like Junot and Prince Eugene; these are only leaders of companies in
the great army of lovers of books, in which it is honourable enough
to be a private soldier.



THE LIBRARY



The Library which is to be spoken of in these pages, is all unlike
the halls which a Spencer or a Huth fills with treasure beyond
price. The age of great libraries has gone by, and where a
collector of the old school survives, he is usually a man of
enormous wealth, who might, if he pleased, be distinguished in
parliament, in society, on the turf itself, or in any of the
pursuits where unlimited supplies of money are strictly necessary.
The old amateurs, whom La Bruyere was wont to sneer at, were not
satisfied unless they possessed many thousands of books. For a
collector like Cardinal Mazarin, Naude bought up the whole stock of
many a bookseller, and left great towns as bare of printed paper as
if a tornado had passed, and blown the leaves away. In our modern
times, as the industrious Bibliophile Jacob, says, the fashion of
book-collecting has changed; "from the vast hall that it was, the
library of the amateur has shrunk to a closet, to a mere book-case.
Nothing but a neat article of furniture is needed now, where a great
gallery or a long suite of rooms was once required. The book has
become, as it were, a jewel, and is kept in a kind of jewel-case."
It is not quantity of pages, nor lofty piles of ordinary binding,
nor theological folios and classic quartos, that the modern amateur