who read, and the few who write.

The studies of an author are usually restricted to particular subjects.
His tastes are tinctured by their colouring, his mind is always shaping
itself by their form. An author's works form his solitary pride, and his
secret power; while half his life wears away in the slow maturity of
composition, and still the ambition of authorship torments its victim
alike in disappointment or in possession.

But soothing is the solitude of the MAN OF LETTERS! View the busied
inhabitant of the library surrounded by the objects of his love! He
possesses them--and they possess him! These volumes--images of our mind
and passions!--as he traces them from Herodotus to Gibbon, from Homer to
Shakspeare--those portfolios which gather up, the inventions of genius,
and that selected cabinet of medals which holds so many unwritten
histories;--some favourite sculptures and pictures, and some antiquities
of all nations, here and there about his house--these are his furniture!

In his unceasing occupations the only repose he requires, consists not in
quitting, but in changing them. Every day produces its discovery; every
day in the life of a man of letters may furnish a multitude of emotions
and of ideas. For him there is a silence amidst the world; and in the
scene ever opening before him, all that has passed is acted over again,
and all that is to come seems revealed as in a vision. Often his library
is contiguous to his chamber,[A] and this domain "_parva sed apta_," this
contracted space, has often marked the boundary of the existence of the
opulent owner, who lives where he will die, contracting his days into
hours; and a whole life thus passed is found too short to close its
designs. Such are the men who have not been unhappily described by the
Hollanders as _lief-hebbers_, lovers or fanciers, and their collection as
_lief-hebbery_, things of their love. The Dutch call everything for which
they are impassioned _lief-hebbery_; but their feeling being much stronger
than their delicacy, they apply the term to everything, from poesy
and picture to tulips and tobacco. The term wants the melody of the
languages of genius; but something parallel is required to correct
that indiscriminate notion which most persons associate with that of
_collectors_.

[Footnote A: The contiguity of the CHAMBER to the LIBRARY is not the
solitary fancy of an individual, but marks the class. Early in life, when
in France and Holland