ing or other turning up for
him, so long as he keeps within moderate bounds. If he be rich and
ravenous, however, there is nothing for it but duplicating--the most
virulent form of book-mania. We have seen that Heber, whose collection,
made during his own lifetime, was on the scale of those public libraries
which take generations to grow, had, with all his wealth, his
liberality, and his persevering energy, to invest himself with
duplicates, triplicates--often many copies of the same book.

It is rare that the private collector runs himself absolutely into this
quagmire, and has so far exhausted the market that no already
unpossessed volume turns up in any part of the world to court his eager
embraces. The limitation constitutes, however, a serious difficulty in
the way of rapidly creating great public libraries. We would obtain the
best testimony to this difficulty in America, were our brethren there in
a condition to speak or think of so peaceful a pursuit as
library-making. In the normal condition of society there--something
like that of Holland in the seventeenth century--there are powerful
elements for the promotion of art and letters, when wealth gives the
means and civilisation the desire to promote them. The very absence of
feudal institutions--the inability to found a baronial house--turns the
thoughts of the rich and liberal to other foundations calculated to
transmit their name and influence to posterity. And so we have such
bequests as John Jacob Astor's, who left four hundred thousand dollars
for a library, and the hundred and eighty thousand which were the
nucleus of the Smithsonian Institution. Yes! Their efforts in this
direction have fully earned for them their own peculiar form of
laudation as "actually equal to cash." Hence, as the book-trade and
book-buyers know very well, the "almighty dollar" has been hard at work,
trying to rear up by its sheer force duplicates of the old European
libraries, containing not only all the ordinary stock books in the
market, but also the rarities, and those individualities--solitary
remaining copies of impressions--which the initiated call uniques. It is
clear, however, that when there is but one copy, it can only be in one
place; and if it have been rooted for centuries in the Bodleian, or the
University of Tubingen, it is not to be had for Harvard or the Astorian.
Dr Cogswell, the first librarian of the Astorian, spent some time in
Europe with his princely endowment