Our theme has hitherto been public libraries, but the observations which have been hazarded with regard to purchasing, arrangement, and cataloguing will be applicable, with some alterations, to private libraries also. In many countries in which great private libraries have been once prevalent, and diffused a useful light, the rising of a great public library has dimmed their lustre, and even occasioned their extinction. Many a smile has been excited by the maxim of the enthusiastic engineer, that rivers were made to feed navigable canals, but it may be well maintained that the chief use of private libraries, after they have run their course for a generation, is to feed public collections. Nothing can be well more misplaced than the regret expressed by Evelyn and others at the non-continuance of libraries as heir-looms in certain families. If, indeed, a private library be generously opened as some have been to the application of every scholar, and be made subservient to general use, nothing better can be wished for while it lasts, but a library like this, though nominally private, is in reality a public one.
So, i many a nobleman's park in the country, which is open to his neighbours, is as conducive in its degree to the public benefit as one of the public parks of London. But the case is different when, as with Beckford at Foothill, a proprietor surrounds his estate with a high wall, and shuts himself up in selfish magnificence, and in England the instances are few in which private libraries have been other than private. But even if liberality in this respect had been much more frequent and conspicuous than it has been, it is surely a far more healthy state of things that in future it should be looked to as a staff, and not as a crutch ; that progress in literature should be released from dependence on the favours of the great. In the case of a private library which is given or bequeathed to public use, the collector is a public benefactor of a high order; in the case of one which is broken up at its collector's death, its breaking-up may possibly be just as useful as its collection ; in the ease of one kept in private hands for generation after generation, it is more than probable that an injury is done to the public by withdrawing from public use what is not turned to private account. Among the many memorable circumstances con nected with the sale of the memorable Valdarfer Boccaccio in 1812, perhaps the most striking is, that the purchaser, who gave the highest price for it ever given for a book, had at the time, unknown to himself, another copy in his own library, which had descended to him by inheritance. The only instance in which it would seem desirable that a great private library should remain in a family is in the case of a great author. It seems an appropriate tribute to his memory that Sir Walter Scott's collection should be kept entire at Abbotsford, but to keep the library of an ordinary collector together in respect to his memory, is not at all justified by the ante of Scott. The monument which is erected to him in the centre of Edinburgh might as well be quoted as a justification for the ostentatious columns in honour of aristocratic landlords, which it is now the practice to raise from the so-called voluntary subscriptions of their tenants. To be incorporated in a public library, or rather to be distributed in several, is the proper " euthanasia " of a private collection.
Having thus examined tho composition of a library of the very first order, and the rules that have been proposed for collecting and managing such a library, with a view of making it of the utmost possible public benefit, it remains to take a general survey of libraries, net in the abstract, but the concrete,—of the history and statistics of such collections as have from time to time been formed.
The most ancient library of which we have any authentic account is that of Osynausilyres, king of Egypt, supported by modern Egyptian arbsolars to have reigned about fourteen centuries before Christ. Instorus Skell', who gives a minute description of the monument of this king. mentions that there ICU in it a room containing a "sacred library,' and bearing an Inscription translated into Greek by Vuxijr 'Isrptlir, which has been playfully rendered "the Apothecaries !bill of the Sour Champollion believed that he had discovered this hall in the palace near Thebes, from which the " Memnon 's Head" now in the British Museum was taken. It has been suppose] that all the libraries of ancient Egypt were merely collections of sacred books; but a con trary Inference may be drawn from the circumstance mentioned by Eustathius, the commentator on Homer, that Homer was absurdly accused by some ancient calumniator of having stolen his Iliad' and 'Odyssey • from a library in Egypt. It is singular that it was on the soil of Egypt that the most f:unous library of all antiquity afterwards arose. The first pnblic library in Greece was formed at Athens by the enlightened tyrant Pisistratus, the supposed collector of the scattered poems of Homer ; but according to the not very probable statement of Genius, it was taken away to Persia by Xerxes, and only subsequently restored to Athens by Seleucus Nicanor, one of the successors to the Asiatic kingdoms of Alexander the Great. Another
of Alexander's successors—Ptolemy, king of Egypt—established in Alexandria a great library, which continued under all vicissitudes the most famous library in the world for about 900 years. The most extraordinary statements are made by the writers of antiquity respect ing the number of volumes it contained. Josephus relates that, on the question being put by Ptolemy, the founder, to 1)emetrius Phalerous, the famous Athenian exile, who had the superintendence of the library, what was the number of volume', Demetrius replied that there were at that time 200,000. but that he hoped there would soon be 500,000. Aulus Gellius speaks of the number of volumes at a subsequent period as 700,000. There can be no doubt that, in this instance of counting, the books' in a poem are taken as " volumes," and that the 'Iliad' would therefore be reckoned as 21, in which case it might be near the mark to assume that 700,000 volumes of the ancient library would contain about u much reading as 60,000 of a modern one. Even then the number is remarkably high for the early period of the history of literature at which the collection was made; and to account for it with any degree of probability, it is necessary to suppose that many copies of the name work were admitted, as was subsequently stated to be the case in the Mohammedan libraries of Egypt, and as was pro bably the case in all ancient libraries. This supposition is strongly supported by the subsequent labours of Aristarchus and the Alexan drian school of critics, who would naturally ground their improved readings on the collection of many copies of the same work. Allowance must also be ma/le for that besetting sin in the enumeration of libraries, exaggeration ; still the existence of exaggeration shows that there was something not too obviously scanty and limited to expend it upon. In the libraries of the middle ages we never hear of tens of thousands. Sixteen hundred years after the library of the kings of Egypt had been spoken of an possibly of half a million volumes, the library of a king of France was stated to contain 910. At the time that Josephus wrote, the library formed by Demetrius Phalereus and his successors no longer existed. In the wars of Julius Caesar In Egypt, In some desperate struggles with the mercenary soldiers, the building in which it was kept accidentally caught fire, and the whole collection was coneumed. The calamity was probably deeply felt by the most literary of conquerors, and in his' Commentaries,' and thou of his freedman llirtius, there is no allusion whatever to the fact, which is however sufficiently established by the testimony of Seneca, Ilutarch, Dion Cassius, Aulus Genius, and Atninianus Marcel linus. Seneca, who refers to one of the lost Leeks of Livy, 'speaks of 400,000 volumes as having perished It seems, however, from various Indications, that the library had increased so enormously previous to this conflagration, that the later part of it was kept in a separate building, In another part of the city, and thus escaped. Mark Antony, In subsequent passion for Cleopatra, endeavoured to repair the loss of the early library of the l'toleuries by presenting to her the library of l'ergamus, the collection next in celebrity to theirs. The kings of Pergamus had entered into a rivalry with the kings of Egypt in the collection of books, and the contest had been carried on so warmly that, according to tradition, the Egyptians forbade the of pp s, to which the Pergamenians responded by the Invention of parchment, called from them Pergamena —the name from which the English one is derived When Mark Antony presented the library to Cleopatra it amounted, according to Plutarch, to 200,000 volumes, and, being added to the preserved collection, formed thence forth the new library of Alexandria, which continued the first in the world. The Romans, t liosigh Egypt was their province, respected its integ rity; and when a conflagration destroyed the public libraries at home, the emperor Domitiln ountented himself with sending copyists to Alexandria to repair the lam. Its subsequent history is involved 111 much obscurity, and Indeed many of the circumstances which have already been narrated are not established upon the most solid !anis. There seems to be reason to believe that a great destruction of the library took piece in the assault of the Christian, on the temple of &Tapia, on the tritunph of Christianity over heathenism, A D. 389; and the collection is asserted to have finally perished in A.D. 633, when the 31ohainnialane, under Anna', conquered Egypt.