224 THE LIBRARY 



authors its surest reciters, its most eloquent interpreters. The 

 oratory of the law-court and of the parliament, that of the pulpit 

 and of the cathedra, will not be able to withstand the enticement 

 of being preserved and handed on to posterity, to which their triumphs 

 have hitherto sent down but a weak, uncertain echo. " I shall not 

 die altogether" -Non omnis moriar so will think the orator and 

 the dramatic or lyric artist; and the libraries will cherish these 

 witnesses to art and to life, as they now collect play-bills and 

 lawyers' briefs. 



But internationalism and cooperation will save the future library 

 from the danger of losing altogether its true character by becoming, 

 as it were, a deposit of memories or of embalmed residua of life, among 

 which the librarian must walk like a bearer of the dead. The time 

 will come when, if these mortuary cities of dead books are not to 

 multiply indefinitely, we must invoke the authority of Fra Girolamo 

 Savonarola, and proceed to a burning of vanities. A return to an- 

 cient methods will be a means of instruction, and those centenary 

 libraries which have preserved their proper character, which have 

 not undergone hurtful augmentations, which have reserved them- 

 selves for books and manuscripts alone, which have disdained all 

 the ultra-modern rubbish which has neither the form nor the name 

 of book, these libraries will be saluted as monuments worthy 

 of veneration. And then some patron who, from being a multi- 

 millionaire, as was his far-off ancestor, will have become at least 

 a multi-billionaire, will provide here in America for the founding of 

 libraries, not of manuscripts, which will no longer be for sale, but 

 of reproductions of codices in black or in colors; and we shall have 

 libraries of facsimiles most useful for the study of the classics, just 

 as we now have museums of casts for the study of the plastic arts. 



The application of photography and of photogravure to the re- 

 production of texts which are unique rather than rare, makes it 

 possible for us not only to have several examples of a precious codex 

 or manuscript, but to fix the invisible deterioration which began in 

 it at a certain date, so that, as regards its state of preservation, the 

 facsimile represents an interior stage to the future state of the original. 

 By thus wonderfully forecasting the future, these reproductions 

 render less disastrous the effects of a fire such as that which lately 

 destroyed the library of Turin. They have, therefore, found great 

 favor among students and have excited the attention of the most 

 enlightened governments. If the means for carrying on what have 

 hitherto been but isolated efforts do not fail, if generous donors and 

 institutions and governments do not deny their aid, we might 

 already begin a methodical work of reproduction, and come to an 

 agreement concerning the method of fulfilling a vast design which 

 should comprehend all the most precious archetypes of the various 



