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THE LIBRARY.

"Books, like men their authors, have but one way of coming into the world; but there are ten thousand to go out of it, and return no more."-Tale of a Tub, LET us take off our hats and march with reverent steps, for we are about to enter into a library, that intellectual heaven wherein are assembled all those master spirits of the world who have achieved immortality; those mental giants who have undergone their apotheosis, and from the shelves of this literary temple still hold silent communion with their mortal votaries. Here, as in one focus, are concentrated the rays of all the great luminaries since Cadmus, the inventor of letters, discovered the noble art of arresting so subtle, volatile, and invisible a thing as Thought, and imparted to it an existence more durable than that of brass and marble. This was, indeed, the triumph of mind over matter; the lighting up of a new sun; the formation of a moral world only inferior to the Almighty fiat that produced Creation. But for this miraculous process of eternizing knowledge, the reasoning faculty would have been bestowed upon man in vain: it would have perished with the evanescent frame in which it was embodied; human experience would not extend beyond individual life; the wisdom of each generation would be lost to its successor, and the world could never have emerged from the darkness of barbarism. Books have been the great civilizers of men. The earliest literature of every country has been probably agricultural; for subsistence is the most pressing want of every new community: abundance, when obtained, would have to be secured from the attacks of less industrious savages; hence the necessity for the arts of war, for eloquence, hymns of battle, and funeral orations. Plenty and security soon introduce luxury and refinement; leisure is found for writing and reading; literature becomes ornamental as well as useful; and poets are valued, not only for the delight they afford, but for their exclusive power of conferring a celebrity more durable than all the fame that can be achieved by medals, statues, monuments, and pyramids, or even by the foundation of cities, dynasties, and empires.

This battered, soiled, and dog's-eared Homer, so fraught with scholastic reminiscences, is the most sublime illustration of the preservative power of poetry that the world has yet produced. Nearly three thousand years have elapsed since the body of the author reverted to dust, and here is his mind, his thoughts, his very words, handed down, to us entire, although the language in which he wrote has for many ages become silent upon the earth. This circumstance, however, is rather favourable to endurance; for a classic poem, like the Phoenix, rises with renewed vigour from the ashes of its language. He who writes in a living tongue, casts a flower upon a running stream, which buoys it up and carries it swimmingly forward for a time, but the rapidity of its flight destroys its freshness and withers its form, when, the beauties of its leaves being no longer recognizable, it soon sinks unnoticed to the bottom. A poem in a dead language is the same flower poised upon a still, secluded fountain, whose unperturbed waters gradually convert it into a petrifaction, unfading and immutable. To render Achilles invulnerable he was dipped into the river of the dead, and he who would arm his work against the scythe of Time must clothe it

in an extinct language. When the Chian bard wandered through the world reciting his unwritten verses, which then existed only as a sound, Thebes with its hundred gates flourished in all its stupendous magnificence, and the leathern ladies and gentlemen who grin at us from glass cases, under the denomination of mummies, were walking about its streets, dancing in its halls, or perhaps prostrating themselves in its temples before that identical Apis, or Ox-deity, whose thigh-bone was rummaged out of the sarcophagus in the great pyramid, and transported to England by Captain Fitzclarence. Three hundred years rolled away after the Iliad was composed, before the she-wolf destined to nourish Romulus and Remus prowled amid the wilderness of the seven hills, whereon the marble palaces of Rome were subsequently to be founded. But why instance mortals and cities that have sprung up and crumbled into dust, since an immortal has been called into existence in the intervening period? Cupid, the god of love, is nowhere mentioned in the works of Homer, though his mother plays so distinguished a part in the poem; and so many situations occur where he would infallibly have been introduced, had he been then enrolled in the celestial ranks. It is obvious, therefore, that he was the production of later mythologists; but, alas! the deity and his religion, the nations that worshipped him and the cities where his temples were reared, are all swept away in one common ruin. Mortals and immortals, creeds and systems, nations and empires, all are annihilated together. Even their heaven is no more. Hyænas assemble upon Mount Olympus instead of deities: Parnassus is a desolate waste; and the silence of that wilderness, once covered with laurel groves and gorgeous fanes, whence Apollo gave out his oracles, is now only broken by the occasional crumbling of some fragment from the rocky summit of the two-forked hill, scaring the wolf from his den and the eagle from her cliff.

And yet here is the poem of Homer fresh and youthful as when it first emanated from his brain; nay, it is probably in the very infancy of its existence, only in the outset of its career, and the generations whom it has delighted are as nothing compared to those whom it is destined to charm in its future progress to eternity. Contrast this majestic and immortal fate with that of the evanescent dust and clay, the poor perishing frame whose organization gave it birth; and what an additional argument does it afford, that the soul capable of such sublime efforts cannot be intended to revert to the earth with its miserable tegument of flesh. That which could produce immortality may well aspire to its enjoyment.

Ah! if the "learned Thebans," of whom we have made mention, had thought of embalming their minds instead of their bodies; if they had committed their intellect to paper, instead of their limbs to linen; and come down to us bound up in vellum, with a steel clasp, instead of being coffined up in sycamore with an iron screw, how much more perfect would have been the posthumous perservation, and how much more delightful to the literary world to have possessed an epic Thebaid from an ancient Theban, than from so affected and turgid a Roman as Statius. Let us not, however, despair. A portion of the very poem of Homer which has elicited these remarks, has lately been discovered in the enveloping folds of a mummy; and who shall say that we may not hereafter unravel the verses of some Memphian bard, who has

been taking a nap of two or three thousand years in the catacombs of Luxor? M. Denon maintains that almost all the learning, and nearly all the arts of modern Europe, were known to the ancient Egyptians; and as a partial confirmation of this theory I may here mention, that on the interior case of a mummy chest there was lately found a plate of crystallised metal resembling tin, although that art has only been recently and accidentally discovered in England. So true is it that there is nothing new which has not once been old.

What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! What an epitome of the past world, and how capricious the fate by which some of them have been preserved while others of greater value have perished! The monks of the middle ages being the great medium of conservation, and outraged nature inciting them to avenge the mortification of the body by the pruriousness of the mind, the amatory poets have not only come down to us tolerably entire, but they "have added fat pollutions of their own," passing off their lascivious elegies as the production of Cornelius Gallus, or anonymously sending forth into the world still more licentious and gross erotics. Some of the richest treasures of antiquity have been redeemed from the dust and cobwebs of monastical libraries, lumber-rooms, sacristies, and cellars; others have been excavated in iron chests, or disinterred from beneath ponderous tomes of controversial divinity, or copied from the backs of homilies and sermons, with which, in the scarcity of parchment, they had been overwritten. If some of your multitudinous writers would compile a circumstantial account of the resurrection of every classical author, and a minute narrative of the discovery of every celebrated piece of ancient sculpture, what an interesting volume might be formed!

Numerous as they are, what are the books preserved in comparison with those that we have lost? The dead races of mankind scarcely outnumber the existing generation more prodigiously than do the books that have perished exceed those that remain to us. Men are naturally scribblers, and there has probably prevailed, in all ages since the invention of letters, a much more extensive literature than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Osymandias, the ancient King of Egypt, if Herodotus may be credited, built library in his palace, over the door of which was the well-known inscription-" Physic for the Soul." Job wishes that his adversary had written a book, probably for the consolation of cutting it up in some Quarterly or Jerusalem Review; the expression, at all events, indicates a greater activity" in the Row" than we are apt to ascribe to those primitive times. Allusion is also made in the Scriptures to the library of the Kings of Persia, as well as to one built by Nehemiah. Ptolomy Philadelphus had a collection of 700,000 volumes destroyed by Cæsar's soldiers; and the Alexandrian Library, burnt by the Caliph Omar, contained 400,000 manuscripts. What a combustion of congregated brains:-the quintessence of ages-the wisdom of a world-all simultaneously converted into smoke and ashes! This, as Cowley would have said, is to put out the fire of genius by that of the torch; to extinguish the light of reason in that of its own funeral pyre; to make matter once more triumph over

mind. Possibly, however, our loss is rather imaginary than real, greater in quantity than in quality. Men's intellects, like their frames, continue pretty much the same in all ages, and the human faculty, limited in its sphere of action, and operating always upon the same materials, soon arrives at an impassable acme which leaves us nothing to do but to ring the changes upon antiquity. Half our epic poems are modifications of Homer, though none are equal to that primitive model; our Ovidian elegies, our Pindarics, and our Anacreontics, all resemble their first parents in features as well as in name. Fertilizing our minds with the brains of our predecessors, we raise new crops of the old grain, and pass away to manure the intellectual field for future harvests of the same description. Destruction and reproduction is the system of the moral as well as of the physical world.

An anonymous book loses half its interest; it is the voice of the invisible, an echo from the clouds, the shadow of an unknown substance, an abstraction devoid of all humanity. One likes to hunt out an author, if he be dead, in obituaries and biographical dictionaries; to chase him from his birth; to be in at his death, and learn what other offspring of his brain survive him. Even an assumed name is better than none; though it is clearly a nominal fraud, a desertion from our own to enlist into another identity. It may be doubted whether we have any natural right thus to leap down the throat, as it were, of an imaginary personage, and pass off a counterfeit of our own creation for genuine coinage. But the strongest semi-vitality, or zoophite state of existence, is that of the writers of Ephemerides, who squeeze the whole bulk of their individuality into the narrow compass of a single consonant or vowel; who have an alphabious being as Mr. A., a liquid celebrity under the initial of L., or attain an immortality of zig-zag under the signature of Z. How fantastical to be personally known as an impersonal, to be literally a man of letters, to have all our virtues and talents entrusted to one little hieroglyphic, like the bottles in the apothecary's shop. Compared to this ignoble imprisonment, how light the punishment of the negligent Sylph, who was threatened to Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins, Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye; Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,

While clogg'd, he beats his silken wings in vain.

So gross are my perceptions, that my mind refuses to take cognizance of these Magazine sprites, in their alphabetical and shadowy state. I animate these monthly apparitions, put flesh and blood around the bones of their letters, and even carry my humanity so far as to array theirs in appropriate garments. I have an ideal (not always a beau ideal) of every one of the contributors to the New Monthly, as accurate, no doubt, as the notion which Lavater formed of men's characters from their autograph. Sometimes, however, this Promethean art has been a puzzling process. One Essayist, wishing to immortalize himself, like the Wat Tylericide Mayor of London, by a dagger, assumed that note of reference as his signature, and occasioned me infinite trouble in providing a sheath of flesh. Another, who now honourably wields the sword of justice in the land of the convict and the kangaroo, used to distinguish his well-written papers

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by three daggers at once, taxing my imagination to the utmost by this tripartite individuality, and making expensive demands upon the wardrobe of my brain. A third held out a hand at the bottom of his page, beckoning me to its welcome perusal-a symbol which my eye (if the catachresis may be allowed) was always eager to grasp and shake, and to which my fancy affixed a body with as much confidence as he who conjured up a Hercules from a foot. But the most bewildering of these contractions of humanity was the subscription of a star; for, after a man had become sidereal and accomplished his apotheosis, it seemed somewhat irreverend to restore him to his incarnate

state.

"This raised a mortal to the skies,

That drew an author down."

I brought down these Astræi from their empyrean, remodelled their frames, gave them a suit of clothes for nothing, and had before my mind's eye a distinct presentment of their identity.

Even when we assume a literary individuality somewhat more substantial than this fanciful creation; when one is known, propriâ persona, as the real identical Tomkins, who writes in a popular magazine under the signature of any specific letter, to what does it amount?— an immortality of a month, after which we are tranquilly left to enjoy an eternity-of oblivion. Our very nature is ephemeral: we "come like shadows, so depart." From time to time some benevolent and disinterested compiler endeavours to pluck us from the Lethean gulf, by republishing our best papers under the captivating title of "Beauties of the Magazines," "Spirit of the modern Essayists," or some such embalming words; but alas! like a swimmer in the wide ocean, who attempts to uphold his sinking comrade, he can but give him a few moments' respite, when both sink together into the waters of oblivion. We know what pains have been taken to appropriate Addison's and Steele's respective papers in the Spectator, distinguished only by initials. Deeming my own lucubrations (as what essayist does not?) fully entitled to the same anxious research, I occasionally please myself with dreaming that some future Malone, seated in a library, as I am at this present moment, may take down a surviving volume of the New Monthly, and naturally curious to ascertain the owner of the initial H, may discover by ferreting into obituaries and old newspapers, that it actually designates a Mr. Higginbotham, who lies buried in Shoreditch church. Anticipating a handsome monument with a full account of the author, and some pathetic verses by a poetical friend, he hurries to the spot, and after an infinity of groping, assisted by the sexton's spectacles, discovers a flat stone, which, under the customary emblems of a death's head and cross bones, conveys very satisfactory information that the aforesaid Mr. Higginbotham was born on one day and died upon another. Of all the intervening period, its hopes and fears, its joys and miseries, its verse and prose, not an atom farther can be gleaned. And this it is to be a writer of Ephemerides! Verily, Mr. Editor, the idea is so disheartening, that I should be tempted to commit some rash act, and perpetrate publication on my own account, but that I have before my eyes the fate of certain modern Blackmores, impressing upon me the salutary truth, that if we must perish and be forgotten, it is better to die of a monthly essay than an annual epic. H.

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