217 



LIBRARIES. 



LIBRARIES. 



213 



Romans, it appears to be forgotten that Latin was for about fifteen 

 centuries the language most intimately connected with the history of 

 our own country, as well as of many others. It was in Latin that 

 C;csar wrote his account of the discovery of Britain ; in Latin that the 

 Saxon Bede composed his valuable history of the English church ; in 

 Latin that the monkish chroniclers, Saxon, Norman, and English, com- 

 piled their records of contemporary events for century after century. 

 It was the same with France, with Italy, with Spain, with Germany, with 

 Scandinavia. In Poland and Hungary and Holland the usage of Latin 

 continued still later, and the parliamentary speeches of Hungarian 

 magnates almost up to our own times, and the lectures of Dutch pro- 

 fessors even now are delivered in the language of Cicero and Ca?sar. 

 The e"arly productions of printing were mostly in Latin , and for long 

 afterwards the appearance of literary Europe was that of a learned 

 republic, in which Latin was the predominant speech, and the modern 

 languages merely took the position of provincial dialects. The libraries 

 of mark throughout Europe were chiefly filled with Latin, and it might 

 almost have been expected that the happy idea would have occurred to 

 gome great potentate to collect together all the Latin books that kept 

 pouring from the press in the different parts of Europe. It was 

 towards the close of the 15th century that King Matthias Cor- 

 vinus, of Hungary, applied himself to the task of collecting a mag- 

 nificent library, for which hia expenses were truly regal, amounting 

 according to some, to 30,000 florins a-year. He is said to have kept thirty 

 copyists constantly employed ; and at his death, in 1490, his collection 

 ig stated to have amounted to nearly 55,000 volumes, " almost all 

 manuscripts." Had this expenditure been recorded of a monarch who 

 died in 1390, or before the invention of printing, our admiration might 

 have been excited in a high degree, but it awakens wonder that admi- 

 ration should be claimed for a monarch who expended treasures in multi- 

 plying manuscripts after he had himself invited the first printer to 

 Buda. The proceedings of King Matthias, however, are still pointed 

 to by gome modern writers with unalloyed panegyric. When the 

 collecting of books first came into fashion, the early printed Greek 

 and Latin volumes were those most sought after, and large collections 

 were made of " incunables," or " cradle-books," as those are technically 

 called which were issued in the infancy or cradle-tunes of printing. 

 The firgt editions of the classics, however, were those which attracted 

 the most attention, and other works of the 15th century were com- 

 paratively neglected. In Panzer's valuable catalogue of the books 

 printed before 1535, a work which, including the German part, extends 

 to thirteen quarto volumes, he is obliged to refer to numerous libraries 

 as the depositaries of the various treasures which he describes from 

 numerous catalogues. There is no library in Europe which approaches 

 to containing them all. Yet there are still floating about Europe so 

 many copies of volumes of the period referred to, not only for sale, 

 but often for sale at very moderate prices, that the steady adherence 

 of a well-provided library for gome years to the rule which has, it is 

 said, been adopted by some, of buying every work not in its possession 

 printed before 1500, would probably have a very considerable effect. 

 Four hundred years, and more, have not cleared from the booksellers' 

 shelves the copies of many books which were only printed, it is said, in 

 editions of less than five hundred copies : but here again it is more 

 than probable that the next fifty years will effect more than all their 

 predecessors have done. 



After the literature of the language of ancient Italy, that of the 

 language of modern Italy appears to have entered the earliest into general 

 circulation. In the days of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, a know- 

 ledge of Italian was more common in England than it has ever been 

 since, and for part of the time it was the popular language of the court of 

 France, which was as usual governed by female influence, and was then 

 under the guidance of Italian princesses. There has therefore always 

 been a tendency for Italian books to find their way out of the country, 

 as well as Italian paintings. At the same time the division of Italy 

 into so many rival and hostile states has had a singular effect in pre- 

 venting the circulation of its literature within its own boundaries. It 

 haa often been the cage, that Milan did not know what books were 

 issued at Naples, and Florence was a comparative stranger to the 

 current literature of Rome. The same division in Germany has been 

 productive of exactly the opposite effects, and has led to an organisation 

 of the book -trade superior to that which prevails in France and England. 

 From the same cause there appears to have been no marked attempt 

 in any Italian library to form a complete collection of Italian literature : 

 the strong local attachment which has been sufficient to preserve in use 

 a host of different dialects, many of them often used for literary pur- 

 poses, has, at least until the present generation, prevented the mind from 

 being sufficiently expansive to embrace all Italy from the Alps to the sea. 

 In many of the Italian libraries also the books appear to have been kept 

 in singular subordination to what should have been their accessories ; 

 in the Vatican library not a book is visible till presses have been 

 opened, and the historians of its progress dwell most on its architecture, 

 its paintings, and ornaments. The result has been that the great 

 libraries of Paris and London are probably richer in Italian literature 

 than any within the bound* of Italy, and that in that literature much 

 apparently still remains to be discovered. Roscoe, the historian of 

 i/. i :iinl I .en the Tenth, expressed his Hiirpri.su that after a careful 

 htudy of his authorities it should still be in the power of a Bristol 

 C"!lrctor, Mr. Bright, to show him a volume of Italian popular poetry^ 



on the battle of Pavia and other contemporary events, of which he had 

 never seen mention, and the like of which he had no reason to suppose 

 ever existed. There are only two copies known of a contemporary 

 Italian popular poem of the discovery of America. They are both in 

 the British Museum, for which both of them were bought at different 

 times at sales in Paris. It should be added, that both the sales were 

 of the libraries of Italian collectors. 



The literature of Spain, like that of Italy, early attracted attention 

 abroad. Spanish was for a time the language of the court of Vienna, 

 cultivated in France and England, and well known in Italy. There is 

 something peculiarly original and racy about many of its productions : 

 its romances of chivalry, its ballads, its histories of wild adventure in 

 America told by the adventurers themselves, its final comic romance 

 of chivalry destined to throw all the others out of the saddle, its drama 

 that followed Don Quixote, though much of it was as romantic as 

 Amadis de Gaul. But along with the very earliest of this litera- 

 ture grew the weed that was destined to choke it, and the decline 

 of Spanish letters kept pace with that of Spanish power. There 

 is perhaps in no other European language, except possibly in that 

 of Portugal, so great a proportion of worthless books as in that of 

 Spain. The most ardent collector cannot but shrink from the prospect 

 of encumbering his shelves with much of that kind of literature which 

 flourished in Spanish convent libraries till their dissolution in 1835. 

 Meanwhile the fate of Spain in regard to books has been signally un- 

 fortunate. Careless of bibliography themselves for a long period, the 

 Spaniards have at length awaked to find that much of their most 

 valuable early literature has left their shores for England, France, 

 Germany, and the United States. In the critical editions which, much 

 to their credit, they are now publishing of Lope de Vega, of Calderon, 

 and others, they are often driven to confess their inability to find at 

 Madrid copies of editions which are irrevocably fixed in the public 

 libraries of Paris and London. A Spanish bibliographer of eminence 

 was accustomed to say that the extravagant prices given at some 

 English sales for a few favourite books were some of the most profit- 

 able investments that English capital ever made ; for the effect had 

 been to draw to the London market from Spain a mass of volumes 

 which, once being there, were obliged to be sold for what prices they 

 would bring, and brought much less at London than they would at 

 Madrid. It was at one time much easier, he stated, to find rare 

 Spanish books in England than in Spain, and some that now adorn the 

 Peninsula were redeemed at low prices from English book-stalls. The 

 Spaniards are probably not at the end of their calamities of this kind. 

 They set us the example of planting colonies beyond the Atlantic, 

 and there are nations which speak the Spanish language which will, 

 in the natural course of things, begin to drayv literary treasures from 

 Spam. If then- political troubles have hitherto retarded the progress of 

 literature among these nations, the fact of their speaking Spanish has 

 produced an interest in that language among their English-speaking 

 neighbours which has already borne its fruits. The best reuent con- 

 tributions to the history of Spain and Spanish literature have come 

 from Boston, in Massachusetts. On the whole it should be the aim of 

 Spanish bibliographers to ^centralise the collections they still retain, 

 and guard against further loss by establishing as far as possible a com- 

 plete national library, in which they should also collect the Spanish 

 publications of South America and Mexico. 



Portugal stands in much the same position as Spain, except that its 

 books have never been so much in demand abroad as those of its 

 neighbour. By the breaking up of the libraries of the convents, the 

 national library, established at Lisbon in 1796, has been considerably 

 enriched ; but Senhor Innocencio da Silva, the author of the excellent 

 bibliographical dictionary of Portuguese books now publishing, remarks 

 in almost every page that some book he is describing is not to be 

 found in the national library. Of many of the books he has only to 

 mention that they were in the library of Lord Stuart de Rothesay, 

 which was sold a few years ago in London. At that sale, extensive 

 purchases were made for the British Museum, which already pos- 

 sessed some of the finest and rarest works in Portuguese literature, 

 by the accession of the King's and the Grenville libraries. The 

 ' Cancioneiro ' of Resende, the first two editions of Camoens's ' Luciad,' 

 the early editions of Barros and Castanheda, the Hebrew Pentateuch, 

 which was the first book printed in Portugal, are probably united in 

 no other library, and they are here associated with a good collection of 

 general Portuguese literature, not wanting in the recent productions of 

 both Portugal and Brazil. 



France and England have now been in close connection, whether as 

 friends or foes but always as rivals for about 800 years, and the con- 

 test which has been carried on in many a field in Europe, Asia, and 

 America, has been carried on in the field of literature also. For 

 about the first 400 years, up to the invention of printing, the French 

 language flourished in England, and our libraries are rich in manu- 

 scripts in that language, many of which were written by Englishmen ; 

 for part of the last 400 years the French language has often been more 

 widely known and more extensively used in countries with which 

 Krance had scarcely any connection, in Russia and Poland, than among 

 its insular neighbours. Printing flourished in France from the moment 

 that a German doctor of the Sorboune invited German printers to Paris 

 it rose at once into elegance, and began from the first to command a 

 foreign market. There are books in English printed for Anthony 



