(Our author doesn’t mention it, but Virginia Woolf, in a paper read at school, echoed de Bury’s contention: “I have sometimes dreamt,” she wrote, “that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”’)
