which every man should read who has the opportunity-should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. To neglect the opportunity of becoming familiar with them is deliberately to sacrifice the position in the social scale which an ordinary education enables its possessor to reach. But are we next

to read through the sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bolandist lives of the saints, and the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and the Encyclopædia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in succession? Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity. But in all these we have named, even in the statutes at large, and in thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower. In fact, a course of reading," as it is sometimes called, is a course of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect in the perusal straight on of any large book is a sort of mental slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's Decline and Fall, luminous and comprehensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with a little Boston's Fourfold State, or Hervey's Meditations, or Sturm's Reflections for Every Day in the Year, or Don Juan, or Ward's History of Stokeupon-Trent.

Now, while it is quite true that collectors do not in general read their books successively straight through, the practice of desultory reading, as it is sometimes termed, is a cognate failing with their habit of collecting. They are notoriously addicted to the practice of standing arrested on some round of a ladder, where, having mounted up for some certain book, they have by wayward chance fallen upon another, in which, at the first opening, has come up a passage which fascinates the finder as the eye of the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding guest, and compels him to stand there poised on his uneasy perch and read.

Peradventure the matter so perused suggests another passage in some other volume which it will be satisfactory and interesting to find, and so another and another search is made, while the hours pass by unnoticed, and the day seems all too short for the pursuit which is a luxury and an enjoyment, at the same time that it fills the mind with varied knowledge and wisdom.

The fact is that the book-hunter, if he be genuine, and have his heart in his pursuit, is also a reader and a scholar. Though he may be more or less peculiar, and even eccentric in his style of reading, there is a necessary intellectual thread of connection running through the objects of his search which predicates some acquaintance with the contents of the accumulating volumes. Even although he profess a devotion to mere external features

the style of binding, the cut or uncut leaves, the presence or the absence of the gilding-yet the department in literature holds more or less connection with this outward sign. He who has a passion for old editions of the classics in vellum bindings-Stephens's Aldines and Pannartz's-will not be put off with a copy of Robinson Crusoe or the Ready Reckoner, bound to match and range with the contents of his shelves. Those who so vehemently affect some external peculiarity are the eccentric exceptions; yet even

they have some consideration for the contents of a book as well as for its coat.

The possession, or in some other shape the access to a far larger collection of books than can be read through in a lifetime, is in fact an absolute condition of intellectual culture and expansion. The library is the great intellectual stratification in which the literary investigator works-examining its external features, or perhaps driving a shaft through its various layers-passing over this stratum as not immediate to his purpose, examining that other with the minute attention of microscopic investigation. The geologist, the botanist, and the zoologist, are not content to receive one specimen after another into their homes, to be thoroughly and separately examined, each in succession, as novel-readers go through the volumes of a circulating library at twopence a-night-they have all the world of nature before them, and examine as their scientific instincts or their fancies suggest. For all inquirers, like pointers, have a sort of instinct, sharpened by training and practice, the power and acuteness of which astonish the unlearned. "Reading with the fingers," as Bayle called it turning the pages rapidly over and alighting on the exact spot where the thing wanted is to be found-is far from a superficial faculty, as some deem it to be,—it is the thoroughest test of active scholarship. It was what enabled Bayle himself to collect so many flowers of literature, all so interesting, and yet all found in corners so distant and obscure. No one can be an ardent follower of such a pursuit without having his own library. And yet it is probably among those whose stock is the largest that we shall find the most frequent visitors to the British Museum and the State Paper Office, perhaps for what cannot even be found there, to the Imperial Library at Paris, or the collections of some of the German universities.

Thus the collector and the scholar are so closely connected with each other that it is difficult to draw the line of separation between them. As dynamic philosophers say, they act and react on each other. The possession of certain books has made men acquainted with certain pieces of knowledge which they would not otherwise have acquired. It is, in fact, one of the amiable weaknesses of the set-one of the failings leaning to virtue's side-to take a luxurious glance at a new acquisition. It is an outcropping of what remains in the man, of the affection towards a new toy that flourished in the heart of the boy. Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his new-bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under observation in the course of our own clinical inquiries into the malady; but we are not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far on in the night. Thus is a general notion formed of the true object and tenor of a book, which is retained in the mind, stored for use, and capable of being refreshed and strengthened whenever it is wanted. In that brilliant affair, the sale of the Venice Decameron for upwards of two thousand pounds, it is satisfactory to find that the mighty purchaser, Lord Blandford, put the book in his pocket on the spot and walked home with it. Ere next morning he would know a good deal more of Boccaccio than he did before.

There are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disappointing surprises in encountering the interiors of books.

The title-page is not always a distinct intimation of what is to follow. Whoever dips into the Novellæ of Leo, or the Extravagantes, as edited by Godefroi, will not find either of them to contain matter of a light, airy, and

amusing kind. Dire have been the disappointments incurred by the Diversions of Purley-one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade over one of our best story books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the late Mrs Johnston. The History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, has sorely perplexed certain strongminded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search of the absolutely correct and improving; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders. There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called Mac Ewen on the Types, a theological book, in fact, treating of the types of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told us that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might have it and be d- -d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means rams: but the other competitor also declined the lot; he was a compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr Ruskin having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of sheepfolds." We are informed that this work had a considerable run among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering; and, by the way, we have heard of some grumb

lings from a friend more accustomed to the field than to the library, who, having before him the advertisement of our June number, so far misread it as to invest half-a-crown, under the impression that it contained an article called "The Buckhunter."

Many readers will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edition of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive book- hunter, Dr Richard Farmer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. Those who potter in libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big volumes, sometimes find curious things-for all gems are not collected in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of Hatsell's Precedents in Parlia ment for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to throw light on the mysterious process called "naming a member." A story used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict observance of forms were fond of repeating, that as he often, upon a member's not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder, threatened to name him-Sir, sir, I must name you'— on being asked what would be the consequence of putting that threat in execution and naming a member, he answered, 'The Lord in heaven knows.'

66

In the perusal of a very solid book on the progress of the ecclesiastical differences of Ireland, written by a native of that country, after a good deal of tedious and vexatious matter, the reader's complacency is restored by an artless statement how an eminent person "abandoned the errors of the Church of Rome and adopted those of the Church of England."

It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and have his ears cut off, and be one of the chief causes of our great civil wars, and all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book containing more than a thousand. It was as far down in his very index as W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio Mastyx was found under the head "Women actors." The words which follow are rather unquotable in this nineteenth century, but it was a very odd compliment to Queen Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her something like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of the Emperor." The Histrio Mastyx was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had. The calamitous discovery of the sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio Mastyr where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible. Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing the order of the sybilline books, it became always larger and larger, until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop to this," passed it without examination: It got a good deal of reading immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immorality of stage-plays to exclaim that churchmusic is not the noise of men, but rather "a bleating of brute beastschoristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen, bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney took surely a more nice

distinction when he made a charge against the author in these terms: "All stage-players he terms them rogues: in this he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament; for unless they go abroad, they are not

rogues.

This last quotation is from the State Trials, and the law of association carries us straight to law books, reports, and indices. We cannot lay hands at this moment on the index which refers to Mr Justice Best-he was the man, as far as memory serves, but never mind. A searcher after something or other, running his eye down the index through letter B, arrived at the reference "Best-Mr Justice-his great mind." Desiring to be better acquainted with the particulars of this assertion, he turned up the page referred to, and there found, to his great satisfaction, "Mr Justice Best said he had a great mind to commit the witness for prevarication."

Menage wrote a book upon the amenities of the civil law, which does anything but fulfil its promise. There are many much better to be got in the most unlikely corners ; as, where a great authority on copyright begins a narrative of a case in point by saying, "One Moore had written a book which he called Irish Melodies;" and again, in an action of trespass on the case, "The plaintiff stated in his declaration that he was the true and only proprietor of the copyright of a book of poems entitled The Seasons, by James Thomson."

We are not sure but, in the very mighty heart of all legal formality and technicality-the Statutes at large-some funny things might be found. The best that now occurs to the memory is not to be brought to book, and must be given as a tradition which bears that a bill which proposed, as the punishment of an offence, to levy a certain pecuniary penalty, one half thereof to go to her Majesty and the other half to the informer, was altered in committee, in so far that, when it appeared in the form of an act, the

punishment was changed to whipping and imprisonment, the destination being left unaltered.

It is wonderful that such mistakes are not of frequent occurrence when one remembers the hot hasty work often done by committees, and the complex entanglements of sentences on which they have to work. A great law reformer was at the trouble of counting the words in one sentence of an Act of Parliament, and found that, beginning with "Whereas" and ending with the word "repealed," it was precisely the length of an ordinary three-volume novel. To offer the reader that sentence on the present occasion would be rather a heavy joke, and as little reasonable as the revenge offered to a village schoolmaster who, having complained that the whole of his little treatise on the Differential Calculus was printed bodily in one of the earlier editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica (not so profitable as the later), was told that he was welcome, in his turn, to incorporate the Encyclopædia Britannica in the next edition of his little treatise.

In the supposition, however, that there are few readers who, like Lord King, can boast of having read the Statutes at large through, we venture to give a title of an Act-a title only, remember, of one of the bundle of acts passed in one session as an instance of the comprehensiveness of English statute law, and the lively way in which it skips from one subject to another. It is called

"An Act to continue several laws for the better regulating of pilots, for the conducting of ships and vessels from Dover, Deal, and the Isle of Thanet, up the River Thames and Medway; and for the permitting rum or spirits of the British sugar plantations to be landed before the duties of excise are paid thereon; and to continue and amend an Act for preventing fraud in the admeasurement of coals within the city and liberties of Westminster, and several parishes near thereunto; and to continue several laws for preventing exactions of occu

piers of lochs and wears upon the River Thames westward; and for ascertaining the rates of water-carriage upon the said river; and for the better regulation and government of seamen in the merchant service; and also to amend so much of an Act made during the reign of King George I. as relates to the better preservation of salmon in the River Ribble; and to regulate fees in trials and assizes at nisi prius," &c.

But this gets tiresome, and we are only half way through the title after all. If the reader wants the rest of it, as also the substantial act itself whereof it is the title, let him turn to the 23d of George II., chap. 26.

No wonder, if he anticipated this sort of thing, that Bacon should have commended "the excellent brevity of the old Scots acts." Here, for instance, is a specimen, an actual statute at large, such as they were in those pigmy days :—

66

'Item, it is statute that gif onie of resides and remains there against the the King's lieges passes in England, and King's will, he shall be halden as Traiter to the King."

Here is another, very comprehensive, and worth a little volume of modern statute-books, if it was duly enforced :

Item, it is statute and ordained, that all our Sovereign lord's lieges being under his obeisance, and especially the Isles, be ruled by our Sovereign lord's own laws, and the common laws of the realm, and none other laws."

The Irish statute-book opens characteristically with "An act that the King's officers may travel by sea from one place to another within the land of Ireland." And further on we have a whole series of acts, with a conjunction of epithets in their titles which, at the present day, would be deemed anything but courteous, for the better suppressing ing" Robbers, Rapparees, and others, and for preventing robberies, burglaries, and other heinous crimes." The classes so associated having an unreasonable dislike of being killed, this puts difficulties in the way of those beneficially employed in killing