By his will, made some twelve months previously, he directed that the whole of his property of every description, books excepted, should be turned into money and divided between two persons named in equal shares. The books he bequeathed to another worm, who lived a mile or two away, and who used occasionally to drop in to compare notes, subject, however, to the express condition that they should neither be sold nor otherwise parted with, and be kept in the same state in which they then were. For their further preservation he directed that the legatee should have the use of the books for his life only, and that after his death they should become the absolute property of a third person, at that time comparatively young in years, a good scholar, and a man of money. One would certainly have thought that these precautions would have sufficed to preserve this library intact for a very considerable length of time; but, as events turned out, it was carted off within a month and sold piecemeal by auction to the highest bidders.
In the first place, it seems, the owner for life had looked over the books, and not finding them sufficiently representative of the particular branch of study to which he devoted himself, went to the reversioner and proposed a joint sale. The latter demurred, not, indeed, to the general principle, but to the suggested division of the proceeds. He said that a life interest in the hands of a man of fifty was worth less than a prospective inheritance of the whole by one much younger, and in this he was right. An actuary very quickly calculated the shares, and then came the hammer and the end.
There are hundreds and thousands of such cases, but not many bookworms of the type I have mentioned. They are fast dying out, for they belong to a very old school, which has no part or lot in these go-ahead days. It would be pitiable to hear a graybeard say farewell to a class of boys, and to see him totter to the door, which, as Epictetus says, is always open; and still more pitiable would it be if we could enter into his thoughts and regrets. Fortunately, we are as yet spared the pain of such partings as these, for our school is new—brand new—and what few old-time book-men are left feel out of place therein. Rather do they regard us in the light of merry roisterers growing wise by painful stages, whose presence is not as yet mellowed by experience, nor sanctified by the touch of time.
And so there are two schools of book-men, one closed to all but the very few, the other open to all who choose to enter, and in each there is a table laden with delights. But at the head of each alike sits the skeleton of Egyptian orgies, veiled, perhaps, after the manner of later and more effeminate times, but still there. It is the same skeleton that startled the Epicurean in the heyday of his pleasures, and threatened him ere the banquet was half over. So also it menaces us, for it clutches a hammer, and we know that it will very shortly proclaim
THE END.
Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London.
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF BOOK-COLLECTING ***