will always
offer a fine field for collectors. As the coaching age recedes farther
back, so it will be found that an increasing number of men will want to
read about what they no longer can hear _viva voce_. All out-door
subjects are good hobbies. Flower culture and the laying out of grounds,
birds and natural history generally are good subjects, but it must be
understood that no one can find another a subject, one can only
_suggest_, and that is all I propose to do here. Books offer a very
endless variety of hobbies. So I have merely named one or two highways,
and there is an endless maze of bypaths which offer delightful hunting
grounds. Dr. Johnson, it may be remembered, expressed a very sound
commonsense view of this matter to Boswell:

'When I mentioned that I had seen in the King's Library fifty-three
editions of my favourite _Thomas a Kempis_ . . . . in eight languages
. . . . Johnson said he thought it unnecessary to collect many editions of
a book which were all the same except as to paper and print. He would
have the original, and all the translations, and all editions having
variations in the text. He approved of the famous collection of the
editions of Horace by Douglas, and, he added, "Every man should try to
collect one book in that manner. . . . ."'

FOOTNOTE:

[26] _Murray's Magazine_, September, 1889.

_Old Country Libraries._

The library of Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford, which represented about the
maximum that an ordinary student would possess, consisted of

'A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,'

and these he kept 'at his beddes hed.'

Dr. Jessopp, in one of his learned papers,[27] has pointed out that in
the thirteenth century the number of books in the world was, to say the
least, small. A library of five hundred volumes would, in those days,
have been considered an important collection, and after making all due
allowances for ridiculous exaggerations, which have been made by
ill-informed writers on the subject, it may safely be said that nobody
in the thirteenth century--at any rate in England--would have erected a
large and lofty building as a receptacle for books, simply because
nobody could have contemplated the possibility of filling it. Here and
there amongst the larger and more important monasteries there were
undoubtedly collections of books, the custody of which was entrusted to
an accredited officer, but the time