THIS miscellany was first formed, many years ago, when two of my friends were occupied in those anecdotical labours, which have proved so entertaining to themselves, and their readers. I conceived that a collection of a different complexion, though much less amusing, might prove somewhat more instructive; and that literary history afforded an almost unexplored source of interesting facts. The work itself has been well enough received by the public to justify its design. Every class of readers requires a book adapted to itself and that book which interests, and perhaps brings much new information to a multitude of readers, is not to be contemned, even by the learned. More might be alleged in favour of works like the present than can be urged against them. They are of a class which was well known to the ancients. The Greeks were not without them; the Romans loved them under the title of Varia Eruditio; and the Orientalists, more than either, were passionately fond of these agreeable collections. The fanciful titles, with which they decorated their variegated miscellanies, sufficiently express their delight. The design of this work is to stimulate the literary curiosity of those, who, with a taste for its tranquil pursuits, are impeded in their acquirements. The characters, the events, and the singularities of modern literature, are not always familiar even to those who excel in classical studies. But a more numerous part of mankind, by their occupations, or their indolence, both unfavourable causes to literary improvement, require to obtain the materials for thinking, by the easiest and readiest means. This work has proved useful: it has been reprinted abroad, and it has been translated; and the honour which many writers at home have conferred on it, by referring to it, has exhilarated the zealous labour which seven editions have necessarily exacted The late William Seward, Esq., and James Pettit Andrews, Esq. CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. LIBRARIES. THE passion for forming vast collections of books has necessarily existed in all periods of human curiosity; but long it required royal munificence to found a national library. It is only since the art of multiplying the productions of the mind has been discovered, that men of letters have been enabled to rival this imperial and patriotic honour. The taste for books, so rare before the fifteenth century, has gradually become general only within these four hundred years; in that small space of time the public mind of Europe has been created. Of LIBRARIES, the following anecdotes seem most interesting, as they mark either the affection, or the veneration, which civilized men have ever felt for these perennia! repositories of their minds. The first national library founded in Egypt seemed to have been placed under the protection of the divinities, for their statues magnificently adorned this temple, dedicated at once to religion and to literature. It was still farther embellished by a well known inscription, for ever grateful to the votary of literature; on the front was engraven, The nourishment of the soul or, according to Diodorus, The medicine of the 'mind.' The Egyptian Ptolemies founded the vast library of Alexandria, which was afterwards the emulative labour of rival monarchs; the founder infused a soul into the vast body he was creating, by his choice of the librarian Demetrius Phalereus, whose skilful industry amassed from all nations their choicest productions. Without such a librarian, a national library would be little more than a literary chaos. His well exercised memory and critical judgment are its best catalogue. One of the Ptolemies refused supplying the famished Athenians with wheat, until they presented him with the original manuscripts of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and in returning copies of these originals, he allowed them to retain the fifteen talents which he had pledged with them as a princely security. Even when tyrants, or usurpers, possessed sense as well as courage, they have proved the most ardent patrons of literature; they know it is their interest to turn aside the public mind from political speculations, and to afford their subjects the inexhaustible occupations of curiosity, and the consoling pleasures of the imagination. Thus Pisistratus is said to have been among the earliest of the Greeks, who projected an immense collection of the works of the learn. ed, and is believed to have been the collector of the scattered works, which passed under the name of Homer. The Romans, after six centuries of gradual dominion, must have possessed the vast and diversified collections of the writings of the nations they conquered; among the most valued spoils of their victories, we know that manuscripts were considered as more precious than vases of gold. Paulus Emilius, after the defeat of Perseus, king of Macedon, brought to Rome a great number which he had amassed in Greece, and which he now distributed among his sons, or presented to the Roman people. Sylla followed his example. After the siege of Athens, he discovered an entire library in the temple of Apollo, which having carried to Rome he appears to have been the founder of the first Roman public library. After the taking of Carthage, the Roman senate rewarded the family of Regulus with the books found in the city. A library was a national gift, and the most honourable they could bestow. From the intercourse of the Romans with the Greeks, the passion for forming libraries rapidly increased, and indiviuals began to pride themselves on their private collections, Of many illustrious Romans, their magnificent taste in their libraries has been recorded. Asinius Pollio, Crassus Cæsar, and Cicero, have, among others, been celebrated for their literary splendour. Lucullus, whose incredible opulence exhausted itself on more than imperial luxuries, more honourably distinguished himself by his vast collec tions of books, and the happy use he made of them by the liberal access he allowed the learned. It was a library,' says Plutarch, whose walks, galleries, and cabinets, were open to all visiters; and the ingenious Greeks, when at leisure, resorted to this abode of the Muses to hold literary conversations, in which Lucullus himself loved to join.' This library, enlarged by others, Julius Cæsar once proposed to open for the public, having chosen the erudite Varro for its librarian; but the daggers of Brutus and his party prevented the meditated projects of Cæsar. In this museum, Cicero frequently pursued his studies, during the time his friend Faustus had the charge of it, which he describes to Atticus in his 4th Book, Epist. 9. Amidst his public occupations and his private studies, either of them sufficient to have immortalized one man, we are astonished at the minute attention Cicero paid to the formation of his libraries, and his cabinets of antiquities. The emperors were ambitious at length to give their names to the libraries they founded; they did not consider the purple as their chief ornament. Augustus was himself an author, and in one of those sumptuous buildings called Thermes, ornamented with porticoes, galleries, and statues, with shady walks, and refreshing baths, testified his love of literature by adding a magnificent library, one of these libraries he fondly called by the name of his sister Octavia; and the other, the temple of Apollo, became the haunt of the poets, as Horace, Juvenal, and Persius have commemorated. The successors of Augustus imitated his example, and even Tiberius had an imperial library chiefly consisting of works concerning the empire and the acts of its sovereigns. These Trajan augmented by the Ulpian library, so denominated from the family name of this prince. In a word we have accounts of the rich ornaments the ancients bestowed on their libraries; of their floors paved with marble, their walls covered with glass and ivory, and their shelves and desks of ebony and cedar. The first public library in Italy, says Tiraboschi, was founded by a person of no considerable fortune: his credit, his frugality, and fortitude, were indeed equal to a treasury. This extraordinary man was Nicholas Niccoli, the son of a merchant, and in his youth himself a merchant; but after the death of his father he relinquished the beaten roads of gain, and devoted his soul to study, and his fortune to assist students. At his death he left his library to the public, but his debts being greater than his effects, the princely generosity of Cosmo de Medici realized the inten tion of its former possessor, and afterwards enriched it, by the addition of an apartment, in which he placed the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaic, and Indian Mss. The intrepid resolution of Nicholas V, laid the foundations of the Vatican; the affection of Cardinal Bessarion for his country, first gave Venice the rudiments of a public library; and to Sir T. Bodley we owe the invaluable one of Oxford, Sir Robert Cotton, Sir H. Sloane, Dr Birch, Mr Cracherode, and others of this race of lovers of books, have all contributed to form these literary treasures, which our na tion owe to the enthusiasm of individuals, who have found such pleasure in consecrating their fortunes and their days to this great public object; or, which in the result produces the same public good, the collections of such men have been frequently purchased on their deaths, by government, and thus have entered whole and entire into the great national collections. Literature, like virtue, is its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of vast library, have far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches; that delicious beverage which they have swallowed, so thirstily, from the magical cup of literature. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, Chancellor and high treasurer of England so early as 1341, perhaps raised the first private library in our country. He purchased thirty or forty volumes of the abbot of St. Albans for fifty pounds weight of silver. He was so enamoured of his large collection, that he expressly composed a treatise on his love of books, under the title of Philobiblion,' an honourable bute paid to literature, in an age not literary. on the continent, about 1440. It is a circumstance worthy observation, that the French sovereign, Charles V, sur a silver lamp suspended from the centre, should be illuminnamed the Wise, ordered that thirty portable lights, with ated at night, that students might not find their pursuits inwhose professional avocations admit not of morning studies, terrupted at any hour. Many among us, at this moment, to them from the omission of the regulation of the zealous find that the resources of a public library are not accessible Charles V of France. An alarming objection to nightown British Museum not a light is permitted to be carried studies in public libraries is the danger of fire, and in our about on any pretence whatever. The history of the and the progress of the human mind and public opinion tri-Bibliotheque du Roi' is a curious incident in literature. might be traced by its gradual accessions, noting the changeable qualities of its literary stores chiefly from theoIn 1789 Neckar reckoned the literary treasures to logy, law and medicine, to philosophy, and elegant literaamount to 225,000 printed books, 70,000 manuscripts, and published by M. Le Prince in 1782, it appears that it was 15,000 collections of prints. By a curious little volume first under Louis XIV that the productions of the art of engraving were collected and arranged; the great minister Marolles, who may be ranked among the fathers of our Colbert purchased the extensive collections of the Abbé de print-collectors. Two hundred and sixty-four ample portfolios laid the foundations, and the catalogues of his collections, printed by Marolles himself, are rare, curious, and high-priced. Our own national print-gallery is yet an infant establishment. To pass much of our time amid such vast resources, that man must indeed be not more animated than a leaden Mercury, who does not aspire to make some small addition to his library, were it only by a critical catalogue! He must be as indolent as that animal called the sloth, who perishes on the tree he climbs, after he has eaten all its leaves. Henry Rantzau, a Danish gentleman, the founder of the great library at Copenhagen, whose days were dissolved in the pleasures of reading, discovers his taste and ardour in the following elegant effusion: Salvete aureoli mei libelli, Quam vos sæpe oculis juvat videre, Et sperare decus perenne scriptis ; IMITATED. Golden volumes! richest treasures Lights who beam'd through many ages! This passion for the acquisition and enjoyment of books, The family of the Fuggers had long felt an hereditary passion for the accumulation of literary treasures; and their portraits, with others in their picture gallery, form a curious quarto volume of 127 portraits, excessively rare even in Germany, entitled Fuggerorum Pinacotheca.' Wolfius, who daily haunted their celebrated library, pours out his gratitude in some Greek verses, and describes this Bibliotheque as a literary heaven, furnished with as many books as there were stars in the firmament; or as a literary garden, in which he passed entire days in gathering fruit and flowers, delighting and instructing himself by perpetual occupation. In 1364 the royal library of France did not exceed twenty volumes. Shortly after Charles V increased it to nine hundred, which by the fate of war, as much at least as that of money, the Duke of Bedford afterwards purchased and ansported to London, where libraries were smaller than ture. Mr Hallam has observed, that in 1440, England had However made comparatively but little progress in learning-and Germany was probably still less advanced. there was in Germany a celebrated collector of books in the person of Trithemius, the celebrated abbot of Spanheim, who died in 1516; he had amassed about two thousand manuscripts, a literary treasure which excited such general attention, that princes and eminent men of that day travelled to visit Trithemius and his library. About this time six or eight hundred volumes formed a royal collection, and their high value in price could only be furnished by a prince. This was indeed a great advancement in libraries, when at the beginning of the fourteenth century the library of Louis IX contained only four classical authors, and that of Oxford, in 1300, consisted of a few tracts kept in chest.' The pleasures of study are classed by Burton among those exercises or recreations of the mind which pass within doors. Looking about this world of books' he exand take more delight and true content of mind in them, claims, I could even live and die with such meditations, than in all thy wealth and sport!, there is a sweetness, leave off, as well may witness those many laborious hours, which, as Circe's cup, bewitcheth a student, he cannot days and nights, spent in their voluminous treatises. So sweet is the delight of study. The last day is prioris discipulus.' 'Heinsius was mewed up in the library of Leyden all the year long, and that which to my thinking should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. I no sooner, saith he, come into the library, but I bolt the such vices, whose nurse is Idleness, the mother of Ignordoor to me, excluding Lust, Ambition, Avarice, and all ance and Melancholy. In the very lap of eternity amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit, and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones and rich men, that know not this happiness.' Such is the incense of a votary who scatters it on the altar less for the cere mony than from the devotion. There is, however, an intemperance in study, incompa tible often with our social or more active duties. The illustrious Grotius exposed himself to the reproaches of some of his contemporaries for having too warmly pursued his studies, to the detriment of his public station. It was the boast of Cicero, that his philosophical studies had never interfered with the services he owed the republic, and that he had only dedicated to them the hours which sures. Looking on his voluminous labours, we are sur others gave to their walks, their repasts, and their piea prised at this observation: how honourable is it to him, that his various philosophical works bear the titles of the different villas he possessed; which shows that they were composed in their respective retirements. Cicero must have been an early riser; and practised that magic art o employing his time, as to have multiplied his days THE BIBLIOMANIA. LITERATURE. The preceding article is honourable to literature, yet impartial truth must show that even a passion for collecting books is not always a passion for literature. The Bibliomania, or the collecting an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves. Their motley libraries have been called the mad houses of the human mind; and again, the tomb of books, possessor will not communicate them, and cofwhen the fins them up in the cases of his library-and as it was facetiously observed, these collections are not without a Lock on the human Understanding.* The Bibliomania has never raged more violently than in the present day. It is fortunate that literature is in no ways injured by the follies of collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily defend the good. Some collectors place all their fame on the view of a splendid library, where volumes arrayed in all the pomp of lettering, silk linings, triple gold bands and tinted leather, are locked up in wire cases, and secured from the vulgar hands of the mere reader, dazzling our eyes like eastern beauties peering through their jealousies! Bruyere has touched on this mania with humour: 'Of such a collector,' says he, 'as soon as I enter his house, I am ready to faint on the staircase, from a strong smell of Morocco leather: in vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, &c., naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures! a gallery by the by which he seldom traverses when alone, for he rarely reads, but me he offers to conduct through it! I thank him for his politeness, and, as little as himself, care to visit the tan-house, which he calls his library.' Lucian has composed a biting invective against an ignorant possessor of a vast library. Like him, who in the present day, after turning over the pages of an old book, chiefly admires the date. Lucian compares him to a pilot, who was never taught the science of navigation; to a rider who cannot keep his seat on a spirited horse; to a man who not having the use of his feet, wishes to conceal the defect by wearing embroidered shoes; but, alas! he cannot stand in them! He ludicrously compares him to Thersites wearing the armour of Achilles, tottering at every step; leering with his little eyes under his enormous helmet, and his hunch-back raising the cuirass above his shoulders. Why do you buy so many books? he says:you have no hair, and you purchase a comb; you are blind, and you will have a grand mirror; you are deaf, and you will have fine musical instruments! Your costly bindings are only a source of vexation, and you are continually discharging your librarians for not preserving them from the silent invasion of the worms, and the nibbling triumphs of the rats! Such collectors will contemptuously smile at the collec- Ancillon was a great collector of curious books, and * An allusion and pun which occasioned the French trans- tion, which never appeared, a literary man argued, that Fortunate are those who only consider a book for the LITERARY JOURNALS. When writers were not numerous, and readers rare, the unsuccessful author fell insensibly into oblivion; he dissolved away in his own weakness; if he committed the was not arraigned at the public tribuna-and the awful At length, a private folly of printing what no one would purchase, he terrors of his day of judgment consisted only in the retributions of his publisher's final accounts. taste for literature spread through the body of the people, vanity induced the inexperienced and the ignorant to aspire to literary honours. To oppose these forcible entries into the haunts of the Muses, periodical criticism brandished its formidable weapon; and the fall of many, taught some of our greatest geniuses to rise. Multifarious writings produced multifarious strictures, and public criticism reached to such perfection, that taste was generally diffused, enlightening those whose occupations had otherwise never permitted them to judge of literary compositions. The invention of Reviews, in the form which they have at length gradually assumed, could not have existed but in the most polished ages of literature; for without a constant supply of authors, and a refined spirit of criticism, they could not excite a perpetual interest among the lovers of literature. These publications are the chronicles of taste and science, and present the existing state of the public mind, while they form a ready resource for those idle hours, which men of letters do not choose to pass idly. Their multiplicity has undoubtedly produced much evil; puerile critics, and venal drudges, manufacture reviews: hence that shameful discordance of opinion, which is the scorn and scandal of criticism. Passions hostile to the peaceful truths of literature have likewise made tremendous inroads in the republic, and every literary virtue has been lost! In Calamities of Authors,' I have given the history of a literary conspiracy, conducted by a solitary critic Gilbert Stuart, against the historian Henry. These works may disgust by vapid panegyric, or gross invective; weary by uniform dulness, or tantalize by superficial knowledge. Sometimes merely written to catch the public attention, a malignity is indulged against authors, to season the caustic leaves. A reviewer has admired those works in private, which he has condemned in his official capacity. But good sense, good temper, and good taste, will ever form an estimable journalist, who will inspire confidence, and give stability to his decisions. To the lovers of literature these volumes when they have outlived their year, are not unimportant. They constitute a great portion of literary history, and are indeed the annals of the republic. To our own reviews, we must add the old foreign journals, which are perhaps even more valuable to the man of letters. Of these the variety is considerabie; and many |