ement,' says Disraeli, 'to the frivolous is a vast
desert; to the man of genius it is the enchanted garden of Armida.' And
for 'man of genius' I would substitute 'man of literary pursuits.'

There is a pleasant story told of a monk who lived in the monastery of
St. Honorat, which is situated on one of the Lerine Islands, off the
coast of Provence. Possessed of a mind which, in the larger world, would
indubitably have become an influence in the artistic progress of mankind,
he found the sole outlet for its expression in the painting of those
exquisite miniatures which are at once the delight and the despair of a
more modern age. But it was not in the scriptorium nor was it in the
bestiaries or the examples of his predecessors that he acquired his art.
Every year, in the spring and autumn, he would go alone to one of the
delicious islands of Hyeres, where there was a small hermitage. Here he
would spend the weeks, not altogether in prayer and fasting, but in
making friends with the birds and small animals that resorted there;
studying their gestures, plumage, and colours, that he might reproduce
them faithfully on the vellum of his missals and devotional books. Surely
he learnt more on this deserted island than was possible at that time in
the richest library in France.

There is another kind of solitude, however, which can afford consolation
to the soul as deep and as lasting as that afforded by the woods, the
hills, the moors, the islands, those

'Waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be'--

and that is, the solitude engendered by a deep communion with books. For,
if our paths lie amid the toil and turmoil of the world, and if it be
impossible for us to seek seclusion amid the wastes, where else than in a
library can we obtain that mental solitude so necessary for the
nourishing of our literary spirit?

Roger Ascham, sick at heart with long parting from his beloved books,
writes to Sir William Cecil from Brussels in 1553, to beg that 'libertie
to lern, and leysor to wryte,' which his beloved Cambridge alone could
afford him. 'I do wel perceyve,' he says, 'their is no soch quietnesse in
England, nor pleasur in strange contres, as even in S. Jons Colledg, to
kepe company with the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Tullie.'
And he goes on to say, 'Thus I, first by myn own natur, . . . lastly