222 TIME-TRIED FRIENDS. so that we can only learn from them that which we knew before. But this verdict of the master of dialectics has never converted many from the studious and studied ignorance it condemns. The incorrigibles side rather with Wordsworth, affirming that Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, An octogenarian essayist describes his fondness for sitting in a room with a few books with which he has been long acquainted-old companions, which he has carried about with him by land and by sea for fifty years; well he knows them-both their faults, to which he is very gentle, and their virtues, which he tries to imitate. "They have been a comfort both in prosperity and adversity-the best friends that I have found." "A mingled race, the wreck of chance or time, That talk all tongues, and breathe of every clime; The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table puts into a homely stanza his collection, be it real or ideal :— Of books but few-some fifty score For daily use, and bound for wear; 'C'EST AVEC LES MORTS QU'IL FAUT VIVRE. 223 The elder Disraeli has been described by his son as "a complete literary character," a man who really passed his life in his library, and upon whose habits even marriage produced no change. Dr. Boyd somewhere pictures the bachelor scholar in his comfortable room, with the blazing fire, and the mellow lamp, and the warmly-curtained windows, upon whom the backs of his books look out like old friends, and who reflects that after he is married he will not be able to afford so many, to say nothing of collateral calls on his time and attention. But Isaac Disraeli allowed wedlock to make no "solution of continuity" in his bookish life. When he got up in the morning, it was to enter the chamber where he lived alone with his books, and " at night his lamp was ever lit within the same walls." Whether in town or in the country, it was practically all the same. In London his only amusement, we are told, was to ramble among booksellers; and if he entered a club, it was only to go into the library. "In the country he scarcely ever left his room but to saunter in abstraction upon a terrace, muse over a chapter, or coin a sentence." From his soul he must have pitied the manner of man of whom, under any circumstances, it could be said that to him "Books are but formal dulness, tedious friends," while all his sympathies would go along with Boileau, saying, "Ce n'est pas avec les vivants qu'il faut vivre, 224 'C'EST AVEC LES MORTS QU'IL FAUT VIVRE. c'est avec les morts" (The life best worth leading is not with the living, but with the dead-that is with books). Leigh Hunt used to sit surrounded by his books, and while he paced the room, or allowed his eyes to wander, "the contents of those familiar volumes were present to his mind as if the pages had stood open before him." Books constituted the happiness of Paul Louis Courier, to whom the world outside of his study appeared so rife with disquieting influences. During his campaign in Calabria a pocket "Iliad" was, he says, "my society, my sole companion, in the bivouac and the watch." One of Moore's most distinguished contemporaries contrasts with that poet's butterfly career of fashion and favouritism his own companionship with the silent but ever speech-gifted Dead : "Alone I spent my earlier hour While thou wert in the roseate bower, And raised to thee was every eye, And every song won every sigh. One servant and one chest of books Followed me into mountain nooks, Where, sheltered from the sun and breeze, So, and with more to the same purport, writes the poet whose poetry found in Southey its staunchest advocate, and whose often capricious friendship Southey found constant to the last, ill-mated as in so many respects the two men might seem to be. With one or two brief excerpts from Southey's own SOUTHEY'S 'DAYS AMONG THE DEAD? 225 familiar letters, these annotations on his "Days Among the Dead" may, or must, close. To his brother Henry he writes from Keswick, in 1804 (a big library his text): "But I never was more independent of society; thank God, the dead are more to me than the living-if they should be called the dead whose works will live and act for ever." And to his attached correspondent, Miss Barker, he writes, four years later, on the occasion of again getting settled with his books: "At last, God be praised, we are gathered together, and earnestly it my wish that neither they nor I may be removed from our present resting-place till I take up my last lodgings in Crosthwaite churchyard." Never before, he asserts in the same letter, was so poor a man so rich in books, and never did any man who possessed books enjoy them more heartily. Q TAKING UP A NEW STUDY IN OLD AGE; OR, NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN. HAKSPEARE'S Norfolk tells his sovereign that is SHAK he "Too far in years to be a pupil now." But we have the word of Saint Ambrose for it, that Nulla atas ad perdiscendum est: there is no age past learning. Cicero says of old age, De Senectute, that it hinders not our continuing our studies, even to the latest period of our existence. Haply he would not have acquiesced unconditionally in what Seneca alleges, that an old man learning his rudiments. (elementarius senex) is a disgraceful and ridiculous object; for if the rudiments be of some new study taken up in the old age of a veteran student, there may be more to suggest interest and admiration, not without a touch of the pathetic, than ridicule and contempt. Applied in this sense, the saying of Solon, that the older he grew, the more he learnt, Tnpάokw δ' ἀεὶ πολλά διδασκόμενος, is by no means, any more than in its wider sense of "we live and learn," the saying of an unwise man. As an old man Cato learnt Greek; and as one historian of ancient Rome observes, the language of Homer and Demosthenes could boast no more signal triumph than that it |
