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Curiosities Of Literature V1: The Works Of Isaac Disraeli
Curiosities Of Literature V1 The Works Of Isaac Disraeli Author:Isaac Disraeli Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to him, that his various philosophical works bear the titles of the different villas he possessed, which indicates that they were composed in these respective re... more »tirements! Cicero must have been an early riser; and practised that magic art in the employment of time, which multiplies our days. THE BIBLIOMANIA. The preceding article is honourable to literature, yet even a passion for collecting books is not always a passion for literature. The Bibliomania, or the collecting an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves. Their motley libraries have been called the madhouses of the human mind; and again, the tomb of books, when the possessor will not communicate them, and coffins them up in the cases of his library. It was facetiously observed, these collections are not without a Lock on the Human Understanding. The Bibliomania never raged more violently than in our own tunes. It is fortunate that literature is in no ways injured by the follies of collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily protect the good. Some collectors place all their fame on the view of a splendid library, where volumes, arrayed in all the pomp of lettering, silk linings, triple gold bands, and tinted leather, are locked up in wire cases, and secured from the vulgar hands of themere reader, dazzling our eyes like eastern beauties peering through their jalousies! An allusion and pun which occasioned the French translator of the present work an unlucky blunder: puzzled, no doubt, by my facetioudy, he translates "mettant, comme on 1'a tretjudicieutement fait observer, 1'entendement humain sous la clef." The great work an...« less