The sight of a Library must often have brought to mind the noble words of Milton respecting the vitality of books; and may sometimes have suggested the further and correlative thought that any great Collection of books must have had, so to speak, its individual life,–full of significance and rich in interest,–if only there were at hand the insight and the skill so to tell the story as to elicit, not to bury, its true meaning.

But it would need rare powers and diversified acquirements–amongst them a talent for the combination of extreme brevity with the utmost clearness–to perform such a task in a way that should bring an untired reader face to face with the founders and patrons, the organizers and the students, who, generation after generation, busied themselves in building up one of the great Libraries of the world, or in diffusing the knowledge there amassed.