Broadly stated, the outcome of all the pother has been to restore to an unthankful world what is probably a complete set of the works of Philodemus! "Philodemus!" gasp the scholars. "Who wanted him?" A fifth-rate Greek philosopher and a fourth-rate poet, who lived at Rome in the days of Cicero, better esteemed for his verses than his reasoning, and not much for either. But no Livy? No Terence? No Cicero? Not one line; hardly anything but the prose treatises of Philodemus, concerning which Signor Comparetti observes with emphasis that the oblivion they lay in was anything but undeserved. Such is the greatest practical joke played on us by the Time Spirit in the present age. But now, laying aside our disappointment and bad temper, let us see what can be made out of this curious, if worthless, discovery. Who could have cared to collect the works of Philodemus, large and small, even to the notes he made from other books? The philosophy was Epicurean, but the chief works of the leaders of that school are with few exceptions not there. Who could it be but Philodemus himself, the only man, surely, for whom such a collection would have value? But what, then, was the library doing in this splendid and costly villa at Herculaneum? Philodemus was a poor Greek scholar, the last man who could have afforded to collect fine marbles or to house them nobly. The villa must have belonged to his patron and protector. Cicero names for us the patrician who enjoyed the privilege of hearing Philodemus reason when he would. It was Piso, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cæsoninus, attacked by Cicero in one of the greatest of his orations. Piso had known this poor scholar from a boy, learnt the philosophy of Epicurus from him, and gave him rooms in his own house. To Piso, probably, belonged this villa. Here he may have ended his stormy life in the society of Philodemus; and when that learned man ascended to Parnassus, his books remained in what had been his study, preserved perhaps by some lingering attachment to his memory, perhaps by such a superstitious pride in what is never read as may be seen in certain country houses of to-day, where the squire believes the dusty volumes collected by his grandfather are a credit to the house, and chides the housemaid if he ever finds a cobweb on the peaceful shelves. It will also be remembered that, unless you want the space very much, it is easier to leave books alone than to destroy them. On the whole, I do not think the discovery of this library affords any evidence of the prevalence of cultivated taste in Herculaneum. Rather the opposite, indeed, for whatever value the owners of the house may have attached to the library the fact remains that they added to it nothing in the hundred years which followed the decease of Philodemus.