wealth of England in these precious estates. Mr. Edwards, whom I have
already quoted, mentions Charles the Fifth of France, in 1365, as a
collector of manuscripts. But some ten years back the Director of the
Bibliotheque Nationale informed me that the French King John collected
twelve hundred manuscripts, at that time an enormous library, out of
which several scores were among the treasures in his care. Mary of
Medicis appears to have amassed in the sixteenth century, probably with
far less effort, 5,800 volumes.[9] Oxford had before that time received
noble gifts for her University Library. And we have to recollect with
shame and indignation that that institution was plundered and destroyed
by the Commissioners of the boy King Edward the Sixth, acting in the
name of the Reformation of Religion. Thus it happened that opportunity
was left to a private individual, the munificent Sir Thomas Bodley, to
attach an individual name to one of the famous libraries of the world.
It is interesting to learn that municipal bodies have a share in the
honor due to monasteries and sovereigns in the collection of books;
for the Common Council of Aix purchased books for a public library in
1419.[10]

Louis the Fourteenth, of evil memory, has at least this one good deed
to his credit, that he raised the Royal Library at Paris, founded two
centuries before, to 70,000 volumes. In 1791 it had 150,000 volumes. It
profited largely by the Revolution. The British Museum had only reached
115,000 when Panizzi became keeper in 1837. Nineteen years afterward he
left it with 560,000, a number which must now have more than doubled.
By his noble design for occupying the central quadrangle, a desert
of gravel until his time, he provided additional room for 1,200,000
volumes. All this apparently enormous space for development is being
eaten up with fearful rapidity; and such is the greed of the splendid
library that it opens its jaws like Hades, and threatens shortly to
expel the antiquities from the building, and appropriate the places they
adorn.

But the proper office of hasty retrospect in a paper like this is
only to enlarge by degrees, like the pupil of an eye, the reader's
contemplation and estimate of the coming time, and to prepare him for
some practical suggestions of a very humble kind. So I take up again the
thread of my brief discourse. National libraries draw upon a purse which
is bottomless. But all public libraries are not national. And