Author of "A Century of Birmingham Life," "Modern Birmingham,"
"Staffordshire and Warwickshire," &c. &c.

BIBLIOTHER

AUC 1882

CASSELL, PETTER, GALP FO

LONDON, PARIS & NEW YORK,

[ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.]

270. g. 942.

"Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books, written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate, audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbours and arsenals, vast cities, highdomed, many-engined-they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb, mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece ! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men '-CARLYLE.