much which it would be a positive mistake to believe. That is the
worst of erudition--that the next scholar sucks the few drops of
honey that you have accumulated, sets right your blunders, and you
are superseded. You have handed on the torch, perhaps, and even
trimmed it. Your errors, your patient explanations, were a
necessary step in the progress of knowledge; but now the procession
has turned the corner, and is out of sight.

Yet even here, it pleases me to think, some mute and unsuspected
treasure may lurk unknown. In a room like this, for over a couple
of centuries, stood on one of the shelves an old rudely bound
volume of blank paper, the pages covered with a curious straggling
cipher; no one paid any heed to it, no one tried to spell its
secrets. But the day came when a Fellow who was both inquisitive
and leisurely took up the old volume, and formed a resolve to
decipher it. Through many baffling delays, through many patient
windings, he carried his purpose out; and the result was a
celebrated Day-book, which cast much light upon the social
conditions of a past age, as well as revealed one of the most
simple and genial personalities that ever marched blithely through
the pages of a Diary.

But, in these days of cheap print and nasty paper, with a central
library into which pours the annual cataract of literature, these
little ancient libraries have no use left, save as repositories or
store-rooms. They belong to the days when books were few and
expensive; when few persons could acquire a library of their own;
when lecturers accumulated knowledge that was not the property of
the world; when notes were laboriously copied and handed on; when
one of the joys of learning was the consciousness of possessing