calculated to remove sources of contention between nations, and best adapted, therefore, to the permanent interests of the contracting parties: 1. Privateering is and remains abolished. 2. The merchant vessels and cargoes of belligerents shall be exempted from seizure and confiscation by the public armed vessels of the hostile Powers. 3. This exemption of the private property of either belligerent shall extend to their colonies, which, as belonging to the enemy, have in former times been made the scene of devastation and plunder. 4. The right of visiting and searching neutral or hostile merchantmen for contraband of war shall be abolished. 5. Contraband of war shall be defined; and to deal in such contraband shall be made a breach of the civil law, and punishable by each State as a violation of its proclamation of neutrality. 6. Except in the case of contraband as aforesaid, all trade shall be lawful between the subjects of either belligerents, there being no reason for individuals to be involved in the quarrel that exists between their respective governments. 7. The only limitation to commerce shall be so effective a blockade of an enemy's ports as shall render it impossible for ships to enter or leave them; and the mere notification that a port is blockaded shall not justify the seizure of ships that have sailed from, or are sailing to, them in any part of the world. 8. The right to lay hostile embargoes on the ships of a friendly power, by reason of war being declared between them, shall be abolished. 9. The right to confiscate or destroy the ships of a friendly Power for the service of a belligerent State, the jus angariæ, shall be abolished. 10. It shall be dishonourable for any ship to sail under false colours for any pretext whatever. II. It shall be dishonourable in sea-battles to use torpedoes or any other "infernal machines.” What, then, would remain for the naval forces of maritime Powers to do? Everything, it may be replied, which constitutes legitimate warfare, and conforms to the elementary conception of a state of hostility; the blockading of hostile ports, and all the play of attack and defence that may be imagined between belligerent navies. Whatsoever is more than this-the plunder of an enemy's commerce, embargoes on his ships, the search of neutral vessels-not only cometh of piracy, as has been shown, but is in fact piracy itself, without any necessary connection with the conduct of legitimate hostilities. J. A. FARRER. 231 BOOKS AND THEIR AUTHORS. THE `HE debt of gratitude which mankind at large owes to books has been so often acknowledged, that the words begotten of rapt devotion are now the commonplaces of our most ordinary thoughts. We are scarce conscious of using a metaphor, when we speak of our books as friends, and of their perusal as converse. If our debt to them is infinite, our payments are habitual and incessant. In our every thought of books there is a thanksgiving. But while books thus lay all the world under a cheerfully paid tribute of praise, there is one class whose members are twice their debtors. These last, while, like their brethren, they owe to books the daily bread of their intellectual life, derive from them. also a second existence-a serene and shadowy immortality, which seems almost to fulfil the old pagan fable of an astral apotheosis. The authors of books are also their children. Or say, rather, that in their fate the hopes of the Buddhist are realised, and that the "brooding spirit of wisdom and of love" which lighted the days of their mortality has now absorbed them into its own divine essence. Whatever their actual doom may be, for us they are books. Shakespeare's ghost has donned immortal calfskin. Petrarch is a neat octavo. Horace, in spite of Dante, has escaped from the sighings and shadows of that milder Inferno, and reposes in snugbound ease within the volumed Elysium of our bookcase. Such is the mighty debt which authors owe to books—an endless existence in the purest thoughts of men, an everlasting rest in the sunshine of their most grateful memories. We purpose in this paper to see in some small measure how they have attempted to repay that debt-how they have honoured and loved those bestowers of immortality. We do not find expressed in ancient literature such a reverence for books as is continually overflowing in fervent praise from the mouths of modern authors. Leigh Hunt gives a humorous reason for this, when he says that the form of an ancient library was uncongenial to the growth of those affections which so readily entwine themselves around our so-called volumes. But the real cause, we think, lay much deeper. The two great peoples of antiquity were, from the bent of their minds, users rather than lovers of books. Of the Greeks especially is this true. With all their poetry and refinement, the Athenians were a wonderfully business-like race. In Plato's "Republic" (which, after all, is only the ideal of the mos), we find expressed a utilitarianism of at once the strictest and the broadest kind. Nothing is admitted which is not useful, and scarce any use is left out of sight. We can quite well understand how a people with notions like this, though they valued their books, could yet hardly be said to love them. They read them, enjoyed them, profited by them -and then put them by. Worship them they never did. Like the bees of their own Hymettus, they gathered the honey, but thought not of cherishing the flower. It is a significant fact, that that part of the literature of Greece which was produced after the fall of her national life smacks more of the study than do the great works which were the offspring of her prime. Plutarch and Lucian are emphatically bookish authors. See how the former revels in talk of hoarded volumes, and libraries in whose porches the learned assemble. And even where these writers have nothing articulate to say about books, we can always see that their reading has been that of the loving student. We are more at home among the Roman authors, who have less of that lofty pride of genius which disdains a pleasure sucked from the sweet husk of learning. Virgil, in the "Georgics," speaks of vegetating at Naples in all the laziness of study. Horace, in his oftsighed wishes for rural ease and calm, seldom omits a prayer for books— O rus, quando ego te adspiciam? quandoque licebit, Nunc veterum libris, nunc somno et inertibus horis Ducere sollicitae jucunda oblivia vitae ? and again, Sit bona librorum et provisae frugis in annum Horace in his library! what a picture that would be! Say on some winter evening when, without, Soracte glimmered white under the southern moon, and indoors the heaped-up logs cracked briskly on the hearth. We can fancy him there, luxuriously reclined on a couch, a roll of Alcæus or Sappho in his hand, and a flask of Falernian beside him. Catullus, too, was evidently a book-lover. In the elegy addressed to Manius Allius he laments that most of his volumes are left at Rome, and that he has brought with him only one case out of the many which he possesses. Be sure that there was a snug little bibliotheca in the "a at Sirmio, and that the pinnace which "flashed along the Lydian lake," when it did not bear some laughing Lesbia, had a corner where a precious papyrus might be stowed. Seneca knew the charms of books, and the Plinies, uncle and nephew. The Elder Pliny was used to say that he had never found a volume out of which he did not get good, and the Laurentine villa of the Younger, with its "bookcase for such works as can never be read too often," shows like a green islet amid the black fen of later Roman life. But Cicero was the great bibliomaniac of antiquity. Everyone knows the famous passage in the oration "Pro Archia " about the delights of study. 'Tis a noble scene-the great orator pleading the cause of his beloved learning at the bar of the ages. Nor was it his genius alone that Cicero devoted to the service of books. Many a hoarded sesterce went to increase his store of volumes, for, rich man though he was, he was always saving to add to his library. In his letters he more than once entreats his friend Atticus not to part with his collection until he (Cicero) has laid by enough to purchase it. The hours which others gave to business, to pleasure, and even to sleep, he spent in reading. His books were the soul of his home. "Since Tyrannus has arranged them," he says, 66 a new spirit seems to animate my house." Nor was his own library enough. We find him feeding on Faustus' collection at Puteoli, devouring books with Dionysius, sitting with Cato among the volumes of the young Lucullus. How he would revel in the British Museum or the dusty cloisters of Oxford! But we fear that the loss of so many of his own works (notably of that treatise "On Glory") would sadly distress him. The dark ages of medieval history are interesting to modern bookworms chiefly for the slender streak of light which runs through them from studious convent to convent. It must have been no small matter to be a lover of books in those days, when the normal pleasure of a learned life was enhanced by the difficulty of gratification and the sense of superiority-when the academical library of Oxford consisted of a few tracts, and the collection at Glastonbury Abbey numbered only 400 volumes. For a deep draught of the sweets of the bibliomanie, give us a few precious manuscripts, and set us in the "dim religious light" of the cloister, shut in from a limitless brawling world by the quiet of hoary walls and fruitful garden greenery. It was such a life that inspired Richard of Bury to write his panegyric on books. This old worthy, who must have been a kind of édition de luxe of Chaucer's "Clerk of Oxenford," gave the Abbot of St. Albans fifty pounds-weight of silver for some thirty volumes. His "Philobiblon" contains nigh every imaginable word that can be said in praise of books, and is subdivided into heads in the right clerical style. Here is a specimen of the enthusiastic laudation he lavishes on his subject : How great is the wonderful power arising from books! for by them we see not only the ends of the world, but of time; and we contemplate alike things that are and things that are not, as in a sort of mirror of eternity. In books we ascend mountains and fathom the depths of the abyss; we behold varieties of fishes which the common atmosphere can by no means contain in soundness; we distinguish the peculiarities of rivers and springs, and different countries, in volumes; we transcend the kingdoms of Jove, and with lines and com passes measure the territories of the seven planets, and at last survey the great firmament itself, decorated with signs, degrees, and configurations in endless variety. The period which abolished this monkish monopoly of learning was, perhaps, of all ages, the one fraught with greatest glory to books. In no other epoch has erudition been such a power in the world— so greedily coveted, or so flatteringly recognised. A student then would give anything for learning, and learning oft did nigh everything for him. Petrarch and Boccaccio, the pioneers of the literary renaissance, were unwearied book-hunters. If the former, in spite of all his genius, cuts rather a sorry figure as the lover of Laura, we can feel nothing but respect for him as the student and preserver of ancient learning. We find him, in a letter to a Florentine citizen, accounting for a four years' detention of a volume of Cicero by stating that, for want of a competent copyist, he has transcribed it himself. His end was worthy of him, for he was found dead among his books. And in the Italy of his own and the three or four succeeding generations, he had numerous disciples-men who, like old Bardi in "Romola," passed secluded days in a converse with antiquity, and echoed with fervour their master's Ciceronian words— Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur." The invention of printing, by the multiplication and cheapening of books, increased to an incalculable degree the means of a scholar's enjoyment. Volumes that formerly could scarce be obtained, or obtained only at an extravagant cost, were now placed comparatively within the reach of the multitude. A bookseller's catalogue, dated some time in the early years of the sixteenth century, gives some interesting details of prices. A Greek Testament is marked at 12 sous, a folio Latin Bible at 100 sous, a “Virgil” at 2 sous 6 deniers. It is little wonder, in these circumstances, that the love of books begins to find frequent expression in literature. Erasmus was the arch-bookworm of those days. From the time |