at it is the very form in which some great ruling intellect,
resuscitated from long interment, burst upon the dazzled eyes of Europe
and displayed the fulness of its face?

His Achievements in the Creation of Libraries.

So much, then, for the benefit which the class to whom these pages are
devoted derive to themselves from their peculiar pursuit. Let us now
turn to the far more remarkable phenomena, in which these separate and
perhaps selfish pursuers of their own instincts and objects are found to
concur in bringing out a great influence upon the intellectual destinies
of mankind. It is said of Brindley, the great canal engineer,
that,--when a member of a committee, where he was under examination, a
little provoked or amused by his entire devotion to canals, asked him if
he thought there was any use of rivers,--he promptly answered, "Yes, to
feed navigable canals." So, if there be no other respectable function in
life fulfilled by the book-hunter, I would stand up for the proposition
that he is the feeder, provided by nature, for the preservation of
literature from age to age, by the accumulation and preservation of
libraries, public or private. It will require perhaps a little
circumlocutory exposition to show this, but here it is.

A great library cannot be constructed--it is the growth of ages. You may
buy books at any time with money, but you cannot make a library like one
that has been a century or two a-growing, though you had the whole
national debt to do it with. I remember once how an extensive publisher,
speaking of the rapid strides which literature had made of late years,
and referring to a certain old public library, celebrated for its
affluence in the fathers, the civilians, and the medieval chroniclers,
stated how he had himself freighted for exportation, within the past
month, as many books as that whole library consisted of. This was likely
enough to be true, but the two collections were very different from each
other. The cargoes of books were probably thousands of copies of some
few popular selling works. They might be a powerful illustration of the
diffusion of knowledge, but what they were compared with was its
concentration. Had all the paper of which these cargoes consisted been
bank-notes, they would not have enabled their owner to create a
duplicate of the old library, rich in the fathers, the civilians, and
the medieval chroniclers.

This impossibility of improvising libraries is r