Not harshly abusing them, No, nor ill using them, (Maddening some, saddening some) makes them amend. Earning pure daily bread, Bear with them, share with them! God will befriend. Poor outcasts-for peace they sigh, Sure 'twere release to die! Who shall say such as they mercy ne'er found? Christ alone knows it well; Judge no more! once before He wrote on the ground. C. T. K. WE ON PUBLIC LIBRARIES. AN INAUGURAL LECTURE AT LIMERICK. BY THE REV. MATTHEW RUSSELL. E are gathered to-night round a cradle-the cradle of the Public Library of Limerick. As it cannot speak for itself, being but an infant, its parents have made me its sponsor to speak for it and in doing so they have been guilty of a flagrant violation of the principle, so much vaunted now-a-days in theory, of putting the right man in the right place. Upon their choice let the blame fall upon the speaker, not upon his theme-if we do not bring away with us the conviction that the occasion which has drawn us here together is an important, nay, a solemn, occasion. There is at all times a holy interest clinging round the cradle of infancy when we view it as the opening of an endless career on which depends, not for time only, the highest welfare of a soul or of many souls. "Oh! thou bright thing, fresh from the hand of God, By the unceasing music of thy being! Nearer I seem to God when looking on thee: Whence all things flow! O bright and singing babe, Some of this grave interest may well be enlisted also in favour of an infant Public Library. "What wilt thou be hereafter ?" It, too, has a career before it which may affect whole sections of human society 1. ore widely, more deeply, and more lastingly than the career or *Alexander Smith's "Life Drama." the most prominent and most influential personage. And this even when it has only to discharge its functions within a limited sphere, and on a moderate scale, such as shall probably content the modest ambition of the Library now inaugurated. However, before approaching the consideration of the subject under its local and personal aspects, let us remind ourselves that this infant, puny as it is at its birth, comes of an ancient race, and that there have been giants of that race. In plainer words, a rapid glance at the earliest and then at some of the greatest Public Libraries, will be a fitting introduction to what I and those who will follow me may have to say in particular about this, the most recent of such Institutions-the last, and, as yet, the least. The most ancient Library of which any authentic account has reached us is that of Ozymandias, king of Egypt, who is supposed by modern Egyptian scholars—not learned men of Egypt, for there are none such, but Egyptologists-to have reigned about 1400 years before Christ. Shelley has embalmed the name of this mummy in one of his stern, massive sonnets:— “I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' The poet, probably, in these lines meant only to convey an overwhelming impression of the hollowness of human boasting, and of the dreary oblivion which entombs all bygone grandeurs, without intending any special reference to that dimly historical Ozymandias, in whose monument, as described by Diodorus Siculus, there was a room conaining a Library, with an inscription translated into Greek by the ords Yoxne larpeiov, and playfully rendered into English as the othecaries' Hall of the Soul. It was in Egypt again, in the city of Alexandria, that King Ptolemy, one of Alexander's successors, established a great Library, which conled under all vicissitudes the most famous Library in the world for That is, the artist and, the monarch himseif. In the Cornhill Magazine (vol. 9.581) a writer, whom a recent collection of his critical papers allows us to ise as Mr. George Barnett Smith, introduces this sonnet thus:-"His pase emotion, uttered in 'many a winding bout of linked sweetness,' could scarcely ree utterance in an instrument which demands reticence of language and stern ssion of thought. One grand sonnet, however, has been produced by Shelley, fills the imagination as only the work of a great master can." 900 years. Aulus Gellius tells us that it contained in his time 700,000 volumes.* To account for this startling number with some degree of probability, it has been conjectured that many copies of the same book were admitted, and that the books or cantoes of a single poem were treated as so many volumes, reckoning the "Iliad," for instance, not as one but twenty-four: so that the seven hundred thousand volumes of the ancient Library would perhaps contain about as much reading as 60,000 of our modern ones-a figure still remarkably high for so early a period in the history of literature. The destruction of this Alexandrian Library is the best known part of its story-how, when the Mahometans under Amru conquered Egypt, in the year of our Lord 638, Amru asked his master the Caliph Omar in disposing of the spoils of Alexandria what was to be done with the Royal Library, and how the Caliph replied: "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Koran, they are useless and need not be preserved if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed." "Accordingly," says Gibbon-who, however, after his fashion, sneers and doubts deliberately about the whole transaction-"the volumes of papyrus or parchment were distributed among the four thousand baths of the city, and such was their multitude that six months were barely sufficient for the consumption of this precious fuel." If Egypt claims the glory of having established the Earliest Libraries that the world remembers to have seen, the glory of originating two of the greatest belongs to two countries never named with indifference amongst Irishmen-Poland and France. Italy indeed was the first to distinguish herself in this respect in the modern world. The Vatican Library, long the foremost Library in the universe, is still peculiarly rich in manuscripts and other literary treasures; and there are in other Italian cities several libraries of the second and third order, as they are called. But immensely larger than any of these, and absolutely larger than any library that has ever existed, first in the first order of Libraries is that which before the battle of Sedan was called the Imperial Library of Paris,+ and now in the cycle of revolutionary changes is called for the third time the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is to be hoped that its officials in these troublous times may fare better than their predecessors in the first French Revolution, when of its Librarians Barthélemy, the author of Anacharsis, was imprisoned, three others were guillotined, and Champfort on being arrested in the Library committed suicide. It has been estimated very carefully that this Library contained in 1860 about 880,000 volumes, and the annual increase since then, at the rate of 11,000 volumes a year, would bring it up beyond a million. Compare with these figures the earlier facts in its history that Louis XIV. found it containing 5,000 volumes and left in it 70,000. You have been surprised to hear poor Poland mentioned in this * Seneca, however, reduces the number to 400,000, and Eusebius to 100,000. "The great Library of Paris, called variously, under the various forms of government through which France has passed, the Royal, the National, the Imperial, then again Royal, then a second time National, then Imperial Library of Paris, and now once more the National Library.”—Edinburgh Review, January, 1874. context. Like everything that once was Poland's-except Prussia's and Austria's pickings-the Libraries of Poland are now in the possession of Russia. The chief of these is still known, at least outside the dominions of the Czar, as the Zaluski Library, from its founder, a Polish bishop of princely birth and fortune, Joseph Kaluski, who lived through the first seventy years of the last century, and who, assisted by his brother Andrew, Bishop of Cracow, established and fitted up for public use at Warsaw the largest library ever formed at private expense. Just as the undertaking was completed, the Russian ambassador had the unfortunate bishop torn from his darling tomes, and sent into banishment. His Library, in the partition of Poland, was seized upon as the property of the state and transported bodily to St. Petersburg, to become the great Imperial Library of Russia, though at the time it contained only five Russian books. Much of it had been plundered before its removal, and much was lost on the way; yet, when what arrived was counted, it was found to amount to the enormous mass of 270,000 volumes. At the time of the good bishop's death, in 1774, this library, amassed by a private individual, was twice the extent of the Library of the British Museum at the same date, the national collection of England. When, however, the Emperor Alexander, visiting London after the occupation of Paris by the Allies in 1814, went over the Museum Library and remarked on its scantiness, the librarian, Planta, is said to have replied that, if small, it was at least honestly acquired. It is to be hoped that this rebuke was really administered, and not merely thought of while Planta was shaving next morning-as happens with a great many clever repartees. Nay, not only were the first foundations of the Russian Library thus laid in injustice, but its next and chief accession of 150,000 volumes is stated in the Official Guide itself to have been procured in 1834 by the Emperor Nicholas from the plunder (they do not use so rude a word) of several noblemen and public institutions of Poland, in particular from Prince Adam Czartoryski's castle at Pulawy and the Polish Society of Warsaw. While the Russian Bear is tranquilly pursuing his studies in the magnificent Library thus rifled from the country of Kosciusko, is he ever startled, I wonder, by any faint echoes of that shriek which Freedom* gave as Kosciusko fell? From Poland one's thoughts glide easily home to Ireland; and exceedingly curious also is the origin of the largest library in our Poland of the Western Sea. It was in this very season, one Christmas-time in those sad years when the bard of Red Hugh O'Donnell addressed his distracted country as the mistress of his heart in passionate, mystic strains, which can have lost little of their pathos even in being rendered into a colder tongue, when the translator is so true a poet as poor Clarence Mangan. *"Shriek? I didn't! No one heard it, Though a rhyming Scot averred it." Dublin Acrostics. The "Spanish ale" which was to give health and hope to Erin was indeed forthcoming, but not of the quality or in the quantity expected. The O'Neill, with MacDonnell of Antrim, MacGennis of Down, and MacMahon of Monaghan, marched, against his will and better judgment, from the north where his party were strong, to the south where they were weak-marched to meet the Spaniards and that O'Donnell to whose bard we have just been listening. Again the leader of the Spaniards, Don Juan d'Aquilla, overruled the Irish general's more cautious policy, and the Battle of Kinsale was fought bravely but with disastrous results on Christmas Eve, 1601. Strangely enough in good sooth, it was on that bloody battle-field that Trinity College Library was founded. The English army, it seems, "resolved to do some worthy act that might be a memorial of the due respect they had for religion and learning;" and they raised amongst themselves (out of their honest earnings, of course) £1800 to furnish a Library for the University of Dublin, then recently established. Fifty years after, another English army, with the approval of the Lord Protector, supplemented the liberality of Queen Elizabeth's soldiers by presenting the vast collections of Archbishop Ussher to the same Library. At present it contains 102,000 volumes, and 1,500 precious manuscripts. But it might have prospered better, and done more real good for the mind and literature of the country, if it had not thus in its early days received the blessing of Oliver Cromwell. As Englishmen had thus much to do with the establishment of the principal Library in Ireland, on the other hand, the founder of the chief Library in England was of Irish birth. Sir Hans Sloane was born at Killeleagh in the county of Down, and died at Chelsea in 1753 at the age of ninety-two. At that time it would have been |