If people are to be wedded to their books, it is hard that, under our
present moral dispensations, they are not to be allowed the usual
exclusive privileges of marriage. A friend thinks no more of borrowing a
book nowadays, than a Roman did of borrowing a man's wife; and what is
worse, we are so far gone in our immoral notions on this subject, that
we even lend it as easily as Cato did his spouse. Now what a happy thing
ought it not to be to have exclusive possession of a book,--one's
Shakespeare for instance; for the finer the wedded work, the more
anxious of course we should be, that it should give nobody happiness but
ourselves. Think of the pleasure of not only being with it in general,
of having by far the greater part of its company, but of having it
entirely to oneself; of always saying internally, 'It is my property';
of seeing it well-dressed in 'black or red', purely to please one's own
eyes; of wondering how any fellow could be so impudent as to propose
borrowing it for an evening; of being at once proud of his admiration,
and pretty certain that it was in vain; of the excitement nevertheless
of being a little uneasy whenever we saw him approach it too nearly; of
wishing that it could give him a cuff of the cheek with one of its
beautiful boards, for presuming to like its beauties as well as
ourselves; of liking other people's books, but not at all thinking it
proper that they should like ours; of getting perhaps indifferent to it,
and then comforting ourselves with the reflection that others are not
so, though to no purpose; in short, of all the mixed transport and
anxiety to which the exclusiveness of the book-wedded state would be
liable; not to mention the impossibility of other people's having any
literary offspring from our fair unique, and consequently of the danger
of loving any compilations but our own. Really, if we could burn all
other copies of our originals, as the Roman Emperor once thought of
destroying Homer, this system would be worth thinking of. If we had a
good library, we should be in the situation of the Turks with their
seraglios, which are a great improvement upon our petty exclusivenesses.
Nobody could then touch our Shakespeare, our Spenser, our Chaucer, our
Greek and Italian writers. People might say, 'Those are the walls of the
library!' and 'sigh, and look, and sigh again'; but they should never
get in. No Retrospective rake should anticipate our privileges of
quotation. Our Mary Wollstonecrafts and our Madame de Staëls--no one
should know how finely they were lettered,--what soul there was in their
disquisitions. We once had a glimpse of the feelings which people would
have on these occasions. It was in the library of Trinity College,
Cambridge. The keeper of it was from home; and not being able to get a
sight of the manuscript of Milton's _Comus_, we were obliged to content
ourselves with looking through a wire-work, a kind of safe, towards the
shelf on which it reposed. How we winked, and yearned, and imagined we
saw a corner of the all-precious sheets, to no purpose! The feelings
were not very pleasant, it is true; but then as long as they were
confined to others, they would of course only add to our
satisfaction.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _Wedded to Books._