poets were on their way, “by this day month,” wrote Southey, “they will probably be here; then shall I be happier than if his Majesty King George the Fourth were to give orders that I should be clothed in purple, and sleep upon gold, and have a chain upon my neck, and sit next him because of my wisdom, and be called his cousin.” Thus the four thousand volumes, which lay piled about the library when Southey first gathered his possessions together, grew and grew, year after year, until the grand total mounted up to eight, to ten, to fourteen thousand. Now Kirke White’s brother Neville sends him a gift of Sir William Jones’s works, thirteen volumes, in binding of bewildering loveliness. Now Landor ships from some Italian port a chest containing treasures of less dubious value than the Raffaelles and Leonardos, with which he liberally supplied his art-loving friends. Oh, the joy of opening such a chest; of discovering the glorious folios; of glancing with the shy amorousness of first desire at title-page and colophon; of growing familiarity; of tracing out the history suggested by book-plate or autograph; of finding a lover’s excuses for cropped margin, or water-stain, or worm-hole! Then the calmer happiness of arranging his favourites on new shelves; of taking them down again, after supper, in the season of meditation and currant-rum; and of wondering for which among his father’s books Herbert will care most when all of them shall be his own. “It would please you,” Southey writes to his old comrade, Bedford, “to see such a display of literary wealth, which is at once the pride of my eye, and the joy of my heart, and the food of my mind; indeed, more than metaphorically, meat, drink, and clothes for me and mine. I verily believe that no one in my station was ever so rich before, and I am very sure that no one in any station had ever a more thorough enjoyment of riches of any kind or in any way.”