In the Track of the Bookworm — Reading Notes

Junot had a vellum library which sold in London for 1,400 pounds, while his great master was not too busy in conquering Europe not only to solace himself in his permanent libraries, and in books which he carried with him in his expeditions, but to project and actually commence the printing of a camp library of duodecimo volumes, without margins, and in thin covers, to embrace some three thousand volumes, and which he had designed to complete in six years by employing one hundred and twenty compositors and twenty-five editors, at an outlay of about 163,000 pounds. St. Helena destroyed this scheme. It is curious to note that Napoleon despised Voltaire as heartily as Frederick admired him, but gave Fielding and Le Sage places among his traveling companions; while the Bibliomaniac appears in his direction to his librarian: "I will have fine editions and handsome bindings. I am rich enough for that." The main thing that shakes one's confidence in the correctness of his literary taste is that he was fond of "Ossian." Julius Caesar also formed a traveling library of forty-four little volumes, contained in an oak case measuring 16 by 11 by 3 inches, covered with leather. The books are bound in white vellum, and consist of history, philosophy, theology, and poetry, in Greek and Latin. The collector was Sir Julius Caesar, of England, and this exquisite and unique collection is in the British Museum. The books were all printed between 1591 and 1616.

Southey brought together fourteen thousand volumes, the most valuable collection which had up to that time been acquired by any man whose means and estate lay, as he once said of himself, in his inkstand. Time fails me to speak of Erasmus, De Thou, Grotius, Goethe, Bodley; Hans Sloane, whose private library of fifty thousand volumes was the beginning of that of the British Museum; the Cardinal Borromeo, who founded the Ambrosian Library at Milan with his own forty thousand volumes, and the other great names entitled to the description of Bibliomaniac. We must not forget Sir Richard Whittington, of feline fame, who gave 400 pounds to found the library of Christ's Hospital, London.

The fair sex, good and bad, have been lovers of books or founders of libraries; witness the distinguished names of Lady Jane Gray, Catherine De Medicis, and Diane de Poictiers.

It only remains to speak of the great opium-eater, who was a sort of literary ghoul, famed for borrowing books and never returning them, and whose library was thus made up of the enforced contributions of friends--for who would have dared refuse the loan of a book to Thomas de Quincey? The name of the unhappy man would have descended to us with that of the incendiary of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. But the great Thomas was recklessly careless and slovenly in his use of books; and Burton, in the "Book-hunter," tells us that "he once gave in copy written on the edges of a tall octavo 'Somnium Scipionis,' and as he did not obliterate the original matter, the printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny jumble between the letter-press Latin and the manuscript English." I seriously fear that with him must be ranked the gentle Elia, who said: "A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us that we know the topography of its blots and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum." And yet a great degree of slovenliness may be excused in Charles because, according to Leigh Hunt, he once gave a kiss to an old folio Chapman's "Homer," and when asked how he knew his books one from the other, for hardly any were lettered, he answered: "How does a shepherd know his sheep?"

The love of books displayed by the sensual Henry and the pugnacious Junot is not more remarkable than that of the epicurean and sumptuous Lucullus, to whom Pompey, when sick, having been directed by his physician to eat a thrush for dinner, and learning from his servants that in summer-time thrushes were not to be found anywhere but in Lucullus' fattening coops, refused to be indebted for his meal, observing: "So if Lucullus had not been an epicure, Pompey had not lived." Of him the veracious Plutarch says: "His furnishing a library, however, deserved praise and record, for he collected very many and choice manuscripts; and the use they were put to was even more magnificent than the purchase, the library being always open, and the walks and reading rooms about it free to all Greeks, whose delight it was to leave their other occupations and hasten thither as to the habitation of the Muses."