There the potential Dibdin or
Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
a role in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
complete."
I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther.
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