MORLEY, _On Popular Culture_.

There is no truer word than that of Solomon: 'There is no
end of making books'; the sight of a great library verifies
it; there is no end--indeed, it were pity there should
be.--BISHOP HALL.

You that are genuine Athenians, devour with a golden
Epicurism the arts and sciences, the spirits and extractions
of authors.--CULVERWELL, _Light of Nature_.

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book;
he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink;
his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only
sensible in the duller parts.--SHAKESPEARE, _Love's Labour's
Lost_.

I have wondered at the patience of the antediluvians; their
libraries were insufficiently furnished; how then could
seven or eight hundred years of life be
supportable?--COWPER, _Life and Letters by Southey_.

Unconfused Babel of all tongues! which e'er
The mighty linguist Fame or Time the mighty traveller,
That could speak or this could hear!
Majestic monument and pyramid!
Where still the shapes of parted souls abide
Embalmed in verse; exalted souls which now
Enjoy those arts they wooed so well below,
Which now all wonders plainly see
That have been, are, or are to be
In the mysterious Library,
The beatific Bodley of the Deity!

COWLEY, _Ode on the Bodleian_.

This to a structure led well known to fame,
And called, 'The Monument of Vanished Minds,'
Where when they thought they saw in well-sought books
The assembled souls of all that men thought wise,
It bred such awful reverence in their looks,
As if they saw the buried writers rise.
Such heaps of written thought; gold of the dead,
Which Time does still disperse but not devour,
Made them presume all was from deluge freed
Which long-lived authors writ ere Noah's shower.

DAVENANT, _Gondibert_.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a
progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose
progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the
purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that
bred them.--MILTON, _Areopagitica_.

Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour
less of absolute instinct,