What a quaint use does Richard of Bury make of this very passage!
Addressing the clergy, he says "Eat the book with Ezekiel, that the belly
of your memory may be sweetened within, and thus, as with the panther
refreshed, to whose breath all beasts and cattle long to approach, the
sweet savor of the spices it has eaten may shed a perfume without."

Willing enough would I be to devote the whole of my paper to Richard of
Bury. I must, however, content myself with one other noble extract, which,
I hope, will whet my reader's appetite for more: "Moses, the gentlest of
men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly, wherein they [books] may be
protected from any injury. Take, he says, this book of the Law and put it
in the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God. O fitting
place and appropriate for a library, which was made of imperishable shittim
[i.e. acacia] wood, and was covered within and without with gold."

Still we must not push this idea of costly bookcases too far. Judah the
Pious wrote in the twelfth century, "Books were made for use, not to be
hidden away." This reminds me that Richard of Bury is not the only medieval
book-lover with whom we might spend a pleasant evening. Judah ben Samuel
Sir Leon, surnamed the Pious, whom I have just quoted, wrote the "Book of
the Pious" in Hebrew, in 1190, and it has many excellent paragraphs about
books. Judah's subject is, however, the care of books rather than the
solace derivable from them. Still, he comes into my theme, for few people
can have enjoyed books more than he. He had no selfish love for them: he
not only possessed books, he lent them. He was a very prince of
book-lenders, for he did not object if the borrowers of his books re-lent
them in their turn. So, on dying, he advised his sons to lend his books
even to an enemy (par. 876). "If a father dies," he says elsewhere (par.
919), "and leaves a dog and a book to his sons, one shall not say to the