No longer does he inquire, as Becatello inquired of Alphonso, King of Naples, which had done the better—Poggius, who sold a Livy, fairly writ in his own hand, to buy a country home near Florence, or he, who to buy a Livy had sold a piece of land? No longer is the scale turned in the negotiation of a treaty between princes by the weight of a rare book, as when Cosimo dei Medici persuaded King Alphonso of Naples to a peace by sending him a codex of Livy. No longer does the Book-Worm sit in his modest book-room, absorbed in his adored volumes, heedless of the waning lamp and the setting star, of hunger and thirst, unmindful of the scent of the clover wafted in at the window, deaf to the hum of the bees and the low of the kine, blind to the glow of sunsets and the soft contour of the blue hills, and the billowy swaying of the wheat field before the gentle breath of the south
No longer can it be said that
THE BOOK-WORM DOES NOT CARE FOR NATURE.
feel no need of nature’s flowers—
Of flowers of rhetoric I have store;
I do not miss the balmy showers—
When books are dry I o’er them pore.
Why should I sit upon a stile
And cause my aged bones to ache,
When I can all the hours beguile
With any style that I would take?
Why should I haunt a purling stream,
Or fish in miasmatic brook?
O’er Euclid’s angles I can dream,
And recreation find in Hook.
Why should I jolt upon a horse
And after wretched vermin roam,
When I can choose an easier course
With Fox and Hare and Hunt at home?
Why should I scratch my precious skin
By crawling through a hawthorne hedge,
When Hawthorne, raking up my sin,
Stands tempting on the nearest ledge?
No need that I should take the trouble
To go abroad to walk or ride,
For I can sit at home and double
Quite up with pain from Akenside.
he modern Book-Worm deals in sums of six figures; he keeps an agent “on the other side;” he cables his demands and his decisions; his name flutters the dovecotes in the auction-room; to him is proffered the first chance at a rarity worth a King’s ransom; too busy to potter in person with such a trifle as the purchase of a Mazarine Bible, he hires others to do the hunting and he merely receives the game; the tiger skin and the elephant’s tusk are laid at his feet to order, but he misses all the joy and ardor of the hunt. How different is all this from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s account of his own library, of which he says: “There were not three works therein which were not of mine own purchase, and all of them together, in the order wherein I had ranked them, compiled like to a complete nosegay of flowers, which in my travels I had gathered out of the gardens of sixteen several kingdoms.”
