LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1892
[All rights reserved]
| page | |
| De Foe's Novels | 1 |
| Richardson's Novels | 47 |
| Pope as a Moralist | 94 |
| Sir Walter Scott | 137 |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | 169 |
| Balzac's Novels | 199 |
| De Quincey | 237 |
| Sir Thomas Browne | 269 |
| Jonathan Edwards | 300 |
| Horace Walpole | 345 |
Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of theancient saints, full of true virtue, and that withoutdelusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.—Bacon,Advancement of Learning.
We visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of theinspiration, and cannot easily breathe in other air lesspure, accustomed to immortal fruits.—Hazlitt's PlainSpeaker.
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as thoughall the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed theirlabours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in somedormitory or middle state. I seem to inhale learning,walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their oldmoth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of thesciential apples which grew around the happyorchard.—Charles Lamb, Oxford in the Long Vacation.
My neighbours think me often alone, and yet at such times Iam in company with more than five hundred mutes, each ofwhom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite asintelligibly as any person living can do by uttering ofwords; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as nearto me as I please; I handle them as I like; they nevercomplain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence,though ever so abruptly, take no offence.—Sterne,Letters.
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dearfriends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathernboxes,—Emerson, Books, Society, and Solitude.viii
Nothing is pleasanter than exp