Verlaine, Baudelaire, a natural history of my native county, an old
directory of my native town, Sir Thomas Browne, Poe, Walpole's
Letters, and a book of memoirs that I will not name. A curious list,
you will say. Well, never mind! We do not all care to eat beefsteak
and chip potatoes off an oak table, with a foaming quart to the right
hand. We have our idiosyncrasies. The point is that I existed on the
bare necessaries of life (very healthy--doctors say) for a long time.
And then, just lately, I summoned energy and caused fifteen hundred
volumes to be transported to me; and I arranged them on shelves; and
I re-arranged them on shelves; and I left them to arrange themselves
on shelves.

Well, you know, the way that I walk up and down in front of these
volumes, whose faces I had half-forgotten, is perfectly infantile. It
is like the way of a child at a menagerie. There, in its cage, is that
1839 edition of Shelley, edited by Mrs. Shelley, that I once nearly
sold to the British Museum because the Keeper of Printed Books thought
he hadn't got a copy--only he had! And there, in a cage by himself,
because of his terrible hugeness, is the 1652 Paris edition of
Montaigne's Essays. And so I might continue, and so I would continue,
were it not essential that I come to my argument.

Do you suppose that the presence of these books, after our long
separation, is making me read more than I did? Do you suppose I am
engaged in looking up my favourite passages? Not a bit. The other
evening I had a long tram journey, and, before starting, I tried to
select a book to take with me. I couldn't find one to suit just the
tram-mood. As I had to _catch_ the tram I was obliged to settle on
something, and in the end I went off with nothing more original than
"Hamlet," which I am really too familiar with.... Then I bought an
evening paper, and read it all through, including advertisements. So I
said to myself: "This is a nice result of all my trouble to resume
company with some of my books!" However, as I have long since ceased
to be surprised at the eccentric manner in which human nature refuses
to act as one would have expected it to act, I was able to keep calm
and unashamed during this extraordinary experience. And I am still
walking up and down in front of my books and enjoying them without
reading them.

I wish to argue that a great deal of cant is talked (and written)
about reading. Papers such as the "Anthenaeum," which nevertheless