not the greatest of the Queenly bookwomen and did not steal, we shall
invite Mary Queen of Scots, while she is living in Holyrood, and has
her library beside her. Mary had a fine collection of books well
chosen and beautifully bound, and as I look now at the catalogue it
seems to me a library more learned than is likely to be found even in
the study of an advanced young woman of to-day. A Book of Devotion
which was said to have belonged to her and afterwards to a Pope,
gloriously bound, I was once allowed to look upon, but did not buy,
because the price was marked in plain figures at a thousand guineas.
It would be something to sit in a corner and hear Monkbarns and
Charles Lamb comparing notes, and to watch for the moment when Lamb
would withdraw all he had said against the Scots people, or Earl
Spencer describing with delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle
of Sale. But I will guarantee that the whole company of bookworms
would end in paying tribute to that intelligent and very fascinating
young woman from Holyrood, who still turns men's heads across the
stretch of centuries. For even a bookman has got a heart.

Like most diseases the mania for books is hereditary, and if the
father is touched with it the son can hardly escape, and it is not
even necessary that the son should have known his father. For
Sainte-Beuve's father died when he was an infant and his mother had
no book tastes, but his father left him his books with many comments
on the margins, and the book microbe was conveyed by the pages. "I
was born," said the great critic in the Consolations, "I was born in
a time of mourning; my cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father left
me his soul, mind, and taste written on every margin of his books."
When a boy grows up beside his father and his father is in the last
stages of the book disease, there is hardly any power which can save
that son, unless the mother be robustly illiterate, in which case the