THE LIBRARY AN HERACLEA
Now behold us, ... settled in all the state and grandeur of our own house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury: the library of the Museum close at hand. My father spends his mornings in those lata silentia, as Virgil calls the world beyond the grave. And a world beyond the grave we may well call that land of the ghosts, a book collection.
'Pisistratus,' said my father, one evening as he arranged his notes before him, and rubbed his spectacles. 'Pisistratus, a great library is an awful place! There, are interred all the remains of men since the Flood.'
'It is a burial-place!' quoth my Uncle Roland, who had that day found us out.
'It is an Heraclea!' said my father.
'Please, not such hard words,' said the Captain, shaking his head.
'Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead. Do I want to speak to Cicero?—I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?—I write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up Aristophanes.... But it is not that which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with these "spirits elect": to say to them, "Make way—I too claim place with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the death that consumes my dust."'—E. G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton. The Caxtons.