Dreading to be all-forgotten,
    Still their greatness to divide,
  Dying, prayed to have his Poets
    Buried one on either side.

  But this suited not the gold-laced
    Ushers of the royal tomb,
  Where the princely House of Weimar
    Slumbered in majestic gloom.

  So they ranged the coffins justly,
    Each with fitting rank and stamp,
  And with shows of court precedence
    Mocked the grave’s sepulchral damp.

  Fitly now the clownish sexton
    Narrow courtier-rules rebukes;
  First he shows the grave of Goethe,
    Schiller’s next, and last—­the Duke’s.

  Vainly ’midst these truthful shadows
    Pride would daunt her painted wing;
  Here the Monarch waits in silence,
    And the Poet is the King!

THE LIBRARIAN’S STORY.

Librarians are a singular class of men,—­or rather, a class of singular men.  I choose the latter phrase, because I think that the singularities do not arise from the employment, but characterize the men who are most likely to gravitate toward it.  A great philosopher, whom nobody knows, once stated the Problem of Humanity thus:  “There are two kinds of people,—­round people, and three-cornered people; and two kinds of holes,—­round holes, and three-cornered holes.  All mysterious providences, misfortunes, dispensations, evils, and wrong things generally, are attributable to this cause, namely, that round people get into three-cornered holes, and three-cornered people get into round holes.”  The librarian is not only a three-cornered person, but a many-cornered one,—­a human polyhedron.  And he is in his right place,—­a many-cornered man in a many-cornered hole; especially if the hole be like that which I am thinking of,—­an Historical Library.

The only bibliothecarian peculiarity in point at present is, a gift to root up, (country boys, speaking of pigs, say rootle; it is more onomatopoeian,) to rootle up the most obscure and useless pieces of information; not, like Mr. Nadgett, to work them into a chain of connected evidence for some actual purpose, but merely to know them, to possess a record of them, either as found in some printed or manuscript document, or as recorded by the librarian himself; and to keep the record pickled away in some place where it will be as little likely as possible to be found or read by anybody else.

So much concerning Librarians; a word now about Character.

Bad blood is hereditary.  I don’t mean scrofulous, but wicked blood.  Vicious tendencies pass down in a family, appearing in the most various manifestations, until at last the evil of the race works its only possible remedy, by resulting in its extinction.  There is, in some sense, an absolute unity amongst the successive generations of those of one blood; at least, so much so that our feeling of poetical justice is rather gratified than otherwise when the crimes