pear
to you the more valuable, or the more liable to be called for; catalogue
and bind them, or file them away, according to the use which they are
likely to have: relegate the rest, assorted always by subject-matters or
classes, to marked piles, or to pamphlet cases, according to your means;
and the problem is approximately solved.

To condemn any pamphlet to "innocuous desuetude," or to permanent
banishment from among the intellectual stores of a library, merely
because it is innocent of a stiff cover, is to despoil the temple of
learning and reject the good things of Providence. What great and
influential publications have appeared in the world in the guise of
pamphlets! Milton's immortal "Areopagitica, or Plea for Unlicenced
Printing," was a pamphlet of only forty pages; Webster's speech for the
Union, in reply to Hayne, was a pamphlet; every play of Shakespeare, that
was printed in his life-time, was a pamphlet; Charles Sumner's discourse
on "The True Grandeur of Nations" was a pamphlet; the "Crisis" and
"Common Sense" of Thomas Paine, which fired the American heart in the
Revolution, were pamphlets. Strike out of literature, ancient and modern,
what was first published in pamphlets, and you would leave it the poorer
and weaker to an incalculable degree.

Pamphlets are not only vehicles of thought and opinion, and propagandists
of new ideas; they are often also store-houses of facts, repositories of
history, annals of biography, records of genealogy, treasuries of
statistics, chronicles of invention and discovery. They sometimes throw
an unexpected light upon obscure questions where all books are silent.
Being published for the most part upon some subject that was interesting
the public mind when written, they reflect, as in a mirror, the social,
political, and religious spirit and life of the time. As much as
newspapers, they illustrate the civilization (or want of it) of an epoch,
and multitudes of them, preserved in great libraries, exhibit this at
those early periods when no newspapers existed as vehicles of public
opinion. Many of the government libraries of Europe have been buying up
for many years past, the rare, early-printed pamphlets of their
respective countries, paying enormous prices for what, a century ago,
they would have slighted, even as a gift.

When Thomas Carlyle undertook to write the life of Oliver Cromwell, and
to resurrect from the dust-bins of two centuries, the letters and
speeches of t