those magical shells tremulous with the secrets of the ocean of life; those love-letters that pass from hand to hand of a thousand lovers that never meet; those honeycombs of dreams; those orchards of knowledge; those still-beating hearts of the noble dead; those mysterious signals that beckon along the darksome pathways of the past; voices through which the myriad lispings of the earth find perfect speech; oracles through which its mysteries call like voices in moonlit woods; prisms of beauty; urns stored with all the sweets of all the summers of time; immortal nightingales that sing for ever to the rose of life:  Books, Bibles—­ah me! what have ye become to-day!

What, indeed, has become of that mystery of the Printed Word, of which Carlyle so movingly wrote?  It has gone, it is to be feared, with those Memnonian mornings we sleep through with so determined snore, those ancient mysteries of night we forget beneath the mimic firmament of the music-hall.

Only in the lamplit closet of the bookman, the fanatic of first and fine editions, is it remembered and revered.  To him alone of an Americanised, ‘pirated-edition’ reading world, the book remains the sacred thing it is.  Therefore, he would not have it degraded by, so to say, an indiscriminate breeding, such as has also made the children of men cheap and vulgar to each other.  We pity the desert rose that is born to unappreciated beauty, the unset gem that glitters on no woman’s hand; but what of the book that eats its heart out in the threepenny box, the remainders that are sold ignominiously in job lots by ignorant auctioneers?  Have we no feeling for them?

Over-production, in both men and shirts, is the evil of the day.  The world has neither enough food, nor enough love, for the young that are born into it.  We have more mouths than we can fill, and more books than we can buy.  Well, the publisher and collector of limited editions aim, in their small corner, to set a limit to this careless procreation.  They are literary Malthusians.  The ideal world would be that in which there should be at least one lover for each woman.  In the higher life of books the ideal is similar.  No book should be brought into the world which is not sure of love and lodging on some comfortable shelf.  If writers and publishers only gave a thought to what they are doing when they generate such large families of books, careless as the salmon with its million young, we should have no such sad alms-houses of learning as Booksellers’ Row, no such melancholy distress-sales of noble authors as remainder auctions.  A good book is beyond price; and it is far easier to under than over sell it.  The words of the modern minor poet are as rubies, and what if his sets bring a hundred guineas?—­it is more as it should be, than that any sacrilegious hand should fumble them for threepence.  It recalls that golden age of which Mr. Dobson has sung, when—­

        ’... a book was still a Book,
    Where a wistful man might look,
    Finding something through the whole
    Beating—­like a human soul’;