oks,
at any rate. So I savagely fell to, and threw the books back again into
their immemorial places, and the cause of freedom in 'The City of Books'
sleeps for another hundred editions.

Only I placed Elia next to the Duchess, because he was a human fellow, and
had no theories.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF 'LIMITED EDITIONS'

Why do the heathen so furiously rage against limited issues, large-papers,
first editions, and the rest? For there is certainly more to be said for
than against them. Broadly speaking, all such 'fads' are worthy of being
encouraged, because they maintain, in some measure, the expiring dignity
of letters, the mystery of books. Day by day the wonderfulness of life is
becoming lost to us. The sanctities of religion are defiled, the 'fairy
tales' of science have become commonplaces. Christian mysteries are
debased in the streets to the sound of drum and trumpet, and the sensitive
ear of the telephone is but a servile drudge 'twixt speculative bacon
merchants. And Books!--those miraculous memories of high thoughts and
golden moods; those magical shells tremulous with the secrets of the
ocean of life; those love-letters that pass from hand to hand of a
thousand lovers that never meet; those honeycombs of dreams; those
orchards of knowledge; those still-beating hearts of the noble dead; those
mysterious signals that beckon along the darksome pathways of the past;
voices through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech;
oracles through which its mysteries call like voices in moonlit woods;
prisms of beauty; urns stored with all the sweets of all the summers of
time; immortal nightingales that sing for ever to the rose of life: Books,
Bibles--ah me! what have ye become to-day!

What, indeed, has become of that mystery of the Printed Word, of which
Carlyle so movingly wrote? It has gone, it is to be feared, with those
Memnonian mornings we sleep through with so determined snore, those
ancient mysteries of night we forget beneath the mimic firmament of the
music-hall.

Only in the lamplit closet of the bookman, the fanatic of first and fine
editions, is it remembered and revered. To him alone of an Americanised,
'pirated-edition' reading world, the book remains the sacred thing it is.
Therefore, he would not have it degraded by, so to say, an indiscriminate
breeding, such as has also made the children of men cheap and vulgar to
each other. We pity the desert rose that is born to unapprec