1

Why this deep trouble, father? Are we not secure?"

"I cannot divine, Mary, why they have taken this direction. They go out of their way to reach us. I did not think I had an enemy, even among the Parliamentarians."

'But are you assured they come hither?"

"I cannot doubt it. This note is from Roscommon Castle. They have halted to-night within a few hours' ride of our lands. I fear to-morrow will be a sad day for us. Our cattle will be driven off, our farmyard will be burned down, and then-you may feel what it is to want."

The picture he had drawn was painful to contemplate, and he bowed his head dejectedly.

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What matters it, father?" said Mary, tenderly. "Even in poverty we could be happy together."

"Together! together! Aye, we must live together," mused Dillon, as if struck by the last word. "You could not live alone. Who would protect you if I were taken away? Oh, no! not yet, not yet," he repeated, abstractedly, stroking all the while the dark tresses of his daughter, whose head rested upon his breast;-"not yet, not yet!"

He was recalled to himself by the violent sobs of his child. The strange words which he uttered half unconsciously, struck her with a vague, undefined terror, and she clung weeping and sobbing to his breast.

"I have frightened you, Mary," he exclaimed, in tones of selfreproach. "A pest on these old wife's fancies. Betake you to rest, my child. Should they come, we may perhaps obtain by a parley what we cannot obtain by force."

WASTE.

ITH sordid heart at Mary's waste
The wily Judas sneers,

Till Christ with pledge of endless fame
Her loving spirit cheers.

With gentler accents Martha pleads

Against her sister's rest;

But Christ extols the better choice,

Which none shall e'er molest.

T. E, B.

Not harshly abusing them,

No, nor ill using them,

(Maddening some, saddening some) makes them amend.
Instruct them to pray instead,

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?
'Iwere hard all their woe to tell,

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,
The motions of thy dancing limbs are swayed

By the unceasing music of thy being!

Nearer I seem to God when looking on thee:
'Tis ages since He made His youngest star-
His hand was on thee as 'twere yesterday.
Thou later revelation! Silver stream,
Breaking with laughter from the lake divine,

Whence all things flow! O bright and singing babe,
What wilt thou be hereafter ?" *

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 more widely, more deeply, and more lastingly than the career of

*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.

1

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
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies - whose frown
And wrinkled lips and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive (stamped on these lifeless things)
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed !*
And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings-
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

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 containing a Library, with an inscription translated into Greek by the words Ψύχης Ιατρείον, and playfully rendered into English as the Apothecaries' 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 continued under all vicissitudes the most famous Library in the world for

* That is, the artist and the monarch himself. In the Cornhill Magazine (vol. XIV., p. 581) a writer, whom a recent collection of his critical papers allows us to recognise as Mr. George Barnett Smith, introduces this sonnet thus :---“ His passionate emotion, uttered in many a winding bout of linked sweetness,' could scarcely find free utterance in an instrument which demands reticence of language and stern compression of thought. One grand sonnet, however, has been produced by Shelley, which 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."

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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.