“Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prete,
   Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gate.”

“Often lost, always spoiled,” said Charles Nodier, “such is the fate of every book one lends.”  The Parisian collector, Guibert de Pixerecourt, would lend no books at all to his dearest friends.  His motto, inscribed above the lintel of his library-door, was, “Go to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.”  As Pixerecourt was the owner of many volumes which “they that sell” cannot procure, or which could only be bought at enormous rates, his caution (we will not say churlishness) was rather inconvenient for men of letters.  But if hard pressed and in a strait, he would make his friend a gift of the book which was necessary to his studies.  This course had the effect of preventing people from wishing to borrow.  But many of the great collectors have been more generous than Pixerecourt.  We forget the name (not an illustrious one) of the too good-natured man who labelled his books, “Not my own, but my friends’.”  “Sibi et amicis” ("His own and his friends’ property”) has been the motto of several illustrious amateurs since Grolier and Maioli stamped it on the beautifully decorated morocco of their bindings.  Other people have invented book-plates, containing fell curses in doggrel Latin or the vernacular on the careless or dishonest borrower: 

   “Aspice Pierrot pendut
   Parceque librum non a rendu”

is the kind of macaronic French and Latin which schoolboys are accustomed to write under a sketch of the borrower expiating his offences on the gallows.

The mischief of borrowing, the persistent ill-luck which cleaves to property thus obtained, have been proverbial since the young prophet dropped the axe-head in the deep water, and cried, “Alas, for it is borrowed.”  The old prophet, readily altering the specific gravity of the article, enabled his disciple to regain it.  But there are no prophets now, none, at least, who can repair our follies, and remove their baneful effects by a friendly miracle.  What miracle can restore the books we borrow and lose, or the books we borrow and spoil with ink, or with candle-wax, or which children scrawl or paint over, or which “the dog ate,” like the famous poll-book at an Irish election, that fell into the broth, and ultimately into the jaws of an illiterate animal?  Books are such delicate things!  Yet men—­and still more frequently women—­read them so close to the fire that the bindings warp, and start, and gape like the shells of a moribund oyster.  Other people never have a paper-knife, and cut the leaves of books with cards, railway tickets, scissors, their own fingers, or any other weapon that chances to seem convenient.  Then books are easily dirtied.  A little dust falls into the leaves, and is smudged by the fingers.  No fuller on earth can cleanse it.  The art of man can remove certain sorts of stains, but only by stripping the book of its binding,