Stratton.
Opposite the entrance is a memorial window, its centre-pin representing
two female figures,--Knowledge and Prudence,--with the four great poets,
Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Chaucer, in the corners. On the east wall is a
portrait of Mr. Green by Madrazo, and on the west a tablet with an
inscription informing the visitor that, the library having received a
donation of fifty thousand dollars from the estate of John Cleve Green,
the trustees had placed the tablet as a memento of this munificence.
There are books in this alcove not to be duplicated in European
libraries. A work on Russian antiquities, for instance, containing
beautifully-colored lithographs of the Russian crown-jewels, royal
robes, ecclesiastical vestments, and the like, cannot be found, it is
said, either in Paris or London. The scope of the collection may be seen
by a glance at the catalogue, whose departments embrace architecture,
art-study, anatomy, biography, book-illustration, cathedrals and
churches, costumes, decorative, domestic, and industrial art, heraldry,
painting, and picturesque art.

It is a coincidence merely, but nearly all the great libraries of the
city are grouped within a block or two of Astor Place, making that short
thoroughfare the scholarly centre of the town. In its immediate
vicinity, on the corner of Second Avenue and Eleventh Street, stands the
fire-proof building of the New York Historical Society, whose library
and collection of paintings and relics form one of the features of the
city. This Society dates back to the year 1804, when Egbert Benson, De
Witt Clinton, Rev. William Linn, Rev. Samuel Miller, Rev. John N. Abeel,
Rev. John M. Mason, Dr. David Hosack, Anthony Bleecker, Samuel Bayard,
Peter G. Stuyvesant, and John Pintard, met by appointment at the City
Hall and agreed to form a society "the principal design of which should
be to collect and preserve whatever might relate to the natural, civil,
or ecclesiastical history of the United States in general and of the
State of New York in particular." Active measures were at once taken for
the formation of a library and museum, special committees being
appointed for the purpose. The range of the collection embraced books,
manuscripts, statistics, newspapers, pictures, antiquities, medals,
coins, and specimens in natural history. The Society made the usual
number of removals before being finally established as a householder.
From 1804 to 1809 it met in the old City Ha