The American movement in literature was followed by a movement on that side of the Atlantic, still more unexpected on this, and which indeed %night well take Europe by surprise. The libraries of the provinces now forming the United States, had received, previous to the declaration of independence, no scanty contributions from English liberality. After the war of the revolution there was a time in the new commonwealth when public libraries attracted little of the public attention. Dr. Channing, in a discourse in 1836, spoke of the Redwood library, at Newport, Rhode Island, as "yonder beautiful edifice, now SO frequented and so useful as a public library, but once so deserted that I spent day after day, and sometimes week after week, amidst its dusty volumes without Interruption from a single visitor." This state of affairs LAS been completely changed in the course of the last forty years, the movement proceeding with accelerateal rapidity, in the last thirty, the last twenty, and the last ten. Numerous collectors have appeared who have expended large sums of money in the purchase of libraries of standard European, but more particularly of standard English, literature, and more especially of books relating, however remotely, to America. Some of these collections have been since dis pencil on the death of their possessors, and acme have even returned for sale to England. But several have been presented to publie libra ries, and °theta, which have been amassed at large expense, have been collected with the expressed intention of bequeathing them to public use. The subscription libraries of America, of which the first was founded at Philadelphia, by Franklin, in 1731, have grown numerous, and been remarkably supported by donationa of money from individual members. On more than one occasion agents have been sent to Europe with thousand', of pounds, supplied from private funds, to be expended in the purchase of books for public libraries ; and on whole libraries occurring for sale in Europe, an individual has advanced the money to acquire them in is mass, and present them in a mass to some public collection. The " State Libraries " belonging to several of the states have, at the same time, been largely augmented at the public expense. A library of 80,000 volumes was collected in about four years, and has been opened to the public in New York, on the founda tion of Mr. Astor, a Gennan snerclamt, who made his fortune in America, and by the donationa of his squally public-spirited son. Congress appropriated a sum of more than lo0,000/., left to the United States for the Increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," to the foundation of an establishment called the Smithsonian Institution, of which a library was to form a leading feature. in Massachusetts, a law was lambed, in 1850, for the foundation of libraries iu towns, and one has been set on foot and opened in Boston which has been - • — assisted by munificent donations, and keeps agents constantly employed in Europe. Two American writers, who have each published a volume of statistics on the subject, have thrown over it a somewhat ludicrous air, by giving the name of public libraries to the collections of books belonging to Suodayschools and common sehoola, often of less than a hundred volumes, to which an Englishman would as little think of seriously applying the term as to our common circulating libraries, or the collections in our coffee-shops. Professor Jewett, in 1850, thus states the number of public libraries in the United States as 10,199, and the volumes in them as 3,753,004 ; and Mr. Itheee, in 1859, raises the number of public libraries to 50,890, containing 12,720,6S6 voltunes. Striking off at a blow 48,000 of these public libraries, of which 30,000 belong to Sunday-echools, and 18,000 to common schools, the remainder will still excite our surprise. The effect of their existence has been to send an American agent to almost every important sale of books that occursin England, and to every bookseller's shop, and to raise eon aiderably the price of standard English literature not of the present day.
A movement analogous to that in America has already developed itself at an English colony in Australia, in which the rapid wealth flowing from gold-digging has been turned to the creation of libraries as well as railways. In the city of Melbourne, in the province of Victoria, founded in 1S37, there are already a library of the Supreme Court, a library of the University, a library of the.Legislature, and finally, a public library, supported at the publie expense, founded in 1856, and counting in 1859, 25,000 volumes. At Sydney there is also a university with its library, and we have already heard of Caxton, that have been recently purchased in London, whose ultimate destina tion is a public library at the Antipodes.
These movements do honour to all who take part in them, and cannot be viewed by an English lover of books and literature without feelings of the warmest sympathy and admiration—not unmingled with a wish that the example they display may soon be followed in countries where perhaps it ought to have been set. These sentiments of gratification would be unmingled if, in Great Britain and Ireland, there wero two or three libraries possessed of a complete collection of English literature. It is unfortunately the case that as yet there is not one. The danger is therefore evident that, under these circum stances, such a collection may possibly never exist—that such of our books as are unique, or only extant in a small number of copies, and aro not yet secured in our public libraries, may be lost to them for ever. The first edition of the ` Pilgrim's Progress,' which differs con siderably from the second, is 110W so Beane that Macaulay, in his life of Bunyan, speaks of it as no longer extant, and iu fact only two copies are known to exist. Were one of these in the library of the British
Museum we might not only hear with indifference, but with pleasure, that the other is at New York.
It is quite possible that, ere many years are over, an English scholar, who is in search of a rare English book, may be referred for it, not to Oxford or to Althorpe, but to Washington, or San Francisco, or the Antipodes. When, less than twenty years ago, the increased grant was given to the library of the British Museum, it was not given a moment too early, and on the liberality of the House of Commons to the Museum for the next twenty years, and the way in which that liberality is made use of, it will probably depend whether an English library, such as might bare been collected with comparative ease at the begin ning of the century, shall ever exist at all. That it should exist is the interest of all who enjoy the common inheritance—the English language, no less than the interest of the English nation.
In speaking of collections of books, the word " books" may be used in a limited or an extended sense. A pamphlet is scarcely considered, in common usage, entqled to be called a book. It would be thought by many that a complete collection of English literature had been formed when the jurisprudential department, was such as may be found at our Inns of Court; the medical, such as exists in the College of Surgeons ; the Church of England theology, such as at Sion College; and so on, going through all departments. A collection resembling this was probably contemplated by Sir Thomas Bailey, and in rejecting plays he assumed, as we have seen, that he was only rejecting trash. All men now smile at his error, because we find that in so doing he rejected the plays of Shakspere, but many who smile would fully agree with more recent curators of the Bodleian in rejecting novels. In fact, there was no public library in England in which such works were admitted, at the beginning of the present century, and the hiblio =niece who gave high prices for Lodge's Rosalind,' and Lilly's ' Euphuee, would probably have looked on the proposal to collect the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe or Charlotte Smith with ineffable scorn. Even now the new school of bibliographers its probably in a minority, which maintaina that books like these should be carefully collected, preserved, • and catalogued. The grounds upon which they rest are several. These books are generally very short-lived. Nothing is an difficult to find, if it happen to lo wanted, as a novel that was in everybody's hands some years ago, for being in everybody's hands it was the more liable and likely to be pulled to pieces. About thirty yams after its publication, a search for the first edition of ' Waverley was long ineffectual, till a copy turned up in private hands. We have been told that at the library of the British Museum, a collection of old novels of a certain period was long a desideratum, till about fourteen hundred volumes appeared in an auction, catalogued without specifica tion as " Old Novels," in lots of forty volumes each, and were bought for the Museum at less than a penny a volume, probably the cheapest purchase ever made for the national library. The best novels are now admitted to form one of the very best portions of English literature. Of the Vicar of Wakefield' and of Waverley: few will deny that the national library should contain the early editions, those that passed under the author's revision, and those which present peculiar charac teristics, special illustrations or special notes. After such books as these there come hundreds of novels of the second, and thousands of the third class—stories which have had their season, which have been read with interest, laid aside and forgotten,—but some of which after being nearly forgotten have revived again, and have been discovered to possess merit greater than was at first imagined. Novels have been for the last fifty years, at least, the field in which most of the genius that was formerly devoted to the drama has sought its exercise, and it was the opinion of Sir Walter Scott that that field was rich indeed in buried treasure. It is to novels in .fact that most of us owe our knowledge of the forms of life around us with which we do not come in immediate contact—it is in them that the lawyer can study the life of a man-of-war, and the midshipman that of a country parsonage or a cathedral town. The time may come when future generations will look back to the English novels of our own time with as ineffectual emulation as our generation on the drama of the Elizabethan age. But in regard even to volumes of which the merit is not discernible, the new bibliographic school is at variance with the old. It contends that while it is one part of the purpose of a great publio library to preserve a copy of every book that people take pains to collect on account of its value, it should be another part of its purpose to preserve a copy of the books which nobody takes pains to collect, because they are therefore almost certain to disappear. There is no knowing beforehand what adventitious interest may come to attach to a book from particular circumstances. Anonymous novels and romances of no intrinsic merit cannot but wear a different aspect in our eyes when they are known to have been written by Theodore Hook or Shelley, as a commonplace anonymous review of Wordsworth in an old magazine is scanned with an attention its merits little deserve when discovered to be by Byron at college. In all the minute biographies of our recent great authors—in those of Byron, Walter Scott, Moore, Southey, Wordsworth—the reader finds indications of this kind which invest with interest books and fragments that he might have been previously inclined to pass without notice.