being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when
such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I
regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from
sacrifice.

Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word. Dozens of my books were
purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called
the necessaries of life. Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a
bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily
need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I
have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so
advantageous a price, that I _could_ not let it go; yet to buy it meant
pangs of famine. My Heyne's _Tibullus_ was grasped at such a moment. It
lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now
and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.
Sixpence was the price--sixpence! At that time I used to eat my mid-day
meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the
real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.
Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a
plate of meat and vegetables. But I did not dare to hope that the
_Tibullus_ would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due
to me. I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing
the stall, two appetites at combat within me. The book was bought and I
went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated
over the pages.

In this _Tibullus_ I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct. 4,
1792." Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago?
There was no other inscription. I like to imagine some poor scholar,
poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his