Herschel (God rest his dear soul!) said and wrote: ``Were I to
pay for a taste that should stand me in stead under every variety

of circumstances and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to
me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things

might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste
for reading. Give a man this taste and a means of gratifying it,

and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man; unless,
indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of

books. You place him in contact with the best society in every
period of history--with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest,

the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity.
You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all

ages. The world has been created for him.''
For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless

burly, bearish, phrase- making old Tom Carlyle. ``Of all
things,'' quoth he, ``which men do or make here below by far the

most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call
books.'' And Judge Methuen's favorite quotation is from

Babington Macaulay to this effect: ``I would rather be a poor
man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love

reading.''
Kings, indeed! What a sorry lot are they! Said George III. to

Nicol, his bookseller: ``I would give this right hand if the
same attention had been paid to my education which I pay to that

of the prince.'' Louis XIV. was as illiterate as the lowliest
hedger and ditcher. He could hardly write his name; at first, as

Samuel Pegge tells us, he formed it out of six straight strokes
and a line of beauty, thus: | | | | | | S--which he afterward

perfected as best he could, and the result was LOUIS.
Still I find it hard to inveigh against kings when I recall the

goodness of Alexander to Aristotle, for without Alexander we
should hardly have known of Aristotle. His royal patron provided

the philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition of
learning, dispatching couriers to all parts of the earth to

gather books and manuscripts and every variety of curious thing
likely to swell the store of Aristotle's knowledge.

Yet set them up in a line and survey them --these wearers of
crowns and these wielders of scepters--and how pitiable are they

in the paucity and vanity of their accomplishments! What knew
they of the true happiness of human life? They and their

courtiers are dust and forgotten.
Judge Methuen and I shall in due time pass away, but our

courtiers--they who have ever contributed to our delight and
solace-- our Horace, our Cervantes, our Shakespeare, and the rest

of the innumerable train--these shall never die. And inspired
and sustained by this immortalcompanionship" target="_blank" title="n.伴侣关系；友谊">companionship we blithely walk the

pathway illumined by its glory, and we sing, in season and out,
the song ever dear to us and ever dear to thee, I hope, O gentle

reader:
Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke,

Eyther in doore or out,
With the greene leaves whispering overhead,

Or the streete cryes all about;
Where I maie reade all at my ease

Both of the newe and old,
For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke

Is better to me than golde!
VI

MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA
My bookseller and I came nigh to blows some months ago over an

edition of Boccaccio, which my bookseller tried to sell me. This
was a copy in the original, published at Antwerp in 1603,

prettily rubricated, and elaborately adorned with some forty or
fifty copperplates illustrative of the text. I dare say the

volume was cheap enough at thirty dollars, but I did not want it.
My reason for not wanting it gave rise to that discussion between

my bookseller and myself, which became very heated before it
ended. I said very frankly that I did not care for the book in

the original, because I had several translations done by the most
competent hands. Thereupon my bookseller ventured that aged and

hackneyed argument which has for centuries done the book trade
such effective service--namely, that in every translation, no

matter how good that translation may be, there is certain to be
lost a share of the flavor and spirit of the meaning.

``Fiddledeedee!'' said I. ``Do you suppose that these
translators who have devoted their lives to the study and

practice of the art are not competent to interpret the different
shades and colors of meaning better than the mere dabbler in

foreign tongues? And then, again, is not human life too short
for the lover of books to spend his precious time digging out the

recondite allusions of authors, lexicon in hand? My dear sir, it
is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money for that

which one can get done much better and at a much smaller
expenditure by another hand.''

From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and
took down my favorite copy of the ``Decameron'' and thumbed it

over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly
attached to that little volume. I can hardly realize that nearly

half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted.
She was such a creature as the great novelist himself would have

chosen for a heroine; she had the beauty and the wit of those
Florentine ladies who flourished in the fourteenth century, and

whose graces of body and mind have been immortalized by
Boccaccio. Her eyes, as I particularly recall, were specially

fine, reflecting from their dark depths every expression of her
varying moods.

Why I called her Fiammetta I cannot say, for I do not remember;
perhaps from a boyish fancy, merely. At that time Boccaccio and

I were famous friends; we were together constantly, and his
companionship" target="_blank" title="n.伴侣关系；友谊">companionship had such an influence upon me that for the nonce I

lived and walked and had my being in that distant, romantic
period when all men were gallants and all women were grandes

dames and all birds were nightingales.
I bought myself an old Florentine sword at Noseda's in the Strand

and hung it on the wall in my modest apartments; under it I
placed Boccaccio's portrait and Fiammetta's, and I was wont to

drink toasts to these belovedcounterfeit presentments in
flagons (mind you, genuineantique flagons) of Italian wine.

Twice I took Fiammetta boating upon the Thames and once to view
the Lord Mayor's pageant; her mother was with us on both

occasions, but she might as well have been at the bottom of the
sea, for she was a stupid old soul, whollyincapable of sharing

or appreciating the poetic enthusiasms of romantic youth.
Had Fiammetta been a book--ah, unfortunate lady!--had she but

been a book she might still be mine, for me to care for lovingly
and to hide from profane eyes and to attire in crushed levant and

gold and to cherish as a best-belovedcompanion in mine age! Had
she been a book she could not have been guilty of the folly of

wedding with a yeoman of Lincolnshire--ah me, what rude
awakenings too often dispel the pleasing dreams of youth!

When I revisited England in the sixties, I was tempted to make an
excursion into Lincolnshire for the purpose of renewing my

acquaintance with Fiammetta. Before, however, I had achieved
that object this thought occurred to me: ``You are upon a

fool's errand; turn back, or you will destroy forever one of the
sweetest of your boyhood illusions! You seek Fiammetta in the

delusive hope of finding her in the person of Mrs. Henry Boggs;
there is but one Fiammetta, and she is the memory abiding in your

heart. Spare yourself the misery of discovering in the hearty,
fleshy Lincolnshire hussif the decay of the promises of years

ago; be content to do reverence to the ideal Fiammetta who has
built her little shrine in your sympathetic heart!''

Now this was strange counsel, yet it had so great weight with me