A library,--the assembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;--reminds me of that fresco by RAPHAEL, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces, popularly styled "The School of Athens," and which I hope to see hung up as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical man, like FRANKLIN'S Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. SOCRATES, with sly humor, is humbling the self-sufficient ALCIBIADES that he may rouse him to loftier aspirations. PYTHAGORAS is writing among disciples, one of whom holds his musical scale, while above all, and in the midst of the temple, appear ARISTOTLE, father of natural philosophy, pointing down to the earth, and PLATO, the father of spiritual philosophy with hand uplifted toward heaven, man as it were feeling for God. The culture proffered in such a School of Athens, as RAPHAEL painted--and as an ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle of architecture, the dome,--which is well said to unite clustered arches and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in air, and looking to the stars. "Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime." THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY This section, devoted to the general relations of the library and society, which opened with a historical account by Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, may appropriately close with another of similar tenor, contributed eleven years later to _The American Magazine of Civics_ (New York, May, 1895) by Prof. Henry H. Barber. It covers some of the same ground but gives results to a later date, while it is still only introductory to the social development of more recent years. Henry Hervey Barber was born in Warwick, Mass., Dec. 30, 1835, graduated at Meadville Theological Seminary in 1861 and after holding several Unitarian pastorates was professor of philosophy and theology there from 1884 to 1904. He was also editor of the Unitarian Review from 1875 to 1884. He died about 1915.