THE HUNGRY BOOK-LOVER.
[TO THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."
Sin,—Apropos of Lord Rosebery's allusion, in his recent in- teresting address, to the Aberdeen student "who hesitated for some time between a new suit of clothes, which he sorely wanted, and an old Hebrew Bible, for which he had acquired an avaricious desire. He chose the Bible," one is reminded of that pathetic passage in Gissing's "Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft " :- " Dozens of my books were purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called the necessaries of life. Many a timo 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 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 "fibullus ' 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! . . . 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 sum fell due to me. I paced the pavement, finger- ing the coppers in my pocket, eyeing the stall, two appetites at
combat within 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."
Worthy indeed are such poor scholars to drink the precious life-blood of a master spirit.—I am, Sir, &c., STANLEY HUTTON.
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