The question if books should be lent out from great public libraries is generally decided differently iu foreign countries and in England. It is perhaps a consequence of this that " circulating libraries" in their modern sense—that is, shops in which books are lent for hire—are, apparently, an English, or rather a Scottish, invention. In their larger sense they may be traced as far back as the days of St. Jerome, in the 4th century. St. Jerome expressly mentions that St. Pamphilus, presbyter of Caesarea, who died A.D. 309, made a collection of books amounting to 30,000 volumes, chiefly of a religious character, with the object of lending them out to religiously disposed people to read. " This," says Dr. Adam Clarke, " is, if I mistake not, the first notice we have of a circulating library." There are, however, some traces in Aulus Gellius that it was permitted to borrow books from the public libraries ; though probably the usage of having libraries at the public baths, where so many of the people spent their time, and the habit of living in public' common among the ancient as well as modern nations of the south, made it far from a prevalent practice to borrow books to read at home. In the middle ages there are frequent traces in the history of the universities of Bologna and Paris that it was customary for bookaellers to lend books for hire to the students, who would otherwise have hardly been able to obtain the requisite number for study. In Buach'a I landbuch der Erfindungen; circulating libraries are said to have been originally invented by Dr. Franklin, when a journeyman printer at Boston, in 1720. In 1720, Franklin was a boy of fourteen, and the institution that is meant is doubtless the subscription library established by him at Philadelphia in 1731, which is generally considered as the earliest subscription library, but the invention of which is not uuequivecally claimed for Franklin in his Autobiography, though the terms which ho used are consistent with that supposition. The first circulating library in Great Britain is said in the' Picture of London,' to have been begun by Allan Ramsay at Edinburgh in 1725, the year in which he pub.
fished the Gentle Shepherd.' They were not introduced to London till 1740, by Bathe, a bookseller in the Strand, and in 1770, according to Timperley, there were only four circulating libraries in London and its neighbourhood. From that period the new institution must have advanced with rapidity. It is now general throughout Europe, though England and Germany are perhaps its most congenial soils. It has had the effect of fostering' the production of a peculiar species of literature—the "circulating library literature "—which was once at all events, flimsy and ephemeral to a proverb.
Many of the London libraries of this kind were, even in the 18th century, of considerable dimensions ; but an establishment of this class has been developed by Mr. Charles Edward Mudie, in the space from 1840 to 1860, into quite a new stage of influence and importance. Mr. Mudie, by taking hundreds and even thousands of copies of par ticular books, is enabled to au ply at his, not their risk, the demand of country circulating libraries which are in communication with him, and it sometimes happens that two rival establishments in a country town both announce that they are connected with Mudie. Even the second largest library in London—that of the London Institution iu Finsbury Circus,—takes out a subscription of 1001. a-year to procure from Mudie the temporary loan of such volumes as the management does not think worthy of a permanent place in the collection. His influence was even beginning to extend abroad, and his books to circulate at Paris, by means of a branch establishment there; but we believe that this has been abandoned in consequence of the difficulties occasioned by the Custom House and the prohibition of some books in his catalogue. The development of this great establishment appears to have been fatal to innumerable book-clubs, or at least to have induced them to abandon the old plan, of selecting the books for themselves and dis posing of them after use among their own members, for that of procuring them from 3ludie, and of course returning them to 'him when they are read. One effect of the system not to be admired is that it substitutes the decision of a single purchaser for that of thousands ; but as that purchaser's decision is a costly one, and made at his own risk, he is not likely to favour his own taste in many cases in opposition to that of the public. The great masa of the books, as soon as they begin to £111 out of circulation, are disposed of at reduced prices, and it is on the terms on which this can be managed, and the adroitness with which it is effected, that the profit and loss of this vast machinery must depend. The announcements of the augmenta tions of the library have gradually swelled up to " 150,000 volumes a-year;" but this of course affords no measure of what is the real augmen tation, probably little more than 1000 volumes being annually added to the permanent stock. The establishment is almost as unparalleled of its kind as its near neighbour—the British Museum.
Another large circulating library in London is of a different con stitution and superior order—the London Library, in St. James's Square, established by a society of literary men, who by the payment of sn entrance-fee and an annual subscription, or by an annual sub scription alone, obtain the right of borrowing books from a library which comprises, among other volumes, the folios of the 'Acta Sane thrum.' The London Library is, in fact, a proprietary library of not an unusual type, except that the circulation of its volumes is made the prominent feature. The now extinct Surrey Institution and Alders gate Street Institution also circulated their books, and the Russell Institution is constituted on the same plan.
• When several establishments of this kind exist in a capital, there is certainly less inducement to allow the books which belong to the national library to circulate beyond its walls. Mr. I'anizzi, both when Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Museum, and when Prin. cipal Librarian of that establishment, has often expressed hid opinion before committees of the House of Commons and elsewhere, that it would be advisable to form supplementary institutions in different parts of the metropolis, to relieve the Museum of some of the present pressure on its resources. Should auxiliary libraries ever be formed, consisting, of course, of books of which in every case other copies might be found at the Museum, the plan might then, perhaps, be entertained with advantage of circulating the books of these libraries, as in case of loss, the lose would not be so serious. But with regard to a great national library, the preservation of books is as main an object as their collection. Such a library is not for the use of one generation only,—in fact, some of its uses are only developed by its passing into the hands of successive generations. It should be exposed to no other risks than such as are absolutely inevitable. The testimony of 314Ibech, the librarian of Royal Library at Copenhagen, where lending is permitted, is to the effect, not only that the risk is greater, as must of course be the case where the books are removed from super vision and control, but that in practice great damage is found to ensue. It would, perhaps, be expedient to examine the subject more closely before a final determination was come to on either side ; for while the Bodleian library is strictly non-circulating, the books are freely lent out to the members of the University from the University library of Cambridge, and yet any material difference in the condition of the two libraries, to the disadvantage of that of Cambridge, is certainly not a matter of public notoriety. Even if it should be found inadminsiblo to adopt the freedom of borrowing practised in foreign libraries, and the want of which in England is so loudly complained of by foreign scholars, a proposal made in Fraser's Magazine' for June, 1800, by Mr. Spedding, the editor of Bacon, might be taken into consideration. Mr. Spedding proposes that if a scholar in London be desirous of consulting a manuscript or rare book in the Bodleian, not existing in the Museum collection, he shall communicate his wish to the Oxford authorities, and they, if they entertain his application, shall trans mit the books required, not to his or to any private address, but to the authorities of the British Museum, who shall retail, the book for a certain period in their custody and send it to the Reading Room, under the same guardianship and supervision as their own books. Of course, under similar circumstances, a book might be sent from the Museum to the Bodleian, and there might be a certain number of libraries with which the communication should be kept up. By this ingenious arrangement some of the advantages proposed by the lending system would certainly be afforded, under safeguards not now obtainable ; but there would still remain the strong objection, that a reader wishing to examine a particular book known to be in a particular library, might be subjected to a disappointment which he now is in no hazard of. This objection is tersely stated in a passage from a letter by Niebuhr, which was quoted by the commissioners for examining into the University of Oxford. " It is lamentable," writes Niebuhr from the University of Bonn, "that I am here much worse off for books than I was at Rome, where I was sure to find whatever was in the library, because no books were lent out ; here 'I find that just the book which I most want is always lent out." There are few libraries from which books are lent of which stories are not current respecting the abuse of the privilege, of volumes kept for years by persons too high or too venerable to be questioned. The rules of such institutions are often laxly observed by those from whom wo should least expect such disregard. In Walter Scott's correspondence with Southey there is a passage in which he recommends him not to show publicly a book which he had sent him, because it belongs to the Advocates' library, and it is forbidden for those books to be sent out of Scotland.