neration, and then superseded? Even apart
from the question of the cost of purchase, the amount of space
available is small, considering modern needs. These problems and such
as these have not yet been solved by college librarians; but the
college library, quite apart from the books in it, is an education in
itself. The old days of neglect are past, the days reflected in the
scandalous story--told of more than one college--about the old fellow
who was missing for two months, and, after being searched for high
and low, was found hanging dead in the college library. Now the
libraries everywhere are being used continually, and men can realize
in them, perhaps better than anywhere else, how great the past of
Oxford has been, and can form some idea of the labours of forgotten
generations, which have made the University what it was and what it
is.

Every library has its treasures, to show the present generation how
beautiful an old book can be which was produced in days when its
production was not a mere publisher's speculation, but the work of a
scholar seeking to promote knowledge and advance the cause of Truth.
And it does not require much imagination for a student, in a building
like Merton Library, to conjure up the picture of his mediaeval
predecessor, sitting on his hard wooden bench, with his chained MSS.
volume on the shelf above, and poring over the crabbed pages in the
unwarmed, half-lighted chamber. If the picture brings with it the
thought of the transitoriness of human endeavour, and if the words of
the Teacher seem doubly true, "Of making of books there is no end,
and much study is a weariness of the flesh," yet in the fresh life of
young Oxford, such reflections are only salutary; pessimism, despair
of humanity, are not vices likely to flourish among undergraduates in
the healthy society of modern colleges.

Those only, it might be said, can properly reform the present who
understand the past, and it is perhaps the spirit of the Merton
Library, at once old and new, which has inspired the statesmen whom
Merton has sent to take part in the government of Britain during the
last half-century. Lord Randolph Churchill, the founder of Tory
democracy, his present-day successor in the same role, Lord
Birkenhead, and the ever young Lord Halsbury are men of the type
which Walter de Merton wished to train, "for the service of God in
Church and State," men who champion the existing order, but who are
willing to develop