required now than in Hobbes's time. Few men would care
to read more than a hundred books through in a year, and yet there are
twenty thousand volumes added annually to the shelves of the British
Museum.

THE ESSAYISTS.

It has been my privilege, during the last three or four years, to
examine with more or less care something like four hundred bookcases,
containing works on all departments of literature. _I am inclined to
turn away in disgust if the Essayists are not patronised._

Those delightful Essayists! Happy is the man who has his shelves full of
them--writers who talk sense with wanton heed and giddy cunning, who
spread their souls out on paper, who disarm hostility by taking you
completely into their confidence. Addison, with the roguish gleam in his
eye as he is calculating the number of sponges in the cost of a lady's
finery; Goldsmith, in his London garret, talking of the ludicrous
escapades of the Man in Black; Lamb luxuriating in reminiscences of Old
Benchers. All these splendid, unsystematic delights, mingled with the
breezes of byegone summers and the sunsets of long ago! Old ghosts
whisper you their secrets; you hear the brush of sweeping garments that
have been moth-eaten these hundred years. Crowded streets of people
appear before the eye of fancy--London in the days of Anne and the
Georges. In the company of such wits, there are no slow-moving hours:
you have in them friends who never need tire you, for should the
slightest tedium intervene, you may, without offence, stop their flow of
conversation. Our living intimates are prone to drynesses and huffs; but
these old prattling wits ever welcome us with a smile of affability.

A BANFF THEORY.

While speaking of Essayists, I ought to mention a peculiar Banffshire
theorist who addressed me in the following words: "Give me an old set of
_Blackwood_ in the Kit North days, and I can easily forego your
pinchbeck stories and propagandist novels of to-day. I put the most
interesting period for reading at _sixty years ago_, and I think Scott
must have known the charm of that number when he gave the alternative
title to _Waverley_. It is pleasant to know how the world wagged when
your grandfather was a ruddy egg-purloining rogue of five. When I read
farther back than a century, I feel imagination flagging--the Merry
Monarch is not much more to me than John the Baptist. But the men of the
forties stand out clear and distinct. If I have never seen an
out-