his devotion to his
country should run no risk of being misunderstood?

Wherever there is an Irish bookseller, at home or in the two new worlds,
who has taken an intelligent, not merely a sordid interest in his
business, he is the natural agent of this design; and in the many
districts where there is no bookseller at present a _quasi_ bookseller
might be created. If the popular journals in Dublin encourage their agents
to act on behalf of the enterprize, a solid body of retail dealers would
be at once available. I have spoken only of Irish readers, our duty begins
with them, but it does not end with them. Ireland has many friends in
England, and good books have friends everywhere. The volumes of such a
Library ought to be found on the bookstalls from Liverpool to Edinburgh,
they ought to be proffered to the passengers by the great transatlantic
routes, and to the eager crowd of purchasers who throng the book arcades
of Melbourne and Sydney. Can all this be done? Who will be our Minister of
Public Instruction, to organise it and set it in motion? If there be such
a one, I think I see here many who will be his willing associates and
assistants. For one old man who can only hope to see the good work fairly
begun, I can promise that whatever he can do with his moderate resources
to help it in money, or with his waning powers to help it with cordial
co-operation, shall not be wanting.

If we can revive the love of noble books among our people, that is a
result which standing alone is worth striving for. To love noble books is
to share with statesmen and philosophers the pleasure on which they set
the highest price. Time has made trite and commonplace the great saying of
Fenelon, "If the crowns of Europe were laid at my feet in exchange for
books and the love of reading, I would spurn them all." Our own Goldsmith
declares that taking up a new book worth reading is like making a new
friend; a friend from whom we will never be separated by any of the
melancholy mischances on which human friendships are so often wrecked. But
good books will do more than this--they will awaken all that is best in
our nature, and teach us to live worthier lives. They will do for us what
we rarely permit the closest friend to do--they will teach us our faults
and how to amend them. What they might do, not for the individual, but for
the nation, I dare not predict--the possibilities are so prodigious. One
of the keenest intellects of the eighteenth