A Prayer for a Conflagration

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THE credibility of the story that the Caliph Omar caused the destruction of the Alexandrian library has been seriously questioned, but this does not prevent some of us from wishing that the caliph were alive to-day, in order that we might request him to repeat his exploit on a larger scale. It is true that we should probably desire him to save a few books beside the Koran, and that we should have a pretty lively time determining which these few books should be. Mr. Swinburne would doubtless assert with vehement volubility that all extant copies of Victor Hugo’s works should be put in a safe place at once, and Professor Saintsbury would begin at the other end and insist on committing every copy of Byron to the flames. It would certainly be a battle royal of the critics, if not a new battle of the books, But if, as sometimes happens in such cases, the contending parties should agree to suspend hostilities, and to select a scapegoat on which to centre their animosities, could they make a better, a more grateful choice, than to offer up to the salutary conflagration the whole army of monographs, doctors’ theses, and “ studies ” that the university and other presses are turning out for the invasion of our libraries and the subjugation of our true kingdoms, according to good Sir Edward Dyer, — to wit, our minds ? Are not these precious specialists whom, in imitation of Germany, we are training up, threatening to become a very plague of Egypt to us, — or rather two plagues in one, that of the locusts and that of the darkness, — and must not something be done to rid us of them ? Alexandria had its commentators, the seventeenth century had its weavers of interminable romances, our fathers had their ponderous divines and portentous eulogistic biographers ; but we have our specialists, and there is no Omar in sight to burn either them or their monographs. Such being the case, is it too much to beseech the universities to increase their corps of instructors in rhetoric ? If our institutions of learning are to become mere manufactories of books, we can at least ask that they manufacture readable ones.