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1893.] THE DIAL 297 little for books or names dating back of the present century: but it is not for him alone that the book has been written.

"Mighty Book-Hunters," Dr. Burton called his little clan; and "mighty" collectors are marshalled in the Elton clan. We find here scarcely any mention of the present-day Gladstones and Locker-Lampsons, but of those classic fellows who "found time to discuss the merits of the authors before the Flood" we have a plenty. The great libraries once at the breast of the Sphinx and in the House of Serapis, and those on the site of Cairo and at Alexandria, as well as the one sent by Antony as a gift to Cleopatra, are, with their founders, like the ladies of Villon's ballad, "gone with last year's snow." But of all these, and of many others besides, Mr. and Mrs. Elton give us much pleasant and instructive gossip. "It pleased the Greeks to invent traditions about the books of Polycrates," the tyrant of Samos who usurped the royal power about 532 B.C.; but the splendors of the private library began only about 100 years B.C., in the days of Lucullus. Seneca, though a millionaire, complained bitterly of the pomp of Lucullus, and rejoiced at the destruction of Alexandria's treasures. "Our idle book-hunters," he said, "know about nothing but titles and bindings; their chests of cedar and ivory, and the book-cases that fill the bathroom, are nothing but fashionable furniture, and have nothing to do with learning." The Roman stoic would doubtless throw up his hands in holy horror at the contents of a Sheraton Shrine, or M. James Rothschild's hundred books worth $200,000, yet find solace in our "bulged and bruised octavos" of to-day.

Mr. and Mrs. Elton have grouped the great collectors of England, Italy, France, and Germany under several headings, and have brought together various schools, classified as "Royal Collectors," "Grolier and his Successors," "De Thou—Pinelli—Peirese," and the like. In the dark ages, when learning was at a low ebb, there were not many great collectors of books. "The knowledge of books might almost have disappeared in the seventh century, when the cloud of ignorance was darkest, but for a new and remarkable development of learning in the Irish monasteries." But the books of the monks, like those that had preceded them, were few and costly; and although the collectors who lived and conducted their pious enterprises of hoarding the sacred memorials of their ancestors, from the seventh century down to the beginning of the sixteenth—fifty years after the dawn of the art of printing—are brought together with scrupulous care by Mr. and Mrs. Elton, we do not find among them many names great from the point of view of a collector of to-day, with a signal exception here and there, such as Richard de Bury, "who had more books than all the other Bishops of England," until we reach Maioli and Grolier and De Thou, who are still the patron saints of those who love books for books' sake.

When Pope Nicholas V., who came into power in 1447, founded the Vatican Library and endowed it with five thousand volumes, books were still worth their weight in precious stones. He opened his Greek treasure-house to the Western World, and gathered about him a set of scholars who were kept busy enriching the world's store of knowledge. He obtained the "Commentary upon St. Matthew," of which Erasmus made use in his Paraphrase, and of which Aquinas wrote that he "would rather have a copy than be master of the city of Paris." Wanting to read Homer in Latin verse, and "to get a version of the Iliad and Odyssey, he gave a large retaining fee, a palazzo, and a farm in the Campagna, and made a deposit of ten thousand pieces of gold to be paid on the completion of the contract." Another great Italian collector was Antonio Magliabecchi, whose portrait has been engraved for Mr. and Mrs. Elton's book. Early in life a jeweller's shop-boy, who never left Florence, he in time became renowned throughout the world for his knowledge of books. His memory was so trustworthy and his information so exact that he was believed to know the habitat of all the rare books in the world; yet he has been despised as "a man who lived on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow was a folio." He left to the library that bears his name about 30,000 volumes of his own collecting.

Germany had its early collectors also, among whom, to mention only two, were Pirckheimer (whose book-plate was engraved by Dürer) and Henri Estienne's friend Ulric Fugger, whose library was "said to contain as many books as there were stars in heaven."

Among the great collectors in England are names more or less familiar to us from the libraries they founded Bodley, Harley, Selden, Cotton. But in France bibliophiles and collectors have, since the time of Grolier, been as numerous as the books in Ulric Fugger's library. One great French name seems to have fallen out of Mr. and Mrs. Elton's galaxy - that of the Comtesse de Verrue, who,