of his own cabinet.  His rank and his opulence were no obstructions to his settled habits.  CICERO himself, in his happier moments, addressing ATTICUS, exclaimed—­“I had much rather be sitting on your little bench under Aristotle’s picture, than in the curule chairs of our great ones.”  This wish was probably sincere, and reminds us of another great politician who in his secession from public affairs retreated to a literary life, where he appears suddenly to have discovered a new-found world.  Fox’s favourite line, which he often repeated, was—­

  How various his employments whom the world
  Calls idle!

De Sacy, one of the Port-Royalists, was fond of repeating this lively remark of a man of wit—­“That all the mischief in the world comes from not being able to keep ourselves quiet in our room.”

But tranquillity is essential to the existence of the man of letters—­an unbroken and devotional tranquillity.  For though, unlike the author, his occupations are interrupted without inconvenience, and resumed without effort; yet if the painful realities of life break into this visionary world of literature and art, there is an atmosphere of taste about him which will be dissolved, and harmonious ideas which will be chased away, as it happens when something is violently flung among the trees where the birds are singing—­all instantly disperse!

Even to quit their collections for a short time is a real suffering to these lovers; everything which surrounds them becomes endeared by habit, and by some higher associations.  Men of letters have died with grief from having been forcibly deprived of the use of their libraries.  DE THOU, with all a brother’s sympathy, in his great history, has recorded the sad fates of several who had witnessed their collections dispersed in the civil wars of France, or had otherwise been deprived of their precious volumes.  Sir ROBERT COTTON fell ill, and betrayed, in the ashy paleness of his countenance, the misery which killed him on the sequestration of his collections.  “They have broken my heart who have locked up my library from me,” was his lament.

If this passion for acquisition and enjoyment be so strong and exquisite, what wonder that these “lovers” should regard all things as valueless in comparison with the objects of their love?  There seem to be spells in their collections, and in their fascination they have often submitted to the ruin of their personal, but not of their internal enjoyments.  They have scorned to balance in the scales the treasures of literature and art, though imperial magnificence once was ambitious to outweigh them.