’Even a millionaire will ease his toils, lengthen his life, and add 100 per cent. to his daily pleasures, if he becomes a bibliophile; while to the man of business with a taste for books, who through the day has struggled in the battle of life, with all its irritating rebuffs and anxieties, what a blessed season of pleasurable repose opens upon him as he enters his sanctum, where every article wafts him a welcome and every book is a personal friend!’

As for the millionaire, I frankly say I have no desire his life should be lengthened, and care nothing about adding 100 per cent. to his daily pleasures.  He is a nuisance, for he has raised prices nearly 100 per cent.  We curse the day when he was told it was the thing to buy old books; and, if he must buy old books, why is he not content with the works of Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, and Flavius Josephus, that learned Jew?  But it is not the millionaire who set me thinking; it is the harassed man of business; and what I am wondering is, whether, in sober truth and earnestness, it is possible for him, as he shuts his library door and finds himself inside, to forget his rebuffs and anxieties—­his maturing bills and overdue argosies—­and to lose himself over a favourite volume.  The ‘article’ that wafts him welcome I take to be his pipe.  That he will put the ‘article’ into his mouth and smoke it I have no manner of doubt; my dread is lest, in ten minutes’ time, the book should have dropt into his lap and the man’s eyes be staring into the fire.  But for a’ that, and a’ that—­great is bookishness and the charm of books.

CONFIRMED READERS

Dr. Johnson is perhaps our best example of a confirmed reader.  Malone once found him sitting in his room roasting apples and reading a history of Birmingham.  This staggered even Malone, who was himself a somewhat far-gone reader.

‘Don’t you find it rather dull?’ he ventured to inquire.

‘Yes,’ replied the Sage, ‘it is dull.’

Malone’s eyes then rested on the apples, and he remarked he supposed they were for medicine.

‘Why, no,’ said Johnson; ’I believe they are only there because I wanted something to do.  I have been confined to the house for a week, and so you find me roasting apples and reading the history of Birmingham.’

This anecdote pleasingly illustrates the habits of the confirmed reader.  Nor let the worldling sneer.  Happy is the man who, in the hours of solitude and depression, can read a history of Birmingham.  How terrible is the story Welbore Ellis told of Robert Walpole in his magnificent library, trying book after book, and at last, with tears in his eyes, exclaiming:  ‘It is all in vain:  I cannot read!’

Edmund Malone, the Shakespearian commentator and first editor of Boswell’s Johnson, was as confirmed a reader as it is possible for a book-collector to be.  His own life, by Sir James Prior, is full of good things, and is not so well known as it should be.  It smacks of books and bookishness.