on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and their wet-combats at the Mermaid. But
before the night is too far gone and while yet you can hold yourself from
nodding, you will please read about Captain John Smith of Virginia and his
"strange performances, the scene whereof is laid at such a distance, they
are cheaper credited than confuted."

In no proper sense am I a buyer of old books. I admit a bookish quirk
maybe, a love of the shelf, a weakness for morocco, especially if it is
stained with age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. I'll
go in "just to look about a bit, to see what the fellow has," and on an
occasion I pick up a volume. But I am innocent of first editions. It is
a stiff courtesy, as becomes a democrat, that I bestow on this form
of primogeniture. Of course, I have nosed my way with pleasure along
aristocratic shelves and flipped out volumes here and there to ask their
price, but for the greater part, it is the plainer shops that engage me. If
a rack of books is offered cheap before the door, with a fixed price upon a
card, I come at a trot. And if a brown dust lies on them, I bow and sniff
upon the rack, as though the past like an ancient fop in peruke and buckle
were giving me the courtesy of its snuff box. If I take the dust in my
nostrils and chance to sneeze, it is the fit and intended observance toward
the manners of a former century.

I have in mind such a bookshop in Bath, England. It presents to the street
no more than a decent front, but opens up behind like a swollen bottle.
There are twenty rooms at least, piled together with such confusion of
black passages and winding steps, that one might think that the owner
himself must hold a thread when he visits the remoter rooms. Indeed, such
are the obscurities and dim turnings of the place, that, were the legend of
the Minotaur but English, you might fancy that the creature still lived in
this labyrinth, to nip you between his toothless gums--for the beast grows