VAN PRAUN, a friend of Albert Durer’s, of whom we possess a catalogue of pictures and prints, was one of these enthusiasts of taste.  The Emperor of Germany, probably desirous of finding a royal road to a rare collection, sent an agent to procure the present one entire; and that some delicacy might be observed with such a man, the purchase was to be proposed in the form of a mutual exchange; the emperor had gold, pearls, and diamonds.  Our lief-hebber having silently listened to the imperial agent, seemed astonished that such things should be considered as equivalents for a collection of works of art, which had required a long life of experience and many previous studies and practised tastes to have formed, and compared with which gold, pearls, and diamonds, afforded but a mean, an unequal, and a barbarous barter.

If the man of letters be less dependent on others for the very perception of his own existence than men of the world are, his solitude, however, is not that of a desert:  for all there tends to keep alive those concentrated feelings which cannot be indulged with security, or even without ridicule in general society.  Like the Lucullus of Plutarch, he would not only live among the votaries of literature, but would live for them; he throws open his library, his gallery, and his cabinet, to all the Grecians.  Such men are the fathers of genius; they seem to possess an aptitude in discovering those minds which are clouded over by the obscurity of their situations; and it is they who so frequently project those benevolent institutions, where they have poured out the philanthropy of their hearts in that world which they appear to have forsaken.  If Europe be literary, to whom does she owe this more than to these men of letters?  Is it not to their noble passion of amassing through life those magnificent collections, which often bear the names of their founders from the gratitude of a following age?  Venice, Florence, and Copenhagen, Oxford, and London, attest the existence of their labours.  Our BODLEYS and our HARLEYS, our COTTONS and our SLOANES, our CRACHERODES, our TOWNLEYS, and our BANKS, were of this race![A] In the perpetuity of their own studies they felt as if they were extending human longevity, by throwing an unbroken light of knowledge into the next age.  The private acquisitions of a solitary man of letters during half a century have become public endowments.  A generous enthusiasm inspired these intrepid labours, and their voluntary privations of what the world calls its pleasures and its honours, would form an interesting history not yet written; their due, yet undischarged.

[Footnote A:  Sir Thomas Bodley, in 1602, first brought the old libraries at Oxford into order for the benefit of students, and added thereto his own noble collection.  That of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (died 1724), was purchased by the country, and is now in the British Museum; and also are the other collections named above.  Sir Robert Cotton died 1631; his collection is remarkable for its historic documents and state-papers.  Sir Hans Sloane’s collections may be said to be the foundation of the British Museum, and were purchased by Government for 20,000_l_., after his death, in 1749.  Of Cracherode and Townley some notice will be found on p. 2 of the present volume.  Sir Joseph Banks and his sister made large bequests to the same national establishment.—­ED.]