the handwriting of Pico
of Mirandula. We may see a copy of Marshal Strozzi's will, discussing his
plans of suicide, a history of the city composed and written out by
Machiavelli, and a large and interesting series of Poggio's literary
correspondence. The most celebrated of the librarians was Giovanni Lami,
who in the last century kept up with such spirit a somewhat dangerous
controversy with the Jesuits; but his monument at Santa Croce may have
been owed less to his triumphs in argument than to his passionate
devotion to books. His life was spent among them, and he died with a
manuscript in his arms; and his memory is still preserved in Florence by
the Greek collection with which he endowed the University.

The Abbe Marucelli left his name to another Florentine library. He was a
philanthropist as well as a bibliophile; and he gave the huge assemblage
of books which he had gathered at Rome to the use of the students in the
home of his boyhood. He wrote much, but was almost too modest to publish
or preserve his works. Perhaps the most interesting portion of his gift
consisted of a series of about a hundred large folios in which, like the
Patriarch Photius, he had written in the form of notes the results of the
reading of a life-time.

[Illustration: ANTONIO MAGLIABECCHI.]

The Magliabecchian Library maintains the remembrance of a portent in
literature. Antonio Magliabecchi, the jeweller's shop-boy, became
renowned throughout the world for his abnormal knowledge of books. He
never at any time left Florence; but he read every catalogue that was
issued, and was in correspondence with all the collectors and librarians
of Europe. He was blessed with a prodigious memory, and knew all the
contents of a book by 'hunting it with his finger,' or once turning over
the pages. He was believed, moreover, to know the habitat of all the rare
books in the world; and according to the well-known anecdote he replied
to the Grand Duke, who asked for a particular volume: 'The only copy of
this work is at Constantinople, in the Sultan's library, the seventh
volume in the second book-case, on the right as you go in.' He has been
despised as 'a man who lived on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow
was a folio.' Dibdin declared that Magliabecchi's existence was confined
to 'the parade and pacing of a library'; but, as a matter of fact, the
old bibliomaniac lived in a kind of cave made of piles and masses of
books, with hardly any room for h