Of course, you know there are many fine houses where a library is a part of the upholstery, so to speak. Books in handsome binding kept locked under plate-glass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to stylish establishments as servants in livery, who sit with folded arms, are to stylish equipages. I suppose those wonderful statues with the folded arms do sometimes change their attitude, and I suppose those books with the gilded backs do sometimes get opened, but it is nobody's business whether they do or not, and it is best not to ask too many questions. This sort of thing is common enough, but there is another case that may prove deceptive if you undertake to judge from appearances. Once in a while you will come on a house where you will find a family of readers and almost no library. Some of the most indefatigable devourers of literature have very few books. They belong to book clubs, they haunt the public libraries, they borrow of friends, and somehow or other get hold of everything they want, scoop out all it holds for them, and have done with it.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._ THE SCENT OF BOOKS I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its _scent_, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but the scent of the noble pages restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand. For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.--G. GISSING. _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft._ Of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me, From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. W. SHAKESPEARE. _The Tempest._ AN EPISCOPAL LIBRARY Here, duly placed on consecrated ground, The studied works of many an age are found, The ancient Fathers' reverend remains; The Roman Laws, which freed a world from chains; Whate'er of law passed from immortal Greece To Latin lands, and gained a rich increase; All that blessed Israel drank in showers from heaven, Or Afric sheds, soft as the dew of even. ALCUIN. A MODERN LIBRARY