tion, for to him there is no close season, except the
spring cleaning which he furiously resents, and only allows once in five
years, and his autumn holiday, when he takes some six handy volumes with
him. For him there are no hindrances of weather, for if the day be
sunshine he taketh his pleasure in a garden, and if the day be sleet of
March the fireside is the dearer, while there is a certain volume--Payne's
binding, red morocco, a favourite colour of his--and the bookman reads
_Don Quixote_ with the more relish because the snowdrift is beating on
the window. During the hours of the day when he is visiting patients,
who tell their symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about
corn, or composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is
thinking of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and
eighty minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a
man can work or hope to get. He will spend the time in the good company
of people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with them.
Some of them of high estate and some extremely low; some of them learned
persons and some of them simple, country men. For while the bookman
counteth it his chief honour and singular privilege to hold converse with
Virgil and Dante, with Shakespeare and Bacon, and suchlike nobility, yet
is he very happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Dandie Dinmont, with Mr.
Micawber and Mrs. Gamp; he is proud when Diana Vernon comes to his room,
and he has a chair for Colonel Newcome; he likes to hear Coleridge
preach, who, as Lamb said, "never did anything else," and is much
flattered when Browning tries to explain what he meant in _Paracelsus_.
It repays one for much worry when William Blake not only reads his _Songs
of Innocence_ but also shows his own illustrations, and he turns to his
life of Michael Angelo with the better understanding after he has read
what Michael Angelo wrote to Vittoria Colonna. He that hath such
friends, grave or gay, needeth not to care whether he be rich or poor,
whether he know great folk or they pass him by, for he is independent of
society and all its whims, and almost independent of circumstances. His
friends of this circle will never play him false nor ever take the pet.
If he does not wish their company they are silent, and then when he turns
to them again there is no difference in the welcome, for they maintain an
equal mind and are ever in good humour. As he com