of the books, and in the perpetual wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the office was no sinecure. Thus we may well imagine that Gosselin, who had charge of the Bibliothèque du Roi during the wars of the League, had enough to do to ensure the safety of his charge, and it is not surprising to learn that during his forty-four years of office he never found time to make a catalogue, nor that his too jealous guardianship often thwarted the inquiring zeal of Isaac Casaubon, who afterwards succeeded him.[1] He, again, was a striking example of a class of librarian that even to-day is by no means extinct—the mere scholar, who reads instead of causing books to be read.
The modern conception of the librarian seems to have been first reached, at least in Great Britain, by one John Durie, who set forth his views in an interesting little work, "The Reformed Librarie-Keeper" (London, 1650, 12mo). He was particularly opposed to the notion of a library being a mere museum of curiosities, and greatly blames the administration of the library at Heidelberg, in that "they that had the keeping of this librarie made it an idol, to bee respected and worshipped for a raritie by an implicate faith." He sets forth the defects that characterised the librarians of his time in words that are not without their application to-day:—
"The Librarie-keeper's place and office, in most countries (as most other Places and offices both in Churches and
- ↑ See Mark Pattison's "Casaubon,"
