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There he lived a long life of such simplicity and abstinence as the poverty of the poorest of his flock scarcely drove them to. He had one failing to link his life with this nether world he was a book-hunter.
So are we brought again back to the conclusion that the true book-hunter must not be a follower of any abstract external rules, but must have an inward sense and literary taste. It is not absolutely that a book is rare, or that it is run after, that must commend it to him, but something in the book itself. Hence the relics which he snatches from ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them.
From some mysterious cause, it has been known to develop itself most flagrantly among tulip-collectors, insomuch that there are legends of Dutch devotees of this pursuit who have paid their thousands of dollars for a duplicate tuber, that they might have the satisfaction of crushing it under the heel. This line of practice is not entirely alien to the book-hunter.
As the judicious physician informs the patient suffering under some cutaneous or other external torture, that the poison lay deep in his constitution that it must have worked in some shape and well it is that it has taken one so innocuous so may even the book-hunter be congratulated on having taken the innate moral malady of all the race in a very gentle and rather a salubrious form.
For some years after the new library was established Naudé travelled in quest of books over the greater part of Europe. He said that he would have ransacked Spain if Mazarin had not preferred an invasion by the regular army. He was the 'familiar spirit' of the auction-room, and it became a by-word that a visit from the great book-hunter was as bad as a storm in the book-shops.
Most of them, we are told, were bought by the 'intrepid book-hunter' M. Guyon de Sardières, whose whole library in its turn was engulphed in the miscellaneous collections of the Duc de la Vallière. An article in the Bibliophile Français contains a curious argument in favour of Diane de Poitiers, as being one of a band of devoted Frenchwomen who saved their country from foreign ideas.
"Everywhere have I sought peace and found it nowhere," says the blessed Thomas a Kempis, "save in a corner with a book." Whether that good monk wrote the "De Imitatione Christi" or not, one always likes him for his love of books. Perhaps he was the only book-hunter that ever wrought a miracle.
These are things easily obtained in their freshness, but the term fugitive is too expressive of their nature, and after a generation or two they have all flown away, save those which the book-hunter has exorcised into the vaults of some public collection. There is perhaps too little done in our own day in preserving for posterity these mute witnesses of our sayings and doings.
It is rare, so rare that Boswell's latest biographer speaks of it as the 'forlorn hope of the book-hunter, though he doubts not that copies of it are lurking in some private collection. One copy at least is lurking in the Bibliotaph's library. He bought it, not for a song to be sure, but very reasonably.
To pass over gambling, tippling, and other practices which cannot be easily spoken of in good society, let us look to the other shapes in which man lets himself out for instance to horse-racing, hunting, photography, shooting, fishing, cigars, dog-fancying, dog-fighting, the ring, the cockpit, phrenology, revivalism, socialism; which of these contains so small a balance of evil, counting of course that the amount of pleasure conferred is equal for it is only on the datum that the book-hunter has as much satisfaction from his pursuit as the fox-hunter, the photographer, and so on, has in his, that a fair comparison can be struck?
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