the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches; that delicious beverage which they have swallowed, so thirstily, from the magical cup of literature. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, chancellor and high treasurer of England so early as 1341, perhaps raised the first private library in our country. He purchased thirty or forty volumes of the Abbot of St. Alban's for fifty pounds weight of silver. He was so enamoured of his large collection, that he expressly composed a treatise on his love of books, under the title of Philobiblion, an honourable tribute paid to literature, in an age not literary.

To pass much of our time amid such vast resources, that man must indeed be not more animated than a leaden Mercury, who does not aspire to make some small addition to his library, were it only by a critical catalogue! He must be as indolent as that animal called the Sloth, who perishes on the tree he climbs, after he has eaten all its leaves.

Henry Rantzau, a Danish gentleman, the founder of the great library at Copenhagen, whose days were dissolved in the pleasures of reading, discovers his taste and ardour in the following elegant effusion:

Salvete aureoli mei libelli,
Meæ deliciæ, mei lepores!

Quam vos sæpe oculis juvat videre,
Et tritos manibus tenere nostris !
Tot vos eximii, tot eruditi,
Prisci lumina sæculi et recentis,
Confecere viri, suasque vobis
Ausi credere lucubrationes:
Et sperare decus perenne scriptis;
Neque hæc irrita spes fefellit illos.

IMITATED.

Golden volumes! richest treasures!

Objects of delicious pleasures!

You my eyes rejoicing please,

You

my hands in rapture seize!
Brilliant wits and musing sages,
Lights who beam'd through many ages!
Left to your conscious leaves their story,
And dared to trust you with their glory;
And now their hope of fame achieved,
Dear volumes!-you have not deceived!

This passion for the acquisition and enjoyment of books has been the occasion of their lovers embellishing their outsides with costly ornaments; a rage which ostentation may have abused; but when these volumes belong to the real man of letters, the most fanciful bindings are often the emblems of his taste and feelings. The great Thuanus was eager to procure the finest copies for his library, and his volumes are still eagerly purchased, bearing his autograph on the last page. A celebrated

amatuer was Grollier, whose library was opulent in these luxuries; the Muses themselves could not more ingeniously have ornamented their favourite works. I have seen several in the libraries of our own curious collectors. He embellished their outside with taste and ingenuity. They are gilded and stamped with peculiar neatness, the compartments on the binding are drawn, and painted, with different inventions of subjects, analogous to the works themselves; and they are further adorned by that amiable inscription, Jo. Grollierii et amicorum! purporting that these literary treasures were collected for himself and for his friends!

The family of the Fuggers had long felt an hereditary passion for the accumulation of literary treasures: and their portraits, with others in their picture gallery, form a curious quarto volume of 127 portraits, excessively rare even in Germany, entitled "Fuggerorum Pinacotheca." Wolfius, who daily haunted their celebrated library, pours out his gratitude in some Greek verses, and describes this bibliotheque as a literary heaven, furnished with as many books as there were stars in the firmament; or as a literary garden, in which he passed entire days in gathering fruit and flowers, delighting and instructing himself by perpetual occupation.

In 1864 the royal library of France did not exceed twenty volumes. Shortly after Charles V. increased it to nine hundred, which by the fate of

war, as much at least as that of money, the Duke of Bedford afterwards purchased and transported to London, where libraries were smaller than on the continent, about 1440. It is a circumstance worthy observation, that the French sovereign, Charles V. surnamed the Wise, ordered that thirty portable lights, with a silver lamp suspended from the centre, should be illuminated at night, that students might not find their pursuits interrupted at any hour. Many among us, at this moment, whose professional avocations admit not of morning studies, find that the resources of a public library are not accessible to them from the omission of the regulation of the zealous Charles V. of France. An alarming objection to night-studies in public libraries is the danger of fire, and in our own British Museum not a light is permitted to be carried about on any pretence whatever. The history of the "Bibliotheque du Roi" is a curious incident in literature; and the progress of the human mind and public opinion might be traced by its gradual accessions, noting the changeable qualities of its literary stores chiefly from theology, law and medicine, to philosophy and elegant literature. In 1789 Neckar reckoned the literary treasures to amount to 225,000 printed books, 70,000 manuscripts, and 15,000 collections of prints. By a curious little volume published by M. Le Prince in 1782, it appears that it was first under Louis XIV. that

the productions of the art of engraving were collected and arranged; the great minister Colbert purchased the extensive collections of the Abbé De Marolles, who may be ranked among the fathers of our print-collectors. Two hundred and sixty-four ample port-folios laid the foundations, and the catalogues of his collections, printed by Marolles himself, are rare, curious, and high-priced. Our own national print-gallery is yet an infant establishment.

Mr. Hallam has observed, that in 1440 England had made comparatively but little progress in learning and Germany was probably still less advanced. However there was in Germany a famous collector of books in the person of Trithemius, the celebrated abbot of Spanheim, who died in 1516; he had amassed about two thousand manuscripts, a literary treasure which excited such general attention, that princes and eminent men of that day travelled to visit Trithemius and his library. About this time six or eight hundred volumes formed a royal collection, and their high value in price could only be furnished by a prince. This was indeed a great advancement in libraries, when at the beginning of the fourteenth century the library of Louis IX. contained only four classical authors, and that of Oxford, in 1300, consisted of " a few tracts kept in chests."

The pleasures of study are classed by Burton