Excerpt from The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft And as through all the seeming inequities of for tunes he preserved the sense Of personal accounta bility, so he never permitted the stress of poverty or the exigence of hackwork to rob him of his great literary heritage. His coat he might pawn for a dinner, but his few chosen classics - Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Homer, Virgil, Cicero - went with him from cellar to garret, his inalienable friends. His love Of books - real books - was like that Of the Old Renaissance scholars, for whom, indeed, he had a profound reverence, and whose laborious pursuit Of erudition he would have chosen for himself as a happy career: The zeal of learning is never out of date; the example - were there no more - burns be fore one as a sacred fire, forever unquenchable. A scholar in that sense he could not be, but Ryecroft's tale Of the dinner sacrificed for a copy Of Heyne's Tibullus in an Old shop is as full Of the true ro mance of bookishness as any Of the letters in which Charles Lamb gloats over his more easily acquired folios. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.