eings once had tails, and in his theological moods he will expound St.
John's Epistles, or the principles of Christianity. The bookman, in
fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare not claim
that he searches for accurate information in his books as for fine gold,
and he has been known to say that that department of books of various
kinds which come under the head of "what's what," and "why's why," and
"where's where," are not literature. He does not care, and that may be
foolish, whether he agrees with the writer, and there are times when he
does not inquire too curiously whether the writer be respectable, which
is very wrong, but he is pleased if this man who died a year ago or three
hundred years has seen something with his own eyes and can tell him what
he saw in words that still have in them the breath of life, and he will
go with cheerful inconsequence from Chaucer, the jolliest of all book
companions, and Rabelais--although that brilliant satirist had pages
which the bookman avoids, because they make his gorge rise--to Don
Quixote. If he carries a Horace, Pickering's little gem, in his
waistcoat pocket, and sometimes pictures that genial Roman club-man in
the Savile, he has none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius. The
bookman has a series of love affairs before he is captured and settles
down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged
married man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are
perilous to his inflammable heart.

In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the sweetness of
literature in two of the best novels ever written, as well as two of the
best pieces of good English. One is _Robinson Crusoe_ and the other the
_Pilgrim's Progress_. Both were written by masters of our tongue, and
they remain until this day the purest and most appetising introduction to
the book passion. They created two worlds of adventure with minute vivid
details and constant surprises--the foot on the sand, for instance, in
_Crusoe_, and the valley of the shadow with the hobgoblin in _Pilgrim's
Progress_--and one will have a tenderness for these two first loves even
until the end. Afterwards one went afield and sometimes got into queer
company, not bad but simply a little common. There was an endless series
of Red Indian stories in my school-days, wherein trappers could track the
enemy by a broken blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by coming down
th