f, on the other hand, a library be regarded as a Museum--and I use the
word in its original sense as a temple or haunt of the Muses--very
different ideas are evoked. Such a place is as useful as the other--every
facility for study is given--but what I may call the personal element as
affecting the treasures there assembled is brought prominently forward.
The development of printing, as the result of individual effort; the art
of bookbinding, as practised by different persons in different countries;
the history of the books themselves, the libraries in which they have
found a home, the hands that have turned their pages, are there taken
note of. Modern literature is fully represented, but the men of past days
are not thrust out of sight; their footsteps seem to linger in the rooms
where once they walked--their shades seem to protect the books they once
handled. What Browning felt about frescoes may be applied--_mutatis
mutandis_--to books in such an asylum as I am trying to portray:

Wherever a fresco peels and drops,
Wherever an outline weakens and wanes
Till the latest life in the painting stops,
Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains:
One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick,
Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,
A lion who dies of an ass's kick,
The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.

It may be safely asserted that at no time has a love of reading, a desire
to be fairly well-informed on all sorts of subjects, been so widely
diffused as at the present day. As a necessary consequence of this the
'workshop' view of a library has been very generally accepted. I have no
wish to undervalue it; I only plead for the recognition of another
sentiment which may at times be overlaid by the pressure of daily
avocations. In Cambridge, at least, there is no fear that it should ever
be obliterated altogether, for we have effected a happy alliance between
the present and the past, by which neither is neglected, neither is unduly
prominent. This being the case, it has occurred to me that I may be so
fortunate as to interest a Cambridge audience while I set before them some
of the results at which I have arrived in investigating the position, the
arrangement, and the fittings of libraries in the medieval and renaissance
periods. It will, of course, be impossible to attempt more than a sketch
of so extensive a subject, and I fear that I must omit the contents of the
bookc