Excerpt from Books in the House: An Essay on Private Libraries and Collections for Young and OldHaps, those sturdy republicans Milton and Landor, to whose style the epithet royal seems at all fitting. My quarrel with the metaphor is that to talk with kings and queens implies, at least to the imagination, some sense of aloofness and constraint, even of embarrassment, and that to conjure up this picture before the eyes of a timid reader is no good service. Books may be brothers and sisters to us, even fathers and mothers, they may be as schoolmasters and priests, as bachelor uncles, or the golden-mouthed traveller to whom we listen at an inn - but always, if they are to be of any use, they must be as living friends or acquaintances, and the whole art of forming and keeping a library consists in treating them on this footing, alike mentally and materially.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.