ent soon discovers that half of the hundred
are out of print, or locked up in costly editions. Fifty pounds would not
purchase the volumes recommended. But it would not be impossible to
produce a library containing these very books, or a collection varied by
admitting some books more pertinent to our present wants, for fifty
shillings, to be paid over a period of three or four years--an expenditure
which would be burthensome to few Irishmen accustomed to read.

How are the good books to be circulated effectually? I have always
insisted, and I do now emphatically insist that if this thing is to be
well done the young men of Irish birth at home and abroad must regard it
as their work, and be determined it shall succeed. They must supply
canvassers in every centre of Irish feeling in Ireland, England, Scotland,
America, and Australia. And where the young men are still struggling for a
foothold in the world, the work ought not to be made burthensome to them,
but reproductive. There exists in America a system of canvassing agents by
which books are brought to the remotest farmhouses, and the canvassers
paid a reasonable compensation. Ought we not to imitate this method in our
enterprise?

It will be our duty to see that the literary labourers also shall be
fairly paid, for they are commonly neither a sordid nor even a provident
race. It will be a labour of love to them to feed the mind of their
country, as it has been a labour of love to the men of their class
everywhere. Who can read without a glow of sympathy how the struggling
Scotch farmer and exciseman who gave immortal songs to Scotland, refused
pecuniary reward for a work which he desired to be one of pure
patriotism; or how the indigent French poet, living contentedly in an
humble Pension in the Champs Elysees, on an annuity from his publisher,
declined a seat in the Chamber of Deputies from the Republic which he had
done so much to make possible, and still more emphatically declined all
aid or recognition from the Bonaparte family, to whose cause he had
recalled the French nation by splendid but too indiscriminate panegyrics
on its founder; or how our own national poet, who alone in modern times is
fit to be named with the other two as a writer of songs that will live for
ever, rejected in turn a national tribute, a seat in Parliament, and the
assistance of opulent friends under unexpected calamity--Moore, like Burns
and Beranger, being determined that the purity of