Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/243

 The Librarian's Dream. day lately I called on a learned friend, and found him very sad. He said he had had a sad dream : he had dreamt of a Social War, and a bloody triumph of Philistine Demos over leisure and learning. Culture became almost a crime. "Now," said I in reply, "you have got a glimpse of the nightmare which has haunted me for ten years. It is the mainspring of all my work. I have always had a longing to see literature condensed ; so that when the crash comes, there will be some monumental work (of which the ' Encyclopaedia Britan- nica ' gives an idea) to rise above the wreck. It ought not to be on paper, but graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever." After an evening's talk I went home melancholy, and in my turn dreamed a dream. I was projected into some future age, centuries ahead. The crash had come and gone. Social democracy had trampled upon learning; libraries had been burnt in the convulsions, and universities turned into manual training schools. Then the Asiatic nations had burst their bounds, as predicted by Charles H. Pearson, and there had been a world-wide mingling of races. The infusion of Gothic blood into the Roman Empire amid the wrecks of ancient states and learned capitals, was merely a provincial foreshadowing on a small scale of what had now happened on a cosmic scale. At last, after centuries of Philistinism, there had come a revival of learning. Thanks to the art of printing, though it had fallen into desuetude (for the Orientals had taken us back to primitive copying), the gigantic researches of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries had not perished. Away in remote corners of the earth chiefly in Scandinavia vast libraries had been pre- served, which elsewhere had vanished. It was also found that thousands of good books had been kept as heirlooms in families who could not read them, and who merely regarded them as 18