Or match with words that tender sky?
II
‘I KNOW a pretty little edition of the Religio Medici,’ writes Mr. Le Gallienne in his Retrospective Reviews, ‘which has been quite spoiled for me by the astounding remark of its editor upon Browne’s beautiful description of his life as “a miracle of thirty years”—yet its actual incidents justify no such description!’
Mr. Walters will not thus spoil for his readers the work of the writers he loves. He strikes no jarring note. On the contrary, he is capable, when writing of books, book-making, and book-buying, of an enthusiasm which I envy as much as I admire.
‘I have confessed,’ he says in his chapter on ‘Second-hand Books,’ ‘that I am of the company of book-lovers who delight in dipping into the “lucky tubs” to be found outside booksellers’ windows. I know of no pleasanter way of spending a spare half-hour. Give me a few “loose” coppers, place my feet upon a likely road, and I am content. I am now, let me say, of the happy company of book-fishermen. And this, mark you, is fishing in real earnest, this effort to “hook” good food for the mind, to place in one’s basket a “book that delighteth and giveth perennial satisfaction.”’
The comparison of a book-seeker to an angler is as happy as it is original, and the phrase—though phrase-making must not be confused, as Leslie Stephen points out, with thought-finding—‘a book-fisherman’ has something of Charles Lamb’s own ‘self-pleasing quaintness.’
Lamb would, indeed, appear to be Mr. Walters’s favourite author. That he knows his Elia intimately and can interpret him aright to others is clear from the chapter on ‘Books and Gardens.’
‘We are told,’ says Mr. Walters, ‘that Lamb was a lover of towns and crowded streets. Would it not be truer to say that he was a lover of the conditions in which he chanced to be placed? London claimed him—for the sanest reasons, no doubt—and, lo! under his pen, London became a garden.’
This is truly and finely said. Of such acute and illuminative comment, there is no lack in Mr. Walters’s delightful book, which should assuredly find a place in the library of book-loving women and men.