EXHORTING THE FOOLES ACCLOYED WITH THIS VICE TO AMEND THEIR FOLLY Say worthy doctors and clerks curious: What moveth you of books to have such number, Since divers doctrines through ways contrarious Doth man's mind dsitract and sore encumber; Alas, blind men awake, out of your slumber, And if ye will needs your books mutliply With diligence endeavour you some to occupy. A. BARCLAY. LETTER-FERRETS Dionysius scoffeth at those grammarians who ploddingly labour to know the miseries of Ulysses, and are ignorant of their own.... Except our mind be the better, unless our judgement be the sounder, I had rather my scholar had employed his time in playing at tennis; I am sure his body would be the nimbler. See but one of these our university men or bookish scholars return from school, after he hath there spent ten or twelve years under a pedant's charge: who is so inapt for any matter? who so unfit for any company? who so to seek if he come into the world? all the advantage you discover in him is that his Latin and Greek have made him more sottish, more stupid, and more presumptuous, than before he went from home.... My vulgar Perigordian speech doth very pleasantly term such self-conceited wizards, letter-ferrets, as if they would say letter-stricken men, to whom (as the common saying is) letters have given a blow with a mallet.--MONTAIGNE. DAINTIES THAT ARE BRED OF A BOOK Sir, he hath not fed of the dainties that are bred of a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink: his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.--W. SHAKESPEARE. _Love's Labour's Lost._ AN ANTIQUARY He loves no library, but where there are more spiders' volumes than authors', and looks with great admiration on the antique work of cobwebs. Printed books he contemns, as a novelty of this latter age; but a manuscript he pores on everlastingly, especially if the cover be all moth-eaten, and the dust make a parenthesis between every syllable. He would give all the books in his study (which are rarities all) for one of the old Roman binding, or six lines of Tully in his own hand.--J. EARLE. _Microcosmographie._ AN IGNORANT BOOK-COLLECTOR