meads, trembling with the
earthquake of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the
promontory of Parnassus and the Porticoes of the Stoics." The Duke of
Roxburghe and Earl Spencer, two gallant sportsmen whose spoils have
enriched the land; Monkbarns also, though we will not let him bring any
antiquities with him, jagged or otherwise; and Charles Lamb, whom we
shall coax into telling over again how he started out at ten o'clock on
Saturday night and roused up old Barker in Covent Garden, and came home
in triumph with "that folio Beaumont and Fletcher," going forth almost in
tears lest the book should be gone, and coming home rejoicing, carrying
his sheaf with him. Besides, whether Bodley and Dibdin like it or not,
we must have a Royalty, for there were Queens who collected, and also on
occasions stole books, and though she be not the greatest of the Queenly
bookwomen and did not steal, we shall invite Mary Queen of Scots, while
she is living in Holyrood, and has her library beside her. Mary had a
fine collection of books well chosen and beautifully bound, and as I look
now at the catalogue it seems to me a library more learned than is likely
to be found even in the study of an advanced young woman of to-day. A
Book of Devotion which was said to have belonged to her and afterwards to
a Pope, gloriously bound, I was once allowed to look upon, but did not
buy, because the price was marked in plain figures at a thousand guineas.
It would be something to sit in a corner and hear Monkbarns and Charles
Lamb comparing notes, and to watch for the moment when Lamb would
withdraw all he had said against the Scots people, or Earl Spencer
describing with delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle of Sale. But
I will guarantee that the whole company of bookworms would end in paying
tribute to that intelligent and very fascinating young woman from
Holyrood, who still turns men's heads across the stretch of centuries.
For even a bookman has got a heart.

Like most diseases the mania for books is hereditary, and if the father
is touched with it the son can hardly escape, and it is not even
necessary that the son should have known his father. For Sainte-Beuve's
father died when he was an infant and his mother had no book tastes, but
his father left him his books with many comments on the margins, and the
book microbe was conveyed by the pages. "I was born," said the great
critic in the _Consolations_, "I was born in a time