ese masses, and such as these, ought to be selected first for
what I will not scruple to call interment. It is a burial; one, however,
to which the process of cremation will never of set purpose be applied.
The word I have used is dreadful, but also dreadful is the thing.
To have our dear old friends stowed away in catacombs, or like the
wine-bottles in bins: the simile is surely lawful until the use of that
commodity shall have been prohibited by the growing movement of the
time. But however we may gild the case by a cheering illustration, or by
the remembrance that the provision is one called for only by our excess
of wealth, it can hardly be contemplated without a shudder at a process
so repulsive applied to the best beloved among inanimate objects.

It may be thought that the gloomy perspective I am now opening exists
for great public libraries alone. But public libraries are multiplying
fast, and private libraries are aspiring to the public dimensions. It
may be hoped that for a long time to come no grave difficulties will
arise in regard to private libraries, meant for the ordinary use of that
great majority of readers who read only for recreation or for general
improvement. But when study, research, authorship, come into view, when
the history of thought and of inquiry in each of its branches, or in any
considerable number of them, has to be presented, the necessities of the
case are terribly widened. Chess is a specialty and a narrow one. But
I recollect a statement in the Quarterly Review, years back, that there
might be formed a library of twelve hundred volumes upon chess. I think
my deceased friend, Mr. Alfred Denison, collected between two and three
thousand upon angling. Of living Englishmen perhaps Lord Acton is the
most effective and retentive reader; and for his own purposes he has
gathered a library of not less, I believe, than 100,000 volumes.

Undoubtedly the idea of book-cemeteries such as I have supposed is very
formidable. It should be kept within the limits of the dire necessity
which has evoked it from the underworld into the haunts of living men.
But it will have to be faced, and faced perhaps oftener than might be
supposed. And the artist needed for the constructions it requires will
not be so much a librarian as a warehouseman.

But if we are to have cemeteries, they ought to receive as many bodies
as possible. The condemned will live ordinarily in pitch darkness, yet
so that when wanted, th