Being a Cambridge man, I can get books from the University Library--Oxford men cannot get books from theirs--and by going to the Reading Room at the British Museum, I can use the books in the immense collection there. That was all I needed when I had a house in town: if I wanted a book down here, I had only to wait till I went up. Now that I am always here, I feel the loss of it, and have to buy extensively. I have about four thousand books, and find I want quite eight or ten. If you have only a single subject, you may perhaps get the necessary books; but you can hardly manage that, if you have several subjects, and do not want mere books-of-reference or text-books, but the books containing the material on which such works are based. These books cannot always be obtained without delay, and therefore must be ordered in advance, as soon as you foresee that you will need them. And then, before a book arrives, you may perceive another way of dealing with the subject, and find you do not need the book at all. I have tried to arrange my books by subjects, or alphabetically by author’s names--with Roger Ascham next to Daisy Ashcroft--but it always ends in my arranging them by sizes. If a book is higher or wider than the book alongside, it bulges at the edges where the other does not hold it in; and the slightest bulging lets the dust creep in between the leaves. Books are classed as 4to, 8vo, 16mo, &c., according to the folding of the sheets; but the sheets themselves are of all shapes and sizes, crown, royal, demy, and so on. And books come out in dozens of different heights and widths, as if they never were intended to stand in rows on shelves. In the Pepysian Library at Cambridge the books are all arranged by sizes; and the arrangement is so rigid that the volumes of a work are separated if there is the slightest difference in their size. But then Mr Pepys had a catalogue of them that was “perfectly alphabeticall.” They are in the bookcases that Sympson made for him in 1666, and they number just three thousand. There is a story that he always kept that number, neither more nor less, turning one book out if he brought another in. But his catalogue has only 2474, and the other 526 were added by his nephew: so it must really be a story of his nephew, not of him. There was a saying of Mark Pattison’s that no man can respect himself unless he has at least a thousand books, and I have heard it argued that no man need have more. But really it must all depend on what editions they are. There are ninety-four volumes in one edition of Voltaire’s works, and another edition is contained in three. I have these three volumes on my shelves: 6,250 pages with two columns to the page and 78 lines to the column, making about ten million words in all. Goethe’s works are only half that length, but they spread out into five-and-fifty volumes on my shelves: 18,000 pages of 29 lines each.