sh system then? Assume that a man in a
position to marry reaches thirty-five or forty without having fallen
in love. Why should he not try the French system for a change? Any
marriage is better than none at all. Naturally, in England, he
couldn't go up to the Chosen Fair and announce: "I am not precisely in
love with you, but will you marry me?" He would put it differently.
And she would understand. And do you think she would refuse?

VI

BOOKS

THE PHYSICAL SIDE

The chief interest of many of my readers is avowedly books; they may,
they probably do, profess other interests, but they are primarily
"bookmen," and when one is a bookman one is a bookman during about
twenty-three and three-quarter hours in every day. Now, bookmen are
capable of understanding things about books which cannot be put into
words; they are not like mere subscribers to circulating libraries;
for them a book is not just a book--it is a _book_. If these lines
should happen to catch the eye of any persons not bookmen, such
persons may imagine that I am writing nonsense; but I trust that the
bookmen will comprehend me. And I venture, then, to offer a few
reflections upon an aspect of modern bookishness that is becoming
more and more "actual" as the enterprise of publishers and the
beneficent effects of education grow and increase together. I refer to
"popular editions" of classics.

Now, I am very grateful to the devisers of cheap and handy editions.
The first book I ever bought was the first volume of the first modern
series of presentable and really cheap reprints, namely, Macaulay's
"Warren Hastings," in "Cassell's National Library" (sixpence, in
cloth). That foundation stone of my library has unfortunately
disappeared beneath the successive deposits, but another volume of the
same series, F.T. Palgrave's "Visions of England" (an otherwise scarce
book), still remains to me through the vicissitudes of seventeen years
of sale, purchase, and exchange, and I would not care to part with it.
I have over two hundred volumes of that inestimable and incomparable
series, "The Temple Classics," besides several hundred assorted
volumes of various other series. And when I heard of the new
"Everyman's Library," projected by that benefactor of bookmen, Mr.
J.M. Dent, my first impassioned act was to sit down and write a
postcard to my bookseller ordering George Finlay's "The Byzantine
Empire," a work which has waited sixty years for popular recognit