Unconfused Babel of all tongues! which e'er The mighty linguist Fame or Time the mighty traveller, That could speak or this could hear! Majestic monument and pyramid! Where still the shapes of parted souls abide Embalmed in verse; exalted souls which now Enjoy those arts they wooed so well below, Which now all wonders plainly see That have been, are, or are to be In the mysterious Library, The beatific Bodley of the Deity! COWLEY, _Ode on the Bodleian_. This to a structure led well known to fame, And called, 'The Monument of Vanished Minds,' Where when they thought they saw in well-sought books The assembled souls of all that men thought wise, It bred such awful reverence in their looks, As if they saw the buried writers rise. Such heaps of written thought; gold of the dead, Which Time does still disperse but not devour, Made them presume all was from deluge freed Which long-lived authors writ ere Noah's shower. DAVENANT, _Gondibert_. Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.--MILTON, _Areopagitica_. Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end.--FIELDING, _Tom Jones_. We whom the world is pleased to honour with the title of modern authors should never have been able to compass our great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the general good of mankind.--SWIFT, _Tale of a Tub_. A good library always makes me melancholy, where the best author is as much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coronation.--SWIFT.