ical" Caliph Omar al
Raschid. Over and over has this act been disproved, and yet it will
continue to be reasserted with uniform pertinacity in successive rolling
sentences, all as like each other as the successive billows in a swell
at sea.[60]

[Footnote 60: One of the latest inquirers who has gone over the ground
concludes his evidence thus: "Omar ne vint pas a Alexandrie; et s'il y
fut venu, il n'eut pas trouve des livres a bruler. La bibliotheque
n'existait plus depuis deux siecles et demi."--Fournier, L'Esprit dans
l'Histoire. What shall we say to the story told by Zonaras and repeated
by Pancirole, of the burning, in the reign of the Emperor Basilisc, of
the library of Constantinople, containing one hundred and twenty
thousand volumes, and among them a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
written in golden letters on parchment made from the intestines of the
dragon?]

Apart, however, from violence and accident, there is a constant decay of
books from what might be called natural causes, keeping, like the decay
of the human race, a proportion to their reproduction, which varies
according to place or circumstance; here showing a rapid increase where
production outruns decay, and there a decrease where the morbid elements
of annihilation are stronger than the active elements of reproduction.
Indeed, volumes are in their varied external conditions very like human
beings. There are some stout and others frail--some healthy and others
sickly; and it happens often that the least robust are the most
precious. The full fresh health of some of the folio fathers and
schoolmen, ranged side by side in solemn state on the oaken shelves of
some venerable repository, is apt to surprise those who expect mouldy
decay; the stiff hard binding is as angular as ever,--there is no
abrasion of the leaves, not a single dog-ear or a spot, or even a
dust-border on the mellowed white of the margin. So, too, of those
quarto civilians and canonists of Leyden and Amsterdam, with their
smooth white vellum coats, bearing so generic a resemblance to Dutch
cheeses, that they might be supposed to represent the experiments of
some Gouda dairyman on the quadrature of the circle. An easy life and an
established position in society are the secret of their excellent
preservation and condition. Their repose has been little disturbed by
intrusive readers or unceremonious investigators, and their repute for
solid learning has given them a claim to attention