Helen had no album of her own, she said, but she was curious always to see the autographs of celebrated people.
“Why?” said Beauclerc.
“I don’t know. It seems to bring one nearer to them. It gives more reality to our imagination of them perhaps,” said Helen.
“The imagination is probably in most cases better than the reality,” replied he.
Lady Davenant stooped over Helen’s shoulder to look at the handwriting of the Earl of Essex—the writing of the gallant Earl of Essex, at sight of which, as she observed, the hearts of queens have beat high. “What a crowd of associated ideas rise at the sight of that autograph! who can look at it without some emotion?”
Helen could not. Beauclerc in a tone of raillery said he was sure, from the eager interest Miss Stanley took in these autographs, that she would in time become a collector herself; and he did not doubt that he should see her with a valuable museum, in which should be preserved the old pens of great men, that of Cardinal Chigi, for instance, who boasted that he wrote with the same pen for fifty years.
“And by that boast you know,” said Lady Davenant, “convinced the Cardinal de Retz that he was not a great, but a very little man. We will not have that pen in Helen’s museum.”
“Why not?” Beauclerc asked, “it was full as well worth having as many of the relics to be found in most young ladies’ and even old gentlemen’s museums. It was quite sufficient whether a man had been great or little that he had been talked of,—that he had been something of a lion—to make any thing belonging to him valuable to collectors, who preserve and worship even ‘the parings of lions’ claws.’”
That class of indiscriminate collectors Helen gave up to his ridicule; still he was not satisfied. He went on to the whole class of ‘lion-hunters,’ as he called them, condemning indiscriminately all those who were anxious to see celebrated people; he hoped Miss Stanley was not one of that class.
“No, not a lion-hunter,” said Helen; she hoped she never should be one of that set, but she confessed she had a great desire to see and to know distinguished persons, and she hoped that this sort of curiosity, or as she would rather call it enthusiasm, was not ridiculous, and did not deserve to be confounded with the mere trifling vulgar taste for sight-seeing and lion-hunting.