thin me. The book was bought and I
went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated
over the pages.

In this _Tibullus_ I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct. 4,
1792." Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago?
There was no other inscription. I like to imagine some poor scholar,
poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his
blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did. How much _that_ was
I could not easily say. Gentle-hearted Tibullus!--of whom there remains
to us a poet's portrait more delightful, I think, than anything of the
kind in Roman literature.

An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?

So with many another book on the thronged shelves. To take them down is
to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph. In those days money
represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think about, but the
acquisition of books. There were books of which I had passionate need,
books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment. I could see them, of
course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as
having and holding them, my own property, on my own shelf. Now and then
I have bought a volume of the raggedest and wretchedest aspect,
dishonoured with foolish scribbling, torn, blotted--no matter, I liked
better to read out of that than out of a copy that was not mine. But I
was guilty at times of mere self-indulgence; a book tempted me, a book
which was not one of those for which I really craved, a luxury which
prudence might bid me forego. As, for instance, my _Jung-Stilling_. It
caught my eye in Holywell Street; the name was familiar to me in
_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, and curiosity grew as I glanced over the pages.
But that day I resisted; in truth, I could not afford the eighteen-pence,
which means that just then I was poor indeed. Twice again did I pass,
each time assuring myself that _Jung-Stilling_ had found no p