of mourning; my
cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father left me his soul, mind, and
taste written on every margin of his books." When a boy grows up beside
his father and his father is in the last stages of the book disease,
there is hardly any power which can save that son, unless the mother be
robustly illiterate, in which case the crossing of the blood may make him
impervious. For a father of this kind will unconsciously inoculate his
boy, allowing him to play beside him in the bookroom, where the air is
charged with germs (against which there is no disinfectant, I believe,
except commercial conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys
will give him an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never
depart from the memory. By and by, so thoughtless is this invalid
father, who has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that
he will allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection,
and explain to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or show him the
thickness of the paper and the glory of the black-letter in an ancient
book. Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken ill and begun on his
own account to prowl through the smaller bookstalls, his father will
listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in the evening, and will
chuckle aloud when one day the poor victim of this deadly illness comes
home with a newspaper of the time of Charles II., which he has bought for
threepence. It is only a question of time when that lad, being now on an
allowance of his own, will be going about in a suit of disgracefully
shabby tweeds, that he may purchase a Theophrastus of fine print and
binding upon which he has long had his eye, and will be taking milk and
bread for his lunch in the city, because he has a foolish ambition to
acquire by a year's saving the Kelmscott edition of the _Golden Legend_.
A change of air might cure him, as for instance twenty years' residence
on an American ranch, but even then on his return the disease might break
out again: indeed the chances are strong that he is really incurable.
Last week I saw such a case--the bookman of the second generation in a
certain shop where such unfortunates collect. For an hour he had been
there browsing along the shelves, his hat tilted back upon his head that
he might hold the books the nearer to his eyes, and an umbrella under his
left arm, projecting awkwardly, which he had not laid down, because he
did not intend