rot were
the perpetual favourites of La Fontaine; from one he borrowed his
humour, and from the other his style. Quevedo was so passionately fond
of the Don Quixote of Cervantes, that often in reading that unrivalled
work he felt an impulse to burn his own inferior compositions: to be a
sincere admirer and a hopeless rival is a case of authorship the hardest
imaginable. Few writers can venture to anticipate the award of
posterity; yet perhaps Quevedo had not even been what he was without the
perpetual excitement he received from his great master. Horace was the
friend of his heart to Malherbe; he laid the Roman poet on his pillow,
took him in the fields, and called his Horace his breviary. Plutarch,
Montaigne, and Locke, were the three authors constantly in the hands of
Rousseau, and he has drawn from them the groundwork of his ideas in his
Emile. The favourite author of the great Earl of Chatham was Barrow; and
on his style he had formed his eloquence, and had read his great master
so constantly, as to be able to repeat his elaborate sermons from
memory. The great Lord Burleigh always carried Tully's Offices in his
pocket; Charles V. and Buonaparte had Machiavel frequently in their
hands; and Davila was the perpetual study of Hampden: he seemed to have
discovered in that historian of civil wars those which he anticipated in
the land of his fathers.

These facts sufficiently illustrate the recorded circumstance of Sir
William Jones's invariable habit of reading his Cicero through every
year, and exemplify the happy result for him, who, amidst the
multiplicity of his authors, still continues in this way to be "the man
of one book."

A BIBLIOGNOSTE.

A startling literary prophecy, recently sent forth from our oracular
literature, threatens the annihilation of public libraries, which are
one day to moulder away!

Listen to the vaticinator! "As conservatories of mental treasures, their
value in times of darkness and barbarity was incalculable; and even in
these happier days, when men are incited to explore new regions of
thought, they command respect as depots of methodical and well-ordered
references for the researches of the curious. But what in one state of
society is invaluable, may at another be worthless; and the progress
which the world has made within a very few centuries has considerably
reduced the estimation which is due to such establishments. We will say
more--"[231] but enough! This idea of striki