P. 163. Montaigne.—'Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.'—Lord Morley.
P. 163. Davies.—
What is the end of Fame? 'Tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper ...
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.
Lord Byron, Don Juan.
P. 164. Hall.—'Hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppitations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies.'—R. Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy.
P. 165. Lytton.—'I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop, filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.'—O. W. Holmes. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table.
P. 169. Walpole.—Mr. Augustine Birrell in Obiter Dicta: The Office of Literature writes that the author's office is to make the reader happy:—
'Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books—these are our demands....
'Literature exists to please—to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures—and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office.'
P. 169. Chaucer.—The book referred to is Ovid's Metamorphoses.