in box rooms or store closets, and
are happiest when everything is turned upside down. It is a slow
business, rearrangement, for one cannot flit a book bound after the taste
of Grolier, with graceful interlacement and wealth of small ornaments,
without going to the window and lingering for a moment over the glorious
art, and one cannot handle a Compleat Angler without tasting again some
favourite passage. It is days before five shelves are reconstructed,
days of unmixed delight, a perpetual whirl of gaiety, as if one had been
at a conversazione, where all kinds of famous people whom you had known
afar had been gathered together and you had spoken to each as if he had
been the friend of your boyhood. It is in fact a time of reminiscences,
when the two of you, the other being Sir Thomas Browne, or Goldsmith, or
Scott, or Thackeray, go over passages together which contain the sweetest
recollections of the past. When the bookman reads the various
suggestions for a holiday which are encouraged in the daily newspapers
for commercial purposes about the month of July, he is vastly amused by
their futility, and often thinks of pointing out the only holiday which
is perfectly satisfying. It is to have a week without letters and
without visitors, with no work to do, and no hours, either for rising up
or lying down, and to spend the week in a library, his own, of course, by
preference, opening out by a level window into an old-fashioned garden
where the roses are in full bloom, and to wander as he pleases from
flower to flower where the spirit of the books and the fragrance of the
roses mingle in one delight.

Times there are when he would like to hold a meeting of bookmen, each of
whom should be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to invite Cosmo Medici,
who was as keen about books as he was about commerce, and according to
Gibbon used to import Indian spices and Greek books by the same vessel,
and that admirable Bishop of Durham who was as joyful on reaching Paris
as the Jewish pilgrim was when he went to Sion, because of the books that
were there. "O Blessed God of Gods, what a rush of the glow of Pleasure
rejoiced our hearts, as often as we visited Paris, the Paradise of the
World! There we long to remain, where on account of the greatness of our
love the days ever appear to us to be few. There are delightful
libraries in cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses
of all sorts of volumes, there academic