POETICAL AND GRAMMATICAL DEATHS 417 SCARRON 421 PETER CORNEILLE 428 POETS 432 ROMANCES 442 THE ASTREA 451 POETS LAUREAT 454 ANGELO POLITIAN 456 ORIGINAL LETTER OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 460 ANNE BULLEN 461 JAMES THE FIRST 462 GENERAL MONK AND HIS WIFE 468 PHILIP AND MARY 469 CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. LIBRARIES. The passion for forming vast collections of books has necessarily existed in all periods of human curiosity; but long it required regal munificence to found a national library. It is only since the art of multiplying the productions of the mind has been discovered, that men of letters themselves have been enabled to rival this imperial and patriotic honour. The taste for books, so rare before the fifteenth century, has gradually become general only within these four hundred years: in that small space of time the public mind of Europe has been created. Of LIBRARIES, the following anecdotes seem most interesting, as they mark either the affection, or the veneration, which civilised men have ever felt for these perennial repositories of their minds. The first national library founded in Egypt seemed to have been placed under the protection of the divinities, for their statues magnificently adorned this temple, dedicated at once to religion and to literature. It was still further embellished by a well-known inscription, for ever grateful to the votary of literature; on the front was engraven,--"The nourishment of the soul;" or, according to Diodorus, "The medicine of the mind." The Egyptian Ptolemies founded the vast library of Alexandria, which was afterwards the emulative labour of rival monarchs; the founder infused a soul into the vast body he was creating, by his choice of the librarian, Demetrius Phalereus, whose skilful industry amassed from all nations their choicest productions. Without such a librarian, a national library would be little more than a literary chaos; his well exercised memory and critical judgment are its best catalogue. One of the Ptolemies refused supplying the famished Athenians with wheat, until they presented him with the original manuscripts of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and in returning copies of these autographs, he allowed them to retain the fifteen talents which he had pledged with them as a princely security.