sesses in her old libraries. Whatever light lies hidden beneath the bushel in these venerable institutions, seems for ever denied to the students and inquirers of the new empire rising in the antipodes, and consequently to the minds of the people at large who receive impressions from students and inquirers. Books can be reprinted, it is true, but where is the likelihood that seven hundred thousand old volumes will be reprinted to put the Astorian Library on a par with the Imperial? Well, perhaps some quick and cheap way will be found of righting it all when we have got a tunnel to Australia, and are shot through it by something only a shade less instantaneous than the electric telegraph.

In the mean time, what a lesson do these matters impress on us of the importance of preserving old books! Government and legislature have done little, if anything, in Britain, towards this object, beyond the separate help that may have been extended to individual public libraries, and the Copyright Act deposits. Of general measures we could point out some which have been injurious, by leading to the dispersal or destruction of books. The house and window duties have done this to a large extent. As this statement may not be quite selfevident, a word in explanation may be appropriate. The practice has been, when any furniture was left in an unoccupied house, to levy the duty to exempt only houses entirely empty. It was a consequence of this that when, by minority, family decay, or otherwise, a mansion-house had to be shut up, there was an inducement entirely to gut it of its contents, including the library. The same cause, by the way, has been more destructive still to furniture, and may be said to have lost to our posterity the fashions of a generation or two. Tables, chairs, and cabinets first grow unfashionable, and then old; in neither stage have they any friends who will comfort or support

them-they are still worse off than books. But then comes an afterstage, in which they revive as antiquities, and become exceeding precious. As Pompeiis, however, are rare in the world, the chief repositories of antique furniture have been mansions shut up for a generation or two, which, after a still larger number of fashions have passed away, are re-opened to the light of day either in consequence of the revival of their old possessors or of their total extinction and the entry of new owners. How the house and window duties disturbed this silent processes by which antiques were created is easily perceived.

One service our Legislature has done for the preservation of books, in the copies which require to be deposited under the Copyright Act at Stationers' Hall for the privileged libraries. True, this has been effected somewhat in the shape of a burden upon authors, for the benefit of that posterity which has done no more for them specially than it has for others of the present generation. But in its present modified shape the burden should not be grudged, in consideration of the magnitude of the benefit to the people of the future-a benefit the full significance of which it probably requires a little consideration to estimate. The right of receiving a copy of every book from Stationers' Hall has generally been looked on as a benefit to the library receiving it. The benefit, however, was but lightly esteemed by some of these institutions, the directors of which represented that they were thus pretty well supplied with the unsaleable rubbish, while the valuable publications slipped past them; and, on the whole, they would sell their privilege for a very small annual sum, to enable them to go into the market and buy such books, old and new, as they might prefer. The view adopted by the law, however, was, that the depositing of these books created an obligation if it conferred a privilege, the institution receiving them having no right

to part with them, but being bound to preserve them as a record of the literature of the age.

If the rule come ever to be better enforced, it will then come to pass that of every book that is printed in Britain, good or bad, five copies shall be preserved in the shelves of so many public libraries, slumbering there in peace, or tossed about by impatient readers, as the case may be. For the latter there need not perhaps be much anxiety; it is for the sake of those addicted to slumbering in peaceful obscurity that this refuge is valuable. There is thus at least a remnant saved from the relentless trunk-maker. If the day of rescuscitation from the long slumber should arrive, we know where to find the book-in a privileged library. It fell to our lot, for instance, to know a man of unquestionable character and scholarship, who wrote a suitable and intelligent book on an important subject, and at his own expense had it brought into the world by a distinguished publisher. Giving the work all due time to find its way, he called at the Row, exactly a year after the day of publication, to ascertain the result. He was presented with a perfectly succinct account of charge and discharge, in which he was credited with three copies sold. Now, he knew that his family had bought two copies, but he never could find out who it was that had bought the third. The one mind into which his thoughts had thus passed, remained ever mysteriously undiscoverable. Whether or not he consoled himself with the reflection that what might have been diffused over many was concentrated in one, it is consolatory to others to reflect that such a book stands on record in the privileged libraries, to come forth to the world if it be wanted. Nor is the resuscitation of a book unsuited to its own age, but suited to another, entirely unexampled. That beautiful poem called Albania was reprinted by Leyden, from a copy preserved somewhere: so utterly friendless had

it been in its obscurity, that the author's history, and even his name, were unknown; and though it at once excited the high admiration of Scott, no scrap of intelligence concerning it could be discovered in any quarter contemporary with its first publication. The Discourse on Trade by Roger North, the author of the amusing Lives of LordKeeper Guildford and his other two brothers, was lately reprinted from a copy in the British Museum, supposed to be the only one existing. Though neglected in its own day, it has been considered worthy of attention in this, as promulgating some of the principles of our existing philosophy of trade. On the same principle, some rare tracts on political economy and trade were lately reprinted by a munificent nobleman, who thought the doctrines contained in them worthy of preservation and promulgation. The Spirit of Despotism, by Vicesimus Knox, was reprinted, at a time when its doctrines were popular, from a single remaining copy: the book is violent and declamatory, and it is supposed that its author discouraged or endeavoured to suppress its sale after it was printed. We happen to know an odd anecdote of this book. A traveller who had it in his luggage, passing the Austrian barrier, was, much to his astonishment, allowed to retain it. To his equal astonishment, the book beside it, being Combe on the Constitution of Man, was prohibitedthe word "constitution" was sufficient to condemn this profound volume.

In the public duty of creating great libraries, and generally of preserving the literature of the world from being lost to it, the collector's services are great and varied. In the first place, many of the great public libraries have been absolute donations of the treasures to which some enthusiastic literary sportsman has devoted his life and fortune. Its gradual accumulation has been the great solace and enjoyment of his active days; he has

beheld it, in his old age, a splendid monument of enlightened exertion, and he resolves that, when he can no longer call it his own, it shall preserve the relics of past literature for ages yet to come, and form a centre whence scholarship and intellectual refinement shall diffuse itself around. We can see this influence in its most specific and material shape, perhaps, by looking round the reading-room of the British Museum-that great manufactory of intellectual produce, where so many heads are at work. The beginning of this great institution, as everybody knows, was in the fifty thousand volumes collected by Sir Hans Sloane - a wonderful achievement for a private gentleman at the beginning of the last century. When George II. gave it the libraries of the kings of England, it gained, as it were, a better start still by absorbing collections which had begun before Sloane was born - those of Cranmer, Prince Henry, and Casaubon. The Ambrosian Library at Milan was the private collection of Cardinal Boromeo, bequeathed by him to the world. It reached forty thousand volumes ere he died, and these formed a library which had arisen in free, natural, and symmetrical growth, insomuch as, having fed it during his whole life, it began with the young and economic efforts of youth and poverty, and went on accumulating in bulk and in the costliness of its contents as succeeding years brought wealth and honours to the great prelate. What those merchant princes, the Medici, did for the Laurentian Library at Florence is part of history. Cosmo, who had his mercantile and political correspondents in all lands, made them also his literary agents, who sent him goods too precious to be resold even at a profit. "He corresponded," says Gibbon, "at once with Cairo and London, and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books were often imported by the same vessel." The Bodleian started with a collection which had cost

Old

Sir Thomas Bodley £10,000, and it was augmented from time to time by the absorption of tributary influxes of the same kind.

The benefactors whose private collections have, by a generous act of endowment, been thus rendered at the same time permanent and public, could be counted by hundreds. It is now, however, our function to describe a more subtle, but no less powerful influence, which the book-hunter exercises in the preservation and promulgation of literature, through the mere exercise of that instinct or passion which makes him what we here call him. What we have already said must have suggested-if it was not seen before-how great a pull it gives to any public library, that it has had an early start; and how hard it is, with any amount of wealth and energy, to make up for lost time, and raise a later institution to the level of its senior. The Imperial Library of Paris, which has so marvellously lived through all the storms that have swept round its walls, was founded in the fourteenth century. It began, of course, with manuscripts; possessing, before the beginning of the fifteenth century, the then enormous number of a thousand volumes. The reason,

however, of its present greatness, so far beyond the rivalry of later establishments, is, that it was in active operation at the birth of printing, and received the first-born of the press. There they have been sheltered and preserved, while their unprotected brethren, tossed about in the world outside, have long disappeared, and passed out of existence for ever.

It is a common notion, which has been floated off from time to time, inflated with every variety of rhetorical gas, that, since the age of printing, no book once put to press has ever died. The notion is quite inconsistent with fact. When we count by hundreds of thousands the books that are in the Paris Library, and not to be had for the British Museum, we see the number

of books which a chance refuge has caught up from the general destruction, and can readily see, in shadowy bulk, though we cannot estimate in numbers, the great mass which, having found no refuge, have disappeared out of separate existence, and been mingled up with the other elements of the earth's crust. We have many accounts of the marvellous preservation of books, after they have become rare-the snatching of them as brands from the burning; their hairbreadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach. It would be interesting, also, to have some account of the progress of destruction among books. A work dedicated apparently to this object, which we have been unable to find in the body, is mentioned under a very tantalising title. It is by a certain John Charles Conrad Oelrichs, author of several scraps of literary history, and is called a Dissertation concerning the Fates of Libraries and Books, and, in the first place, concerning the books that have been eaten-such we take to be the meaning of Dissertatio de Bibliothecorum ac Librorum fatis, imprimis libris comestis. This is nearly as tantalising as the wooden-legged Britisher's explanation to the inquisitive Yankee, who solemnly engaged to ask not another question were he told how that leg was lost, and was accordingly told that "it was bitten off."

But, in fact, we can see the process going on around us, just as we see other things travelling towards decay. Look, for instance, at schoolbooks, how rapidly and obviously they go to ruin. True, there are plenty of them, but save of those preserved in the privileged libraries, or of any that may be tossed aside among lumber in which they happen to remain until they become curiosities, what chance is there of any of them being in existence a century hence? Collectors know well the extreme rarity and value of ancient school-books. Nor is their value by any means fanciful. The dominie will tell us that they are oldfashioned, and the pedagogue who

"ob

keeps a school," and ca's it a acaudemy," will sneer at them as solete and incompatible with the enlightened adjuncts of modern tuition;" but if we are to consider the condition of the human intellect at any particular juncture worth studying, it is certainly of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of children's play-books as well as their workbooks; they are as ephemeral as their other toys. Retaining dear recollections of some that were the favourites, desiring to awaken from them old recollections of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try whether our own children inherit the paternal susceptibility to their beauties, we make application to the bookseller-but, behold, they have disappeared from existence as entirely as the rabbits we fed, and the terrier that followed us with his cheery clattering bark. Neither name nor description-not the announcement of the benevolent publishers," Darton, Harvey, and Darton"-can recover the faintest traces of their vestiges. Old cookery-books, almanacs, books of prognostication, directories for agricultural operations, guides to handicrafts, and other works of a practical nature, are infinitely valuable when they refer to remote times, and also infinitely rare.

But of course the most interesting of all are the relics of pure literature, of poems and plays. Whence have arisen all the anxious searches and disappointments, and the bitter contests, and the rare triumphs, about the early editions of Shakespeare, separately or collectively, save from this, that they passed from one impatient hand to another, and were subjected to an unceasing greedy perusal, until they were at last used up and put out of existence. True it was to be with him

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore,

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like

some ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a long age digging and searching for some fragment of intellectual treasure.

One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the dilapidating effects of use. The Bible seems to have been ever touched with reverent gentleness, and, when the sordid effects of long handling had become inevitably conspicuous, to have been generally removed out of sight, and, as it were, decently interred. Hence it is that, of the old editions of the Bible, the copies are so comparatively numerous and in such fine preservation. Look at those two folios from the block prints of Guttenburg and Fust, running so far back into the earliest stage of the art of printing, that of them is told the legend of a combination with the devil, which enabled one man to write so many copies identically the same. See how clean and spotless is the paper, and how black, glossy, and distinct the type, telling us how little progress printing has made since the days of its inventors, in anything save the greater rapidity with which, in consequence of the progress of machinery, it can now be executed.

The reason of the extreme rarity of the books printed by the early English printers is that, being very amusing, they were used up-thumbed out of existence. Such were Caxton's book of the Ordre of Chyvalry; his Knyght of the Tower; the Myrour of the World; and the Golden Legend; Cocke Lorell's Vote, by De Worde; his Kalender of Shepherdes, and suchlike. If any one feels an interest in the process of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may easily witness it in the debris of a circulating library; and perhaps he will find the phenomenon in still more vivid operation at any book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a choice of Watt's Hymns and

Pilgrim's Progresses. Here, too, it is possible that the enlightened onlooker may catch sight of the bookhunter plying his vocation, much after the manner in which, in some ill-regulated town, he may have beheld the chiffonniers, at early dawn, rummaging among the cinder heaps for ejected treasures. A ragged morsel is perhaps carefully severed from the heap, wrapped in paper to keep its leaves together, and deposited in the finder's pocket. You would perhaps find it difficult to recognise the fragment, if you should see it, in the brilliancy of its resuscitation. A skilled and cautious workman has applied a bituminous solvent to its ragged edges, and literally incorporated, by a sort of paper-making process, each mouldering page into a broad leaf of fine strong paper, in which the print, according to a simile used for such occasions, seems like a small rivulet in a wide meadow of margin. This is termed inlaying, and is a very lofty department in the art of binding. Then there is, besides, the grandeur of russia or morocco, with gilding, and tooling, and marbling, and perhaps a ribbon marker, dangling out with a decoration at its end-all tending, like stars, and garters, and official robes, to stamp the outer insignia of importance on the book, and to warn all the world to respect it, and save it from the risks to which the common herd of literature is liable.

We have recourse to our old friend Monkbarns again for a brilliant description of the bibliophile, as the French politely call him, in the performance of the function assigned to him in the dispensation of things,

renewing our old protest against the legitimacy of the commercial part of the transaction:

"Snuffy Davie bought the Game of Chess, 1474, the first book ever printed in England, from a stall in Holland, for about two groschen, or twopence of our money. He sold it to Osborne for twenty pounds, and as many books as came to twenty pounds more. Osborne resold this