dered to have done most and as
foremost in the work of educating the masses, he said that the
Germans had done most theoretically and in the way of thinking on
the philosophy of the matter, but that the Americans had done most
practically in the way of improving the material means for popular
education.

On the first and second floors the great national library, the
"Biblioteca Vittorio Emmanuele," is--or, it would perhaps be more
accurate to say, will be--placed and made accessible to the public.
At Florence there exists the celebrated Magliabecchian Library, which
when Florence became the capital of Italy was called the National
Library--somewhat ungratefully, it will probably be thought, to the
learned and indefatigable collector who gave his life and his means to
the formation of it, and then bequeathed it to his native city. And I
am inclined to believe that this library is still, for all the general
working purposes of a nineteenth-century student, the best in Italy.
In Rome, when the Eternal City in its turn became the capital of a
New Italy, there existed nothing that deserved to be called a national
library, and the present minister of Public Instruction set about
doing what was possible to supply the want. The Company of Jesus
possessed a fine and valuable library, containing about one hundred
and seventy thousand volumes. This, when the Jesuits were turned out,
was declared national property, and it forms the nucleus of the new
Victor Emmanuel Library. While the Jesuits inhabited their old home it
was arranged in one very fine hall built in the form of a cross,
which will continue to be one of the principal receptacles, in the
new establishment. It was in the middle of 1874 that the Italian
government took possession of this collection. To this have been added
forty-eight other libraries, the former property of the suppressed
convents of the city and provinces of Rome. They were placed for the
nonce in the cells which had been inhabited by the Jesuit fathers. The
mass of books thus collected amounts to about four hundred thousand
volumes. It will be seen at once that the labor of reducing to
order, classifying and arranging such a confused mass must be truly
herculean. But the first librarian of the Victor Emmanuel Library,
Signor Carlo Castellani, well known in the literary world as a
palaeographer of great eminence, is laboring at the colossal task with
an energy and a zeal that have already accomplished m