Page:The Library (Lang).djvu/59

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II.]
THE LIBRARY.
33

disposition of the whole body, and, to say all in one word, are most wholesome and salubrious." The east wind, like the fashion of book-collecting, has altered in character a good deal since the days when Naude was librarian to Cardinal Mazarin. One might as well repeat the learned Isidorus his counsels about the panels of green marble (that refreshes the eye), and Boethius his censures on library walls of ivory and glass, as fall back on the ancient ideas of librarians dead and gone.

The amateur, then, is the person we have in our eye, and especially the bibliophile who has but lately been bitten with this pleasant mania of collecting. We would teach him how to arrange and keep his books orderly and in good case, and would tell him what to buy and what to avoid. By the library we do not understand a study where no one goes, and where the master of the house keeps his boots, an assortment of walking-sticks, the "Waverley Novels," "Pearson on the Creed," "Hume's Essays," and a collection of sermons. In, alas! too many English homes, the Library is no more than this, and each generation passes without adding a book, except now and then a Bradshaw or a railway novel, to the collection on the shelves. The success, perhaps, of circulating libraries, or, it may be, the Aryan tendencies of our race, 'which does not read, and lives