A SONG OF BOOKS

"Oh for a booke and a shadie nooke,

Eyther in-a-doore or out;

With the grene leaves whispering overhede,
Or the streete cryes all about.

Where I maie reade all at my ease,

Both of the newe and olde;

For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke,

Is better to me than golde."

-Old English Song.

F ALL the privileges we enjoy in this nineteenth century, there is none, perhaps, for which we ought to be more thankful than for the easier access to books.

The debt we owe to books was well expressed by Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, author of "Philobiblon," published as long ago as 1473, and the earliest English treatise on the delights of literature: "These are the masters who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and anger, without clothes. or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if inves tigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing; if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you."

This feeling that books are real friends is constantly present to all who love reading.

"I have friends," said Petrarch, "whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they are of all ages and of every country. They have distinguished themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access to them, for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to

me the events of past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of nature. Some teach me how to live, and others how to die. Some by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my spirits; while others give fortitude to my mind, and teach me the important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to depend wholly on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I

may safely rely in all emergencies. In return for all their services, they only ask me to accommodate them with a convenient chamber in some corner of my humble habitation, where they may repose in peace; for these friends are more delighted by the tranquillity of retirement than with the tumults of society."

"He that loveth a book," says Isaac Barrow, "will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, so in all fortunes."

Southey took a rather more melancholy view:

"My days among the dead are pass'd,

Around me I behold,

Where'er these casual eyes are cast,

The mighty minds of old;

My never-failing friends are they,

With whom I converse day by day."

Imagine, in the words of Aikin, "that we had it in our power to call up the shades of the greatest and wisest men that ever existed, and oblige them to converse with us on the most interesting topics-what an inestimable privilege should we think it! -how superior to all common enjoyments! But in a wellfurnished library we, in fact, possess this power. We can ques

tion Xenophon and Cæsar on their campaigns, make Demosthenes and Cicero plead before us, join in the audiences of Socrates and Plato, and receive demonstrations from Euclid and Newton. In books we have the choicest thoughts of the ablest men in their best dress."

"Books," says Jeremy Collier, "are a guide in youth and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things; compose our cares and our passions; and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

Cicero described a room without books as a body without a soul. But it is by no means necessary to be a philosopher to love reading.

Sir John Herschel tells an amusing anecdote illustrating the pleasure derived from a book, not assuredly of the first order.

In a certain village the blacksmith had got hold of Richardson's novel, "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded," and used to sit on his anvil in the long summer evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience. It is by no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all. "At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily, according to the most approved rules, the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and, procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing."

"The lover of reading," says Leigh Hunt, "will derive agreeable terror from Sir Bertram and the Haunted Chamber; will assent with delighted reason to every sentence in Mrs. Barbauld's Essay; will feel himself wandering into solitudes with Gray; shake honest hands with Sir Roger de Coverley; be ready to embrace Parson Adams, and to chuck Pounce out of the window instead of the hat; will travel with Marco Polo and Mungo Park; stay at home with Thomson; retire with Cowley; be industrious with Hutton; sympathizing with Gay and Mrs. Inchbald; laughing with (and at) Buncle; melancholy, and forlorn, and self-restored with the shipwrecked mariner of Defoe."

Carlyle has wisely said that a collection of books is a real university.

The importance of books has been appreciated in many quarters where we might least expect it. Among the hardy Norsemen runes were supposed to be endowed with miraculous power. There is an Arabic proverb, that "a wise man's day is worth a fool's life," and, though it rather perhaps reflects the spirit of the Califs than of the Sultans, that "the ink of science is more precious than the blood of the martyrs."

Confucius is said to have described himself as a man who "in his eager pursuit of knowledge forgot his food, who in the joy of its attainment forgot his sorrows, and did not even perceive that old age was coming on."

Yet, if this could be said by the Chinese and the Arabs, what language can be strong enough to express the gratitude we ought to feel for the advantages we enjoy! We do not appreciate, I think, our good fortune in belonging to the nineteenth century. Sometimes, indeed, one may be inclined to wish that one had not lived quite so soon, and to long for a glimpse of the books, even the school books, of one hundred years hence. A hundred years

ago not only were books extremely expensive and cumbrous, many of the most delightful books were still uncreated - such as the works of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Trollope, not to mention living authors. How much more interesting science has become, especially if I were to mention only one name, through the genius of Darwin! Renan has characterized this as a most amusing century; I should rather have described it as most interesting: presenting us with an endless vista of absorbing problems, with infinite opportunities; with more than the excitements, and less of the dangers, which surrounded our less fortunate ancestors.

Reading, indeed, is by no means necessarily study. Far from it. "I put," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, in his excellent article on the "Choice of Books," "I put the poetic and emotional side of literature as the most needed for daily use."

In the prologue to the "Legends of Goode Women," Chaucer says:

"And as for me, though that I konne but lyte,

On bokes for to rede I me delyte,

And to him give I feyth and ful credence,
And in myn herte have him in reverence,

So hertely, that ther is game noon,
That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,
But yt be seldome on the holy day,

Save, certynly, when that the monthe of May
Is comen, and that I here the foules synge,
And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,
Farewel my boke, and my devocion."

But I doubt whether, if he had enjoyed our advantages, he could have been so certain of tearing himself away even in the month of May.

Macaulay, who had all that wealth and fame, rank and talents could give, yet, we are told, derived his greatest happiness from books. Sir G. Trevelyan, in his charming biography says that" of the feelings which Macaulay entertained towards the great minds of bygone ages it is not for any one except himself to speak. He has told us how his debt to them was incalculable; how they guided him to truth; how they filled his mind with noble and graceful images; how they stood by him in all vicissitudescomforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude, the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the

same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity. Great as were the honors and possessions which Macaulay acquired by his pen, all who knew him were well aware that the titles and rewards which he gained by his own works were as nothing in the balance as compared with the pleasure he derived from the works of others."

There was no society in London so agreeable that Macaulay would have preferred it at breakfast or at dinner "to the company of Sterne or Fielding, Horace Walpole or Boswell."

The love of reading which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for all the treasures of India was, in fact, with Macaulay "a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of the biographer to record."

"History," says Fuller, "maketh a young man to be old without either wrinkles or gray hair, privileging him with the experience of age without either the infirmities or the inconveniences thereof."

So delightful, indeed, are our books that we must be careful not to neglect other duties for them; in cultivating the mind we must not neglect the body.

To the lover of literature or science exercise often presents itself as an irksome duty, and many a one has felt like "the fair pupil of Ascham, who, while the horns were sounding and dogs in full cry, sat in the lonely oriel with eyes riveted to that immortal page which tells how meekly and bravely the first martyr of intellectual liberty took the cup from his weeping jailor."

Still, as the late Lord Derby justly observed, those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness.

Books are now so cheap as to be within the reach of almost every one. This was not always so. It is quite a recent blessing. Mr. Ireland, to whose charming little "Book Lover's Enchiridion," in common with every lover of reading, I am greatly indebted, tells us that when a boy he was so delighted with White's Natural History of Selborne," that in order to possess a copy of his own he actually copied out the whole work.

Mary Lamb gives a pathetic description of a studious boy lingering at a bookstall:

"I saw a boy with eager eye
Open a book upon a stall,
And read, as he'd devour it all;
Which, when the stallman did espy,