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It is only recently that his countrymen have begun to appreciate the work of this great naturalist. A short time ago a resident of Berkeley, a student and book-lover, one who knew Mr. Burbank but had given little attention to his productions, was in Paris. While there he had the good fortune to be present at a lecture delivered before a gathering of the most eminent scientists of Europe.
He made a practice, I was told, of overhauling his library once in so often and of weeding out such volumes as he did not care to keep. Every book-lover has his own way of buying; so there are as many ways of buying as there are purchasers. However, Judge Methuen and I have agreed that all buyers may be classed in these following specified grand divisions: The reckless buyer. The shrewd buyer.
How a true book-lover winces at the thought of the public hangman placing his blood-stained hand on any book, no matter how much a "monster." From the earliest days the Puritan colonists fought stoutly, for the sake of St. Paul, against long hair. They proved themselves worthy the opprobrious name of Roundhead.
In the old castles of Austria, in a monastery of Bohemia, in the house of an ancient Italian family, in certain second-hand bookstores, in out-of-the-way towns he found treasures as precious as pearls and diamonds raked out of the muck-heap. When death took away his only son and left his little grandchildren dependent upon himself the old book-lover looked forward serenely into the future.
The testimony of librarians as to the kind of books people are reading nowadays is somewhat discouraging to the book-lover who has been brought up in the old traditions. We are told that Scott and Thackeray and George Eliot cannot compete with the year's "best sellers," and that the old classics are read only by the few who have a cultivated taste and a trained intelligence.
The Squire had no skill with a room. He hated any alteration in his house, and he had debated this question of a new bookcase to hold the few books he did read from time to time with as much care as the Reverend John Clinton Smith, book-lover as he was, had devoted to the housing of the whole library. "Ah, my dear Tom," said the Squire heartily, "I'm glad you came up.
Over it hung antlers of moose, elk, and deer, while skins of mountain lion, bear, and wolf covered the floor. A large writing-table stood in the centre of the room, and beside it a bookcase filled with the works of some of the world's greatest authors. Darrell lifted one book after another with the reverential touch of the true book-lover, while Mr.
Every book-lover agrees with Channing: "No matter how poor I am..if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the words of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live."
Far be it from the book-lover and the book-collector to rail at blunders, for not unfrequently these very blunders make books valuable. Who cares for a Pine's Horace that does not contain the "potest" error? The genuine first edition of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" is to be determined by the presence of a certain typographical slip in the introduction.
Yet no real book-lover fails to appreciate the neatness and beauty of a tasteful binding, any more than he is indifferent to the same qualities in literary style. Slovenly binding is almost as offensive to a cultivated eye as slovenly composition.
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