August , 1919 
ll 
Cardinal Mazarin, from a por¬ 
trait by an unknown engraver. 
Giulio Mazzarino went to 
Paris at the invitation of 
Cardinal Richelieu, and after 
Richelieu’s death became 
Prime Minister. He accumu¬ 
lated immense wealth and ivas 
a great collector 
fit *}•■ 
COLLECTORS OF YESTERDAY 
They Range From Augustus Caeser to Horace Walpole and Make the Modern 
Collector a Member af a Noble Throng 
T HIS is an age in which Achilles gives 
way to Douglas Fairbanks, Helen of Troy 
to Mary Pickford. At least Homer in the orig¬ 
inal is unpopular and to confess to a liking 
for Virgil in the Latin is to be frowned upon 
by those who have persuaded certain of our 
universities to turn backs on the very cultural 
presences that have given structure to civiliza¬ 
tion. As for myself, I shall continue to be 
old-fashioned. Only this morning I have been 
dipping into good old Pliny’s Letters. Now 
more than ever I am convinced that those who 
cried most loudly against the classics were 
those who knew nothing about them. Where, 
I ask, in all literature will there be found 
more things of human interest than in the writ¬ 
ings of those old masters of antiquity? 
It is Francesco Petrarca’s chief title to fame 
that he was an inveterate collector of classical 
GARDNER TEALL 
writings, that he devoted himself with an un¬ 
ending enthusiasm to the recovery of the litera¬ 
ture of the Ancients. And yet he knew naught 
of Greek, little enough of Latin from the point 
of view of scholarly attainment in the language. 
What he did realize, did sense, was the value 
to intellectual development of these bygone 
literary Titans, and at Padua he warred 
against the medievalism which was, after all, 
nothing more than a warring against the com¬ 
placency of his own times, just as the very 
attitude of those of to-day who fight against 
such of the finer things of life as are to be 
reached only through contact with the original 
writings of Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, 
Sophocles, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, Ovid, 
Plato, Pliny and the rest are, in effect, smugly 
complacent in their acceptance of cultural 
things as they stand. 
Renan called Petrarch the first modern man; 
if only we could be as modern! And what 
a debt the world owes to his collecting pro¬ 
clivities, an instinct connected with an in¬ 
telligence ! 
Of course, there were hundreds, one may 
venture to say thousands of collectors who were 
his contemporaries, for the love of beautiful 
and of interesting things is seldom separated 
in the normal person from the desire to own 
them, a desire that has produced more history 
and more romance than one would dream of. 
There are those who dissolve pearls in wine, 
those who treasure them in necklaces; these 
two sorts are in the world. To Petrarch each 
scrap of writing was as precious as a pearl to 
be added to a necklace to adorn the fair throat 
of Learning, and his accomplishment, his de¬ 
votion to this hobby marks him as the very 
Spanish scene, showing a corner of an old street in Seville, with its antiquarian book and antique shops. From a painting by Benlliure y Gil, 
a contemporary Spanish painter, born 1858. Courtesy of the Anderson Galleries 
