, and formed a resolve to decipher it. Through many baffling
delays, through many patient windings, he carried his purpose out; and
the result was a celebrated Day-book, which cast much light upon the
social conditions of a past age, as well as revealed one of the most
simple and genial personalities that ever marched blithely through the
pages of a Diary.

But, in these days of cheap print and nasty paper, with a central
library into which pours the annual cataract of literature, these
little ancient libraries have no use left, save as repositories or
store-rooms. They belong to the days when books were few and expensive;
when few persons could acquire a library of their own; when lecturers
accumulated knowledge that was not the property of the world; when
notes were laboriously copied and handed on; when one of the joys of
learning was the consciousness of possessing secrets not known to other
men. An ancient Dean of Christ Church is said to have given three
reasons for the study of Greek: the first was that it enabled you to
read the words of the Saviour in the original tongue; the second, that
it gave you a proper contempt for those who were ignorant of it; and
the third was that it led to situations of emolument. What a rich aroma
hangs about this judgment! The first reason is probably erroneous, the
second is un-Christian, and the third is a gross motive which would
equally apply to any professional training whatsoever.

Well, the knowledge of Greek, except for the schoolmaster and the
clergyman, has not now the same obvious commercial value. Knowledge is
more diffused, more accessible. It is no longer thought to be a secret,
precious, rather terrible possession; the possessor is no longer
venerated and revered; on the contrary, a learned man is rather
considered likely to be tiresome. Old folios have, indeed, become
merely the stock-in-trade of the illustrators of sensational novels.
Who does not know the absurd old man, with white silky hair, velvet
skull-cap, and venerable appearance, who sits reading a folio at an oak
table, and who turns out to be the villain of the piece, a mine of
secret and unsuccessful wickedness? But no one in real life reads a
folio now, because anything that is worth reprinting, as well as a good
deal that is not, is reprinted in convenient form, if not in England,
at least in Germany.

And the result of it is that these College libraries are almost wholly
unvisited. It seems a pity