in progress, several benefactions of interest had accrued to the library.  Mr. Lenox had given an additional one hundred thousand dollars, and in 1872 one hundred thousand dollars more, and Mr. Felix Astoin had promised to bestow his fine collection of some five thousand rare French works.  On the 15th of January, 1877, the first exhibition of paintings and sculptures was opened to the public, and continued on two days of the week to the end of the year, and on the 1st of the following December an apartment for the exhibition of rare works and manuscripts was also opened to the public.  Fifteen thousand people visited the library during this first year, thus indicating the popular appreciation of a collection of this kind.  In 1881 nineteen thousand eight hundred and thirty-three admission-tickets were issued,—­the largest number of visitors on any one day being eleven hundred, on the anniversary of Washington’s birthday.

The scope and objects of this unique institution are so admirably set forth by the trustees in their report to the legislature for 1881 that we append an extract.  “The library,” they observe, “differs from most public libraries.  It is not a great general library intended in its endowment and present equipment for the use of readers in all or most of the departments of human knowledge....  Beyond its special collections it should be regarded as supplementary to others more general and numerous and directly adapted to popular use.  It is not like the British Museum, but rather like the Grenville collection in the British Museum, or perhaps still more like the house and museum of Sir John Soane in Lincoln’s Inn’s Fields, in London, both lasting monuments of the learning and liberality of their honored founders.  Thus, while the library does not profess to be a general or universal collection of all the knowledge stored up in the world of books, it is absolutely without a peer or a rival here in the special collections to which the generous taste and liberal scholarship of its founder devoted his best gifts of intellectual ability and ample resources of fortune.  It represents the favorite studies of a lifetime consecrated after due offices of religion and charity to the choicest pursuits of literature and art.  It would be difficult to estimate the value or importance of these marvellous treasures, whose exhibition hitherto only in part has challenged the admiration of all scholars and given a new impulse to those studies for which they furnish an apparatus before unseen in America....  The countless myriads of volumes produced in the past four centuries of printing with movable types have left in all the libraries of all the nations comparatively few monuments, or even memorials, of so many eager, patient, or weary generations of men whose works have followed them when they have rested from their labors.  The Lenox Library was established for the public exhibition and scholarly use of some of the most rare and precious