An ingenious acquaintance was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.  At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts.  I dream away my life in others’ speculations.  I love to lose myself in other men’s minds.  When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think.  Books think for me.

I have no repugnances.  Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low.  I can read anything which I call a book.  There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

In this catalogue of books which are no books—­biblia a-biblia—­I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without”; the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley’s “Moral Philosophy.”  With these exceptions, I can read almost anything.  I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books’ clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants.  To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook; then, opening what “seem its leaves,” to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay.  To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find—­Adam Smith; to view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look himself again in the world.  I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.

He passes on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books; the sizes which appealed to him; the where and when to read:  “I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone and reading ’Candide’!”—­“The Old Margate Hoy” gives reminiscences of a visit to the popular resort—­with some uncomplimentary asides at Hastings—­in the days of the boy, “ill-exchanged for the foppery and freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket,” the boy that asked “no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons.”  “The Convalescent” expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of a sick bed, upon his “regal solitude,” and goes on to show “how convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state.”  The essay was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb’s retirement from the India House in 1825.  At the close he indulged his pen in his conversational fondness for a pun: