together, and also having his books in equal sizes. After a brief
glance at a folio and an octavo side by side he gives up that
attempt, but although he may have to be content to see his large
Augustine, Benedictine edition, in the same row with Bayle's
Dictionary, he does not like it and comforts himself by thrusting in
between, as a kind of mediator, Spotswood's History of the Church of
Scotland with Burnett's Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, that
edition which has the rare portrait of Charles I. by Faithorne. He
will be all his life rearranging, and so comes to understand how it
is that women spend forenoons of delight in box rooms or store
closets, and are happiest when everything is turned upside down. It
is a slow business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound
after the taste of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of
small ornaments, without going to the window and lingering for a
moment over the glorious art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler
without tasting again some favourite passage. It is days before five
shelves are reconstructed, days of unmixed delight, a perpetual whirl
of gaiety, as if one had been at a conversazione, where all kinds of
famous people whom you had known afar had been gathered together and
you had spoken to each as if he had been the friend of your boyhood.
It is in fact a time of reminiscences, when the two of you, the other
being Sir Thomas Browne, or Goldsmith, or Scott, or Thackeray, go
over passages together which contain the sweetest recollections of
the past. When the bookman reads the various suggestions for a
holiday which are encouraged in the daily newspapers for commercial
purposes about the month of July, he is vastly amused by their
futility, and often thinks of pointing out the only holiday which is
perfectly satisfying. It is to have a week without letters and
without visitors, with no work to do, and no hours, either for rising
up or lying down, and to spend the week in a library, his own, of