tome Rerum Romanorum, Elzevir, 1650 and Cornelii Nepotis Vita Excellentium Imperatorum, 1734.

These are a sample of the learned titles of the Library, set down in the Catalogue, and those in the Catalogue are but a fraction of the whole noble collection of books, classical, theological, scientific and political. Then behold here arrayed a vast number of pamphlets, many of them controversial, but all, in some fashion, enlightening us upon the thought of the age.

Would that we could linger in such a sanctuary of the best literature of all time, expressing, as it does, the genius, as a collector, and the polished taste, as a scholar, of a gentleman born and bred in ancient Narragansett.

In the old, old times, probably before almost any one, beside myself, now present, was born, I used to browse, as a little lad, in an ancient attic, among the treasures preserved from the first book-store, in Providence. Even now, the smell of cedar, such as that with which the attic was ceiled, calls up to my imagination great boxes and numerous barrels filled with antique books and pamphlets, printed with "long esses" on coarse yellow paper and in homely marble paper bindings or those of plainest russet leather,—useless except to sell to the junk-man, perhaps some of you would have said, but to me, in those childhood days of comparative booklessness, oh! so wholly delightful. The old shop, from which this literary débris had been transported, when the business was closed about 1817, had stood for a quarter of a century on the present site of the People's Bank, on Market Square.

When the "September Gale" of 1815 drove the water of Providence River, several feet deep, over the Great Bridge, many of the books in this store were inundated for hours. I recall a fond impression I, in those childhood times of simplicity, used to entertain, that a volume was hardly worth reading, unless its leaves were well stained with salt sea water and unless sea-sand, as was actually the case with many of the volumes in the attic, had silted in between the pages. Here are two or three of these treasure-troves, printed and published in Providence, before 1799; for the book-sellers, in Market Square, were pub

lishers, as well as bibliopolists. Here is a copy of Arnold's Poems, doubtless the first printed volume of a Rhode Island-born poet, containing, among many other compositions, some of them of classical character, A Modern Eclogue, Caryl & Susan, the hero, Caryl, having been a barber in Pawtucket.

Here is the Looking-Glass for the Mind, containing a sheaf of admirable juvenile stories illustrated by wood-cuts so execrable and comic that you question if they were not intended to be caricatures. Here, too, is a delightful book for children, with the preposterously unprepossessing title, the Elements of Morality. Both the Looking-Glass and the Elements of Morality having for frontispieces, genuinely fine copperplate engravings, displaying, vividly, in contrast with the crude woodcuts, the small improvement, made in a century or two, in engraving on metal, as well as the immense advance in that on wood. The LookingGlass frontispiece represents an allegorical scene, where a goddess sits before a Greek temple, with a group facing her, explained by the legend underneath: "A lady attended by Virtue & Prudence, is presenting her children to Minerva, from whom they are receiving The Looking Glass."

The frontispiece of the other "improving book" pictures a very human looking boy, crossing a plowed field and engaged in the congenial and characteristic occupation of removing the ears from a living mouse with a pocket-knife and receiving from his uncle the well-merited and, no doubt utterly fruitless rebuke: "He, who can torment a little helpless animal, has surely a bad heart." As a revival of the pleasant old days, I have had struck off from those burnished copper plates, after lying unused for more than a century, these fresh impressions, which seem like voices sounding out of the dead past, somewhat as phonographic records. of our own voices will sound to posterity a hundred years hence.

One of the partners in the "Old Coffee-House "Bookstore collected a library still kept together and showing well what were considered, in 1800, the books which "no gentleman's library could do without." There are seen, among several hundred volumes,-absolutely every single volume of them being bound in sombre russet-brown calf,-The

British Classics in almost numberless volumes, Josephus, Goldsmith, Walter Scott's Memoirs, Radcliffe's Journey (who can remember when and whither?) Rollin's Ancient History, Robertson's Scotland, Robertson's America, The Travels of Anarcharsis, Gibbon's Roman Empire, Hume's History of England, The Works of Burke, Russell's Modern Europe, Anquetil's Universal History and so on,-almost all books which we already have or almost blush not to have in our own libraries to-day.

From this glimpse at a few of the collections of early times, in our little commonwealth, what a leap it seems to the superb assemblages of books existing at the present day! Yet how certain is it that had not a taste for good literature been begun to be cultivated in Colony times and in those when the Republic was in its infancy, the fruitage of to-day would have been much more meagre than it is.

The magnificent Library of Brown University is justly the pride of our State. The junior member of the bookselling and publishing firm, just alluded to, and the collector of the last described private library was one of the first three librarians of the University and thus helped to rock the cradle of the giant that was to be. The John Carter Brown Library, on the other hand, is the fruit of the patient and enlightened toil of a man who spent a life-time in forming a collection of authorities on American History, now absolutely unique among all the collections of Americana upon the face of the globe. But John Carter Brown was a grandson of the senior member of the firm which was supplying the private libraries of Providence with books, a hundred years ago, John Carter, and the builders of the costly setting of this matchless collection were his great-grandsons, all of them deriving at least a portion of their inspiration from that almost forgotten origin.

As I look into the future I behold not only the Carter Brown Library still dwelling, as it does to-day, in its chaste edifice of snowy stone and the Providence Public Library beautifully housed in its grand structure of brick and stone, on Washington street, and the State Library sharing the glories of the Capitol and Brown University Library ensconced in the noble John Hay Memorial, now being raised, but I

catch, also, an inspiring vision of the priceless collection of this R. I. Historical Society enshrined by the munificence of some grateful citizen in a palatial building worthy of its merits and covering, it may be, the whole of the land between the eastern boundary of its present lot and Prospect street. Nay, I descry the honored Providence Athenæum, with its generous store of 70,000 well-chosen volumes, transferred from its present neat but rather narrow quarters, which for seventy years have undergone no external renewal or enlargement to a modern edifice more fitting its treasures of good learning and more eloquent of the public spirit and liberality of a generation which, having received much from its fathers, owes much to the children yet unborn. When these six great libraries shall all have been housed in permanence and beauty, as are most of them already, then will Providence have earned the proud title of the City of Libraries.

EAST GREENWICH, R. I.

DANIEL GOODWIN.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF THE REBELLION

O`

(Second Paper)

N his return to Troy General Wool addressed the following letter

to me:

Dear Colonel Cannon:

HEADQUARTERS OF THE EAST,

TROY, May 4, 1861.

Presuming that you may be of service to the Union Defence Committee in New York City, I have to request that you will, until further orders, place yourself in communication with them, to afford such aid and advice, unofficially, as may be requested, and report to me from time to time at this place.

JOHN E. WOOL,
Major-General.

The highly important and interesting events of General Wool's brief command in the city of New York, and the whole of the circumstances of his coming, his work here, and his recall, are told in the following personal letter from General Wool to myself:

My Dear Colonel:

TROY, N. Y., July 10, 1861.

I have frequently been asked why I am not in the field battling against the traitors of the Union.

The causes may be found in the following condensed history of the services I rendered in the execution of important and responsible duties, assumed on my part at a moment of great peril to the country, and when the Federal Capital was in imminent danger of being taken possession of by the rebels from Virginia and Maryland.

You will recollect the attack on a Massachusetts regiment passing through Baltimore, which resulted in destroying several long bridges between Baltimore and Philadelphia, of divers railroad tracks, and