fer to _sell_ him a few of your own
books. Frequent exercise will confirm your principles, until finally,
when you see one of the book-canvassing tribe, you will foresee half an
hour's innocent amusement.

Certain of the points he so feelingly brings before you may no doubt
awaken a responsive echo in your own bosom. You are well aware, for
example, that your knowledge of the Queens of England is culpably
imperfect. You know you are never likely to go in steadily for the study
of constitutional developments, and so are led to admit the
reasonableness of tackling history from a lighter and more entertaining
point of view. Again, as to the River Thames, one must really grant that
a considerable amount of self-complacency and internal sunniness would
result from the ability to contradict your friends as to the length in
miles of some of its minor tributaries. In science, too, you are no
Kepler or Linnaeus, and there is something satisfactory when pedants
talk of orbits, planes, bulbs, or beetles, in being able to say that
_you have a big book at home that tells all about those things_.

Many people buy books, not because they have a present need for them,
but on the chance that at some time in the future such volumes as they
see for sale will solve a doubt or answer a need. The precise doubt or
the pressing need rarely arises. I met a Celt who had bought a copy of
Josephus in most irritating type, in the hope that it would help him to
confute a Roman Catholic on the Power of the Keys. Then again, people of
a wavering and bird-witted type of mind are constantly changing the
subject of their interest: this month they are attacked by the _furor
poeticus_, next month it will be a _furor botanicus_ or _politicus_.
Each separate frenzy means expenditure. When Browning is the temporary
subject of the mania, a host of expository books on that poet have to be
purchased, all of which are duly consigned to the topmost shelves when
the soreness of the fit is past. There is also a tendency to purchase,
because on the chance opening of a book you light on something that
pleases the whim of the moment. It is a thousand to one that when you
have bought the book you will not find another item worth perusing in
the entire contents. This tendency to buy a book in a panic may be
neutralised by remembering the story (whether true or not) of Defoe, who
is said to have boomed the languid sale of the dreary _Drelincourt on
Death_ by means of a s