weather, for if the day be sunshine he taketh his pleasure in a
garden, and if the day be sleet of March the fireside is the dearer,
while there is a certain volume--Payne's binding, red morocco, a
favourite colour of his--and the bookman reads Don Quixote with the
more relish because the snowdrift is beating on the window. During
the hours of the day when he is visiting patients, who tell their
symptoms at intolerable length, or dictating letters about corn, or
composing sermons, which will not always run, the bookman is thinking
of the quiet hour which will lengthen into one hundred and eighty
minutes, when he shall have his reward, the kindliest for which a man
can work or hope to get. He will spend the time in the good company
of people who will not quarrel with him, nor will he quarrel with
them. Some of them of high estate and some extremely low; some of
them learned persons and some of them simple, country men. For while
the bookman counteth it his chief honour and singular privilege to
hold converse with Virgil and Dante, with Shakespeare and Bacon, and
suchlike nobility, yet is he very happy with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and
Dandie Dinmont, with Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp; he is proud when
Diana Vernon comes to his room, and he has a chair for Colonel
Newcome; he likes to hear Coleridge preach, who, as Lamb said, "never
did anything else," and is much flattered when Browning tries to
explain what he meant in Paracelsus. It repays one for much worry
when William Blake not only reads his Songs of Innocence but also
shows his own illustrations, and he turns to his life of Michael
Angelo with the better understanding after he has read what Michael
Angelo wrote to Vittoria Colonna. He that hath such friends, grave
or gay, needeth not to care whether he be rich or poor, whether he
know great folk or they pass him by, for he is independent of society
and all its whims, and almost independent of circumstances. His
friends of this circle will never play him false nor ever take the