CONFESSIONS OF A
BOOK-LOVER
BY
MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
IN MEMORY OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
A MAN OF ACTIONIN LOVE WITH BOOKS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
CONFESSIONS OF A
BOOK-LOVER
CHAPTER I
My Boyhood Reading
Early Recollections
To get the best out of books, I am convincedthat you must begin to love these perennial friendsvery early in life. It is the only way to know alltheir "curves," all those little shadows of expressionand small lights. There is a glamourwhich you never see if you begin to read with aserious intention late in life, when questions oftechnique and grammar and mere words begin toseem too important.
Then you have become too critical to feel throughall Fenimore Cooper's verbiage the real lakes andwoods, or the wild fervour of romance beneath dearSir Walter's mat of words. You lose the unreclaimableflavour of books. A friend you may[Pg 2]irretrievably lose when you lose a friend—if youare so deadly unfortunate as to lose a friend—foreven the memories of him are embittered; but nogreat author can ever have done anything thatwill make the book you love less precious to you.
The new school of pedagogical thought disapproves,I know, of miscellaneous reading, and nomodern moralist will agree with Madame deSévigné that "bad books are better than no booksat all"; but Madame de Sévigné may have meantbooks written in a bad style, or feeble books, andnot books bad in the moral sense. However, Imust confess that when I was young, I read severalbooks which I was told afterward were very badindeed. But I did not find this out until somebodytold me! The youthful mind must possess somethingof the quality attributed to a duck's back!I recall that once "The Confessions of Rousseau"was snatched suddenly