A superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple question:  What would become of us if the circulating libraries ceased to exist?  It is a horrid and almost indelicate supposition, but let us be brave and face the truth.  On this earth of ours nothing lasts. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse.  Imagine the utter wreck overtaking the morals of our beautiful country-houses should the circulating libraries suddenly die!  But pray do not shudder.  There is no occasion.

Their spirit shall survive.  I declare this from inward conviction, and also from scientific information received lately.  For observe:  the circulating libraries are human institutions.  I beg you to follow me closely.  They are human institutions, and being human, they are not animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual.  Thus, any man with enough money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall be able to evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves him.

For, and this is the information alluded to above, Science, having in its infinite wanderings run up against various wonders and mysteries, is apparently willing now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, I conclude, to all his works as well.

I do not know exactly what this “Science” may be; and I do not think that anybody else knows; but that is the information stated shortly.  It is contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes. {5} I know it is not a censored book, because I can see for myself that it is not a novel.  The author, on his side, warns me that it is not philosophy, that it is not metaphysics, that it is not natural science.  After this comprehensive warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will admit, a pretty hard nut to crack.

But meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about the physical effect of some common, hired books.  A few of them (not necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) I only met once.  But there is infinite variety in the noises books do make.  I have now on my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw.  I am inconsolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it is all about, for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced to give it up ere the end of the page is reached.

The book, however, which I have found so difficult to define, is by no means noisy.  As a mere piece of writing it may be described as being breathless itself and taking the reader’s breath away, not by the magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubility in the delivery.  The constantly elusive argument and the illustrative quotations go on without a single reflective pause.  For this reason alone the reading of that work is a fatiguing process.