Nature is nothing, if not natural.  If I am to read to any purpose, I must read with a relish, and browse at will with the bridle off.  Sometimes I go into a library, the slow accretion of a couple of centuries, or perhaps the mushroom growth from a rich man’s grave, a great collection magically convoked by the talisman of gold.  At the threshold, as I ardently enter, the flaming sword of regulation is waving.  Between me and the inviting shelves are fences of woven iron; the bibliographic Cerberus is at his sentryship; when I want a full draught, I must be content with driblets; and the impatient messengers are sworn to bring me only a single volume at a time.  To read in such a hampered and limited way is not to read at all; and I go back, after the first fret and worry are over, to the little collection upon my garret-shelf, to greet again the old familiar pages.  I leave the main army behind,—­“the lordly band of mighty folios,” “the well-ordered ranks of the quartos,” “the light octavos,” and “humbler duodecimos,” for

  “The last new play, and frittered magazine,”—­

for the sutlers and camp-followers, “pioneers and all,” of the grand army,—­for the prizes, dirty, but curious, rescued from the street-stall, or unearthed in a Nassau-Street cellar,—­for the books which I thumbed and dogs-eared in my youth.

I have, in my collection, a little Divinity, consisting mostly of quaint Quaker books bequeathed to me by my grandmother,—­a little Philosophy, a little Physic, a little Law, a little History, a little Fiction, and a deal of Nondescript stuff.  Once, when the res angusta domi had become angustissima, a child of Israel was, in my sore estate, summoned to inspect the dear, shabby colony, and to make his sordid aureat or argent bid therefor.  Well do I remember how his nose, which he could not, if his worthless life had depended upon it, render retrousse, grew sublimely curvilinear in its contempt, as his hawk-eyes estimated my pitiful family.  I will not name the sum which he offered, the ghoul, the vampire, the anthropophagous jackal, the sneaking would-be incendiary of my little Alexandrian, the circumcised Goth!  He left me, like Churchill’s Scotch lassie, “pleased, but hungry”; and I found, as Valentine did in Congreve’s “Love for Love,” “a page doubled down in Epictetus which was a feast for an emperor.”

I own, my excellent Robert, that a bad book is, to my taste, sometimes vastly more refreshing than a good one.  I do not wonder that Crabbe, after he had so sadly failed in his medical studies, should have anathematized the medical writers in this fine passage:—­

  “Ye frigid tribe, on whom I waited long
  The tedious hours, and ne’er indulged in song! 
  Ye first seducers of my easy heart,
  Who promised knowledge ye could not impart! 
  Ye dull deluders, Truth’s destructive foes! 
  Ye Sons of Fiction, clad in stupid prose! 
  Ye treacherous leaders, who, yourselves in doubt,
  Light up false fires, and send us far about!—­
  Still may yon spider round your pages spin,
  Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin! 
  Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell! 
  Most potent, grave, and reverend friends,—­farewell!”