Don't collect books, and don't envy the possessors of costly libraries. Read and recollect. Of course you have a Bible and Prayer-book. Add to these the Pilgrim's Progress, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Byron (if you like), a History of England, Greece, and Rome, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Napier's Peninsular War. A moderate sum will give you these; and you possess a cabinet encyclopedia of religious, moral, and entertaining knowledge, containing more than you want for practical purposes, and quite as much as your brains can easily carry. Never mind the old classics; leave them to college libraries, where they look respectable, and enjoy long slumbers. The monthly periodicals will place you much more _au courant_ with the conversation and acquirements of the day. Add, if you can, a _ledger_, with a good sound balance on the right side, and you will be a happier, and perhaps, a better read man, than though you were uncontrolled master of the Bodleian, the National Library of France, and the innumerable tomes of the Vatican into the bargain. Don't collect books, I tell you again emphatically. See what in my case it led to--"one modern instance more." Collect wisdom; collect experience; above all, collect _money_--not as our friend Horace recommends, "quocunque modo," but by honest industry alone. And when you have done this, remember it was my advice, and be grateful. What I say here applies to private collecting only. Far be it from me to discourage great public libraries, which, under proper arrangements, are great public benefits; useful to society, and invaluable to literature. But as they are regulated at present, fenced round with so many restrictions, and accessible chiefly to privileged dignitaries, or well-paid officials, who seldom trouble them, they are little better than close boroughs, with a very narrow constituency. A BACHELOR'S CHRISTMAS. A bachelor's life is not without its attractions. Freedom of will and action are, at least, among a bachelor's joys; but experience has taught me that, after a certain time, such absence from restraint resolves itself into that species of liberty which Macaulay touchingly designates "the desolate freedom of the wild ass."