Page:Le Morte d'Arthur - Volume 2.djvu/420

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his tastes. He likes best of all an old author who has worn well or a comparatively new author who has gained something tike newspaper notoriety. In attempting to lead him on from the good books that are known to those that are less known, the publishers may have at times been even too adventurous. But the elect reader is or ought to be a party to this conspiracy of books and bookmen. He can make it possible, by his help and his co-operative zest, to add still some famous old authors like Burton of the Anatomy of Melancholy, or longer novels like Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, a cut-and-come-again book for a winter fireside, or more modern foreign writers like Heine whom Havelock Ellis has promised to sponsor. "Infinite riches in a little room," as the saying is, will be the reward of every citizen who helps year by year to build the City of Books. It was with that belief in its possibilities that the old Chief (J. M. Dent) threw himself into the enterprise. With the zeal of a true book-lover, he thought that books might be alive and productive as dragons' teeth, which, being "sown up and down the land, might chance to spring up armed men." That is a great idea, and it means a fighting campaign in which every recruit, every new reader who buys a volume, counts.

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