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Page 16
Miss Susan insists that much of this light and its attendant heat
falls upon my head, compelling there a dryness of the scalp
whereby the follicles have been deprived of their natural
nourishment and have consequently died. She furthermore
maintains that the welsh-rarebits of which I partake invariably
at the eleventh hour every night breed poisonous vapors and
subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors, rising by their
natural courses to my brain, do therein produce a fever that
from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy
condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and
exterior cranial integument.
Now, this very declaration of Miss Susan's gives me a potent
argument in defence of my practices, for, being bald, would not a
neglect of those means whereby warmth is engendered where it is
needed result in colds, quinsies, asthmas, and a thousand other
banes? The same benignant Providence which, according to
Laurence Sterne, tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb provideth
defence and protection for the bald. Had I not loved books, the
soul in my midriff had not done away with those capillary
vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally flourished upon
my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and profits of
reading in bed might never have fallen to my lot.
And indeed baldness has its compensations; when I look about me
and see the time, the energy, and the money that are continually
expended upon the nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful
that my lot is what it is. For now my money is applied to the
buying of books, and my time and energy are devoted to the
reading of them.
To thy vain employments, thou becurled and pomaded Absalom!
Sweeter than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is
the smell of those old books of mine, which from the years and
from the ship's hold and from constant companionship with sages
and philosophers have acquired a fragrance that exalteth the soul
and quickeneth the intellectuals! Let me paraphrase my dear
Chaucer and tell thee, thou waster of substances, that
For me was lever han at my beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes rich, or fidel, or sautrie;
But all be that I ben a philosopher
Yet have I but litel gold in cofre!
Books, books, books--give me ever more books, for they are the
caskets wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity
--words, the only things that live forever! I bow reverently to
the bust in yonder corner whenever I recall what Sir John
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.
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