III

BOOKS





The one room in my College which I always enter with a certain
sense of desolation and sadness is the College library. There used
to be a story in my days at Cambridge of a book-collecting Don who
was fond of discoursing in public of the various crosses he had to
bear. He was lamenting one day in Hall the unwieldy size of his
library. "I really don't know what to do with my books," he said,
and looked round for sympathy. "Why not read them?" said a sharp
and caustic Fellow opposite. It may be thought that I am in need of
the same advice, but it is not the case. There are, indeed, many
books in our library; but most of them, as D. G. Rossetti used to
say in his childhood of his father's learned volumes, are "no good
for reading." The books of the College library are delightful,
indeed, to look at; rows upon rows of big irregular volumes, with
tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs.
What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of
controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical
treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry
ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take
one down: it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent
of antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular
print meets the eye with a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But
what do they tell one? Very little, alas! that one need know, very