Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/10

viii a day he 'casts a long look' towards the Bodleian and the British Museum. Many a day he thinks with idle regret of his own study, where he is surrounded by those books to which he has often to refer. The cost of carriage and the time lost in transport hinder him from taking backwards and forwards more than a few of the most needful works. Last year I sent off from London a box of books to Alassio, on the Italian Riviera, three weeks before I myself started for that pleasant little town. It was not till full five weeks after my arrival that they reached me. Fifty-nine days had they spent in traversing little more than a thousand miles. They had advanced at the rate of about three-quarters of a mile an hour. Towards Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva, where I passed three winters, they used to creep at a somewhat faster pace, for in every four-and-twenty hours they moved at least five-and-twenty miles. It is scarcely likely that Gibbon, when he transported his great library to Lausanne, had his patience as sorely tried as mine. The Kentish carrier, who, leaving Rochester betimes, delivered that same day a gammon of bacon and two razes of ginger as far as Charing Cross, was certainly more expeditious.

Had I been in England while the book was passing through the press the disadvantages which arose from my earlier absence would have been greatly lessened. It has so happened that of the eleven months during which it has been in the printer's hands I have spent nearly ten abroad. In the six volumes of the Life, and in the two volumes of the Letters, there is scarcely a quotation or a reference in my notes which I did not verify in the proof by a comparison with the original authority. I never trusted my own copy. The labour was great, but it was not more than a man should be ready to undergo who ventures