of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate, who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make his children the ornaments of society.  There the potential Dibdin or Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf—­more fair to him than the hanging gardens of Babylon.  There stand “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Gulliver,” perhaps “Gil Blas,” Goldsmith’s Histories of Greece and Rome, “Original Poems for Infant Minds,” the “Parent’s Assistant,” and (for Sundays) the “Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,” with other narratives of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.  With these are admitted also “Viri Romae,” Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and even the Latin grammar, because they count, playing here upon these mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators, a role in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated volumes—­the “books without which no gentleman’s library can be complete.”

I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn it.  The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather’s study, but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther.  These were heads of ancient worthies[1]—­Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca, and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly banished again with a quousque tandem! Besides those I have mentioned, there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the slave of tradition, I called Heraclitus—­an error which my excellent schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life, he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.

[Footnote 1:  Some readers may recall the reference to these “heads of ancient wise men” in “An Interview with Miles Standish.”—­C.E.N.]

Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers—­the one showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats’s Grecian urn, could never be shed.  I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole business of their lives.  I was puzzled to think which had the harder time of it, and whether