nd the
copies for the King at Babylon, and we have heard of the rolls of
Ecbatana. All the world knows how Nehemiah 'founded a library,' and how
the brave Maccabaeus gathered again what had been lost by reason of the
wars. Every desert in the East seems to have held a library, where the
pillars of some temple lie in the sand, and where dead men 'hang their
mute thoughts on the mute walls around.' The Egyptian traveller sees the
site of the book-room of Rameses that was called the 'Hospital for the
Soul.' There was a library at the breast of the Sphinx, and another where
Cairo stands, and one at Alexandria that was burned in Julius Caesar's
siege, besides the later assemblage in the House of Serapis which Omar
was said to have sacrificed as a tribute of respect for the Koran.

Asia Minor was celebrated for her libraries. There were 'many curious
books' in Ephesus, and rich stores of books at Antioch on the Orontes,
and where the gray-capped students 'chattered like water-fowl' by the
river at Tarsus. In Pergamus they made the fine parchment like ivory,
beloved, as an enemy has said, by 'yellow bibliomaniacs whose skins take
the colour of their food'; and there the wealthy race of Attalus built up
the royal collection which Antony captured in war and sent as a gift to
Cleopatra.

It pleased the Greeks to invent traditions about the books of Polycrates
at Samos, or those of Pisistratus that were counted among the spoils of
Xerxes: and the Athenians thought that the very same volumes found their
way home again after the victories of Alexander the Great. Aristotle
owned the first private library of which anything is actually recorded;
and it is still a matter of interest to follow the fortunes of his books.
He left them as a legacy to a pupil, who bequeathed them to his librarian
Neleus: and his family long preserved the collection in their home near
the ruins of Troy. One portion was bought by the Ptolemies for their
great Alexandrian library, and these books, we suppose, must have
perished in the war with Rome. The rest remained at home till there was
some fear of their being confiscated and carried to Pergamus. They were
removed in haste and stowed away in a cave, where they nearly perished in
the damp. When the parchments were disinterred they became the property
of Apellicon, to whom the saying was first applied that he was 'rather a
bibliophile than a lover of learning.' While the collection was at Athens
he did much