The library, problem, acute everywhere, is perhaps especially so in a college library.  How can it keep pace with the multiplicity of studies?  How should it deal with books indispensable for a short time, perhaps for one generation, and then superseded?  Even apart from the question of the cost of purchase, the amount of space available is small, considering modern needs.  These problems and such as these have not yet been solved by college librarians; but the college library, quite apart from the books in it, is an education in itself.  The old days of neglect are past, the days reflected in the scandalous story—­told of more than one college—­about the old fellow who was missing for two months, and, after being searched for high and low, was found hanging dead in the college library.  Now the libraries everywhere are being used continually, and men can realize in them, perhaps better than anywhere else, how great the past of Oxford has been, and can form some idea of the labours of forgotten generations, which have made the University what it was and what it is.

Every library has its treasures, to show the present generation how beautiful an old book can be which was produced in days when its production was not a mere publisher’s speculation, but the work of a scholar seeking to promote knowledge and advance the cause of Truth.  And it does not require much imagination for a student, in a building like Merton Library, to conjure up the picture of his mediaeval predecessor, sitting on his hard wooden bench, with his chained MSS. volume on the shelf above, and poring over the crabbed pages in the unwarmed, half-lighted chamber.  If the picture brings with it the thought of the transitoriness of human endeavour, and if the words of the Teacher seem doubly true, “Of making of books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” yet in the fresh life of young Oxford, such reflections are only salutary; pessimism, despair of humanity, are not vices likely to flourish among undergraduates in the healthy society of modern colleges.

Those only, it might be said, can properly reform the present who understand the past, and it is perhaps the spirit of the Merton Library, at once old and new, which has inspired the statesmen whom Merton has sent to take part in the government of Britain during the last half-century.  Lord Randolph Churchill, the founder of Tory democracy, his present-day successor in the same role, Lord Birkenhead, and the ever young Lord Halsbury are men of the type which Walter de Merton wished to train, “for the service of God in Church and State,” men who champion the existing order, but who are willing to develop and improve it on the old lines.

ORIEL COLLEGE

“Here at each coign of every antique street
A memory hath taken root in stone,
Here Raleigh shone.” 

          
                                                        L. JOHNSON.