on Trade by Roger North, the author of the amusing Lives of
Lord-Keeper Guildford and his other two brothers, was lately reprinted
from a copy in the British Museum, supposed to be the only one existing.
Though neglected in its own day, it has been considered worthy of
attention in this, as promulgating some of the principles of our
existing philosophy of trade. On the same principle, some rare tracts on
political economy and trade were lately reprinted by a munificent
nobleman, who thought the doctrines contained in them worthy of
preservation and promulgation. The Spirit of Despotism, by Vicesimus
Knox, was reprinted, at a time when its doctrines were popular, from a
single remaining copy: the book, though instructive, is violent and
declamatory, and it is supposed that its author discouraged or
endeavoured to suppress its sale after it was printed.

In the public duty of creating great libraries, and generally of
preserving the literature of the world from being lost to it, the
collector's or book-hunter's services are eminent and numerous. In the
first place, many of the great public libraries have been absolute
donations of the treasures to which some enthusiastic literary sportsman
has devoted his life and fortune. Its gradual accumulation has been the
great solace and enjoyment of his active days; he has beheld it, in his
old age, a splendid monument of enlightened exertion, and he resolves
that, when he can no longer call it his own, it shall preserve the
relics of past literature for ages yet to come, and form a centre whence
scholarship and intellectual refinement shall diffuse themselves around.
We can see this influence in its most specific and material shape,
perhaps, by looking round the reading-room of the British Museum--that
great manufactory of intellectual produce, where so many heads are at
work. The beginning of this great institution, as everybody knows, was
in the fifty thousand volumes collected by Sir Hans Sloane--a wonderful
achievement for a private gentleman at the beginning of the last
century. When George III. gave it the libraries of the kings of England,
it gained, as it were, a better start still by absorbing collections
which had begun before Sloane was born--those of Cranmer, Prince Henry,
and Casaubon. The Ambrosian Library at Milan was the private collection
of Cardinal Borromeo, bequeathed by him to the world. It reached forty
thousand volumes ere he died, and these formed a library