In the Name of the Bodleian, and Other Essays

HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY HALL, CAMBRIDGE
'Peace be with the soul of that charitable and courteous author who for the common benefit of his fellow-authors introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing.' —LORD SHAFTESBURY.
The first paper appeared in the Outlook , New York, the one on Mr. Bradlaugh in the Nineteenth Century , and some of the others at different times in the Speaker . 3, NEW SQUARE, LINCOLN'S INN.
With what feelings, I wonder, ought one to approach in a famous University an already venerable foundation, devoted by the last will and indented deed of a pious benefactor to the collection and housing of books and the promotion of learning? The Bodleian at this moment harbours within its walls well-nigh half a million of printed volumes, some scores of precious manuscripts in all the tongues, and has become a name famous throughout the whole civilized world. What sort of a poor scholar would he be whose heart did not beat within him when, for the first time, he found himself, to quote the words of 'Elia,' 'in the heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley'?
'Devotion mingled with awe' might be a very proper answer for me to make to my own questions, but possessing that acquaintance with the history of the most picturesque of all libraries which anybody can have who loves books enough to devote a dozen quiet hours of rumination to the pages of Mr. Macray's Annals of the Bodleian Library , second edition, Oxford, 'at the Clarendon Press, 1890,' I cannot honestly profess to entertain in my breast, with regard to it, the precise emotions which C.S.C. declared took possession of him when he regarded the decalogue. A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love; but devotion and awe are plants hard to rear in our harsh climate; besides, can it be well denied that there is something in a huge collection of the ancient learning, of mediaeval folios, of controversial pamphlets, and in the thick black dust these things so woefully collect, provocative of listlessness and enervation and of a certain Solomonic dissatisfaction? The two writers of modern times, both pre-eminently sympathetic towards the past, who have best described this somewhat melancholy and disillusioned frame of mind are both Americans: Washington Irving, in two essays in The Sketch-Book , 'The Art of Bookmaking' and 'The Mutability of Literature'; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in many places, but notably in that famous chapter on 'The Emptiness of Picture Galleries,' in The Marble Faun .