e treasures of the French
libraries were certainly in terrible danger when Robespierre had before
him the draft of a decree, that "the books of the public libraries of
Paris and the departments should no longer be permitted to offend the
eyes of the republic by shameful marks of servitude." The word would
have gone forth, and a good deal beyond the mere marks of servitude
would have been doubtless destroyed, had not the emergency called forth
the courage and energies of Renouard and Didot.[59]

[Footnote 59: Edwards on Libraries, vol. ii. p. 272.]

There are probably false impressions abroad as to the susceptibility of
literature to destruction by fire. Books are not good fuel, as,
fortunately, many a housemaid has found, when, among other frantic
efforts and failures in fire-lighting, she has reasoned from the false
data of the inflammability of a piece of paper. In the days when
heretical books were burned, it was necessary to place them on large
wooden stages, and after all the pains taken to demolish them,
considerable readable masses were sometimes found in the embers; whence
it was supposed that the devil, conversant in fire and its effects, gave
them his special protection. In the end it was found easier and cheaper
to burn the heretics themselves than their books.

Thus books can be burned, but they don't burn, and though in great fires
libraries have been wholly or partially destroyed, we never hear of a
library making a great conflagration like a cotton mill or a tallow
warehouse. Nay, a story is told of a house seeming irretrievably on
fire, until the flames, coming in contact with the folio Corpus Juris
and the Statutes at Large, were quite unable to get over this joint
barrier, and sank defeated. When anything is said about the burning of
libraries, Alexandria at once flares up in the memory; but it is
strange how little of a satisfactory kind investigators have been able
to make out, either about the formation or destruction of the many
famous libraries collected from time to time in that city. There seems
little doubt that Caesar's auxiliaries unintentionally burnt one of them;
its contents were probably written on papyrus, a material about as
inflammable as dried reeds or wood-shavings. As to that other burning in
detail, when the collection was used for fuel to the baths, and lasted
some six weeks--surely never was there a greater victim of historical
prejudice and calumny than the "ignorant and fanat