Marshal Saxe, bearing at the end that he had composed this work in
thirteen nights during a fever, and completed it in December 1733; a
fine copy of the Koran, taken from a Turk by a Saxon officer at the last
siege of Vienna, and said to have formerly belonged to Bajazet II.; and
a Greek manuscript of the Epistles of St. Paul of the eleventh century.
An extensive collection of antiquities is preserved in twelve apartments
under the library, below which are eighteen vaulted cellars, stored with
a vast quantity of valuable porcelain, partly of foreign and partly of
Dresden manufacture.

14. _Royal Library, Berlin._--This collection includes works upon almost
all the sciences, and in nearly all languages. Among the manuscripts are
several Egyptian deeds, written on papyrus, in the demotic or enchorial
character. These are very curious, and _fac similes_ of some of them
have been published by Professor Kosegarten in his valuable work on the
"Ancient Literature of the Egyptians."

15. _University Library, Leyden._--This library was founded by William
I., Prince of Orange, and is justly celebrated throughout Europe for the
many valuable specimens of Greek and Oriental literature with which it
abounds. To it Joseph Scaliger bequeathed his fine collection of Hebrew
books; and it was further enriched by the learned Golius, on his return
from the East, with many Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Chaldaic
manuscripts. In addition to these it received the collections of
Holmanns, and particularly those of Isaac Vossius and Ruhuken--the
former containing a number of valuable manuscripts, supposed to have
once belonged to Christina, queen of Sweden; and the latter an almost
entire series of classical authors, with a collection of manuscripts,
perhaps unique, amongst which are copies of several that were consumed
by fire in the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres.

16. _Imperial Library, St. Petersburg._--Russia is indebted for this
splendid collection to an act of robbery and spoliation. In 1795, when
Russia triumphed over the independence of Poland, the victorious
general, Suwaroff, unceremoniously seized the Zaluski Library, of nearly
300,000 volumes, had it packed up in all haste and dispatched to St.
Petersburg. There it formed the basis of the present Imperial Library,
which, but for that stolen collection, instead of now ranking in the
first class of European libraries, would scarcely have been entitled to
a place in the third.

17.