of American artists, the late Edwin A. Abbey.  It represents a very fine gentleman of about 1610, walking in broad sunlight in a garden, reading a little book of verses.  The name is coiled around him, with the motto, Gravis cantantibus umbra.  I will not presume to translate this tag of an eclogue, and I only venture to mention such an uninteresting matter, that my indulgent readers may have a more vivid notion of what I call my library.  Mr. Abbey’s fine art is there, always before me, to keep my ideal high.

To possess few books, and those not too rich and rare for daily use, has this advantage, that the possessor can make himself master of them all, can recollect their peculiarities, and often remind himself of their contents.  The man that has two or three thousand books can be familiar with them all; he that has thirty thousand can hardly have a speaking acquaintance with more than a few.  The more conscientious he is, the more he becomes like Lucian’s amateur, who was so much occupied in rubbing the bindings of his books with sandal-wood and saffron, that he had no time left to study the contents.  After all, with every due respect paid to “states” and editions and bindings and tall copies, the inside of the volume is really the essential part of it.

The excuses for collecting, however, are more than satire is ready to admit.  The first edition represents the author’s first thought; in it we read his words as he sent them out to the world in his first heat, with the type he chose, and with such peculiarities of form as he selected to do most justice to his creation.  We often discover little individual points in a first edition, which never occur again.  And if it be conceded that there is an advantage in reading a book in the form which the author originally designed for it, then all the other refinements of the collector become so many acts of respect paid to this first virgin apparition, touching and suitable homage of cleanness and fit adornment.  It is only when this homage becomes mere eye-service, when a book radically unworthy of such dignity is too delicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor dilettantism comes in between the reader and what he reads.  Indeed, the best of volumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a binding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal.  To the feudal splendours of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, a tenpenny book in a ten-pound binding, I say fie.  Perhaps the ideal library, after all, is a small one, where the books are carefully selected and thoughtfully arranged in accordance with one central code of taste, and intended to be respectfully consulted at any moment by the master of their destinies.  If fortune made me possessor of one book of excessive value, I should hasten to part with it.  In a little working library, to hold a first quarto of Hamlet, would be like entertaining a reigning monarch in a small farmhouse at harvesting.