The Turkish language, though far from being of such general literary importance as Arabic and Persian, is abundant in poets, and ' rich in historians, whose narratives aro more generally interesting as describing the Turkish collisions with the more civilised nations whom they unhappily conquered. Its relative importance is well represented by its numbers in the British Museum, in which it counts less than three hundred manuscripts, while Arabic and Persian are, as we have seen, each over a thousand. Printing was partially established in Con stantinople at the commencement of the 18th century, and after a long interval of interruption, again in the 19th. The libraries at Constanti nople appear to represent the extreme of decentralisation. There are no less than forty of them, and the number of books in each varies according to Von Hammer, from 21100 to 2500, so that the aggregate number of volumes is about 100,000, of which of course the greater part are not only duplicates but triplicates and endless repetitions. Zenker in his Bibliotheca Orientalis,' published at Leipzig in 1846, aims at giving a catalogue of all the hooks in the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages, printed either in Europe or Asia, and, oven including translations, the number of which he has succeeded in col lecting notices is only 1859.
In our literary journey round the world we have been compelled to pass almost insensibly from printed books to manuscripts. Those who would make a general survey of the published literature of the living world fuur centuries after the invention of printing. must still eatand their view beyond the circle of printed books. This state of things furnishes an additional reason for the arrangement which has bun so generally adopted in libraries, of either keeping the manuscript and printed books together if the collection u small, or merely dividing theta if the collection ia large, into two separate departments kept in tba same building.
Some of the most ancient contents of manuscript libraries are among the most recently discovered. The 19th century has already distin guished itself beyond all preceding centuries by its success in making the boundaries of the past recede. While geologists claim to delve into the early history of the earth, the archeologists of art have unearthed the sculptures and paintings of Egypt and Assyria, and the archaeolo gists of literature have decyphered Egyptian hieroglyphics and arrow headed inscriptions. Amid the treasures of the British Museum are 206 hieroglyphical manuscript', on Egyptian papyrus, and what has been called the " library of clay " of the kings of Assyria, disinterred from under pyramids and from buried palaces. In the saloons of Great Russell Street there is now lodged a mass of inscribed earthen cylinders' in the arrow-heeded character, from which Rawlinson and Norris hope to decipher chronicles and leases, religious books, and grammars.
Less ancient indeed than these, but still of very remote antiquity, are the Syrian manuscripts, acquired between 1841 and 1847, from tho monasteries of the desert of Nitria, about 1000 in number, and ranging in date from A.D. 411 to A.D. 1292.
The ancient manuscripts of the languages of Greece and Rome in their classical periods have been the ornament of libraries from tho time of the revival of literature to the present. They have served their most important purpose by aiding scholars to form a standard text of classical authors whose works, once only existing in perhaps two or three copies, have now passed through innumerable editions, and are found wherever literature is- known. It has been remarked that the purity and intelligibility of an author's text are generally in exact proportion to the number of ancient copies of his writings that have been discovered and oollated. The manuscripts themselves remained after this use had been made of them, interesting monuments of the still more venerable than the earliest editions of printed authors, but regarded as having in a measure " done their work " until the reading of palimpsests by Niebuhr and Mal, in the earlier part of the 19th century, threw a new Interest over the contents of old libraries, which it was now seen, might like mineral districts contain treasures beneath superior to those on the surface. A fragment of the Roman historian Lieinianus has thus been recovered by the two Drs. Peitz, father and son, from • manuscript in the British Museum. Almost all Greek classical manuscripts now in existence are in public libraries, where they are open to collation, and free to be used for the pur poses of learning ; but there are still a few in situations, such as the conventual librarian of Mount Athos, where they are not easily accessible to the world of editors, and where their possessors are not qualified to use them to advantage. It has been proposed to apply to them the new process of photography for the purpose of reproducing exact facsimiles for the principal libraries of Europe ; where they might then be used for the collation of texts with as much confidence as if the originals had been transferred there. A Russian photographer con tributed to the exhibition of the Photographic Society in London, some admirable specimens of • reproduction of several pages of a "codex " of Strabo at Mount Athos. Tho introduction of the new art is probably„destlued to work a revolution in collections of ancient manu scripts, but it is not yet satisfactorily ascertained that copies can be allowed to be taken without risk of injury to the original When this obstacle is get over, as there is reason to hope that in a few years it will be, every library of the find rank will probably aim at having facsimiles of the leading manuscripts of the world.