to such a pass. And so, if he goes to the library at all, the bookworm must go there under the plea of writing letters, and take good heed not to become too absorbed, lest he should find that some expedition out of doors has been waiting for him to join it. Or he must stand by the bookshelf in an attitude of pretended irresolution — the true dawdling attitude of a country house — as though only casually, and as it were accidentally, peering into the volume. When he drives to a picnic he longs for a seat on the box, which might afford a chance for gratifying his craving; but if he gets there he is allowed no peace, and is almost required to twist his head off for fear of missing the sights of the neighborhood. These are penalties sufficient for whatever contemptuous expressions he or his associates may in happier moments have been betrayed into towards the unreading public. For, if he is a true brother of the order, some daily dose of literature is as necessary to the bookworm as his daily drops are to the opium-eater; without it he must die, or abruptly end his visit. Towards the end of the day his agonies grow very intense. During the protracted discussion of wines in the dining room his spirits have been rapidly falling, just as the opium-eater's spirits fall when the hour for his dose has long passed, and at last threaten a total extinction; and when he gets into the drawing-room and the music is found fairly under way — "John Peile" for the benefit of the country gentlemen — he is mechanically drawn to the one bookshelf the room contains. Alas, it has glass doors and they are locked! A row of standard authors in virgin bindings — sleeping beauties — lie before his eyes, ready for a touch to awake them into life; but he has not the audacity of the true prince. Certainly the enchantment consists of nothing more than two comparatively inexpensive glass doors. He could break through it, after such a period of torture; but his resolution is not fixed before he is recalled to the excitement of a round game at cards.
Nevertheless, let him take courage, for his time will come at last. Have we not said that otherwise he must perish? It comes when the household has retired for the night. There in bed, at the double danger of murder and suicide — only that, like Macaulay, he has too often run the risk of committing patricide, matricide, and fratricide to attach much weight to such a consideration as that — we may leave him to his orgies. The early habits of the country, early chiefly in the direction of retiring to rest, are a great inducement towards reading in bed, supposing any inducement to such an indulgence were necessary; and for ourselves we have never known any moments of this enjoyment more keenly pleasurable than such as were won under the circumstances in which we have placed the bookworm. Increase of appetite has not in these cases grown from what it fed on, but from a terrible and protracted fast. Fortunately in the present day no household is so unlettered as not to offer us plenty of matter worth reading; indeed there is a certain class of literature almost always to be met with in those country wildernesses, and seeming to have a peculiar appositeness and vitality there. We can remember making our first close acquaintance with Bewick's "British Birds" in the most bookless house in which it was ever our fortune to be cast. Bewick and Walton and White of Selborne are of course sure to be lurking somewhere; and these three authors, less than any that we know, should be read in copies furnished from a lending library. If we do not possess them ourselves, we should certainly wait till we can borrow them from a friend; for they are treasures too sacred and individual to form a part of any communal schemes. In addition to these classics, the country house may be reckoned upon to hold a number of works which are too rapidly disappearing from our town bookshelves — the bygone classics, standing monuments of wit and beauty as they were esteemed by our fathers, now almost utterly faded from the recollection of the present generation. Here they find their asylum, their harbor of refuge, where the peace of their last resting-place is seldom broken. Such books as we mean are "Tom and Jerry," or Seymour's "Sporting Sketches," or "The Book of Beauty, Edited by the Countess of Blessington," with its story by B. Disraeli, Esq., and elegant verses by Thomas Haynes Bayly, or Mrs. Radcliffe or Mrs. Gore, or "our immortal Joanna Baillie" herself — the expression is Scott's — and many immortals more back to the time of the author of "Douglas;" or, again, some of the antique numbers of magazines and reviews — the Gentleman's Magazine of sixty years ago, or the Quarterly and Blackwood under the editorship of Southey and Lockhart. When we read such relics of the past, we see that the historic imagination may be exercised without going further away than
