Literary Petrifactions

William Carew Hazlitt, The Confessions of a Collector, (London, 1897), ch. I., Confessions of a Collector, pp. 2-3:

We hear of the Fratres Poloni,1 five stupendous folios, brimful of erudition—books which seem, to our more frivolous and superficial and hurrying age, better suited to occupy a niche in a museum as a monumental testimony to departed scholarship—books, alas! which those blind instruments of the revolutionary spirit of change, the paper mill and the fire, draw day by day nearer to canonisation in a few inviolable resting-places, as in sanctuaries dedicated to the holy dead. They will enter on a new and more odorous life: we shall look awfully upon them as upon literary petrifactions, which to bygone ages were living and speaking things.

1. The Fratres Poloni (Eng.: The Polish Brethren) describe the collected works of those eminent Unitarian interpreters, who flourished in Poland, A. D. 1575-1660, and whose views, in a more condensed form, may be seen in the Racovian Catechism, translated into English by Rees, Lond. 12mo. 1818. [quoted from a footnote we find in: J. P. Dabney, Annotations on the New Testament, (Cambridge: 1829), pt. I., p. 148.]