While it was true of the Old South that members of its learned professions commonly dallied with the Muses, there was no distinctive profession of letters. The professional poet, historian, and maker of fiction, and publisher and seller of books, were scarcely known. A rural people, a relatively sparse population of readers, the absence of great cities, the concentration of thought and learning upon politics and plans of government, the entire lack of commercialism as a motive to literary production, were reasons why the Old South contributed comparatively little _per se_ to the stock of permanent literature. There was another hindrance in the fact, which I do not like to recall, that the South, in mistaken largeness of heart or short-sightedness of vision, fell upon two ways that lowered its own self-respect and dwarfed the good it might have attained. It set up a fashion, on the one hand, of reading and patronizing alien books, and accounted these foreign literary products as better than its own. And along with this same mistaken fondness for foreign literary wares, it began to slight its own struggling colleges and schools, and to send its sons and daughters elsewhere for a culture not superior to that procurable at its own doors. Yet with such admitted weaknesses, let no one suppose for an instant that the ability to write or think or speak worthy of the finest culture was in any wise wanting to the gentleman of the Old South. Enter his library, and you would find what is becoming rare in the New South, but which was the mark of the gentleman of the Old South—the finest and completest array of costly books upon all subjects, ranging through science, art, literature, theology, biography, history, and politics. Nothing that money could buy or trained scholarship select was omitted. A man’s books were his most intimate friends and comrades, and such was the wide range and patient study of the average gentleman of the Old South that wits and savants vied in paying tribute to his varied and scholarly attainments. In singular contrast, the other day one of our literary leaders, discussing the scanty sale of really valuable books, bemoaned the fact that the Southern gentleman’s library is fast becoming extinct.