What is the end of Fame? 'Tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper ...
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.
LORD BYRON, _Don Juan_.
P. 164. _Hall._--'Hard students are commonly troubled with gouts,
catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic,
crudities, oppitations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such
diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry,
ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times
their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary
studies.'--R. BURTON. _The Anatomy of Melancholy._
P. 165. _Lytton._--'I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's
shop, filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come
from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or
universal principles.'--O. W. HOLMES. _The Professor at the
Breakfast-Table._
P. 169. _Walpole._--Mr. Augustine Birrell in _Obiter Dicta: The Office
of Literature_ writes that the author's office is to make the reader
happy:--
'Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they
produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books--these are
our demands....
'Literature exists to please--to lighten the burden of men's lives; to
make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their
silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures--and
those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed
literature's truest office.'
P. 169. _Chaucer._--The book referred to is Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.
P. 169. _Digby._--Sir Kenelm Digby's 'observations' are generally
printed with _Religio Medici_, although in a letter to Sir T. Browne,
who had written to him on the subject, he explained that the hastily set
down notes did not merit the press, and would 'serve only for a private
letter, or a familiar discourse with lady-auditors'.
To Sir Thomas Browne, 'a library,' says Coleridge, 'was a living world,
and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood.'
P. 170. _Boswell._--'Who is he that is now wholly overcome with
idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares,
troubles, and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind
by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, where as in a glass
he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins,
ends, falls of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the
life, &c. Plutarch therefore calls them _secundas mensas et bellaria_,
the second courses and junkets, because they were usually read at
noblemen's feasts.'--R. BURTON. _Anatomy_.