left it with 560,000, a number which must now
have more than doubled. By his noble design
for occupying the central quadrangle, a desert
of gravel until his time, he provided additional
room for 1,200,000 volumes. All this
apparently enormous space for development is being
eaten up with fearful rapidity; and such is the
greed of the splendid library that it opens its
jaws like Hades, and threatens shortly to
expel the antiquities from the building, and
appropriate the places they adorn.

But the proper office of hasty retrospect in
a paper like this is only to enlarge by degrees,
like the pupil of an eye, the reader's
contemplation and estimate of the coming time, and
to prepare him for some practical suggestions
of a very humble kind. So I take up again
the thread of my brief discourse. National
libraries draw upon a purse which is
bottomless. But all public libraries are not national.
And the case even of private libraries is
becoming, nay, has become, very serious for all
who are possessed by the inexorable spirit of
collection, but whose ardor is perplexed and
qualified, or even baffled, by considerations
springing from the balance-sheet.

The purchase of a book is commonly
supposed to end, even for the most scrupulous