George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

‘ [316] under my directions in Leipzig and Florence, have been bought at above forty per cent under the fair, regular prices.’ To this should be added the fact, that on Mr. Ticknor's purchases the Library was saved all commissions. On the 2d of February he closed his ‘third box of books bought in Rome; making in the three boxes seven hundred and eighty-nine volumes, chiefly Italian, but a good many French, and some English, etc., which have cost, binding inclusive (but not emballage), five hundred and five dollars.’

In one of his letters to Mr. Everett, from Rome, he refers to the fact that five sixths of the books then in the Library were in the English language, and to intimations he had received of a feeling among some persons in favor of making the Library exclusively English. After alluding to his original anxiety to have a popular circulating library, with many copies of many popular books, he goes on:—

I do not, indeed, want for my personal convenience any library at all, except my own, but I should be ashamed of myself, if, in working for such an institution as our Public Library, I could overlook the claims of the poor young men, and others who are not able to buy valuable, costly, and even rare books, in foreign languages, which they need in studies important to them and the public. I never did neglect their claims in relation to my own inconsiderable library, and why should I do it in relation to a large public library? Nor do I see how anybody who may have a collection of rare and valuable books in a foreign language,—Sanscrit, if you please, like the late Mr. Wales's, or little collections in Spanish or Portuguese, like mine, —can find a proper place for them in any such almost wholly English library, with whose general plan such collections would be quite out of keeping, as well as with the common course of its purchase and administration. I have never apprehended that we were making such a library, nor do I suppose so now; but I see from your letter that there are persons who would prefer it,—I mean persons who would prefer to keep our Public Library almost wholly an English one.

In Paris he devoted a considerable part of every day to the affairs of the Library, and in London he passed a month in the summer of 1857, during which he completed the adjustment of