Of the Libraries of the Ancients, the accounts that have descended to us are meagre and unsatisfactory. Some of the authors, to whom we owe such knowledge as we have, are either Encyclopædists, or geographers, or poets, intent on higher or on wider themes, and therefore treating of Libraries in a fashion merely incidental. Others of them derived their own knowledge at second-hand. Living, it may be, in the second or third centuries, and in Italy, we find them more communicative about the Libraries of the Ptolemies and of the Attali, than about the collections which lay almost at their own doors. The usual authorities, in a word, are but rarely bending their main attention to this particular subject. Still more rarely are they eye-witnesses of the facts for which they are made to vouch.

What can now be stated on this opening part of our theme,—and it must needs be stated briefly,—will, therefore, wear a fragmentary and hypothetical aspect. Too frequently, I fear, it will be but the abridgement of an oft- told tale. I begin by noticing the Libraries of Egypt.