'No, certainly not,' is the obvious and truthful reply to that; but this would appear to be different from buying one volume of, say, Pope's works when there ought to be twenty, and trusting to enterprise not unmingled with luck to discover the remaining nineteen. To this, however, he would not agree, and, to do him justice, he did not preach one thing and perform another. His theory was that, if the perusal of an odd volume leads the reader to long for the possession of its fellows, it is better that he should search for them until he finds them, than that he should have them to his hand, as it were, ready made.
Carlyle intimated that a man had far better study the title-page of any book worth the trouble of looking at than read the whole text with a vacant mind, and no doubt he was right, though this, too, seems to be an entirely distinct matter from the general principle that nothing can be learned without a maximum of inconvenience. Such a conclusion is rather a straining of the position insisted upon by Nero's tutor, that no one should collect more books than he can read, and that a multitude of books only distracts the mind. Therefore was it that Francis Bissari in the year 1750 designed a plate, which he pasted in the few volumes he possessed, and which consequently is now extremely scarce. 'Ex-Libris civis Francisci Bissari,' he says, 'Distrahit animum librorum multitude, itaque cum legere non possis quantum habueris, sat est habere quantum legas. Seneca. Ep. 2.'
Still, as I have intimated, the old gentleman had his way and his day, and when he died his books were all despatched to the auction rooms. It took three men more than a week to pack them in boxes. There were books under every bed in the house, and every nook and cranny was full of them. There were, altogether, many thousands of volumes, and nearly all were odd. If a series were found to be complete, as sometimes happened, it was sure to be made up of volumes belonging to different editions, and, naturally enough, in different bindings. The auctioneers did what they could, and sold the vast majority in 'parcels' for a mere song, which in truth was all they were worth.
This peculiar form of book-collecting, though apparently strange, is, and always has been, very usual, for the vast majority of readers are poor. One volume will cost less, proportionately, than the complete set of which it forms part; and, moreover, we are again face to face with the argument that it is better to master the contents of one volume than to have a mere superficial knowledge of a dozen or more. The only thing is that, as the world wags at present, the advice is erratic, and the system of buying books in sections one that cannot be recommended. If we could be sure of a hundred years of life, then things might be different. _Sed Ars longa, vita brevis est_.