Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.My copy of this book was once in the library of the Berkhamsted Mechanics' Institute (shelf mark E XIII 14). The Institute existed (with a name change to Berkhamsted Institute in 1930) from 1845 to 1993. Here is a photograph of the Institute's reading room:
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, March 09, 2018
My Choice of Life
Thomas Babington Macaulay, letter to his sister Margaret, quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Vol. I (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1877), p. 392:
