t of hexameters
would he have catalogued all the labels on it, including those
attractive views of the Hotel Circe, the Hotel Calypso, and other
high-class resorts. Yet no! Had such a hat-box existed and had it been
preserved in his day, Homer would have seen in it a sufficient record,
a better record than even he could make, of Odysseus' wanderings. We
should have had nothing from him but the Iliad. I, certainly never felt
any need of commemorating my journeys till my labels were lost to me.
And I am conscious how poor and chill is the substitute.

My collection like most collections, began imperceptibly. A man does
not say to himself, 'I am going to collect' this thing or that. True,
the schoolboy says so; but his are not, in the true sense of the word,
collections. He seeks no set autobiographic symbols, for boys never
look back--there is too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor
have the objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He
starts a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for
doing something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds' eggs merely
that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his clothes in
climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged to poison and
impale; for stamps...really, I do not know why he, why any sane
creature goes in for stamps. It follows that he has no real love of his
collection and soon abandons it for something else. The sincere
collector, how different! His hobby has a solid basis of personal
preference. Some one gives him (say) a piece of jade. He admires it. He
sees another piece in a shop, and buys it; later, he buys another. He
does not regard these pieces of jade as distinct from the rest of his
possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he has
acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them as mere
items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a little table, or
a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well they look there! How
they intensify one another! He really must get some one to give him
that little pedestalled Cupid which he saw yesterday in Wardour Street.
Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or
take the case of one whose collection is not of beautiful things, but
of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glutton. He will have
pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to arrange them in an
album. Even so, it was not until a fair number of