LITERATURE, like virtue, is often its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of a vast library has far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, and Chancellor of England so early as 1341, perhaps raised the first private library in our country. He purchased thirty or forty volumes of the Abbot of St. Albans for fifty pounds' weight of silver. He was so enamoured of his large collection, that he expressly composed a treatise on his love of books, under the title of _Philobiblion_; and which has been recently translated.[6] He who passes much of his time amid such vast resources, and does not aspire to make some small addition to his library, were it only by a critical catalogue, must indeed be not more animated than a leaden Mercury. He must be as indolent as that animal called the Sloth, who perishes on the tree he climbs, after he has eaten all its leaves. Rantzau, the founder of the great library at Copenhagen, whose days were dissolved in the pleasures of reading, discovers his taste and ardour in the following elegant effusion:-- Salvete aureoli mei libelli, Meæ deliciæ, mei lepores! Quam vos sæpe oculis juvat videre, Et tritos manibus tenere nostris! Tot vos eximii, tot eruditi, Prisci lumina sæculi et recentis, Confecere viri, suasque vobis Ausi credere lucubrationes: Et sperare decus perenne scriptis; Neque hæc irrita spes fefellit illos. IMITATED. Golden volumes! richest treasures! Objects of delicious pleasures! You my eyes rejoicing please, You my hands in rapture seize! Brilliant wits, and musing sages, Lights who beamed through many ages, Left to your conscious leaves their story, And dared to trust you with their glory; And now their hope of fame achieved, Dear volumes! you have not deceived!