individual, they are first
and foremost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race,
onward from that time when they were first written on the tablets of
Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia minor, and the monuments of
Egypt, down to the diamond editions of Mr. Pickering and Mr. Frowde.[6]

It is in truth difficult to assign dimensions for the libraries of the
future. And it is also a little touching to look back upon those of the
past. As the history of bodies cannot, in the long run, be separated
from the history of souls, I make no apology for saying a few words on
the libraries which once were, but which have passed away.

The time may be approaching when we shall be able to estimate the
quantity of book knowledge stored in the repositories of those empires
which we call prehistoric. For the present, no clear estimate even of
the great Alexandrian Libraries has been brought within the circle
of popular knowledge; but it seems pretty clear that the books they
contained were reckoned, at least in the aggregate, by hundreds of
thousands.[7] The form of the book, however, has gone through many
variations; and we moderns have a great advantage in the shape which the
exterior has now taken. It speaks to us symbolically by the title on its
back, as the roll of parchment could hardly do. It is established that
in Roman times the bad institution of slavery ministered to a system
under which books were multiplied by simultaneous copying in a room
where a single person read aloud in the hearing of many the volume to
be reproduced, and that so produced they were relatively cheap. Had they
not been so, they would hardly have been, as Horace represents them,
among the habitual spoils of the grocer.[8] It is sad, and is suggestive
of many inquiries, that this abundance was followed, at least in the
West, by a famine of more than a thousand years. And it is hard, even
after all allowances, to conceive that of all the many manuscripts
of Homer which Italy must have possessed we do not know that a single
parchment or papyrus was ever read by a single individual, even in a
convent, or even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas Acquinas, the
first of them unquestionably master of all the knowledge that was within
the compass of his age. There were, however, libraries even in the West,
formed by Charlemagne and by others after him. We are told that Alcuin,
in writing to the great monarch, spoke with longing of the relative