Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/200

 180 of literature had advanced so far as to necessitate the library custodian, but had not yet produced the library administrator—the Denis and Audiffredi of the succeeding century. Dury saw this, and also saw that the ideal librarian he had conceived in his own mind would need better pay that he might do better work. One exception to his apparently sweeping statements must be noted. Bodley's librarians in the seventeenth century were undoubtedly men of high literary distinction. Yet even here the arrangements for the librarian's remuneration were unsatisfactory, and wrong in principle.

"I have been informed," says Dury, "that in Oxford the settled maintenance of the library keeper is not above fifty or sixty pounds per annum, but that it is accidentally viis et modis, sometimes worth a hundred pound. What the accidents are, and the ways and means by which they come, I have not been curious to search after."

So we are not to know by what shifts Mr. Nicholson's seventeenth-century predecessor mended his salary. "Hay and oats," says Dean Swift, "in the hands of a skilful groom will make excellent wine, as well as ale, but this I only hint."

Dury now proceeds to develop his ideas in a fine and wise passage:—

"I have thought that if the proper employments of library keepers were taken into consideration as they are, or may be made useful to the advancement of learning; and were ordered and maintained