XIX.
THE FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS.
o many peaceful men of the legal robe the companionship of books is inexpressibly dear. What a privilege it is to summon the greatest and most charming spirits of the past from their graves, and find them always willing to talk to us! How delightful to go to our well-known book-shelves, lay hands on our favorite authors—even in the dark, so well do we know them—take any volume, open it at any page, and in a few minutes lose all sense and remembrance of the real world, with its strife, its bitterness, its disappointments, its hollowness, its unfaithfulness, its selfishness, in the pictures of an ideal world!
The real world, do we say? Which is the real world, that of history or that of fiction? In this age of historic doubt and iconoclasm, are not the heroes of our favorite romances much more real than those of history? Captain Ed’ard Cuttle, mariner, is much more real to us than Captain Joseph Cook; Cooper’s Two Admirals than the great Nelson; Leather-Stocking than the yellow-haired Custer; Henry Esmond than any of the Pretenders; Hester Prynne and Becky Sharp than Catherine of Russia or Aspasia or Lucrezia; Sidney Carton than Philip Sidney. Even the kings and heroes who have lived in history live more vividly for us in romance. We know the crooked Richard and the crafty Louis XI. most familiarly, if not most accurately, through Shakespeare and Scott; and where in history do we get so haunting a picture of the great Napoleon and Waterloo as in Victor Hugo’s wondrous but inaccurate chapter? Happy is the man who has for his associates David, Solomon, Job, Paul, and John, in spite of the assaults of modern criticism upon the Scriptures! No one can shake our faith in Don Quixote, although the accounts of the Knight “without fear and without reproach” are so short and vague. There is no doubt about the travels of Christian, although those of Stanley may be questioned. The Vicar of Wakefield is a much more actual personage than Peter who preached the Crusades. Sir Roger de Coverley and his squire life are much more probable to us than Sir William Temple in his gardens