It is a round ball of glass or crystal, slightly
tinged with a pinkish hue, and about as big as a small apple, or a little
bigger than an egg would be if perfectly round. This ancient humbug kept
me looking at it perhaps ten minutes; and I saw my own face dimly in it,
but no other vision. Lastly, I passed through the Ethnographical Rooms;
but I care little for the varieties of the human race,--all that is
really important and interesting being found in our own variety. Perhaps
equally in any other. This brought me to the head of one of the
staircases, descending which I entered the library.
Here--not to speak of the noble rooms and halls--there are numberless
treasures beyond all price; too valuable in their way for me to select
any one as more curious and valuable than many others. Letters of
statesmen and warriors of all nations, and several centuries back,--among
which, long as it has taken Europe to produce them, I saw none so
illustrious as those of Washington, nor more so than Franklin's, whom
America gave to the world in her nonage; and epistles of poets and
artists, and of kings, too, whose chirography appears to have been much
better than I should have expected from fingers so often cramped in iron
gauntlets. In another case there were the original autograph copies of
several famous works,--for example, that of Pope's Homer, written on the
backs of letters, the direction and seals of which appear in the midst of
"the Tale of Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined
with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of
the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style
than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of
Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward
diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance;--in short,
I may as well drop the whole matter here.
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