Excerpt from Memoir of William John Potts

Nothing was more characteristic of him than his love for books, and while in Europe he more than once expressed himself as feeling lost, away from his study-table, surrounded by his favorite volumes. When a boy at school he met with Channing's well-known passage, which says: No matter how poor I am, no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling, if the sacred writers will enter, take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship. Charming was the friend of his mother's family in Boston, and this fact, together with the beauty of the thought, so impressed the, passage on his mind, that I find it quoted in full in a letter written in the latter part of his life. The love of books had entered his soul, and it is not therefore surprising that in two of his letters we find descriptions of the Library of the British Museum and of the great National Library in Paris.

As Librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I had given him a letter of introduction to the officials of the British Museum. I had no personal acquaintance with them, but knowing how courteously they receive students bearing credentials from institutions of learning, I felt that an official letter might be of service to him. The reception he met with was not different from that which any well-accredited person would have received, but is best told in his own words.

The printed rules of the Library, he wrote, state that to be a reader one 'must have the letters of two house holders or a person of note these are the words. I con clude the Librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania must be a great personage. Twenty minutes after I gave your letter (mr. Stevens not being asked for, though I said I could get one from him), I was sitting at one of the desks in that profound library, a Reader for life (only think of it i), the great dome above, twenty thousand reference volumes surrounding me, two assistants crowding round me, smiling most graciously and asking, How many would I like to have - one million three hundred thousand printed books waiting to be called for, with many thousands of manu scripts.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.