Europe quickly found their way to what was still the common centre of religion as well as of letters. Of the ten thousand works which were produced in the fifteenth century more than half were issued by the presses of Italy. Among the rest, a large proportion found their way to Rome, either by presentation or by purchase. In this way the Vatican enjoyed the same advantage over modern collections in regard to carly-printed books to which the admitted pre-eminence in this respect of the Imperial Library of Vienna is justly ascribed; and had it not been for the wholesale destruction which the Vatican suffered in the sack of Rome by the army of the Constable De Bourbon, it might probably have remained an all but complete repertory of the printed books of the fifteenth century. Sixtus V. renewed the building, and laid the foundation of a careful scheme for the systematic enlargement of the collection, which was pursued, though with varying energy, by his immediate successors.

By far the largest proportion, however, of the more recent additions to the priceless collection of MSS. which constitutes the real glory of the Vatican, is due much less to the gradual accumulation which results from a sustained system, than to a series of isolated gifts or purchases, beginning with the collection of Fulvio Orsini in 1600, and ending with that of Cardinal Mai in 1855. Such was the MS. collection of the Benedictine library of Bobbio; the Palatine Library captured at Heidelberg by Tilly, and presented by the Duke of Bavaria to Gregory XV. in 1621; the library of Christina of Sweden-a spoil of war, like that of Heidelberg, but, unlike Heidelberg, the produce of the successes of the Protestant hero, Gustavus Adolphus, transferred to the rival faith by his daughter on her conversion to Rome; the Urbino Library, the remnant of the noble collection of Duke Federigo, already described; the Ottoboni collection, comprising nearly 4,000 MSS.; and the smaller collections of the Marchese Capponi, and of the Greek convent of St. Basil at Grotta Ferrata, the MSS. of which supplied to Cardinal Mai no inconsiderable proportion of the Greek anecdota of his various collections. This career of acquisition, however, has not been without its interruptions. Among the conditions of peace exacted by General Bonaparte as the price of the withdrawal of his troops from the Papal territory in 1797, was one which required that 500 Vatican MSS., to be selected by the French commissioners themselves, should be ceded to the National Library of Paris; and although

*This stipulation is commonly ascribed to the Treaty of Tolentino. In reality it formed an article (the 8th) of the Armistice of Bologna;

in 1815 it was stipulated that these, as well as other Republican spoils from the Pontifical collections, should be restored, yet, to use the words of one of the Paris officials, good care was taken not to send back all;' and the student of the MSS. of the Bibliothèque Nationale may still not unfrequently trace by the press-mark the Roman origin of the MS. submitted for his examination. On the other hand, the Vatican itself sustained, about the same period, a similar deprivation, which however, had less of the character of compulsory restitution. It had happened that, among the 500* MSS. which had been carried off to Paris in 1797, a considerable number, including seventy-six Greek MSS., belonged to the ancient Heidelberg collection. Now, although it may be observed that one of the grounds of the Duke of Bavaria's original gift of the Heidelberg library to the Vatican had been that the books of Heidelberg were in the main derived from suppressed monasteries, yet, from its painful association with the party struggle of the Thirty Years' War, its transfer to Rome had always been a sore point with Protestant Germany; and on occasion of the contemplated restitution to the Pope of the French plunder of the Vatican, the King of Prussia, at the instance of Humboldt, put in to Pope Pius VII. a similar claim on the part of Heidelberg for the restitution of the older spoil of the 17th century. That liberal-minded Pope acceded to the demand, although only in part. Nine hundred MSS. were restored, but the proportion of Greek MSS. among these was small. Only thirty-nine of the MSS. restored were Greek, the great majority being of a class perhaps more specially interesting for Germany, as being chiefly in the departments of German history, archæology, and early German literature.

The number of books and MSS. contained in the Vatican has long been a subject of much uncertainty and curious inquiry. Down to a comparatively late period the Vatican was popularly regarded as the largest collection in the world. In the time of Eustace, the lowest estimate of the number of its volumes was 200,000; some made it 400,000; some swelled the total to a million. Eustace himself looked upon the mean as probable. Even the lowest of these estimates, however, is

and is merely renewed in the 13th article of Tolentino. (Artaud's Pie VII., tome i. p. 18.)

This limit was far exceeded, the number of distinct MSS. carried off being actually 783; of these 42 were Chinese, 40 Ethiopic, 35 Coptic, 7 Chaldee and Syriac, 9 Hebrew, 414 Latin, 206 Greek.

now proved to be far above the reality. The latest writer upon the library, whose book stands at the head of these pages Zanelli-does not venture upon any exact enumeration. The return made to our Foreign Office in 1851-about 100,000 printed volumes and 25,000 MSS.'-makes no distinction between books and pamphlets; and there is little doubt that at that time the return could only have been accurate on the supposition that the latter were included in the enumeration. But the accession, in 1856, of Cardinal Mai's library, which contained about 40,000 volumes, has brought the total of the collection far above the return of 1851, even interpreted by the strict rule of ten pamphlets to a volume. Cardinal Mai's MSS. also form a very valuable accession, even to the world-famed MS. treasures of the Vatican.*

There is one characteristic of the Vatican in which it has no rival the magnificence and artistic beauty of the structure in which it is lodged. The Vatican MSS. (proper) are arranged in presses along the sides and in the middle of a noble gallery 220 ft. in length, and decorated in the highest style of the art of the sixteenth and following century. The Palatine, Urbino, Alexandrine, and other MS. collections are distributed along the walls of a still more striking, though not so stately gallery, 1,000 ft. in length, adorned with frescoes representing the general councils of the Church and other great events of ecclesiastical history. At either end of this gallery are placed the printed books, which alone are exposed in open shelves. Perhaps, indeed, in the other divisions of the library, the visitor, surrounded, as he is, by these imposing representations of the history of Christianity, under vaulted roofs adorned with every resource of pictorial art, and in the midst of bronzes, intagli, marbles, and other objects of historical interest, sacred and profane, too easily loses the idea of a great library. It is hard to realise to oneself the presence within those gilded and decorated panels of so many of those literary treasures to which the world is indebted for the preservation of ancient learning and its diffusion through the early press. And with

all the prestige of the antiquity* of this celebrated library, of the acknowledged pre-eminence which it enjoyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of the admitted value of its vast and varied MS. collections, the most reverent scholar is forced to regard its glories as of the past rather than the present, and to recognise, however reluctantly, that, in the struggle of every-day literary life, and as a practical engine for the advancement of the new-world learning, it cannot any longer be ranked with the great modern collections, which are in truth the growth of a new system, and the representatives of new ideas and pursuits. Even in the city of Rome itself, the Vatican is surpassed in the number of printed books by the Casanata Library in the Dominican convent of St. Maria sopra Minerva, which was returned in 1851 as possessing more than 200,000 volumes, not counting pamphlets, miscellaneous pieces and plays, which exceed 3,000.'

6

The Vatican Library may be regarded as the evŋ kaì véa of the series. To us, with the ideas to which we are now familiar, it seems strange how slow the book-collecting world was in taking advantage of the novel facilities afforded by the printing-press. It might have been expected that, since the operations of book-collecting had turned upon the question of capital rather than of labour, and had taken their place in the open market of the world, a new impulse, if not a new direction, would have been given, in all the great centres of intellectual activity, to the formation of depositories of the productions of the new art, accessible under liberal conditions. to scholars and students of every class. The facts, however, fall very far short of such anticipations; and perhaps the century which preceded the invention of printing may, according to its own condition, challenge without fear a comparison in point of enterprise and liberality, although not of course in actual results, with the eventful hundred years which followed that great revolution. In addition to the splendid examples of activity during the former period already enumerated, we may also mention the first foundation of the Imperial Library at Vienna, that of the Imperial Library of Paris, and--what to modern scholars is perhaps more interesting and hopeful—that of the town libraries of Dantzic, Ulm, Ratisbon, and Nuremberg. On the other hand, the sixteenth century, with all its

Even in its present lodging, the Library dates in part from 1378, and finally from 1417-a date anterior by many years to that of any extant library of the West.

advantages, appears singularly unfruitful of such enterprise. Without entering into historical detail, which our limits preclude, it will be enough to say that out of all the European libraries which possess collections exceeding 150,000 volumes enumerated by Mr. Edwards-twenty-seven in number-only twelve can trace their origin farther back than the year 1600, and even of these one barely falls within that limit, while several others can claim little beyond a nominal existence until long after that date.

Even the existing collections were slow to avail themselves of the fruits of the printing-press. It is a curious incident in the history of that which was long held to be immeasurably the greatest of modern libraries-the National Library of Paris-that at the death of Francis I., in 1547, it contained barely two hundred volumes of printed books. And when, in 1624, Cardinal de Rochefoucauld became abbot of St. Geneviève, its library, now one of the most important libraries for the actual uses of study in Paris, did not contain a single printed volume. It is also worthy of note that, tardy as was the first progress of public libraries under the facilities afforded by the new art, a very small proportion of that progress is directly attributable to the sovereigns or the governments of the several countries of Europe. We shall see hereafter that, up to the present century, the largest European library, as well as the library most freely accessible to students, had been collected by a single family, and in great part by a single individual, a noble Polish ecclesiastic, Joseph Zaluski, Bishop of Kiev.

It would be idle to attempt to pursue in detail into the modern period the history of libraries and the fortunes of book-collecting. The whole space at our disposal would hardly suffice for a bare catalogue of the names and number of volumes of libraries of the present day-not merely the great libraries of the European capitals and great University libraries like our own Bodleian, but collections of minor repute, as the old provincial libraries of France, Italy, and Germany, the growing libraries of America and Australia, even the free libraries which are daily springing into existence, the contents of any one of which would outnumber the volumes on the shelves of all the western libraries of the thirteenth century. We should wish to describe briefly the present condition at least of all those libraries which in our last notice of the subject we

* See Ed. Rev., vol. cix. p. 206.

*