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all the more striking, because it finds the | ernment. They certainly would not have world so completely unprepared. Men done that without necessity, and that it are in a way prepared for the conse- should be necessary proves how comquences of a great death. They have al- pletely personal this part at least of the ways in their own minds reckoned that governing power is. Any other such such and such a death would introduce difficulty would have been met at once great changes, have, in mercantile phrase, by the employment of a subordinate; but discounted them, and are ready to recon- Prince Bismarck, as Parliamentary leadcile themselves to inevitable conse-er, is during sickness irreplaceable, for no quences. This is true even of deaths man, even if possessed of a genius like like Prim's, the world being well aware his own, could or would display it in an that an additional cause of death may ad interim command. His audience and does exist in the case of certain would remember that they were not lispoliticians, but the world does not dis- tening to the orator who is all-powerful count sickness, still less sickness unre- in the State as well as the Reichstag, but vealed in bulletins and official reports. to a speaker whose ideas, however bright, It expects health, and is astonished when- might be overruled next day, or whose ever sickness, as must constantly be the menaces, however weighty, might never case, acts like momentary death, sus- be fulfilled. Ad interim greatness of that pending the ordinary action of its victim. kind is not possible, and when, as in GerIt is quite clear, for example, that the many, and upon this point, the GovernGerman Court and military staff had ment is personal, a fit of gout may bring never reckoned on a sudden failure in it to a standstill. There is a whole bench the agency through which they act on of ministers, fairly competent men, but Parliament, a sudden arrest of that tre- none of them can do the work the sick mendous voice which, among a liberal man could have accomplished in a day. majority, can carry almost any Conserva- The pivot of politics in Germany is, not tive vote. In England men are aston- as is so often asserted, Prince Bismarck's ished to see how suddenly this one divi- life, but that and also the robust health, sion of the machine has ceased to work, which may be, and this time we suspect how suddenly the German Parliament has been, suspended before any but his has become free, how little any other physicians perceived the danger. If NaMinister can do either to awe or to cajole. poleon had but been healthy three days The German statesmen are compelled before Sedan, his son might be reigning in their despair to call on Jupiter to in- in France. That is a platitude; but, troduce the Emperor himself into the then, where is the strength in a system conflict, to the direct injury not only of of government which a platitude shows his Majesty but of his permanent and to be unsound? hitherto most successful scheme of gov

ONE of the candidates for a constituency is | province of Secionda, and mentioned by Sir blessed (?) with an outrageously bad temper, Samuel Baker as an obstacle to navigation, and has the faculty for saying unpleasant has been partially removed by the works orthings in the most unpleasant manner. Andered by the Soudan Government. The river amusing story was related of him at one of th election meetings. Six barristers, as a frolic, agreed to dine together, each man inviting the most cantankerous man he knew. Dinner was provided, and of course laid for twelve- but only seven sat down; for each of the six had invited the same individual.

WE learn, from a Reuter's telegram, that the bank, sixty miles in length, formed for a long time past in the White Nile south of the

is now navigable up to Kondokaro over a distance of ten and a half degrees. The works for the complete removal of the bank continue.

Nature.

QUITE a sensation was produced in the last sitting of the Académie des Sciences, by the exhibition of photographs of Spitzbergen scenery, sent by Prof. Nordenskiöld. One of these represented a meteorite nearly 18 tons in weight.

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For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical.

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TO AMELIA. (AFTER MR. FIELDING.)

I HEARD the ladies, with their candour strange, Proclaim thy beauty quite beyond compare, If kind Dame Nature knew but how to change Thine eyes, thy mouth, thy figure, or thine hair.

Slip backward to the world that lies behind I too, presumptuous! when thy countless

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charms

Are thus decried, and blazoned thus to Fame,

Would add another to these vague alarms, And bid thee change, O heartless fair, thy

name! Macmillan's Magazine.

C. F.

From The Edinburgh Review. LIBRARIES, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

of that history. It has been our wont in this Journal to review at intervals the IN the year 1471, when Louis XI. progress of our own national library. wished to borrow a book from the Med- Perhaps it will not be uninteresting to ical Faculty in Paris, he was required to our readers, if we prefix to our present deposit plate in pledge, and to get one of periodical survey of the progress within his nobles to join him in a guarantee for the last few years of the library of the the safe return of the book. In the Paris British Museum and its great rivals of 1873 there is not one among the price- abroad, a summary account of the libraless volumes that fill untold kilomètres of ries of other times, and of the nature and shelves in the Bibliothèque Nationale circumstances of book-collecting under that is not at the command of the hum- the very different conditions of litblest applicant of honourable reputation. erature which then prevailed. These And in our own national library, at its conditions, it is true, were so different as first reorganization, so easy were the con- almost to render comparison impossible; ditions of access, that, notwithstanding but the very contrast of the conditions the lavish provision of space in its noble reading-room, it became necessary, in the interest of that higher class of readers whose wants mainly a great library must aim at supplying, to exclude, by fixing a limit of age, the "rush of young men from University and King's Colleges to the presses that contain the Latin Dictionaries and Greek Lexicons and Bohn's cribs." Both these extremes, no doubt, especially the first, are exaggerated types of the relative degree of accessibility of books in their respective periods; but, even when every due allowance has been made, the two periods are found to be separated from each other by a vast interval.

will itself be interesting, and will at all events be comforting to us in view of the advantages which we enjoy. Mr. Edwards supplies ample particulars for the purpose; but we shall freely combine with the materials which he has brought together, information drawn from the various bibliographical publications, periodical and otherwise, in every country of Europe, which have of late years elevated the study of books almost to the condition of a science.

The history of libraries is divided by Mr. Edwards into three periods, the ancient, the medieval, and the modern.

The history of the ancient period, like most other branches of early inquiry, has The intellectual history of that interval its region of legend; and in its historical is in some degree represented by the period itself, it is difficult, even where History of Libraries, and Mr. Edwards precise statements of facts are found, to has rendered an acceptable service to separate the true from the apocryphal. letters by bringing together in his "Me-No ancient writer has treated the subject moirs of Libraries," and the two works, of libraries professedly. Of the detailed "Libraries and Founders of Libraries," notices of libraries which we find in the and "Founders of the British Museum," ancient authors, very few are contempowhich form its complement, the materials

L Memoirs of Libraries, including a Handbook of Library Economy. By EDWARD EDWARDS. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1858.

2. Catalogue de l'Histoire de France. 4to.

I.-X. Paris: 1855-1870.

Vols.

St.

ry, or regard libraries personally visited and known by the writers themselves. Thus Aulus Gellius, Seneca, Josephus, Eusebius, and others, tell us many seemingly precise particulars about the famous library of Alexandria; Plutarch is tolerably minute as to the collection of Attalus, King of Pergamus; and Strabo refent-lates very circumstantially the fortunes Svo. of the so-called library of Aristotle, from its first formation at Athens to its transportation to Rome under Sylla. But it is worthy of note that, neither in these nor

3. Catalogue des Nouvelles Acquisitions de la Bibliothèque Impériale Publique. 1.-XII. 8vo. Petersburg: 1863–71.

4 Ein Gang durch die St. Petersburger k. liche Bibliothek. Von. Dr. R. MINTZLAFF, Oberbibliothekar an der k. öffentliche Bibliothek. St Petersburg: 1870.

3. La Biblioteca Vaticana, dalla sua Origine fino al Presente. Per DOMENICO ZANELLL. 8vo. Roma: 1857.

in any other ancient writers, however | Interspersed with these notices are many minute and circumstantial regarding for- curious details regarding the founders, eign collections, is there to be found a beginning with the perhaps legendary precise account, such as might be expect- Osymandyas, King of Egypt, fourteen ed from an observant scholar, of any one centuries before Christ. But the only of the numerous libraries, public and pri- questions as to ancient libraries which vate, which are known to have existed in are important for this inquiry are those Rome during their time, and to which which regard the character of the books, they themselves not unfrequently refer and the probable number of the volumes by name. Aulus Gellius, for instance, which they contained. speaks of meeting friends in the Tiberian It has been conjectured that the books Library,* of making researches in the li- of the early libraries of Egypt were chiefly brary of Trajan,† and of finding a book, sacred, such as Lepsius' "Book of the "after a long search," in the Library of Dead" and Brugsch's "Sai-an-Sinsin; " Peace. But he does not say a word as but no doubt can be entertained of the to the number of volumes, as to the class cosmopolitan character of the Ptolemæan or character of the books, as to the order Library at Alexandria; and in its Roman of their arrangement, or as to the condi-period we may be sure that the Latin tions on which they were made accessible authors were not unrepresented. This to the public, whether in these or in any is highly improbable, however, of the other contemporary Roman libraries. purely Greek libraries. Suetonius records what each of the em- Roman librarians, on the contrary, conperors did in founding or enlarging the sidered a series of the Greek poets, phillibraries of his time, but he leaves us in osophers, and rhetoricians as indispensaignorance as to the nature and extent of ble in their collections. The Palatine the collections themselves. Flavius Vo-library, according to Suetonius,* had two piscus actually gives the very press-mark distinct collections, Greek and Latin, with of a book to which he refers in the Ul-a distinct librarian for each; † and Tibe pian Library,§ but of the Ulpian Library itself he tells absolutely nothing. And it is a curious fact that the only Roman library of whose contents any enumeration is preserved, is not a public but a private one- that which Serenus Sammonicus, preceptor of the younger Gordian, bequeathed to his imperial pupil, and which is said to have contained 62,000 volumes. Mr. Edwards has collected most of the details which have been preserved regard-giving Latin books in exchange.§ In the ing the libraries of remote antiquity the libraries of ancient Egypt; the more modern library of the Ptolemies at Alexandria (B. C. 290); the library of the kings of Pergamus; the libraries of Pisistratus, of Aristotle, and of Apellicon at Athens; and the much more numerous libraries of Rome, both republican and imperial, which, in the time of Constantine, amounted to twenty-nine in number.

Noctes Atticæ, lib. xvii. c. 17, p. 714. + Ibid. xi. c. 17, p. 637.

Ibid. xvi. c. 4, p. 859.

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"Habet Bibliotheca Ulpiana in armario sexto librum elephantinum." (Historia Augusta, Probus. c. 2.)

rius ordered copies even of obscure Greek poets to be placed in all the public libraries of Rome. The same is true of private collections at Rome. It is clear from what Cicero writes, both of himself and of his brother Quintius, that, although there was no regular market for Greek books at Rome, yet the Roman collectors eagerly sought to acquire them for their libraries, partly by purchase, partly by

post-Augustan age, the relative proportions of the two literatures were, perhaps, somewhat modified; but Greek still continued to be the fashionable literature.

A more curious inquiry, suggested by allusions to Christian writings in the Greek and Roman poets and humourists, would be, whether in the libraries of pagan Rome was to be found any representation of the uncouth and semi-barbarous

Suetonius, Octavius, 34, vol. i. p. 240.

† See Geraud, "Essai sur les Livres dans l'Antiquité." Paris, 1840.

‡ Suetonius, Tiberius, 70, vol. i. p. 522.
§ Ep. lib. iii. p. 4.

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