By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. THE FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS. — Now is come the season when the busy lawyer usually hopes to find an opportunity for a little miscellaneous reading. Our own experience, however, has been that we have clone the most reading when we have been the hardest at work, and that leisure relaxes the mental energies. The law library of the late Nathaniel C. Moak, of Albany, — one of the finest in this country, — was pur chased, alter his death, by the widow and daughter of the late Judge Boardman, dean of the law school of Cornell University, and given by them to that law school as a memorial of their deceased husband and father. At the dedication of the new law school building — Boardman Hall — Judge Finch, of the New York Court of Appeals, the present dean, made an address on the presentation of the Moak library, m which fie said of Mr. Moak: — "Brusque and abrupt, and even sometimes rough in his speech; with a voice metallic and resonant and scorn ing all modulations; hating what was false and mean with a temper that had some dynamite in it; with a frame heavy and solid and almost massive in its structure; a bom fighter at the bar and fearless of all adversaries, — one would hardly have picked him out as the gentle student, dearly loving his books. And yet that he surely was. How early he began to gather them about him I do not know, but year by year the fruit of his industry and energy, in volume after volume, in choice editions and rare sclectiuns. crept along the shelves of his office and those of his library at home, until his partners and his wife envied him the room which his favorites absorbed. And this busy man put his chief fortune not into law books alone. Thousands of volumes of history and biography, of science and philosophy, of fiction and poetry, of the drama and of art, were steadily amassed, and as steadily read and studied. And with use of it all he began the work of author and annotator, and wore his life out in the labor he loved. His books were his friends. There art none more faithful and true, and he loved them dearly and guarded them well."
Restricting the application of the words which we have italicized to miscellaneous books, we heartily agree with the sentiment, but the fashion of commonlaw books passes away. Mr. Moak was, as depicted by Judge Finch, a rough and pugnacious man; but many fighting men have loved books and accumulated
libraries. To say nothing of the literary and rhetori cal tastes of Ca'sar, " the foremost man of all time," Frederick the Great had libraries at Sans Souci, Pots dam, and Berlin, in which he arranged the volumes by classes without regard to size. Thick volumes he rebound in sections for more convenient use, and his favorite French authors he sometimes caused to be reprinted in compact editions to his taste. The great Conde inherited a valuable library from his father, and enlarged and loved it. The hard-fighting Junot had a vellum library which sold in London for ,£1.400; while his great master was not too busy in conquering Europe, not only to solace himself in his permanent libraries, and in books which he carried with him in his expeditions, but to project and actu ally commence the printing of a camp library of duodecimo volumes, without margins and in thin covers, to embrace some three thousand volumes, and which he had designed to complete in six years by employing one hundred and twenty compositors and twenty-five editors, at an outlay of about .£163.000. St. Helena destroyed this scheme. To many peaceful men of the robe the companion ship of books is inexpressibly dear. What a privi lege it is to summon the greatest and most charming spirits of the past from their graves, and find them always willing to talk to us! How delightful to go to our well-known book-shelves, lay hands on our favorite authors, — even in the dark, so well do we know them! — take any volume, open it at any page, and in a few minutes lose all sense and remembrance of the real world, with its strife, its bitterness, its disappointment, its hollowness, its unfaithfulness, its selfishness, in the pictures of an ideal world! The real world, do we say? Which is the real world, that of history or that of fiction? In this age of historic doubt and iconoclasm, are not the heroes of our favorite romances much more real than those ol his tory? Captain Ed'ard Cuttle, mariner, is much more real to us than Captain Joseph Cook; Cooper's Two Admirals than the great Nelson: LeatherStocking than the yellow-haired Custer; Henry Esmond than any of the Pretenders; Hester Prynne and Becky Sharp than Catherine of Russia or Aspasia or Lucrezia; Sidney Carton than Philip Sid ney. Even the kings and heroes who have lived in history live more vividly for us in romance. We
