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Updated: June 7, 2025
The number of librarians who have united great learning to a love of books, is the best practical answer to all sneers about the two being incompatible. Nor, while we count among us such names as Panizzi, Birch, Halkett, Naudet, Laing, Cogswell, Jones, Pertz, and Todd, is the race of learned librarians likely to decay.
Mr. Panizzi, if I am not mistaken, promised the world a collection of the miscellaneous poems of Boiardo; but we have not yet had the pleasure of seeing them. In his life of the poet, however, he has given several specimens, both Latin and Italian, which are extremely agreeable.
Louis the Fourteenth, of evil memory, has at least this one good deed to his credit, that he raised the Royal Library at Paris, founded two centuries before, to 70,000 volumes. In 1791 it had 150,000 volumes. It profited largely by the Revolution. The British Museum had only reached 115,000 when Panizzi became keeper in 1837.
Panizzi is, as usual, copious and to the purpose; and has, for the first time I believe, critically proved the regularity and connectedness of Ariosto's plots, as well as the hollowness of the pretensions of the house of Este to be considered patrons of literature. It is only a pity that his Life of Ariosto is not better arranged. Satira vi.
As it is, a new reading-room, after the model of that existing at the National Library in Paris, is about to be built in the courtyard of the Collegio Romano. The classification, arrangement and methods of working the library will be copied in great measure from those introduced by Mr. Panizzi at the British Museum.
In 1822, he hung the priest Giuseppe Andreoli on the charge of Carbonarism; and his theory of justice is amusingly illustrated by the story of his sending in a bill to Sir Anthony Panizzi who had escaped to England for the expenses of hanging him in effigy.
The learned lawyer, his countryman Panciroli, probably in resentment, as Panizzi says, of this preference, accused him of an excess of benignity, and of being fitter for writing poems than punishing ill deeds; and in truth, as the same critic observes, "he must have been considered crazy by the whole tribe of lawyers of that age," if it be true that he anticipated the opinion of Beccaria, in thinking that no crime ought to be punished with death.
Some amongst them impressed me quite as much for their amiability their loveableness, I may say as for their renown; and regard for them increased with coming years. Panizzi was one of these. Dufferin, who was just my age, would have fascinated anyone with the singular courtesy of his manner. Dicky Doyle was necessarily a favourite with all who knew him.
But I could not learn anything about a phallic monolith, which is said by Guerin or Panizzi to have been identified with the Roland myth at Spello. Such a column either never existed here, or had been removed before the memory of the present generation. We are in the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices.
Panizzi used to relate with much glee how, whenever he was at Holkham, Mr. Collyer dogged him like a detective. Collyer to leave him to his researches. The dominie replied 'that he knew his duty, and did not mean to neglect it. He did not lose sight of Mr. Panizzi.
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