sar and Omar at Alexandria, or General Ulrich at Strasburg (in
1870), esteeming it among the first duties of his barbarous
calling to consign ideas and arts to destruction.

But these are the fires of indiscriminate rage, due to the
natural antagonism between civilisation and military barbarism;
it is fire, discriminately applied, that attaches a special
interest and value to books condemned to it. Whether the sentence
has come from Pope or Archbishop, Parliament or King, the book so
sentenced has a claim on our curiosity, and as often on our
respect as our disdain. Fire, indeed, has been spoken of as the
blue ribbon of literature, and many a modern author may fairly
regret that such a distinction is no longer attainable in these
days of enlightened advertisement.

To collect books that have been dishonoured--or honoured--in this
way, books that at the risk of heavy punishment have been saved
from the public fire or the common hangman, is no mean amusement
for a bibliophile. Some collect books for their bindings, some
for their rarity, a minority for their contents; but he who
collects a fire-library makes all these considerations secondary
to the associations of his books with the lives of their authors
and their place in the history of ideas. Perhaps he is thereby
the more rational collector, if reason at all need be considered
in the matter; for if my whim pleases myself, let him go hang who
disdains or disapproves of it.

All the books of such a library are not, of course, suitable for
general reading, there being not a few disgraceful ones among
them that fully deserved the stigma intended for them. But most
are innocent enough, and many of them as dull as the authors of
their condemnation; whilst others, again, are so sparkling and
well written that I wish it were possible to rescue them from the
oblivion that enshrouds them even more thickly than the dust of
centuries. The English books of this sort naturally stand apart
from their foreign rivals, and may be roughly classified
according as they deal with the affairs of State or Church. The
original flavour has gone from many of them, like the scent from
dried flowers, with the dispute or ephemeral motive that gave
rise to them; but a new flavour from that very fact has taken the
place of the old, of the same sort that attaches to the relics of
extinct religions or of bygone forms of life.

The history of our country since the days of printing is exactly
re