The Library

THE Library which is to be spoken of in these pages, is all unlike the halls which a Spenceror a Huth fills with treasure beyond price. The age of great libraries has gone by, andwhere a collector of the old school survives, he is usually a man of enormous wealth, whomight, if he pleased, be distinguished in parliament, in society, on the turf itself, or in any ofthe pursuits where unlimited supplies of money are strictly necessary. The old amateurs, whom La Bruyère was wont to sneer at, were not satisfied unless they possessed manythousands of books. For a collector like Cardinal Mazarin, Naudé bought up the wholestock of many a bookseller, and left great towns as bare of printed paper as if a tornado hadpassed, and blown the leaves away. In our modern times, as the industrious BibliophileJacob, says, the fashion of book-collecting has changed; "from the vast hall that it was, thelibrary of the amateur has shrunk to a closet, to a mere book-case. Nothing but a neatarticle of furniture is needed now, where a great gallery or a long suite of rooms was oncerequired. The book has become, as it were, a jewel, and is kept in a kind of jewel-case." It isnot quantity of pages, nor lofty piles of ordinary binding, nor theological folios and classicquartos, that the modern amateur desires. He is content with but a few books of distinctionand elegance, masterpieces of printing and binding, or relics of famous old collectors, ofstatesmen, philosophers, beautiful dead ladies; or, again, he buys illustrated books, or firsteditions of the modern classics. No one, not the Duc d'Aumale, or M. James Rothschildhimself, with his 100 books worth £40,000, can possess very many copies of books whichare inevitably rare. Thus the adviser who would offer suggestions to the amateur, needscarcely write, like Naudé and the old authorities, about the size and due position of thelibrary. He need hardly warn the builder to make the salle face the east, "because theeastern winds, being warm and dry of their nature, greatly temper the air, fortify thesenses, make subtle the humours, purify the spirits, preserve a healthy disposition of thewhole body, and, to say all in one word, are most wholesome and salubrious." The eastwind, like the fashion of book-collecting, has altered in character a good deal since the dayswhen Naudé was librarian to Cardinal Mazarin. One might as well repeat the learnedIsidorus his counsels about the panels of green marble (that refreshes the eye), andBoethius his censures on library walls of ivory and glass, as fall back on the ancient ideas oflibrarians dead and gone.