title. Numbers 405–408, for example, include a total of twenty-six titles. There are approximately 620 separate titles in the list. Of these 620, about 481 (78 per cent) may be found in the British Museum, 338 (55 per cent) in the Harvard Library, 192 (31 per cent) in the Library of Congress, 188 (30 per cent) in The New York Public Library, 186 (30 per cent) in the Huntington Library, 184 (30 per cent) in the Newberry Library, and 148 (24 per cent) in the Folger Shakespeare Library. At the Bodleian may be consulted about thirty-four titles not in the British Museum; and at the Bibliothèque Nationale, about thirty-seven titles in neither the British Museum nor the Bodleian. At Yale there are about sixty-eight titles not at Harvard; and at the Clark Library, about forty-seven titles not at the Huntington.

Using Congreve’s Book List

We may well ask, What are some of the uses that can be made of Congreve’s book list? For one thing, it may be studied as a carefully selected private library of the period. What authors, what editions, what subjects are to be found in such a library? Which of Congreve’s contemporaries are represented? Which of the current books seemed important enough for a fellow writer to buy or to subscribe for in advance of publication? To what extent did the literature of ancient Greece, of Rome, of modern Italy, of France, of Spain, of Germany find its way into a private library in England’s Augustan Age? And to what extent were such books in their original language? One scholar has found in Congreve’s book list the information he needed about certain early editions of Horace. Another, inquiring into the Italian influence on England during the eighteenth century, has found a partial answer in the Italian books and in the books about Italy set down in Congreve’s list.

Fortunately the list can be made to give information about the one who collected and used the books. We know less, perhaps, about Congreve than about any other equally significant writer of the period; and consequently, additional information about him is especially important. We have long known of course, that he made translations from the French, the Latin, and the Greek and have assumed that he read those languages. We feel more confident about the extent of his reading when we find a full fourth of his library in French, nearly a fifth in Latin, and a goodly number of volumes in Greek. About twenty titles in Italian make us reasonably sure that he read that language also. And since he had in Spanish only a Spanish-English dictionary and two Spanish books (for each of which he had a translation in another language), we may assume that his knowledge of Spanish must have been slight indeed. His deficiency in German is strongly suggested by the fact that German is represented in the list only in translation.

As a translator from the Greek and the Latin Congreve first brought himself to the attention of Dryden, who pronounced the youthful Congreve “more capable than any man I know” to translate the whole of Homer. Congreve never completed that proposed translation, but years later he was singled out by Pope for the dedication of his Homer. That Congreve’s genuine interest in the classics continued throughout his life is attested by the constant and carefully chosen additions to his library. His collection is richest in the works of Cicero, Homer, Horace, and Virgil, but he owned the collected works of many other classical authors. The breadth of his interest is shown by the fact that over sixty Greek and Latin writers are either represented in his library or referred to in his own writings. The Italian Louis Riccoboni visited Congreve in 1727 and was surprised to find that a dramatist could be so scholarly. In Congreve, he said, “Taste [was] joined with great Learning.”