set to-day;
Let my temptation be a book,
Which I shall purchase, hold and keep,
Whereon, when other men shall look,
They'll wail to know I got it cheap."

And again, in "The Bibliomaniac's Bride," nothing breathes better the
spirit of the incurable patient than this:

"Prose for me when I wished for prose,
Verse when to verse inclined,--
Forever bringing sweet repose
To body, heart and mind.
Oh, I should bind this priceless prize
In bindings full and fine,
And keep her where no human eyes
Should see her charms, but mine!"

In "Dear Old London" the poet wailed that "a splendid Horace cheap for
cash" laughed at his poverty, and in "Dibdin's Ghost" he revelled in
the delights that await the bibliomaniac in the future state, where
there is no admission to the women folk who, "wanting victuals, make a
fuss if we buy books instead"; while in "Flail, Trask and Bisland" is
the very essence of bibliomania, the unquenchable thirst for
possession. And yet, despite these self-accusations, bibliophily rather
than bibliomania would be the word to characterize his conscientious
purpose. If he purchased quaint and rare books it was to own them to
the full extent, inwardly as well as outwardly. The mania for books
kept him continually buying; the love of books supervened to make them
a part of himself and his life.

Toward the close of August of the present year my brother wrote the
first chapter of "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac." At that time
he was in an exhausted physical condition and apparently unfit for any
protracted literary labor. But the prospect of gratifying a
long-cherished ambition, the delight of beginning the story he had
planned so hopefully, seemed to give him new strength, and he threw
himself into the work with an enthusiasm that was, alas, misleading to
those who had noted fearfully his declining vigor of body. For years
no literary occupation had seemed to give him equal pleasure, and in
the discussion of the progress of his writing from day to day his eye
would brighten, all of his old animation would return, and everything
would betray the lively interest he felt in the creature of his
imagination in whom he was living over the delights of the
book-hunter's chase. It was his ardent wish that this work, for the
fulfilment of which he had been so long preparing, should be, as he
playfully expressed it, a monument of apologetic compensation to a