he grieved, a change of thought to find;--
The curious here to feed a craving mind;
Here the devout their peaceful temple choose;
And here the poet meets his favoring muse."

The origin of libraries is involved in obscurity. According to some, the
distinction of having first made collections of writings belongs to the
Hebrews; but others ascribe this honor to the Egyptians. Osymandyas, one
of the ancient kings of Egypt, who flourished some 600 years after the
deluge, is said to have been the first who founded a library. The temple
in which he kept his books was dedicated at once to religion and
literature, and placed under the especial protection of the divinities,
with whose statues it was magnificently adorned. It was still further
embellished by a well-known inscription, for ever grateful to the votary
of literature: on the entrance was engraven, "The nourishment of the
soul," or, according to Diodorus, "The medicine of the mind." It
probably contained works of very remote antiquity, and also the books
accounted sacred by the Egyptians, all of which perished amidst the
destructive ravages which accompanied and followed the Persian invasion
under Cambyses. There was also, according to Eustathius and other
ancient authors, a fine library at Memphis, deposited in the Temple of
Phtha, from which Homer has been accused of having stolen both the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey," and afterwards published them as his own.
From this charge, however, the bard has been vindicated by various
writers, and by different arguments.

But the most superb library of Egypt, perhaps of the ancient world, was
that of Alexandria. About the year 290 B. C., Ptolemy Soter, a learned
prince, founded an academy at Alexandria called the Museum, where there
assembled a society of learned men, devoted to the study of philosophy
and the sciences, and for whose use he formed a collection of books, the
number of which has been variously computed--by Epiphanius at 54,000,
and by Josephus at 200,000. His son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, an equally
liberal and enlightened prince, collected great numbers of books in the
Temple of Serapis, in addition to those accumulated by his father, and
at his death left in it upwards of 100,000 volumes. He had agents in
every part of Asia and of Greece, commissioned to search out and
purchase the rarest and most valuable writings; and among those he
procured were the works of Aristotle, and the Septuagint version of