Yet men, even men of letters, have been known to pay their debts, and to restore borrowed property.  Moore paid Lord Lansdowne every penny of the generous sum advanced by that nobleman after the defalcation of Moore’s deputy in Bermuda.  Dr. Johnson paid back ten pounds after a lapse of twenty years,—­a pleasant shock to the lender,—­and on his death-bed (having fewer sins than most of us to recall) begged Sir Joshua Reynolds to forgive him a trifling loan.  It was the too honest return of a pair of borrowed sheets (unwashed) which first chilled Pope’s friendship for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.  That excellent gossip, Miss Letitia Matilda Hawkins, who stands responsible for this anecdote, lamented all her life that her father, Sir John Hawkins, could never remember which of the friends borrowed and which lent the offending sheets; but it is a point easily settled in our minds.  Pope was probably the last man in Christendom to have been guilty of such a misdemeanour, and Lady Mary was certainly the last woman in Christendom to have been affronted by it.  Like Dr. Johnson, she had “no passion for clean linen.”

Coleridge, though he went through life leaning his inert weight on other men’s shoulders, did remember in some mysterious fashion to return the books he borrowed, enriched often, as Lamb proudly records, with marginal notes which tripled their value.  His conduct in this regard was all the more praiseworthy inasmuch as the cobweb statutes which define books as personal property have never met with literal acceptance.  Lamb’s theory that books belong with the highest propriety to those who understand them best (a theory often advanced in defence of depredations which Lamb would have scorned to commit), was popular before the lamentable invention of printing.  The library of Lucullus was, we are told, “open to all,” and it would be interesting to know how many precious manuscripts remained ultimately in the great patrician’s villa.

Richard Heber, that most princely of collectors, so well understood the perils of his position that he met them bravely by buying three copies of every book,—­one for show, one for use, and one for the service of his friends.  The position of the show-book seems rather melancholy, but perhaps, in time, it replaced the borrowed volume.  Heber’s generosity has been nobly praised by Scott, who contrasts the hard-heartedness of other bibliophiles, those “gripple niggards” who preferred holding on to their treasures, with his friend’s careless liberality.

   “Thy volumes, open as thy heart,
    Delight, amusement, science, art,
    To every ear and eye impart. 
    Yet who, of all who thus employ them,
    Can, like the owner’s self, enjoy them?”