But at the
time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated
_Midsummer Night's Dream_ or _Love's Labour's Lost_. I was fully
persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was
rare, and as I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic
notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connect it with
the idea of Shakespeare. But in truth _The Shaving of Shagpat_ has no
other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he
had been so plaguily occupied, than that it is excellent in quality
and of the finest literary flavour.
The ordinary small collection of rarities has no room for three-volume
novels, those signs-manual of our British dulness and crafty disdain
for literature. One or two of these _simulacra_, these sham-semblances
of books, I possess, because honoured friends have given them to
me; even so, I would value the gift more in the decency of a single
volume. The dear little duodecimos of the last century, of course, are
welcome in a library. That was a happy day, when by the discovery of
a _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, I completed my set of Smollett in the
original fifteen volumes.
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