BOOKWORMS

Great is bookishness and the charm of books.  No doubt there are times and seasons in the lives of most reading men when they rebel against the dust of libraries and kick against the pricks of these monstrously accumulated heaps of words.  We all know ‘the dark hour’ when the vanity of learning and the childishness of merely literary things are brought home to us in such a way as almost to avail to put the pale student out of conceit with his books, and to make him turn from his best-loved authors as from a friend who has outstayed his welcome, whose carriage we wish were at the door.  In these unhappy moments we are apt to call to mind the shrewd men we have known, who have been our blithe companions on breezy fells, heathery moor, and by the stream side, who could neither read nor write, or who, at all events, but rarely practised those Cadmean arts.  Yet they could tell the time of day by the sun, and steer through the silent night by the stars; and each of them had—­as Emerson, a very bookish person, has said—­a dial in his mind for the whole bright calendar of the year.  How racy was their talk; how wise their judgments on men and things; how well they did all that at the moment seemed worth doing; how universally useful was their garnered experience—­their acquired learning!  How wily were these illiterates in the pursuit of game—­how ready in an emergency!  What a charm there is about out-of-door company!  Who would not sooner have spent a summer’s day with Sir Walter’s humble friend, Tom Purday, than with Mr. William Wordsworth of Rydal Mount!  It is, we can only suppose, reflections such as these that make country gentlemen and farmers the sworn foes they are of education and the enemies of School Boards.

I only indicate this line of thought to condemn it.  Such temptations come from below.  Great, we repeat, is bookishness and the charm of books.  Even the writings, the ponderous writings, of that portentous parson, the Rev. T.F.  Dibdin, with all their lumbering gaiety and dust-choked rapture over first editions, are not hastily to be sent packing to the auction-room.  Much red gold did they cost us, these portly tomes, in bygone days, and on our shelves they shall remain till the end of our time, unless our creditors intervene—­were it only to remind us of years when our enthusiasms were pure though our tastes may have been crude.

Some years ago Mr. Blades, the famous printer and Caxtonist, published in vellum covers a small volume which he christened The Enemies of Books.  It made many friends, and now a revised and enlarged version in comely form, adorned with pictures, and with a few prefatory words by Dr. Garnett, has made its appearance.  Mr. Blades himself has left this world for a better one, where—­so piety bids us believe—­neither fire nor water nor worm can despoil or destroy the pages of heavenly wisdom.  But the book-collector must not be caught nursing mere