ining-rooms. Procure then as
many books as will suffice for use; but not a single one
for show. You will reply: "Outlay on such objects is
preferable to extravagance on plate or paintings."
Excess in all directions is bad. Why should you excuse a
man who wishes to possess book-presses inlaid with
_arbor-vitae_ wood or ivory: who gathers together masses
of authors either unknown or discredited; who yawns
among his thousands of books; and who derives his chief
delight from their edges and their tickets?

You will find then in the libraries of the most arrant
idlers all that orators or historians have
written--book-cases built up as high as the ceiling.
Nowadays a library takes rank with a bathroom as a
necessary ornament of a house. I could forgive such
ideas, if they were due to extravagant desire for
learning. As it is, these productions of men whose
genius we revere, paid for at a high price, with their
portraits ranged in line above them, are got together to
adorn and beautify a wall[51].

A library was discovered in Rome by Signor Lanciani in 1883 while
excavating a house of the 4th century on the Esquiline in the modern Via
dello Statuto. I will narrate the discovery in his own words.

I was struck, one afternoon, with the appearance of a
rather spacious hall [it was about 23 feet long by 15
feet broad], the walls of which were plain and
unornamented up to a certain height, but beautifully
decorated above in stucco-work. The decoration consisted
of fluted pilasters, five feet apart from centre to
centre, enclosing a plain square surface, in the middle
of which there were medallions, also in stucco-work, two
feet in diameter. As always happens in these cases, the
frame was the only well-preserved portion of the
medallions. Of the images surrounded by the frames, of
the medallions themselves, absolutely nothing was left
_in situ_, except a few fragments piled up at the foot
of the wall, which, however, could be identified as
having been representations of human faces. My hope
that, at last, after fifteen years of excavations, I had
succeeded in discovering a library, was confirmed beyond
any doubt by a legend, written, or rather painted, in
bright red colour on one of the frames. There was but
one name POLONIVS THYAN ..., but this name told more
plainl