windows the recesses were filled out with crowded shelves; the door of a
closet, left ajar, showed that the place was packed with books, roughly
or cheaply clad, and pamphlets. At the bottom of the cases, books
stretched in serried files along the floor. Some had crept up upon the
library-steps, as if, impatient to rejoin their companions, they were
mounting to the shelves of their own accord. They invaded all accessible
nooks and crannies of the room; big folios were bursting out from the
larger gaps, and thin quartos trickling through chinks that otherwise
would have been choked with dust; and even from the mouldings above the
doors bracketed shelves thrust out, upon which rows of volumes perched,
like penguins on a ledge of rock. In fact, books flocked there as
martlets did to Macbeth's castle; there was "no jutty frieze or coigne
of vantage" but a book had made it his "pendent bed,"--and it appeared
"his procreant cradle" too; for the children, in calling the great
folios "papa-books" and "mamma-books," seemed instinctively to have
hit upon the only way of accounting for the rapid increase and
multiplication of volumes in that apartment.

Upon this scene the light fell, tempered by curtains, at the cheapness
and simplicity of which a fashionable upholsterer would have sneered,
but toward whose graceful folds, and soft, rich hues, the study-wearied
eye turned ever gratefully. The two friends sat silently for some
minutes in ruminative mood, till Grey, turning suddenly to Tomes,
asked,--

"What does Iago mean, when he says of Cassio,--

'He hath a daily beauty in his life,
That makes me ugly'?"