The Trials of WHAT an amusing book might be written, Librarians. if he would relate his experiences, by that much-abused and sorely-tried person, the librarian of a great public library! What startling revelations of popular ignorance, almost staggering one's credulity, a veteran like Mr. Cutter of the Boston Athenæum, or Mr. Poole of the Newberry Library in Chicago, might make! Think of a visitor making a furious complaint, book in hand, as did one at the National Library in Paris, against the carelessness which has found a volume altogether different from the one he asked for, namely, "Le Jardin des Racines Grecques," which is, in fact, the very volume he angrily brandishes! "If," says the official, courteously, "this volume does not contain all the information you want, we have others which are completer and go deeper into the matter. For instance, there is the Thesaurus Linguæ Græcæ,"

"That, sir," replies the visitor, "is nothing to the purpose. I am a gardener, and what I want to know is, how the Greeks laid out their gardens."

Think of a visitor asking, as did one at the British Museum, to be allowed to see "the original samshrift," which he afterward explains "is the foundation of every language under the sun!" Suspecting that a Sanskrit manuscript may be the thing desired, the librarian shows him a palm-leaf MS., which completely satisfies his curiosity. He evidently came expecting to find that "the original Sanskrit" was a single document, which he might touch and handle.

The seemingly intuitive sagacity, the result of long experience, with which the employés in a great library divine. the wants of visitors, who give only the vaguest and sometimes wholly misleading hints of the books they wish for,

is extraordinary. I was told by one of the officials in the delivery room of the Boston Athenæum that a lady called there one day, and said, “I want a work on nervous prostration." It seems incredible that, even with all her practice in interpreting the imperfectly expressed wishes of visitors, the assistant librarian should have guessed, and guessed rightly, that the lady wanted a novel entitled "A Fashionable Sufferer." Another and more enigmatical visitor, an old lady, said, "I want a book that begins with C," a request which, one would think, must have baffled the combined efforts of the officials to discover its reference; but the reference was rightly divined. Still another lady asked for "a book about something in your pocket," by which it was rightly guessed that she meant a work entitled "A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder," the only clew being the little preposition in. A gentleman asked one day for "a book by a person who lives in Waltham." Knowing that "A Humble Romance," by Miss Wilkins, of Waltham, was very popular, Miss R. asked if he meant that book, to which the reply was "Yes."

When I was librarian of the Young Men's Library Association in Chicago, some thirty years ago, a rich and fashionable lady sailed into the room one day with an air of conscious importance, and asked, "Have you any of David Copperfield's works?" Another fashionable lady asked, "Have you a page?" When I replied, When I replied, "You mean a catalogue, madam, I presume?" she rejoined, "Well, page or catalogue either, -I don't care which!"

Per contra, the visitors at libraries do not monopolize all the blunders. A lady from St. Paul, who asked at the Boston Public Library for "Evelyn's Diary," was told that

she would find it "below, on the first floor, where all the

novels are kept!"

Bolingbroke IN speaking of the Chicago Young Men's as a Writer. Library Association, I am reminded of an amusing incident, quite different from the foregoing, which may be worth narrating. One day a young man from the High School called at the library when I was its librarian, and asked, "Have you any works on history? I've got to write an essay on that subject, and I want some help." I handed to him Bolingbroke's "Letters on the Study of History," and said sportively, "It would be a good joke to copy a few pages from this book and see what the professor's criticism would be!" Not dreaming of being taken seriously, I was not a little surprised, when, some weeks later, the young man returned the volume, saying, —

"I have followed your suggestion. I copied several pages verbatim, and the professor corrected them with his usual care."

"What general criticism did he make on the essay?"

"Oh, he said that the thoughts were very good indeed, but that the style betrayed marks of youthful immaturity." Considering that the most salient characteristics of Bolingbroke as a writer are notoriously dearth of thought and brilliancy of style, that, while his ideas are generally trite, he nevertheless, "at every turn," as Mr. W. Minto says, "electrifies the reader with some felicitous stroke of criticism or happy adjustment of words to his meaning," the professor's criticism must be deemed altogether original and unique.

Matter-of- THE celebrated philosopher and apostle of Fact Men. utility, Jeremy Bentham, despised poetry, and

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once declared that the game of pushpin" is of equal value with the poetical art. The only value he could see in poetry was as a means of amusement, it being, with pushpin and other amusements, an excellent substitute for drunkenness, slander, and the love of gaming." Malebranche thought that a good poet was "of no more service to the Church or the State than a good player at nine-pins." Locke and the elder Mill held an almost equally contemptuous opinion of this art, which Plato preferred to every other, which Wordsworth has called "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," and which Bacon superbly says, was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind." At a public meeting in England, the painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, heard Dr. Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, assert that a pin-maker is a more valuable and useful member of society than Raphael!

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What a dull, prosaic world would this be were it peopled by such utilitarians, in the narrowest sense of the word, such cold-blooded, matter-of-fact men as these! As Falstaff asked of Honor, they ask of Poetry, if it can set a broken leg, or cure the grief of a wound; and when answered in the negative, they exclaim that it is "a word, air, a trim reckoning," and they'll have none of it. As there are literal, unimaginative minds to which all poetry is a sealed mystery, so there are others to which Nature makes no appeal except by the productive energies of her soil, the profitable uses of the vegetation of her forests, or the mechanical powers to which her streams are converted in their descent from the mountains to the valleys or the sea. Charles Sprague did not exaggerate when, in his charming poem, "Curiosity," he spoke of men

"Who, placed where Catskill's forehead greets the sky,
Grieve that such quarries all unhewn should lie;
Or, gazing where Niagara's torrents thrill,
Exclaim, 'A monster stream to turn a mill !'"

Schiller sang truly, when he said of the Muse,

"To some she is a goddess great,

To some the milch-cow of the field, -
Their only care to calculate

How much butter she will yield."

Judas, when he demanded why the precious ointment poured on the head of our Saviour was thus wasted, instead of being sold and the proceeds given to the poor, showed himself or would have done so if he had been sincere a genuine utilitarian. To such persons, the eloquent appeal of Beattie has no meaning,—

Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields?
The warbling woodland, the resounding heaven,
The pomp of groves, and the garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,

And all that echoes in the song of even,

And that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of Heaven,

Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven?

cence of heaven "

is valued only for the light it gives.

By the hard matter-of-fact man, "all the dread magnifi"this firmament fretted with golden fires' Such a man cannot understand why the tolling of an old cracked bell through the country should have aroused such enthusiasm as did that of Independence Hall recently, on its way to Chicago. Show him the coat in which Nelson died at Trafalgar, or which Grant wore at Lee's surrender, and he would wonder whether the cloth was of West of England