Now behold us, ... settled in all the state and grandeur of our own
house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury: the library of the Museum close at
hand. My father spends his mornings in those _lata silentia_, as Virgil
calls the world beyond the grave. And a world beyond the grave we may
well call that land of the ghosts, a book collection.
'Pisistratus,' said my father, one evening as he arranged his notes
before him, and rubbed his spectacles. 'Pisistratus, a great library is
an _awful_ place! There, are interred all the remains of men since the
Flood.'
'It is a burial-place!' quoth my Uncle Roland, who had that day found us
out.
'It is an Heraclea!' said my father.
'Please, not such hard words,' said the Captain, shaking his head.
'Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead.
Do I want to speak to Cicero?--I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the
Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?--I write
down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up
Aristophanes.... But it is not _that_ which is awful. It is the
presuming to vie with these "spirits elect": to say to them, "Make
way--I too claim place with the chosen. I too would confer with the
living, centuries after the death that consumes my dust."'--E. G. E. L.
BULWER-LYTTON, LORD LYTTON. _The Caxtons._