which had
arisen in free, natural, and symmetrical growth, insomuch as, having fed
it during his whole life, it began with the young and economic efforts
of youth and poverty, and went on accumulating in bulk and in the
costliness of its contents as succeeding years brought wealth and
honours to the great prelate. What those merchant princes, the Medici,
did for the Laurentian Library at Florence is part of history. Old
Cosmo, who had his mercantile and political correspondents in all lands,
made them also his literary agents, who thus sent him goods too precious
to be resold even at a profit. "He corresponded," says Gibbon, "at once
with Cairo and London, and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books were
often imported by the same vessel." The Bodleian started with a
collection which had cost Sir Thomas Bodley L10,000, and it was
augmented from time to time by the absorption of tributary influxes of
the same kind. Some far-seeing promoters of national museums have
reached the conclusion that it is not a sound ultimate policy to press
too closely on the private collector. He is therefore permitted, under a
certain amount of watchful inspection, to accumulate his small treasury
of antiquities, shells, or dried plants, in the prospect that in the
course of time it will find its way, like the feeding rills of a lake,
into the great public treasury.[55]

[Footnote 55: The most complete mass of information which we probably
possess in the English language about the history of libraries, both
home and foreign, is in the two octavos called Memoirs of Libraries,
including a Handbook of Library Concerns, by Edward Edwards.]

In many instances the collectors whose stores have thus gone to the
public, have merely followed their hunting propensities, without having
the merit of framing the ultimate destiny of their collections, but in
others the intention of doing benefit to the world has added zest and
energy to the chase. Of this class there is one memorable and beautiful
instance in Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, who lived and laboured so
early as the days of Edward III., and has left an autobiographical
sketch infinitely valuable, as at once informing us of the social
habits, and letting us into the very inner life, of the highly endowed
student and the affluent collector of the fourteenth century. His little
book, called Philobiblion, was brought to light from an older obscure
edition by the scholar printer Badius Ascensi