Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.

The Library Founder

The Library Founder.

None of the acquisitive passions is so respectable as the avidity of collecting books. It is pre-eminently the scholar's passion. These are his quarry, his mines of Golconda, his Kimberley diamond fields, where he will find who knows what massive jewel or, in any case, the solid substance of his erudition. The wife of his bosom may grumble, as Lady Hamilton gently repined when her helluo librorum carted home fresh additions to the stores of which the philosopher made so little visible use. Even the literary worker who makes no pretensions to learning, and who cares less for the form than for the intrinsic utility of the volumes he uses, is pleased when he picks up for a few shillings a rare treatise of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But these are only amateurs, timorous paddlers in deep waters, while men with tastes, curiosity, and means set out in quest of rare old editions, or have agents in many countries. Thus equipped and thus advised, in a few years they may gather huge or valuable collections with which to feast their own eyes, while they feast the eyes of others. Then, when they die, they bequeath them to their descendants, like the Earls Spencer, or to a college, as did Victor Cousin to the Sorbonne. Now and then, but far seldomer, such a connoisseur may part with his hoards in his lifetime. What motive then governs him? Love of praise perhaps, but also an honest desire to diffuse the benefits of erudition and the materials of research. Such mixed motives we may conceive to have animated Grey when he decided to present to the Cape the splendid accumulation of books and manuscripts he had been getting together during a good many years—nearly twenty, lie himself stated in the preface to the second edition of his Polynesian Mythology.