The Edinburgh Review

3. Catalogue des Nouvelles Acquisitions de la Bibliothèque Impériale Publique. I.-XII. 8vo. St. Petersburg: 1863-71. 4. Ein Gang durch die St. Petersburger k. öffentliche Bibliothek. Von Dr. R. MINTZLAFF, Oberbibliothekar an der k. öffentliche Bibliothek. 8vo. St. Petersburg: 1870. 5. La Biblioteca Vaticana, dalla sua Origine fino al Presente. Per DOMENICO ZANELLI. 8vo. Rema: 1857.

IN N the year 1471, when Louis XI. wished to borrow a book from the Medical Faculty of Paris, he was required to deposit plate in pledge, and to get one of his nobles to join him in a guarantee for the safe return of the book. In the Paris of 1873 there is not one among the priceless volumes that fill untold kilomètres of shelves in the Bibliothèque Nationale that is not at the command of the humblest applicant of honourable reputation. And in our own national library, at its first reorganisation, so easy were the conditions of access, that, notwithstanding the lavish provision of space in its noble reading-room, it became necessary, in the interest of that higher class of readers whose wants mainly a great library must aim at supplying, to exclude, by fixing a limit of age, the 'rush of young men from University and King's Colleges to the presses that contain the Latin Dictionaries and Greek

'Lexicons and Bohn's cribs.' Both these extremes, no doubt, especially the first, are exaggerated types of the relative degree of accessibility of books in their respective periods; but, even when every due allowance has been made, the two periods are found to be separated from each other by a vast interval.

The intellectual history of that interval is in some degree represented by the History of Libraries, and Mr. Edwards has rendered an acceptable service to letters by bringing together in his Memoirs of Libraries,' and the two works, Libraries and Founders of Libraries,' and Founders of the British Museum,' which form its complement, the materials of that history. It has been our wont in this Journal to review at intervals the progress of our own national library. Perhaps it will not be uninteresting to our readers, if we prefix to our present periodical survey of the progress within the last few years of the library of the British Museum and its great rivals abroad, a summary account of the libraries of other times, and of the nature and circumstances of book-collecting under the very different conditions of literature which then prevailed. These conditions, it is true, were so different as almost to render comparison impossible; but the very contrast of the conditions will itself be interesting, and will at all events be comforting to us in view of the advantages which we enjoy. Mr. Edwards supplies ample particulars for the purpose; but we shall freely combine with the materials which he has brought together, information drawn from the various bibliographical publications, periodical and otherwise, in every country of Europe, which have of late years elevated the study of books almost to the condition of a science.

The history of libraries is divided by Mr. Edwards into three periods, the ancient, the medieval, and the modern.

The history of the ancient period, like most other branches of early inquiry, has its region of legend; and in its historical period itself, it is difficult, even where precise statements of facts are found, to separate the true from the apocryphal. No ancient writer has treated the subject of libraries professedly. Of the detailed notices of libraries which we find in the ancient authors, very few are contemporary, or regard libraries personally visited and known by the writers themselves. Thus Aulus Gellius, Seneca, Josephus, Eusebius, and others, tell us many seemingly precise particulars about the famous library of Alexandria; Plutarch is tolerably minute as to the collection of Attalus, King of Pergamus; and Strabo relates very circumstantially the fortunes of the so-called library of Aristotle, from

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The Edinburgh Review, Том 139