Welbore Ellis told of Robert Walpole in his
magnificent library, trying book after book, and at last, with tears
in his eyes, exclaiming: 'It is all in vain: I cannot read!'

Edmund Malone, the Shakespearian commentator and first editor of
_Boswell's Johnson_, was as confirmed a reader as it is possible for a
book-collector to be. His own life, by Sir James Prior, is full of
good things, and is not so well known as it should be. It smacks of
books and bookishness.

Malone, who was an Irishman, was once, so he would have us believe,
deeply engaged in politics; but he then fell in love, and the affair,
for some unknown reason, ending unhappily, his