shall attempt to treat of it in the severe, though rococo, manner of
Aristotle's "Ethics." Here follows an extract from the lost
Aristotelian treatise "Concerning Books":-

"Among the contemplative virtues we reckon the love of books. Now
this virtue, like courage or liberality, has its mean, its excess,
and its defect. The defect is indifference, and the man who is
defective as to the love of books has no name in common parlance.
Therefore, we may call him the Robustious Philistine. This man will
cut the leaves of his own or his friend's volumes with the butter-
knife at breakfast. Also he is just the person wilfully to mistake
the double sense of the term 'fly-leaves,' and to stick the 'fly-
leaves' of his volumes full of fly-hooks. He also loves dogs'-ears,
and marks his place with his pipe when he shuts a book in a hurry;
or he will set the leg of his chair on a page to keep it open. He
praises those who tear off margins for pipe-lights, and he makes
cigarettes with the tissue-paper that covers engravings. When his
books are bound, he sees that the margin is cut to the quick. He
tells you too, that 'HE buys books to read them.' But he does not
say why he thinks it needful to spoil them. Also he will drag off
bindings--or should we perhaps call this crime [Greek text], or
brutality, rather than mere vice? for vice is essentially human, but
to tear off bindings is bestial. Thus they still speak of a certain
monster who lived during the French Revolution, and who, having
purchased volumes attired in morocco, and stamped with the devices
of the oligarchs, would rip off the leather or vellum, and throw
them into the fire or out of the window, saying that 'now he could
read with unwashed hands at his ease.' Such a person, then, is the
man indifferent to books, and he sins by way of defect, being
deficient in the contemplative virtue of book-loving. As to the man