There is a period of modern times, at which the love of books appears to
have been of a more decided nature than at either of these--I mean the
age just before and after the Reformation, or rather all that period
when book-writing was confined to the learned languages. Erasmus is the
god of it. Bacon, a mighty book-man, saw, among his other sights, the
great advantage of loosening the vernacular tongue, and wrote both Latin
and English. I allow this is the greatest closeted age of books; of old
scholars sitting in dusty studies; of heaps of 'illustrious obscure',
rendering themselves more illustrious and more obscure by retreating
from the 'thorny queaches' of Dutch and German names into the 'vacant
interlunar caves' of appellations latinized or translated. I think I see
all their volumes now, filling the shelves of a dozen German convents.
The authors are bearded men, sitting in old wood-cuts, in caps and
gowns, and their books are dedicated to princes and statesmen, as
illustrious as themselves. My old friend Wierus, who wrote a thick book,
_De Praestigiis Daemonum_, was one of them, and had a fancy worthy of
his sedentary stomach. I will confess, once for all, that I have a
liking for them all. It is my link with the bibliomaniacs, whom I admit
into our relationship, because my love is large and my family pride
nothing. But still I take my idea of books read with a gusto, of
companions for bed and board, from the two ages beforementioned. The
other is of too book-worm a description. There must be both a judgement
and a fervour; a discrimination and a boyish eagerness; and (with all
due humility) something of a point of contact between authors worth
reading and the reader. How can I take Juvenal into the fields, or
Valcarenghius _De Aortae Aneurismate_ to bed with me? How could I expect
to walk before the face of nature with the one; to tire my elbow
properly with the other, before I put out my candle and turn round
deliciously on the right side? Or how could I stick up _Coke upon
Littleton_ against something on the dinner-table, and be divided between
a fresh paragraph and a mouthful of salad?--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My
Books._