and washing leaf by leaf in certain acids, an expensive and dangerous process.  There are books for use, stout, everyday articles, and books for pious contemplation, original editions, or tomes that have belonged to great collectors.  The borrower, who only wants to extract a passage of which he is in momentary need, is a person heedless of these distinctions.  He enters a friend’s house, or (for this sort of borrower thrives at college) a friend’s rooms, seizes a first edition of Keats, or Shelley, or an Aldine Homer, or Elzevir Caesar of the good date, and hurries away with it, leaving a hasty scrawl, “I have taken your Shelley,” signed with initials.  Perhaps the owner of the book never sees the note.  Perhaps he does not recognize the hand.  The borrower is just the man to forget the whole transaction.  So there is a blank in the shelves, a gap among the orderly volumes, a blank never to be filled up, unless our amateur advertises his woes in the newspapers.

All borrowers are bad; but in this, as in other crimes, there are degrees.  The man who acts as Menage advises, in the aphorism which Garrick used as a motto on his bookplate, the man who reads a book instantly and promptly returns it, is the most pardonable borrower.  But how few people do this!  As a rule, the last thing the borrower thinks of is to read the book which he has secured.  Or rather, that is the last thing but one; the very last idea that enters his mind is the project of returning the volume.  It simply “lies about,” and gets dusty in his rooms.  A very bad borrower is he who makes pencil marks on books.  Perhaps he is a little more excusable than the borrower who does not read at all.

A clean margin is worth all the marginalia of Poe, though he, to do him justice, seems chiefly to have written on volumes that were his own property.  De Quincey, according to Mr. Hill Burton, appears to have lacked the faculty of mind which recognizes the duty of returning books.  Mr. Hill Burton draws a picture of “Papaverius” living in a sort of cave or den, the walls of which were books, while books lay around in tubs.  Who was to find a loved and lost tome in this vast accumulation?  But De Quincey at least made good use of what he borrowed.  The common borrower does nothing of the kind.  Even Professor Mommsen, when he had borrowed manuscripts of great value in his possession, allowed his house to get itself set on fire.  Europe lamented with him, but deepest was the wail of a certain college at Cambridge which had lent its treasures.  Even Paul Louis Courier blotted horribly a Laurentian MS. of “Daphnis and Chloe.”  When Chenier lent his annotated “Malherbe,” the borrower spilt a bottle of ink over it.  Thinking of these things, of these terrible, irreparable calamities, the wonder is, not that men still lend, but that any one has the courage to borrow.  It is more dreadful far to spoil or lose a friend’s book than to have our own lost or spoiled.  Stoicism easily submits to the latter sorrow, but there is no remedy for a conscience sensible of its own unlucky guilt.