e was as genuine a book-lover as Ben Jonson or my Lord
Verulam. Lord Burleigh, Grotius, and Bonaparte are said to have carried
their libraries in their pockets, and doubtless Shakespeare could have
carried his under his arm.

If all great men have not been book-collectors in the manner which is
generally understood by the phrase, it is certain that they have,
perhaps without a single exception, been book-lovers. They appear, for
the most part, to have made a constant companion of some particularly
favourite book; for instance, St. Jerome slept with a copy of Aristotle
under his pillow; Lord Clarendon had a couple of favourites, Livy and
Tacitus; Lord Chatham had a good classical library, with an especial
fondness for Barrow; Leibnitz died in a chair with the 'Argenis' of
Barclay in his hand; Kant, who never left his birthplace, Koenigsburg,
had a weakness in the direction of books of travel. 'Were I to sell my
library,' wrote Diderot, 'I would keep back Homer, Moses, and
Richardson.' Sir W. Jones, like many other distinguished men, loved his
Caesar. Chesterfield, agreeing with Callimachus, that 'a great book is a
great evil,' and with La Fontaine--

'Les longs ouvrages me font peur
Loin j'epuiser une matiere
Il faut n'en prendre que la fleur'--

hated ponderous, prosy, pedantic tomes. Garrick had an extensive
collection on the history of the stage, but Shakespeare was his only
constant friend. Gibbon was a book-collector more in the sense of a man
who collects books as literary tools than as a bibliophile. But it is
scarcely necessary just now to enter more fully into the subject of
great men who were also book-lovers. Sufficient it is, perhaps, to know
that they have all felt the blessedness of books, for, as Washington
Irving in one of his most lofty sentences has so well put it, 'When all
that is worldly turns to dross around us, these [the comforts of a
well-stored library] only retain their steady value; when friends grow
cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and
commonplace, _these_ only continue the unaltered countenance of happier
days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope
nor deserted sorrow.'

It is infinitely easier to name those who have collected books in this
vast and unwieldy London of ours, than it is to classify them. To adopt
botanical phraseology, the _genus_ is defined in a word or two, but the
species, the varieties, the