It is because the passion for books is a sentimental passion that
people who have not felt it always fail to understand it. Sentiment
is not an easy thing to explain. Englishmen especially find it
impossible to understand tastes and emotions that are not their
own,--the wrongs of Ireland, (till quite recently) the aspirations
of Eastern Roumelia, the demands of Greece. If we are to understand
the book-hunter, we must never forget that to him books are, in the
first place, RELICS. He likes to think that the great writers whom
he admires handled just such pages and saw such an arrangement of
type as he now beholds. Moliere, for example, corrected the proofs
for this edition of the 'Precieuses Ridicules,' when he first
discovered "what a labour it is to publish a book, and how GREEN
(NEUF) an author is the first time they print him." Or it may be
that Campanella turned over, with hands unstrung, and still broken
by the torture, these leaves that contain his passionate sonnets.
Here again is the copy of Theocritus from which some pretty page may
have read aloud to charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X.
This Gargantua is the counterpart of that which the martyred Dolet
printed for (or pirated from, alas!) Maitre Francois Rabelais. This
woeful ballade, with the woodcut of three thieves hanging from one
gallows, came near being the "Last Dying Speech and Confession of
Francois Villon." This shabby copy of 'The Eve of St. Agnes' is
precisely like that which Shelley doubled up and thrust into his
pocket when the prow of the piratical felucca crashed into the
timbers of the Don Juan. Some rare books have these associations,
and they bring you nearer to the authors than do the modern
reprints. Bibliophiles will tell you that it is the early READINGS
they care for,--the author's first fancies, and those more hurried
expressions which he afterwards corrected. These READINGS have
their literary value, especially in the masterpieces of the great;