'Please, not such hard words,' said the Captain, shaking his head. 'Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead. Do I want to speak to Cicero?--I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?--I write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up Aristophanes.... But it is not _that_ which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with these "spirits elect": to say to them, "Make way--I too claim place with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the death that consumes my dust."'--E. G. E. L. BULWER-LYTTON, LORD LYTTON. _The Caxtons._ BOOKS IN A NEW LIGHT I should explain that I cannot write unless I have a sloping desk, and the reading-room of the British Museum, where alone I can compose freely, is unprovided with sloping desks. Like every other organism, if I cannot get exactly what I want, I make shift with the next thing to it; true, there are no desks in the reading-room, but, as I once heard a visitor from the country say, 'it contains a large number of very interesting works.' I know it was not right, and hope the Museum authorities will not be severe upon me if any one of them reads this confession; but I wanted a desk, and set myself to consider which of the many very interesting works which a grateful nation places at the disposal of its would-be authors was best suited for my purpose. For mere reading I suppose one book is pretty much as good as another: but the choice of a desk-book is a more serious matter. It must be neither too thick nor too thin; it must be large enough to make a substantial support; it must be strongly bound so as not to yield or give; it must not be too troublesome to carry backwards and forwards; and it must live on shelf C, D, or E, so that there need be no stooping or reaching too high.... For weeks I made experiments upon sundry poetical and philosophical works, whose names I have forgotten, but could not succeed in finding my ideal desk, until at length, more by luck than cunning, I happened to light upon Frost's '_Lives of Eminent Christians_', which I had no sooner tried than I discovered it to be the very perfection and _ne plus ultra_ of everything that a book should be.... On finding myself asked for a contribution to the _Universal Review_, I went, as I have explained, to the Museum, and presently repaired to bookcase No. 2008 to get my favourite volume. Alas! it was in the room no longer. It was not in use, for its place was filled up already; besides, no one ever used it but myself.... Till I have found a substitute I can write no more, and I do not know how to find even a tolerable one. I should try a volume of Migne's _Complete Course of Patrology_, but I do not like books in more than one volume, for the volumes vary in thickness, and one never can remember which one took; the four volumes, however, of Bede in Giles's _Anglican Fathers_ are not