All my life long I have delighted in voluminous works; in other words, I
have delighted in that sort of detail which permits so intimate a
familiarity with the subjects of which it treats.... Even in this world
of Beauties, and of Extracts, I do not believe myself quite alone in my
love of the elaborate and the minute; and yet I doubt if many people
contemplate very long very big books with the sense of coming enjoyment
which such a prospect gives me; and few shrink, as I do, with aversion
and horror from that invention of the enemy--an Abridgement. I never
shall forget the shock I experienced in seeing Bruce, that opprobrium of
an unbelieving age, that great and graphic traveller, whose eight or
nine goodly volumes took such possession of me, that I named a whole
colony of Bantams after his Abyssinian princes and princesses, calling a
little golden strutter of a cock after that arch-tyrant the Ras Michael;
and a speckled hen, the beauty of the poultry-yard, Ozoro Ester, in
honour of the Ras's favourite wife--I never felt greater disgust than at
seeing this magnificent work cut down to a thick, dumpy volume, seven
inches by five; except, perhaps, when I happened to light upon another
pet book--Drinkwater's _Siege of Gibraltar_, where I had first learned
to tremble at the grim realities of war, had watched day by day the
firing of the red-hot balls, had groped my way through the galleries,
and taken refuge in the casemates,--degraded from the fair proportions
of a goodly quarto into the thin and meagre pamphlet of a lending
library, losing a portion of its lifelike truth with every page that was
cut away.--M. R. MITFORD. _Recollections of a Literary Life._