“HENRY PEACHAM’S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN.  Fashioning him absolut in the most necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may be required in a Noble Gentleman.  Wherunto is annexed a Description of the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes, with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged.  Printed from the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. Gordon. 1906.  Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. At the Clarendon Press.”

Or this: 

“H.  HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure.  Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906.  Pp xviii + 104. 5s. net.”

O excellent H!  Little did he dream that his devises (with an introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his Friends pleasure over three hundred years later.  The compiler of the catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride “strongly bound in exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as leather.  Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest are reproductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good hands.”

One o’clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and curiosity are now both going strong.

“THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598.  The earliest English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. 6d. net.”

Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial enterprises in Elizabeth’s reign?  And there is no limit to the joys of this marvellous catalogue.  How one dreams of the unknown delights of “Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books,” or “Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340” (which means, as I figure it, the “Backbite of Conscience"), or “Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F. Field. 1865.  Two volumes L6 6s. net” or “Shuckford’s Sacred and Profane History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848.  Pp 550. 10s. net.”

But I dare not force my hobbies on you further.  One man’s meat is another’s caviar.  I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent poem entitled “My Pipe,” mentioning the brands I delight to honour, the editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends.  He said that sound editorial policy forbids mentioning commercial products in the text of the magazine.

But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a “commercial product.”  Let us call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony: