Aye, and then hastily folding his arms he
leans forward on the book, and by a brief spell of study invites
a prolonged nap; and then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he
folds back the margin of the leaves, to the no small injury of
the book. Now the rain is over and gone, and the flowers have
appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a
neglecter rather than an inspecter of books, will stuff his
volume with violets, and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil.
Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the
volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered
with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used
leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the
sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is
hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust
that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to
close it.
But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those
shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the
shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity,
become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra
margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if
any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins
to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every
unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we
have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the
most beautiful books.
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