[antform] and so depriving me of the pleasure of arresting them, which I should certainly hav

[Larowe <whe...@di...>]

Nility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half
dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the
born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago. We confess a
bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes; there
is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, "A book is a book"; from the
time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in which "Bible,
large, 1 vol.," and "Bible, small, 1 vol.," asserted their alphabetic
individuality and were the sole _B_s in our little hive, we have had a
weakness even for those checker-board volumes that only fill up; we
cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan
selectness, which, content with one book-case, would have no tomes in it
but _porphyrogeniti_, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer
newcomers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents.
There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over
again the author's lonely labors and tremulous hopes; we see him, on his
first appearance after parturition, "as well as could be expected," a
nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord
and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the
Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the
eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the
author of the "Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique
Poetry," or of the "Unities briefly considered by Philomusus," of which
they have never heard and never will hear so much as the names; we see
the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy
it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete without; we see the
spend-thrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of
friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the
tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such
a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the
book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its
cover, its leaves enshrining memorial flo