Of course the argument in favour of the Times' will extend to many other of the London papers. The British Museum now receives and preserves them all, and in addition, all the English country papers, all the Scotch, and all the Irish. In the Museum returns for 1860, it is reported that in 1859, 584 were received from England, 118 from Ireland, and 125 from Scotland. They are sent from the Stamp Office, not at the time of publication, but a few years after ; and they are attended to with the utmost care, bound and kept ready for instan taneous reference. A new use of them has lately been developed. An excellent example has been set in some of the northern counties of England, of publishing Local Records,' in which all the really memor able occurrences that have taken place in a particular district for about a century, are condensed from a hundred folio volumes of the local newspapers, into the compass of one or two octavos, easy of reference and abundant in interest to the resident or visitor of the different localities. If this practice spread, as it appears likely to do, the vaults of the British Museum will furnish matter for many a volume that will be popular at the fireside, and that must otherwise have remained unwritten. A still wider interest must attach to the annals of English colonies, than to those of English counties ; and there can be little doubt that the prosperous communities of future times will look back to the struggles of their early period as mirrored in their con temporary records, with an interest akin to that felt by the grown man in the reminiscences of his childhood. It is to be regretted that, as yet, little has been done in this direction in the Museum Library. Unless current reports are ill-founded, a great statesman, who was also a Trustee of the Museum. no for a nun than Slr Robert Peel, who had himself been Colonial Secretary, once interposed his veto to pre• rent the innovation of collecting colonial newspapers. Neither et the Namely nor at the East India House, is there a collection of the newspapers published in India, though at the India House a collection of the native newspapers was procured at the suggesUon of the late librarian, Professor Wilson, the eminent Sanserit scholar. A for collecting sets of oil the American newspapers has never, we lieve. been seriously entertained, the notion of assembling them too nearly approaches that formerly advocated by Dr. Anderson, of Clasgew, the ingenious editor of the' Bee,' who wished to collect and preserve everything whatever in print—every shop-bill, every placard for a lost article, tamed throughout Great Britain. The number se now estimated to be upwards of 4000. Seta of the leading American newspapers are of course desirable for the rest. An ingenious idea, put in practice by Mr. Charles Knight some years ago, with regard to the lower periodicals of London, would seem to be the most advisable plan to adopt with these multitudinous journals. lie sent round on a particular day to collect one specimen of every periodical sheet that issued from the press on that day or nearest to it, and was tilos enabled to draw conclusions as to the character and tendency of the whole body of contemporary periodical literature. A collection of the first number of every American newspaper and periodical issued in 18111, would be an interesting and a suggestive exhibition.
The same arguments that hold good for the preservation of news papers, apply, and sometimes with additional force, to other varieties of transient literature—to that most ancient and most despised species of periodical publication the Almanack—to the Directory, of which the annihilation is carried on with such vigour, that it may be questioned if a complete set of the London Directory' exists in London. Mit even in the most respected forms of periodical publication, the long continuance of their success, in point of time, renders their presence onerous in point of space. As no English newspaper has, like some of its Dutch, German, and Swedish contemporaries, lasted over two hundred years, so no English magazine has, like the French 'Mereure; ever extended to more than a thousand volumes; but the sets of the Monthly Review,' and the ' Critical Review,' and tho ' Universal Magazine,' and the 'Scot's Magazine,' to mention none hut those which are defunct, are too voluminous each of them for libraries of ordinary size, while the combination of all of them, and of hundreds more, in some one locality, is as necessary for use as it is difficult of accom plishment. In fine, all those who have had experience of making research in any department of knowledge whatever, have found reason to complain that the stores of English literature in the British Museum, ample as they seem, and as in many respects they are, are still too scanty by far, and that much that is attainable remains to be attained.
The English is not the only language of the British Islands; and apart from the interest which must always attach to the Welsh as the early speech of at least part of the country before an Anglo-Saxon set foot on its soil, that language may claim to be one of the oldest of modern Europe, and it has been cultivated to a high pitch of refinement by a small community, overborne by an overwhelmingly powerful neighbour. It I. singular that the literary cultivation of the country has never developed itself in the direction of bibliographical collections; for the concentrated diligence of a few years,combined with a moderately liberal expenditure, would probably have sufficed to assemble a complete collection of Welsh printed literature, the possession of which might have conferred celebrity on a local society or a local magnate. Nothing of the kind appears to have been done on a scale approaching completeness; and the largest Welsh collection now known is that of the British Museum, with which the scanty libraries formerly belonging to the Welsh School, and the Cymmrodorion Society, have been incor porated. So little does its existence appear to be known in Wales, that we find, in the ' Life of the Rev. Thomas Price,' an eminent Welsh scholar, some bitter complaints of the total neglect of Welsh literature at the British Museum, at a time when more attention was paid to it there than anywhere else. Compared with Welsh, the literature of Gaelic and Ins') is excessively scanty ; but Gaelic has to boast of one name, Onsian, which is famous throughout Christendom, though the Gaelic poems printed under his name are of course no more genuine than the English so-called translations, which are In reality the originals. The best collection of books in Irish is in the Grenville library at the British Museum, amid probably as exten sive a collection of Irish books in English as is anywhere to be found; but both Gaelic and Irish are languages to which more attention might be paid with advantage. There is a complete bibliography of Gaelic books in Iteltra Bibliotheca Scoto-Coltiea,' which might as a guide for collecting them.
In every great public library formed with a view of affording means for the acquisition of sound and substantial knowledge, the foreign books will far outnumber the native. One of the so-called dead languages was for ape after its death the language of all living literary Europe, and the treasures contained in It are in consequence remark able for quantity as well as for quality. Since the revival of literature, though different languages have predominated at different times, and some stitch have shone have had Intervals of obscurity, the number of languages in active cultivation has conatantly been on the increase. After the inventiou of printing, Italian was tho first vernacular language to produce wailers of remarkable genius, and even before the invention of printing it had already had a time of flourishing and a time of dewy. Spain followed, in the age of Charles V. Towards the close of the 1Gth century England had its Elizabethan age. The 17th century produced Richelieu and Louis Xl\'. for France. It was Richelieu who first definitively formed the project of the dethronement of Latin as the general language of serious learning, and the establishment of French in its place. His plans had singular success for a period, and French is still the most general medium of intercourse in Europe; but the great effect has been, not tho introduction of a living language in the place of the dead one, but the general adoption of each living language as a literary medium by those who speak it, This system has been becoming more and more general since about the year 1750, when the Germane may be said to have abandoned Latin for German. At present there are at least six European languages in cultivation— Danish, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian—which a century ago might have been neglected with impunity by the literary student. Russian might always have been expected to rise into importance as the plane of Peter the Great took effect ; but Bohemian and Hungarian were then regarded, even by those who spoke them, as likely to pass away in a course of gradual decay.