r my Shakespeare, the great
Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back
in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old
enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a
treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn
the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and
what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand.
For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition. My eyes
being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when
such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I
regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from
sacrifice.

Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word. Dozens of my books were
purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called
the necessaries of life. Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a
bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily
need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I
have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so
advantageous a price, that I _could_ not let it go; yet to buy it meant
pangs of famine. My Heyne's _Tibullus_ was grasped at such a moment. It
lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now
and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.
Sixpence was the price--sixpence! At that time I used to eat my mid-day
meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the
real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.
Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a
plate of meat and vegetables. But I did not dare to hope that the
_Tibullus_ would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due
to me. I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing
the stall, two appetites at combat wi