Let us consider how great a commodity of doctrine exists in books, how easily, how secretly, how safely they expose the nakedness of human ignorance, without putting it to shame. These are the masters who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and anger, without clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing: if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you.-BURY, RICHARD DE, 1345?-1473, Philobiblion.

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts. -SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM, 1588-98, Love's Labours Lost, Act iv, Scene ii.

Happy, ye leaves! when as those lilly hands, Which hold my life in their dead-doing might, Shall handle you, and hold in love's soft bands,

Like captives trembling at the victors sight. And happy lines! on which, with starry light, Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look

And reade the sorrowes of my dying spright, Written with teares in harts close-bleeding book.

And happy rymes! bath'd in the sacred brooke
Of Helicon, whence she derived is;
When ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
My soules long-lacked foode, my heavens blis;
Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please
alone,

Whom if ye please, I care for other none!
-SPENSER, EDMUND, 1595, Amoretti.

If I were not a King, I would be a University man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, 1 would desire to have no other prison than that library, and to be chained together with so many good authors, et mortuis magister.-JAMES I., 1605, Speech on Visit to the Bodleian Library.

Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.-BACON, FRANCIS LORD, 1605, The Advancement of Learning.

I never come into a library (saith Heinsius) but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not their happiness.-BURTON, ROBERT, 1621, Anatomy of Melancholy.

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, JOHN, 1644, Areopagitica.

Our books. Do not our hearts hug them, and quiet themselves in them even more than in God?—BAXTER, RICHARD, 1650, The Saint's Everlasting Rest.

This to a structure led well known to fame, And called, "The Monument of Vanished Minds,"

Where when they thought they saw in wellsought 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 de