ey
never venture there, I suppose for fear the folios should fall down and
crack their skulls; for they will never affect their heads in any other
way--So follow me."

And I followed through hall and bower, vaulted passage and winding stair,
until we reached the room where she had ordered our refreshments.

CHAPTER TENTH.

In the wide pile, by others heeded not,
Hers was one sacred solitary spot,
Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves contain
For moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.
Anonymous.

The library at Osbaldistone Hall was a gloomy room, whose antique oaken
shelves bent beneath the weight of the ponderous folios so dear to the
seventeenth century, from which, under favour be it spoken, we have
distilled matter for our quartos and octavos, and which, once more
subjected to the alembic, may, should our sons be yet more frivolous than
ourselves, be still farther reduced into duodecimos and pamphlets. The
collection was chiefly of the classics, as well foreign as ancient
history, and, above all, divinity. It was in wretched order. The priests,
who in succession had acted as chaplains at the Hall, were, for many
years, the only persons who entered its precincts, until Rashleigh's
thirst for reading had led him to disturb the venerable spiders, who had
muffled the fronts of the presses with their tapestry. His destination
for the church rendered his conduct less absurd in his father's eyes,
than if any of his other descendants had betrayed so strange a
propensity, and Sir Hildebrand acquiesced in the library receiving some
repairs, so as to fit it for a sitting-room. Still an air of
dilapidation, as obvious as it was uncomfortable, pervaded the large
apartment, and announced the neglect from which the knowledge which its
walls contained had not been able to exempt it. The tattered tapestry,
the worm-eaten shelves, the huge and clumsy, yet tottering, tables,
desks, and chairs, the rusty grate, seldom gladdened by either sea-coal
or faggots, intimated the contempt of the lords of Osbaldistone Hall for
learning, and for the volumes which record its treasures.

"You think this place somewhat disconsolate, I suppose?" said Diana, as I
glanced my eye round the forlorn apartment; "but to me it seems like a
little paradise, for I call it my own, and fear no intrusion. Rashleigh
was joint pro