ore scurrilous than are suffered to run riot in books?
There is to be found hidden away in the pages of some books such filth as
no man would dare to print in a newspaper, from fear of the instant wrath
of the passers-by.

When I consider the debt which libraries and literature alike owe to the
daily and weekly press, it is difficult to characterize with patience the
Parthian arrow flung at it from the grave of a querulous millionaire, who
will owe to these very newspapers the greater part of his success and his
reputation. The father of the respectable testator, Doctor Benjamin Rush,
has left on record many learned speculations concerning the signs and
evidences of lunacy. We may now add to the number the vagaries of the
author of a ponderous work on the human intellect, who gravely proposed
to hand over to posterity an expurgated copy of the nineteenth century,
with all its newspapers left out.

The Library of Congress, or, as it was called in its first general
catalogue in 1815, "The Library of the United States," was founded in
1800, by the purchase of five thousand dollars' worth of books by act of
Congress, upon the removal of the government to Washington. By the act of
January 26, 1802, entitled "An act concerning the Library for the use of
both Houses of Congress," this library was placed in charge of a joint
committee of both Houses of Congress, consisting of three Senators and
three Representatives, and a Librarian, to be appointed by the President
of the United States. It had grown to the number of only 3,000 volumes in
1814, when the British army made a bonfire of our national Capitol, and
the library was consumed in the ruins. The first library of Congress
being thus destroyed, ex-President Jefferson, then living, involved in
debt, and in his old age, at Monticello, offered his fine private library
of 6,700 volumes to Congress, through friends in that body, the terms of
payment to be made convenient to the public, and the price to be fixed by
a committee. The proposition met with able advocacy and also with some
warm opposition. It is illustrative of the crude conceptions regarding
the uses of books which prevailed in the minds of some members, that the
library was objected to on the somewhat incongruous grounds of embracing
too many editions of the Bible, and a number of the French writers in
skeptical philosophy. It was gravely proposed to pack up this portion of
the library, and return it to the illustri