Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/274

 be taken as one mark of the Aristotelian separation of critical from creative faculties, of science from literature, of reasoning analysis from imagination.

Another mark of the same process is to be found in the library associations which Aristotle's works contain. In his youth Aristotle had been a collector of books; while residing at Athens as a pupil of Plato his house had been designated the "house of the reader", and the sum of £200,000, given him by Alexander mainly with a view to collections for his natural history, probably contributed to swell his private library. The days of public libraries, too, and laborious study of the past had now arrived. Aristotle died in 323, shortly before the death of Demosthenes, and a few years afterwards, at the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus, last of Attic orators, Ptolemy Soter founded the celebrated library of Alexandria, the city in which the cosmopolitan Greek spirit was henceforward to find a more congenial home than in any of the old city commonwealths. From a Latin scholium on Plautus (discovered by Professor Osann in 1830) we learn that this library (partly kept in the temple of Serapis, partly in the Brucheium adjoining the palace) contained "in the Brucheium 400,000 rolls of duplicates and unsorted books, and 90,000 separate works properly arranged, and in the Serapeum 42,800 volumes, probably the ultimate selection or most valuable books in the whole collection." Here was a reservoir for literature; and, if literature were really of artificial making and not the outflow of social life, this famous Alexandrian library should have made up for the stagnant shallows into which the living streams of old Greek society had now spread out. But though a library may produce excellent grammarians, critics, scientists, it can do little for literature as distinct from