come to the
support of certain artists and students whose talents and time were
expended almost exclusively in the pursuit of pleasure.

While thus serving as a visible means of support to this horde of
parasites, I fell in with the man who has since then been my intimate
friend. Judge Methuen was a visitor in Paris, and we became boon
companions. It was he who rescued me from the parasites and revived
the flames of honorable ambition, which had well-nigh been extinguished
by the wretched influence of Villon and Rousseau. The Judge was a year
my senior, and a wealthy father provided him with the means for
gratifying his wholesome and refined tastes. We two went together to
London, and it was during our sojourn in that capital that I began my
career as a collector of books. It is simply justice to my benefactor
to say that to my dear friend Methuen I am indebted for the inspiration
which started me upon a course so full of sweet surprises and precious
rewards.

There are very many kinds of book collectors, but I think all may be
grouped in three classes, viz.: Those who collect from vanity; those
who collect for the benefits of learning; those who collect through a
veneration and love for books. It is not unfrequent that men who begin
to collect books merely to gratify their personal vanity find
themselves presently so much in love with the pursuit that they become
collectors in the better sense.

Just as a man who takes pleasure in the conquest of feminine hearts
invariably finds himself at last ensnared by the very passion which he
has been using simply for the gratification of his vanity, I am
inclined to think that the element of vanity enters, to a degree, into
every phase of book collecting; vanity is, I take it, one of the
essentials to a well-balanced character--not a prodigious vanity, but a
prudent, well-governed one. But for vanity there would be no
competition in the world; without competition there would be no
progress.

In these later days I often hear this man or that sneered at because,
forsooth, he collects books without knowing what the books are about.
But for my part, I say that that man bids fair to be all right; he has
made a proper start in the right direction, and the likelihood is that,
other things being equal, he will eventually become a lover, as well as
a buyer, of books. Indeed, I care not what the beginning is, so long as
it be a beginning. There are different ways of reachi