Ah, Cupid! wanton Cupid! 
    ’Twas ever thus your way: 
  When maids would bid you ply your wings,
    You find excuse to stay!

DREAMTHORP
[Sidenote:  Alexander Smith]

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his “History of Civilisation” in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the other appurtenances of intellectual life are not to be procured.  I am acquainted with birds, and the building of nests—­with wildflowers, and the seasons in which they blow,—­but with the big world far away, with what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am acquainted only through the Times, and the occasional magazine or review, sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by whom, it seems, I am not yet forgotten.  The village has but few intellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured by the demand.  Still, there is something.  Down in the village, and opposite the curiously carved fountain, is a schoolroom which can accommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch.  There are our public meetings held.  Musical entertainments have been given there by a single performer.  In that schoolroom last winter an American biologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings, mingled up the next world with this.  Now and again some rare bird of an itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him.  His rounded periods the eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence.  His audience do not understand him, but they see that the clergyman does, and the doctor does; and so they are content, and look as attentive and wise as possible.  Then, in connection with the schoolroom, there is a public library, where books are exchanged once a month.  This library is a kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances.  Each of these books has been in the wars; some are unquestionably antiques.  The tears of three generations have fallen upon their dusky pages.  The heroes and the heroines are of another age than ours.  Sir Charles Grandison is standing with his hat under his arm.  Tom Jones plops from the tree into the water, to the infinite distress of Sophia.  Moses comes home from market with his stock of shagreen spectacles.  Lovers, warriors, and villains,—­as dead to the present generation of readers as Cambyses,—­are weeping, fighting, and intriguing.  These books, tattered and torn as they are, are read with delight to-day.  The viands are celestial, if set forth on a dingy table-cloth.  The gaps and chasms which occur in pathetic or perilous chapters are felt to be personal calamities.  It is with a certain feeling of tenderness that I look upon these books; I think of the dead fingers that have turned over the leaves, of the dead eyes that have travelled along the lines.  An old novel has a history of its own.  When fresh and new, and before it had breathed its