Writers ... are apter to be beholding to books than to men, not only as the first are more in their possession, being more constant companions than dearest friends, but because they commonly make such use of treasure found in books as of other treasure belonging to the dead and hidden under ground; for they dispose of both with great secrecy, defacing the shape or images of the one as much as of the other, through fear of having the original of their stealth or abundance discovered. And the next cause why writers are more in libraries than in company is that books are easily opened, and learned men are usually shut up by a froward or envious humour of retention, or else unfold themselves so as we may read more of their weakness and vanity than wisdom, imitating the holiday-custom in great cities, where the shops of chandlery and slight wares are familiarly open, but those of solid and staple merchandise are proudly locked up.--SIR W. DAVENANT. _Gondibert._ LITERARY COOKERY We have been reading a treatise on the morality of Shakespeare; it is a happy and easy way of filling a book, that the present race of authors have arrived at--that of criticizing the works of some eminent poet: with monstrous extracts and short remarks. It is a species of cookery I begin to grow tired of; they cut up their authors into chops, and by adding a little crumbled bread of their own, and tossing it up a little, they present it as a fresh dish; you are to dine upon the poet;--the critic supplies the garnish; yet has the credit, as well as profit, of the whole entertainment.--HANNAH MORE. _Memoirs._ THE MANUFACTORY OF BOOKS To a veteran like myself, who have watched the books of forty seasons, there is nothing so old as a new book. An astonishing sameness and want of individuality pervades modern books. The ideas they contain do not seem to have passed through the mind of the writer. They have not even that originality--the only originality which John Mill in his modesty would claim for himself--'which every thoughtful mind gives to its own mode of conceiving and expressing truths which are common property'--(_Autobiography_). When you are in London step into the reading-room of the British Museum. There is the great manufactory out of which we turn the books of the season. It was so before there was any British Museum. It was so in Chaucer's time-- For out of the old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn from year to year, And out of old books in good faith Cometh all this new science that men lere. It continued to be so in Cervantes' day. 'There are,' says he in _Don Quixote_, 'men who will make you books and turn them loose in the world with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.'