at the man who
hunts and has racehorses, cares and knows about these things to the
extermination of all other interests. Life becomes ill balanced, whereas
it is necessary to touch life at many points. 'The strenuous scholar
pure and simple,' is becoming more rare, though the type of which the
late Mark Pattison was one will never quite die out. But it is not the
strenuous _scholar_ that one is so anxious to perpetuate, as it is the
strenuous and scholarly man of affairs and men of trained ability who
have mental muscle for parliamentary work and social problems. Such a
class ought to have many recruits from among the wealthier families.

It would assist very much towards this end if men of aptitude were
properly trained to act as custodians of books in private houses. The
art of knowing how to use books is one which must be learnt, and when
properly learnt there is very little indeed that may not be readily
found to hand in a library of but small dimensions.

There are, I believe, in England twenty-two packs of staghounds, and 182
packs of foxhounds. As every one of the masters of these packs must be a
rich man, I should like to know that he at any rate had a sound copy of
the _History_ of the county where he hunts; that he had in his smoking
room a good Encyclopaedia, with fifty other good reference books, and a
hundred good novels.

The rich men of old combined patronage of learning with the pomp and
splendour of their lives. Lucullus distinguished himself by his vast
collection of books, and the liberal access he allowed to lovers of
books. 'It was a library,' says Plutarch, 'whose walls, galleries and
cabinets were open to all visitors; and the ingenious youths, when at
leisure, resorted to this abode of the Muses, to hold literary
conversations, in which Lucullus himself loved to join.' The Emperor
Augustus was himself an author and a book lover, and called one of his
libraries by the name of his sister, Octavia, and the other the temple
of Apollo. Tiberius had a library, and Trajan also, and these spent
constantly upon their books and the housing of them.

I have taken from Renaissance history pictures of several men who might
be taken as types which should exist in every highly civilised country.
They have been vividly and admirably pictured by biographers, and one
can only hope that the rich men of to-day may in five hundred years'
time have as lasting reputations as that of Cosimo, the princely patron
of l