in Goodge Street—­a stall where now and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.  Sixpence was the price—­sixpence!  At that time I used to eat my mid-day meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.  Sixpence was all I had—­yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a plate of meat and vegetables.  But I did not dare to hope that the Tibullus would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due to me.  I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at combat within me.  The book was bought and I went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated over the pages.

In this Tibullus I found pencilled on the last page:  “Perlegi, Oct. 4, 1792.”  Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago?  There was no other inscription.  I like to imagine some poor scholar, poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did.  How much that was I could not easily say.  Gentle-hearted Tibullus!—­of whom there remains to us a poet’s portrait more delightful, I think, than anything of the kind in Roman literature.

   An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
   Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?

So with many another book on the thronged shelves.  To take them down is to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph.  In those days money represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think about, but the acquisition of books.  There were books of which I had passionate need, books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment.  I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them, my own property, on my own shelf.  Now and then I have bought a volume of the raggedest and wretchedest aspect, dishonoured with foolish scribbling, torn, blotted—­no matter, I liked better to read out of that than out of a copy that was not mine.  But I was guilty at times of mere self-indulgence; a book tempted me, a book which was not one of those for which I really craved, a luxury which prudence might bid me forego.  As, for instance, my Jung-Stilling.  It caught my eye in Holywell Street; the name was familiar to me in Wahrheit und Dichtung, and curiosity grew as I glanced over the pages.  But that day I resisted; in truth, I could not afford the eighteen-pence, which means that just then I was poor indeed.  Twice again did I pass, each time assuring myself that Jung-Stilling had found no purchaser.  There came a day when I was in funds.  I see myself hastening to Holywell Street (in those days my habitual pace was five miles an hour), I see the little grey old man with whom I transacted my business—­what was his name?—­the bookseller who had been, I believe, a Catholic priest, and still had a certain priestly dignity about him.  He took the volume, opened it, mused for a moment, then, with a glance at me, said, as if thinking aloud:  “Yes, I wish I had time to read it.”