able attention and
zealous activity.

Sometimes mistakes have been made in selections on this principle, and a
zeal has been embarked which has been found to tend neither to profit
nor edification; for there have been known, at the head of public
libraries, men of the Cerberus kind, who loved the books so dearly as to
be unable to endure the handling of them by the vulgar herd of readers
and searchers--even by those for whose special aid and service they are
employed. They who have this morbid terror of the profanation of the
treasures committed to their charge suffer in themselves the direst
torments--something like those of a cat beholding her kittens tossed by
a dog--whenever their favourites are handled; and the excruciating
extent of their agonies, when any ardent and careless student dashes
right into the heart of some _editio princeps_ or tall copy, or perhaps
lays it open with its face on the table while he snatches another
edition that he may collate a passage, is not to be conceived. It is
then the dog _worrying_ the kittens. Such men will only give
satisfaction in great private libraries little disturbed by their
proprietors, or in monastic or other corporate institutions, where it
is the worthy object of the patrons to keep their collection in fine
condition, and, at the same time, to take order that it shall be of the
least possible service to education or literature. Angelo Mai, the great
librarian of the Vatican, who made so many valuable discoveries himself,
had the character of taking good care that no one else should make any
within his own strictly preserved hunting grounds.

In the general case, however, a bibliophile at the head of a public
library is genial and communicative, and has a pleasure in helping the
investigator through the labyrinth of its stores. Such men feel their
strength; and the immense value of the service which they may sometimes
perform by a brief hint in the right direction which the inquiry should
take, or by handing down a volume, or recommending the best directory to
all the learning on the matter in hand, has laid many men of letters
under great obligations to them.

The most eminent type of this class of men was Magliabecchi, librarian
to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, who could direct you to any book in any
part of the world, with the precision with which the metropolitan
policeman directs you to St Paul's or Piccadilly. It is of him that the
stories are told of answers to