THE BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY.
Munich, 23d October 1856.
A correspondent of the Allgemeine Zeitung some days back, dating from London, indulged in a violent tirade against the Library and Reading-room of the British Museum, though with fewer and less substantial reasons than those alleged against it by English assailants. He states that it is not diffi- cult to see in the British Museum an image of England in a nutshell. in the British Museum you have immense literary_resources, only used, and scarcely used rightly, by an initiated minority. He complains that it is im- possible directly to enter into the system of the arrangements of the Museum, because the run of English culture has for more than a hundred years been too exclusively directed towards the forum, and modern English literature has aimed too much at popularizing weighty literary ingots of gold. (Possibly I have Lot construed this sentence rightly. : I do not pretend to have interpreted it.) He deprecates the assaults of the press on the incon- veniences of the reading-room, because the patient reader can wait for the enormous chamber in process of construction. He blames the authorities for shutting the reading-room at five o'clock in September, and suggests that there should be lights introduced ; which is in itself a question requiring much discussion, and cannot be settled in a line of the 2111gemeine Zeitung. Perhaps the simplest manner to give light to the students and avoid all risk of setting fire to the books, would he to have a chandelier of sufficient di- mension in each of the present reading-rooms, and to give out no more books after a certain hour, so as to confine the lights to the rooms where there are fewest volumes. Of course the German caviller complains of the imperfec- tions of the catalogue ; groaning deeply because when he looks for a good new collected edition of an author's works, he finds various editions of his various works instead ; which, I em inclined to imagine, can hardly be ob- viated in a catalogue. Then there is a pedantical exactness in the cata- logue, and the new catalogue has not proceeded beyond the letter A. More- over, he has the hardihood to state, that in comparison with the British Museum, many German University Libraries have nothing to desire.
I am not personally acquainted with any German University Library, but my experience of the Royal Library at Munich, which Murray says con- tains the second collection of books in the world, (viz. from 400,000 to 540,000 volumes,) makes me place it far below the British Museum in point of accommodation. My studies at the British Museum have perhaps not extended far, but I found little to complain of there. The Royal Library of Munich is only open to readers from eight in the morning to one. Formerly it was only open three days in the week. You are only able to have one book a day, unless you are favoured by the attendants ; and if you get a book at eight in the morning, that being shorter than you expected, or containing fewer materials, occupies you till ten instead of one, you can have no second book for the three hours that remain, unless by special favour. Moreover, there are no books of reference ranged about the reading-room ; so that one of the chief conveniences of the British Museum is absent. You have no reading-desks. In fact, as a library for the public, the Munich Royal Li- brary is most inconvenient. Its merits are those of a private library. Peo- ple are able to have books from it, and it contains a room tolerably stocked with newspapers and periodicals. Of course in London such regulations could not exist ; at least the former could not ; and it might be difficult to have a room stocked with periodicals, for fear of attracting more of the stu- dents who now frequent the British Museum for the purpose of reading novels. I understand that in Munich, some of the more distinguished in- habitants can take home as many as seventy volumes from the Royal Li- brary; which is a great convenience of course to private men, but lessens the public accommodation.
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