and footnotes running sometimes to
twenty thousand words, and, including above six thousand quotations from
the best poets--every one, in short, which has given me pleasure of a
certain quality, whether gentle or acute, at one time or another in my
life."

"!!!"

"--The whole profusely, not to say extravagantly, adorned with woodcuts in
the text, not to mention fifty or sixty full-page illustrations in
copper."

"By eminent artists?"

"Some of them by eminent artists, for the reason only that I number such
among my friends; the rest by amateurs and members of my household who
would help, out of mere affection, in raising this monument."

"They would do it execrably."

"I dare say; but that would not matter in the least. The book should be
bound in leather and provided with serviceable clasps, as well as with a
couple of inner pockets for maps and charts. The maps should contain
plenty of sea, with monsters rising from it--leviathans and sea-serpents--
as they do in Speed's map of Cornwall which hangs in the hall."

"Your book will need a window-seat to hold it."

"Ah, now you talk intelligently! It was designed for a window-seat, and
its fortunate possessor will take care to provide one. Have you any
further objections?"

"Only this: that a book of such a size written by one man (I make the
objection as little personal as I can) must perforce contain many dull
pages."

"Hundreds of them; whole reams of dull pages."

"They will be skipped."

"They will be inserted with that object."

"Oh!"

"It is one of the conditions of becoming a classic."

"Who will read you?"

"Look here. Do you remember the story of that old fellow--a Dutchman, I
think--who took a fancy to be buried in the church porch of his native
town, that he might hear the feet of the townsfolk, generation after
generation, passing over his head to divine service?"

"Well?"

"Well. I shall stand on my shelf, bound in good leather, between (say)
_Bayle's Dictionary_ and _Sibrandus Schnafnaburgensis, his Delectable
Treatise_; and if some day, when the master of the house has been coaxed
by his womenfolk to take a holiday, and they descend upon the books, which
he (the humbug) never reads, belabour and bang the dust out of them and
flap them with dusters, and all with that vindictiveness which is the good
housewife's right attitude towards literature--"

"Had you not better draw breath?"

"Thank you. I will: for the end of the