This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves, taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste. All this may be whim; it may be not only a very hackneyed, but a very idle, practice; yet I persist in it still, and it affords me pleasure, which is profit, in despite of Mr. Bentham, with Mr. Mill on his back. This making of notes, however, is by no means the making of mere memoranda, a custom which has its disadvantages, beyond doubt. "Ce que je mets sur papier," says Bernardin de St. Pierre," je remets de ma memoire, et par consequence je l'oublie "; and, in fact, if you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. But the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the memorandum-book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value. They have a rank somewhat above the chance and desultory comments of literary chit-chat, for these latter are not unfrequently "talk for talk's sake," hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought--however flippant, however silly, however trivial, still a thought; indeed not merely a thing that might have been a thought in time and under more favorable circumstances. In the...