sessions here for once, and to be looking out on a good solid
English wet day?"

Dunsford. Rather a fluid than a solid. But I agree with you in
thinking it is very comfortable here.

Ellesmere. I like to look upon the backs of books. First I think
how much of the owner's inner life and character is shown in his
books; then perhaps I wonder how he got such a book which seems so
remote from all that I know of him--

Milverton. I shall turn my books the wrong side upwards when you
come into the study.

Ellesmere. But what amuses me most is to see the odd way in which
books get together, especially in the library of a man who reads his
books and puts them up again wherever there is room. Now here is a
charming party: "A Treatise on the Steam-Engine" between "Locke on
Christianity" and Madame de Stael's "Corinne." I wonder what they
talk about at night when we are all asleep. Here is another happy
juxtaposition: old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he
would positively loathe. Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and
Horsley next to Priestley; but this sort of thing happens most in
the best regulated libraries. It is a charming reflection for
controversial writers, that their works will be put together on the
same shelves, often between the same covers; and that, in the minds
of educated men, the name of one writer will be sure to recall the
name of the other. So they go down to posterity as a brotherhood.

Milverton. To complete Ellesmere's theory, we may say that all