RIANS AT PLAY

No man of feeling will grudge the librarians of the universe their
annual outing. Their pursuits are not indeed entirely sedentary, since
at times they have to climb tall ladders, but of exercise they must
always stand in need, and as for air, the exclusively bookish
atmosphere is as bad for the lungs as it is for the intellectuals. In
1897 the Second International Library Conference met in London,
attended several concerts, was entertained by the Marchioness of Bute
and Lady Lubbock; visited Lambeth Palace and Stafford and Apsley
Houses; witnessed a special performance of Irving's _Merchant of
Venice_; were elected honorary members of the City Liberal, Junior
Athaeneum, National Liberal, and Savage Clubs; and, generally
speaking, enjoyed themselves after the methods current during that
period. They also read forty-six papers, which now alone remain a
stately record of their proceedings.

I have lately spent a pleasant afternoon musing over these papers.
Their variety is endless, and the dispositions of mind displayed by
these librarians are wide as the poles asunder. Some of them babble
like babies, others are evidently austere scholars; some are gravely
bent on the best methods of classifying catalogues, economizing space,
and sorting borrowers' cards; others, scorning such mechanical
details, bid us regard libraries, and consequently librarians, as the
primary factors in human evolution. 'Where,' asks Mr. Ernest Cushing
Richardson, the librarian of Princetown University, New Jersey,
U.S.A., 'lies the germ of the library?' He answers his own question
after the following convincing fashion: 'At the point where a
definitely formed concept from another's mind is placed beside one's
own idea for integration, the result being a definite new form,
including the substance of both.' The pointsman who presides over this
junction is the librarian.

The young woman of whom Mr. Matthews, the well-known librarian of
Bristol, tells us, who, being a candidate for the post of assistant
librarian, boldly pronounced Rider Haggard to be the author of the
_Idylls of the King_, Southey of _The Mill on the Floss_, and Mark
Twain of _Modern Painters_, undoubtedly placed her own ideas at the
service of Bristol alongside the preconceived conceptions of Mr.
Matthews; but she was rejected all the same.

To speak seriously, who are librarians, and whence come they in such
numbers? Of Bodley's librarian we have heard, and al