inventory of his sweetheart's charms, when itemized as "two lips
indifferent red," "two gray eyes with lids to them," and so on.

But all these forty classes of knowledge ought to be represented in a
library, and the more largely the better. They should also mingle there
in due proportion, "parts into parts reciprocally shot, and all so
forming a harmonious whole." "If the whole body were an eye, where were
the hearing?"

I once lived in a town of a thousand families, where, through a legacy,
one copy of some single author was annually presented to each family.
But, with the same money, a thousand different works might have been
every year purchased, and all kept accessible by all the families. The
result would have been a feast as appetizing to all palates as the
miraculous manna which the rabbins tell us tasted to each Jew like that
particular dainty which he loved best.

It is no objection to a library that no man will ever read it through.
No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for
a man to read all the words in the daily _Tribune_. Nor will any
customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an assortment from which to
select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up
in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of
dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How
much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from
bibliothecal rubbish--or reading which had never been read. Hence even
Samson could not say to the jaw-bone of an ass: "I have no need of you."
The wise thank God for fools. They get their living out of them, and
mostly out of the greatest fools. In truth, no library is large enough.
Guizot and Michelet complain of inability to consult certain books, even
in that Parisian library, where books are as plenty as water in the
deluge, and the shelves would reach from here to Milwaukee.

A library should be a cosmos; but it is a chaos till arrangement,
catalogues and librarians bring us at once the volume we desire, and
which, without them, would be as hard to fish up as the Atlantic cable
lost in mid-ocean.

"Thus warlike arms in magazines we place,
All ranged in order and disposed with grace:
Not thus alone the curious eye to please,
But to be _found_, when need requires, with ease."

In some libraries, however, books are arranged on a system which seems
borrowed from Spanish hospitals