four hundred
years: in that small space of time the public mind of Europe has been
created.

Of LIBRARIES, the following anecdotes seem most interesting, as they
mark either the affection, or the veneration, which civilised men have
ever felt for these perennial repositories of their minds. The first
national library founded in Egypt seemed to have been placed under the
protection of the divinities, for their statues magnificently adorned
this temple, dedicated at once to religion and to literature. It was
still further embellished by a well-known inscription, for ever grateful
to the votary of literature; on the front was engraven,--"The
nourishment of the soul;" or, according to Diodorus, "The medicine of
the mind."

The Egyptian Ptolemies founded the vast library of Alexandria, which was
afterwards the emulative labour of rival monarchs; the founder infused a
soul into the vast body he was creating, by his choice of the librarian,
Demetrius Phalereus, whose skilful industry amassed from all nations
their choicest productions. Without such a librarian, a national library
would be little more than a literary chaos; his well exercised memory
and critical judgment are its best catalogue. One of the Ptolemies
refused supplying the famished Athenians with wheat, until they
presented him with the original manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides; and in returning copies of these autographs, he allowed them
to retain the fifteen talents which he had pledged with them as a
princely security.

When tyrants, or usurpers, have possessed sense as well as courage, they
have proved the most ardent patrons of literature; they know it is their
interest to turn aside the public mind from political speculations, and
to afford their subjects the inexhaustible occupations of curiosity, and
the consoling pleasures of the imagination. Thus Pisistratus is said to
have been among the earliest of the Greeks, who projected an immense
collection of the works of the learned, and is supposed to have been the
collector of the scattered works, which passed under the name of Homer.

The Romans, after six centuries of gradual dominion, must have possessed
the vast and diversified collections of the writings of the nations they
conquered: among the most valued spoils of their victories, we know that
manuscripts were considered as more precious than vases of gold. Paulus
Emilius, after the defeat of Perseus, king of Macedon, brought to R