Page:The Library (Lang).djvu/34

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8
THE LIBRARY.
[CHAP.

forms of sport; the aim is not certain at first, the amateur is nervous, and, as in angling, is apt to "strike" (a bargain) too hurriedly.

I often think that the pleasure of collecting is like that of sport. People talk of "book-hunting," and the old Latin motto says that "one never wearies of the chase in this forest." But the analogy to angling seems even stronger. A collector walks in the London or Paris streets, as he does by Tweed or Spey. Many a lordly mart of books he passes, like Mr. Quaritch's, Mr. Toovey's, or M. Fontaine's, or the shining store of M.M. Morgand et Fatout, in the Passage des Panoramas. Here I always feel like Brassicanus in the king of Hungary's collection, "non in Bibliotheca, sed in gremio Jovis;" "not in a library, but in paradise." It is not given to every one to cast angle in these preserves. They are kept for dukes and millionaires. Surely the old Duke of Roxburghe was the happiest of mortals, for to him both the chief bookshops and auction rooms, and the famous salmon streams of Floors, were equally open, and he revelled in the prime of book-collecting and of angling. But there are little tributary streets, with humbler stalls, shy pools, as it were, where the humbler fisher of books may hope to raise an Elzevir, or an old French play, a first edition of Shelley, or a