Willing enough would I be to devote the whole of my paper to Richard of Bury. I must, however, content myself with one other noble extract, which, I hope, will whet my reader's appetite for more: "Moses, the gentlest of men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly, wherein they [books] may be protected from any injury. Take, he says, this book of the Law and put it in the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God. O fitting place and appropriate for a library, which was made of imperishable shittim [i.e. acacia] wood, and was covered within and without with gold." Still we must not push this idea of costly bookcases too far. Judah the Pious wrote in the twelfth century, "Books were made for use, not to be hidden away." This reminds me that Richard of Bury is not the only medieval book-lover with whom we might spend a pleasant evening. Judah ben Samuel Sir Leon, surnamed the Pious, whom I have just quoted, wrote the "Book of the Pious" in Hebrew, in 1190, and it has many excellent paragraphs about books. Judah's subject is, however, the care of books rather than the solace derivable from them. Still, he comes into my theme, for few people can have enjoyed books more than he. He had no selfish love for them: he not only possessed books, he lent them. He was a very prince of book-lenders, for he did not object if the borrowers of his books re-lent them in their turn. So, on dying, he advised his sons to lend his books even to an enemy (par. 876). "If a father dies," he says elsewhere (par. 919), "and leaves a dog and a book to his sons, one shall not say to the other, You take the dog, and I'll take the book," as though the two were comparable in value. Poor, primitive Judah the Pious! We wiser moderns should never dream of making the comparison between a dog and a book, but for the opposite reason. Judah shrank from equalling a book to a dog, but we know better than to undervalue a dog so far as to compare it with a book. The kennel costs more than the bookcase, and love of dogs is a higher solace than love of books. To those who think thus, what more convincing condemnation of books could be formulated than the phrase coined by Gilbert de Porre in praise of his library, "It is a garden of immortal fruits, without dog or dragon." I meant to part with Richard of Bury, but I must ask permission to revert to him. Some of the delight he felt in books arose from his preference of reading to oral intercourse. "The truth in speech perishes with the sound: it is patent to the ear only and eludes the sight: begins and perishes as it were in a breath." Personally I share this view, and I believe firmly that the written word brings more pleasure than the spoken word.