Almost all personal trace, however, of the famous librarians of antiquity has disappeared; but the interest attaching to the slow emergence of their modern representatives from the flood of ignorance and barbarism rivals that which the history of their prototypes would excite, could this be recovered. It would be interesting to know when and where in Renaissance, or post-Renaissance times, the accumulation of books first became so considerable as to demand the whole time of the officer entrusted with their custody, and thus to give birth to librarianship as a distinct profession. Into this inquiry I do not propose to enter. I wish merely, on the present occasion, to direct your attention to the evidence borne about the middle of the seventeenth century to the development at that period attained by librarianship, and the conception of its duties and possibilities entertained by John Dury, a man in advance of his times.
Dury was by birth a Scotchman, and by profession a divine. He had signalised his appreciation of libraries at an early age by repairing to Oxford with the object of studying in the Bodleian. He is entitled to figure on the roll of librarians himself, having been appointed deputy-keeper of the Royal Library after the execution of Charles I., which charge may very probably have suggested to him those thoughts on the duties of librarians and the standard of librarianship, of which I am to give you an account. The main object of his life, however, was the even more important but certainly less hopeful undertaking of allaying the acrimony of religious zealots. In pursuance of this mission we find him almost more abroad than at home; ever labouring to appease the dissensions of Protestants, now negotiating with Gustavus Adolphus, now with the Synod of Transylvania; now at Utrecht, now at Brandenburgh, now at Metz, where he submitted to the loss of his "great, square, white beard," as a peace offering to the prejudices of French Protestantism. He eventually, long after the Restoration, died in Hesse, where he was entertained and protected by the Regent. It is to be feared that nothing came of his well-meant endeavours but the witness of a good conscience and the blessing that rests upon peace-makers. It may, perhaps, have been inferred that he was not in all respects the most practical of men, and this, indeed, appears from his works on education rather than from his suggestions on libraries. But his utopianism was less owing to infirmity of judgment than to the habitual elevation of his moral and intellectual standard. He thought better of his fellow-men than they deserved, and was himself a man of eminent desert. If his own writings did not survive to speak for him, it would be sufficient to record that he was the intimate friend of Samuel Hartlib, the foreign guest to whom England is so greatly indebted as philanthropist and practical agriculturist, and to whom several of his own treatises are inscribed.