United States or Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We drove about the city on several occasions at midnight, to see the life men, women, and children enjoying the cool breezes, and the restaurants all crowded with people. Sunday in Paris is charming it is the day for the masses of the people. All the galleries of art, the libraries, concert halls, and gardens are open to them.
Yet these have been bought for scores of libraries, which could not afford the latest books in science and art, or biography, history, or travel. There are libraries in which the latest books on electricity, or sewerage, or sanitary plumbing, might have saved many lives, but which must go without them, because the money has been squandered on vapid and pernicious literature.
It is then the dog worrying the kittens. Such men will only give satisfaction in great private libraries little disturbed by their proprietors, or in monastic or other corporate institutions, where it is the worthy object of the patrons to keep their collection in fine condition, and, at the same time, to take order that it shall be of the least possible service to education or literature.
When I consider the debt which libraries and literature alike owe to the daily and weekly press, it is difficult to characterize with patience the Parthian arrow flung at it from the grave of a querulous millionaire, who will owe to these very newspapers the greater part of his success and his reputation.
Added to this are reading-rooms, and various sorts of libraries, which are accessible for a small sum, and sometimes for almost nothing. There have been three valuable courses of Franklin Lectures delivered in Boston, during the three last winters, of twenty lectures each, for only fifty cents a course.
But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the cities and places where the mendicants we have mentioned had their convents, we did not disdain to visit their libraries and any other repositories of books; nay, there we found heaped up amid the utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom.
Here there were schools and teachers for instruction in the foreign language and script, and record-chambers and libraries in which the letters and books of clay could be copied and preserved. Long before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets we might have gathered from the Old Testament itself that such libraries once existed in Canaan.
And, Johnnie, dear, books was what he loved, and when he was a little telegraph messenger, he'd read when he could, in betwixt scamperin' here and there with messages. He lived to make a fortune, and much of that fortune he spent in buildin' libraries for those who can't afford to buy their own books.
Certain classes of the printed stuff just spoken of do not, of course, find their way into children's libraries, since they are barred out from all respectable shelves; but we are still too lenient with print because it is print, and every single book should be carefully examined before it goes into a library where children should have access to the shelves.
As they were about to destroy the precious libraries of Athens, one of their chieftains said, "Let us leave to the Greeks their books, that they, in reading them may forget the arts of war; and that we thus may more easily be able to hold them in subjection."
Word Of The Day