On the features of some, however, especially of the young men whom Aminta had rejected, an incredulousness of such virtue might have been read. It was hard to conceive how she came to be at midnight in the room of the Marquis of Maulear.
END OF BOOK III.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by Stringer & Townsend, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New-York.
From Chambers' Papers for the People.
PUBLIC LIBRARIES.
We welcome the indications, now crowding upon us from every quarter, that the people of this country are beginning to feel the importance of taking active measures for the establishment and increase of public libraries. Large collections of books, open for common use, are at once the storehouses and the manufactories of learning and science; they bring together the accumulated fruits of the experience, the research, and the genius of other ages and distant nations, as well as of our own time and land; and they create the taste, as well as furnish the indispensable aids for the prosecution of literary and scientific effort in every department. In great cities they qualify the exclusive spirit of commercial and professional avocations, and encourage men to steal an hour from the pursuit of gain, and devote it to the attempt to satisfy a natural curiosity and to cultivate an elegant taste. Connected with literary and academical institutions, they supply the means and multiply the objects of study, and keep alive that enthusiasm in the cause of letters without which nothing great or permanent can ever be accomplished. Their establishment is a boon to all classes of society, and all may find in them both recreation and employment; for as the poet Crabbe says:—
"Here come the grieved, a change of thought to find;—
The curious here to feed a craving mind;
Here the devout their peaceful temple choose;
And here the poet meets his favoring muse."
The origin of libraries is involved in obscurity. According to some, the distinction of having first made collections of writings belongs to the Hebrews; but others ascribe this honor to the Egyptians. Osymandyas, one of the ancient kings of Egypt, who flourished some 600 years after the deluge, is said to have been the first who founded a library. The temple in which he kept his books was dedicated at once to religion and literature, and placed under the especial protection of the divinities, with whose statues it was magnificently adorned. It was still further embellished by a well-known inscription, for ever grateful to the votary of literature: on the entrance was engraven, "The nourishment of the soul," or, according to Diodorus, "The medicine of the mind." It probably contained works of very remote antiquity, and also the books accounted sacred by the Egyptians, all of which perished amidst the destructive ravages which accompanied and followed the Persian invasion under Cambyses. There was also, according to Eustathius and other ancient authors, a fine library at Memphis, deposited in the Temple of Phtha, from which Homer has been accused of having stolen both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," and afterwards published them as his own. From this charge, however, the bard has been vindicated by various writers, and by different arguments.