tired
of reading titles and proceeding to burn by wholesale, passing down
books in armfuls to the eager housekeeper, more ready to burn them than
ever she had been to weave the finest lace. And how charming is the hit
of the Curate! "Certainly, these cannot be books of knight-errantry,
they are too small; you'll find they are only poets,"--the supplication
of the niece that the singers should not be spared, lest her uncle, when
cured of his knight-errantry, should read them, become a shepherd,
and wander through forests and fields,--"nay, and what is more to be
dreaded, turn poet, which is said to be a disease absolutely incurable."
So down went "the longer poems" of Diana de Montemayor, the whole of
Salmantino, with the Iberian Shepherd and the Nymphs of Henares. The
impatience of the curate, who, completely worn out, orders all the rest
to be burned _a canga cerrada_, fitly rounds the chapter, and sends us
in good-humor from the _auto da fe_, while the poor knight is in his
bedchamber, all unconscious of the purification in progress, which, if
he had known it, mad as he was, would have made his madness starker
still, thrashing about with his sword, back-stroke and fore-stroke,
and, as Motteux translates it, "making a heavy bustle." 'Tis all droll
enough; especially when we find that the housekeeper made such clean
work of it in the evening, in spite of the good curate's reservations,
and burnt all the books, not only those in the yard, but all those that
were in the house; but I should think twice before I let Freston the
necromancer into any library with which I am acquainted.

Let us be gentle with the denizens of Fame's proud temple, no matter how
they came there. You remember, I suppose, Swift's couplet,--

"Fame has but two gates,--a white and a black one;
The worst they can say is I got in at the back one."

"I have nothing," wrote Pope to his friend Cromwell, "to say to you in
this latter; but I was resolved to write to tell you so. Why should not
I content myself with so many great examples of deep divines, profound
casuists, grave philosophers, who have written, not letters only, but
whole tomes and voluminous treatises about nothing? Why should a fellow
like me, who all his life does nothing, be ashamed to write nothing, and
that, too, to one who has nothing to do but read it?" And so, with "_ex
nihilo nil fit_," he laughingly ends his letter.

And now, while I am at it, I must quote a passage, somew