Confessions of a Book-lover

PART of the present volume appeared in Great Thoughts. Yet here am I, whose name is associatedif at allin the memory of readers with 'little thoughts,' and with booklets impudent in the slenderness of their matter, presumptuously standing forth to bow the public into the writer's presence, and essaying to introduce the one to the other. The necessary explanation shall be brief. I must have been a young man, and Mr. E. Walter Walters a boy, when he and I last met; indeed I am not sure that I altogether remember him. But his father, who bore an honoured name, I well remember. The Rev. W. D. Walters and my own dear and honoured father were personal friends; and when the former's son sent me a manuscript of a book, with the request that I should write an introduction, how could I do otherwise than accede, and express myself honoured by the invitation? That I share all Mr. Walters's whole-hearted bookish enthusiasm, I may not pretend, for, as R. L. Stevenson says, in An Apology for Idlers, 'Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.' So long, however, as the reading of it be not allowed to deprive either man or woman of drinking deep at the wells of life, there are few greater joys, for young or old, than are to be found within the covers of a noble book; and to the enthusiastic book-lover, Mr. Walters's volume should prove treasure trove indeed. He drags (to use a phrase of Stevenson's) with a wide net, but his castings are made, for the most part, in the same waters. Of the literature of the time of Elizabeth, or even of Anne, he tells us little, and it is not until we come to Goldsmith, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and, later, to Jefferies, Thoreau, and Stevenson, that Mr. Walters may be said to let himself go. What my friend Mr. Le Gallienne calls The Lilliput of Literary London, he wisely leaves severely alone.

Dettagli