I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books....
We conceive of Plato as a lover of books; of Aristotle certainly; of
Plutarch, Pliny, Horace, Julian, and Marcus Aurelius. Virgil, too, must
have been one; and, after a fashion, Martial. May I confess that the
passage which I recollect with the greatest pleasure in Cicero, is where
he says that books delight us at home, _and are no impediment abroad_;
travel with us, ruralize with us. His period is rounded off to some
purpose: '_Delectant domi, non impediunt foris; peregrinantur,
rusticantur._' I am so much of this opinion, that I do not care to be
anywhere without having a book or books at hand, and like Dr. Orkborne,
in the novel of _Camilla_, stuff the coach or post-chaise with them
whenever I travel. As books, however, become ancient, the love of them
becomes more unequivocal and conspicuous. The ancients had little of
what we call learning. They made it. They were also no very eminent
buyers of books--they made books for posterity. It is true, that it is
not at all necessary to love many books, in order to love them much. The
scholar, in Chaucer, who would rather have
At his beddes head
A twenty bokes, clothed, in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than robès rich, or fiddle, or psaltry--
doubtless beat all our modern collectors in his passion for reading....
Dante puts Homer, the great ancient, in his Elysium, upon trust; but a
few years afterwards, _Homer_, the book, made its appearance in Italy,
and Petrarch, in a transport, put it upon his bookshelves, where he
adored it, like 'the unknown God'. Petrarch ought to be the god of the
Bibliomaniacs, for he was a collector and a man of genius, which is an
union that does not often happen. He copied out, with his own precious
hand, the manuscripts he rescued from time, and then produced others for
time to reverence. With his head upon a book he died.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT.
_My Books._
The sweet serenity of books.--H. W. LONGFELLOW.