The Company of Jesus possessed a fine and valuable library, containing about one hundred and seventy thousand volumes.  This, when the Jesuits were turned out, was declared national property, and it forms the nucleus of the new Victor Emmanuel Library.  While the Jesuits inhabited their old home it was arranged in one very fine hall built in the form of a cross, which will continue to be one of the principal receptacles, in the new establishment.  It was in the middle of 1874 that the Italian government took possession of this collection.  To this have been added forty-eight other libraries, the former property of the suppressed convents of the city and provinces of Rome.  They were placed for the nonce in the cells which had been inhabited by the Jesuit fathers.  The mass of books thus collected amounts to about four hundred thousand volumes.  It will be seen at once that the labor of reducing to order, classifying and arranging such a confused mass must be truly herculean.  But the first librarian of the Victor Emmanuel Library, Signor Carlo Castellani, well known in the literary world as a palaeographer of great eminence, is laboring at the colossal task with an energy and a zeal that have already accomplished much, and is daily making sensible advances in the work.  It is, however, also evident that four hundred thousand volumes thus collected must include an immense number of duplicates; and, worse still, that (as may be readily supposed from the sources whence the books have come) one special branch of general literature will be represented in very undue proportion.  Of course, the greater portion of the conventual libraries was theological.  It may be presumed that classical and (old) historical literature will be found to exist, the former in tolerable completeness (so far as regards old and in many cases now obsolete editions), and the latter in considerable abundance.  But of modern literature little or nothing can be expected, even of Italian, and still less of any other language.  Among the number of volumes which has been mentioned there are some seven or eight thousand manuscripts, and perhaps an equal number of the editions of the fifteenth century, which go far to make the library an interesting one to the learned and to the student and lover of bibliography, but are of very little avail toward rendering the collection worth much as a national working library.  The question then arises, What means has Italy of procuring such a library for her capital?  Something may be probably expected from the liberality of her Parliament in furtherance of this great national object.  But for the present, in the depressed (though improving) state of the Italian finances, this cannot be much.  There exists in Italy a law similar to that on the same subject in England, by which every publisher is obliged to deposit one copy of every book published in the national library.  But this copy at present is sent to the Magliabecchian Library at Florence.  Signor Castellani hopes that