The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts Part 3

We have to depend, of course, on the evidence of the MSS. themselves. It was happily a common practice to write on the fly-leaf or first leaf _Liber (Sancte Marie) de (tali loco)_. This is decisive. Then, again, some libraries devised a system of press-marks, such as "N. lxviii.,"

let us say. You find this in conjunction with the inscription of owners.h.i.+p; it is a Norwich book, you discover, that you have in hand, and all books showing press-marks of that form are consequently Norwich books too. Or you will find the name of a donor. "This book was the gift of John Danyell, Prior." Search in Dugdale's _Monasticon_ will reveal, perhaps, that John Danyell was Prior of St. Augustine's, Bristol, in 1459. A clue to locality will often be given in such a case by the monk's surname, for it was their custom to call themselves by the name of their native village. Thus, a monk named John Melford or William Livermere will be a Suffolk man, and the abbey in which he was professed is likely to be Bury. Coming to later times, it is apparent that at the Dissolution groups of books from a single abbey came into the hands of a single man. If I find Dakcombe on the fly-leaf of a MS., I am almost ent.i.tled to a.s.sume that it is a Winchester book: John Stonor got his books from Reading Abbey, John Young drew from Fountains, and so forth.

Lastly, and most rarely, you are justified in saying that the handwriting and decoration of this or that book shows it to have been written at St. Albans or at Canterbury. Hitherto the instances where this is possible are few, but I do not doubt that multiplication of observations will add to their number.

In questioning a MS. for any of these indications (except the last) you must be on the look-out for signs of erasures, especially on the margins of the first leaf and on the fly-leaves at either end. Here the owner's name was usually written. Often it was accompanied by a curse on the wrongful possessor, and at the Dissolution there were many wrongful possessors, who, whether disliking the curse or antic.i.p.ating trouble from possible buyers, thought it well to erase name, and curse, and all.

They seldom did it so thoroughly that the surface of the vellum does not betray where it was, and it can be revived by the dabbing (_not_ painting) upon it of ammonium bisulphide, which, unlike the old-fas.h.i.+oned galls, does not stain the page. Dabbed on the surface with a soft paint-brush, and dried off at once with clean blotting paper, it makes the old record leap to light, sometimes with astonis.h.i.+ng clearness, sometimes slowly, so that the letters cannot be read till next day. It is not always successful; it is of no use to apply it to writing in red, and its smell is overpowering, but it is the elixir of palaeographers.

Yet, when all has been done, there is a sadly large percentage of MSS.

which preserve an obstinate silence. They have been rebound (that is common), and have lost their fly-leaves in the process, or, worse than that, they have lain tossing about without a binding and their first and last quires have dropped away. In such cases we can only tell, from our previous experience in ancient handwritings, the date and country of their origin.

ENGLISH LIBRARIES

And now to turn to some individual libraries. Some of the most venerable have practically disappeared--that of Glas...o...b..ry, for instance, the premier abbey of England, the only one which lived through from British to Saxon times.[C] To it we might reasonably look to trace many an ancient book belonging to the days of the old British Church. Leland, who visited the library not long before the Dissolution, represents himself as overawed by its antiquity. But almost the only record he quotes is one by "Melkinus," which most modern writers think was a late forgery. However, there is in the Bodleian one British book from Glas...o...b..ry, written, at least in part, in Cornwall, and preserving remnants of the learning of the British clergy. It has portions of Ovid and of Latin grammar, and pa.s.sages of the Bible in Greek and Latin. The catalogue, too, shows that there were in fact a good number of old MSS., and also that the monks of the fourteenth century did not care much about them, for they are marked as "Old and useless," "Old and in bad condition" (_debilis_), and so on. The actual extant books which we can trace to this foundation are few and for the most part late.

St. Albans, founded by King Offa in the eighth century, has left us, as I said, no catalogue, but there are many of its books in our libraries.

Two groups of them stand out. First are those procured by Abbot Simon (1166-1188) and Prior Mathias. These are very finely written. A typical and very interesting specimen is a Bible at Eton (26) which has three columns to a page--a rare distinction in the twelfth century, pointing, perhaps, to its having been copied from a very early and venerable model. It has a sister book at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and another--a New Testament--at Trinity College, Dublin. Then we have a large and important group of histories. The historiographers of St. Albans form a series reaching from Roger of Wendover (d. 1236) to Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422). The greatest of them was Matthew Paris (d. 1259). We have authentic and even autograph copies of many of these works, and especially of Paris's (at Corpus Christi, Cambridge (26 and 16), and in the British Museum, Royal 14, C. vii., Cotton Nero D. 1, etc.). And we have not only Paris's writing, but many of his drawings, for he was an accomplished artist. All these books furnish us with material for judging of the handwriting used at St. Albans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and we can speak with fair confidence of St.

Albans books of that period.

As in other cases, I believe that many books were written there for other monasteries, either as gifts or as a matter of business. Not every one of the little priories scattered all over the country had its own scriptorium; it was only natural that they should apply to the big establishments when they wanted a Bible or service-book or commentary of really good quality. This practice explains the fact that we quite often find books which we could make oath are products of St. Albans or of Canterbury, and which yet have inscriptions, written when they were new books, showing that they were owned by some small house. Let me here note two other ways in which books wandered from the great abbeys.

_One_: all the abbey libraries were full of duplicates; read any catalogue, and you will realize that. When the Orders of Friars were collecting libraries of their own, and when the colleges in the two Universities were doing the same, they found that the monks were often willing to part with one of their eight or nine sets of Gregory's _Moralia_ or Augustine _On the Trinity_ for a consideration. _Two_: most of the large abbeys maintained hostels at the Universities, singly or jointly, in which some of their younger members studied for degrees.

These hostels were equipped with libraries, and the libraries were furnished from the shelves of the mother-houses. We have at least two lists of books so used: one of those which Durham sent to what is now Trinity College, Oxford; the other of those which Christchurch, Canterbury, deported to Canterbury College, Oxford, which stood on the site of Canterbury Quad, in Christ Church.

There was some compensation, by the way: the abbeys were not invariably the losers. A group of books (at Lambeth) was procured to be written by a Canon of Lanthony when he was studying at Oxford (about 1415), and given to the library of his priory.

We have digressed from the particular to the general. Returning to individual libraries, let us glance at the Norwich Cathedral Priory. Of this, again, we have no catalogue; it is a case in which press-marks and names of owners are our guides. Norwich has a system of press-marks consisting of a letter of the alphabet plus a Roman numeral: "N.

lxviii." The press-marks of several other houses consist of just the same elements, but we can pick out that of Norwich by its size (not large) and its position (top of the first leaf of text); also there is usually added to it the name of the monk who procured it for the house, Henry de Lakenham or W. Catton--someone whose surname is the name of a Norfolk village. Over a hundred MSS. from Norwich are known to me, but they are a very small fraction of the library, as is shown by the numerals attached to the several cla.s.s letters. Very few of them are as old as the twelfth century; late twelfth and particularly early fourteenth make up the bulk. I attribute this to the great fire of 1286, and I take it that then the greater part of the priory books were spoiled, and that energetic steps to refill the library were taken in the years that followed. There are more Norwich books in the University Library at Cambridge than anywhere else; it has not been proved, but I do not much doubt, that most of them were given by the chapter to Cambridge about 1574, at the suggestion of Dr. Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse, who was a member of the cathedral body and an enthusiast for the University Library.

Not very dissimilar was the action of Exeter Chapter, who in 1602 gave over eighty of their MSS. to Sir Thomas Bodley's new library in Oxford, Bodley's brother being then a Canon of Exeter; and not long after the Canons of Worcester picked out a score of their MSS., for Dean Williams's new library at Westminster Abbey. These, however, I believe were never actually sent off. It is just as well, for the Westminster MSS. were burnt in 1694. Of Bury St. Edmunds I have attempted to write the history elsewhere, but it is not likely that many readers of this book will be familiar with my former publication. The only catalogue we have for this abbey is an early one (eleventh to twelfth century) written on the fly-leaves of a copy of Genesis (glossed) at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Thus it contains no fourteenth or fifteenth century books, nor, indeed, has it many entries of extant books of earlier date which we are sure belonged to Bury; but it is not to be despised, though we depend more upon press-marks than upon it for guidance. Bury press-marks were an introduction of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Soon after 1400 Abbot Curteys built a library, and it was under the care of the monk, John Boston, who, I think, is responsible for the press-marks, as he certainly is for the copious bibliographical notices which occurred in some of the books. The press-marks consist of a capital letter and an _arabic_ numeral (A.

130). Here, again, one has to be familiar with the handwriting of the marks and their position (top of first leaf and fly-leaf) in order to distinguish them from those of Exeter (often on last fly-leaf and large) or of the Hereford Franciscans (large, on first fly-leaf). However, in most cases they are backed up by the older inscription _Liber S. aedmundi regis et martiris_. Bury library has, on the whole, fared well; an Alderman of Ipswich, William Smart, procured over 100 of its MSS., which he gave to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1599, and about 150 others are scattered up and down the country. One Bury book of extreme interest--not a library book, but a register--was taken across the Channel in the sixteenth century by a Bury monk to the settlement of the Benedictine refugees at Douai. Since the Revolution it has been (_perhaps_ still is) in the town library there. Its importance is that it contains a list of the benefactors of the abbey, and among other things records the burial-places of the Abbots, including the famous Samson. In recent years it has guided excavators to the discovery of his bones. With it is a Psalter of extraordinary beauty, one of a group of marvellous books done in East Anglia--some say at Gorleston--soon after 1300. I grieve to hear that it has been severely damaged by damp. It has in it the name of an Abbot, John, who, I wish to believe, was of Bury, but doubt is thrown on this.

ENGLISH MSS. ON THE CONTINENT

A digression is allowable here as to English books that have pa.s.sed to the Continent. According to Bale and Dee, there was a great expatriation of them at the Dissolution. In Archbishop Parker's correspondence there is talk of the negotiations of a German scholar, Flacius Illyricus, who wanted to buy Bale's MSS. after his death. At an earlier time Poggio visited England in the hope of unearthing cla.s.sical authors, but writes as if he had been unsuccessful. Then, again, Sigismund Gelenius in 1550 edits at Basel treatises of Tertullian from a MS. belonging to the Abbey of "Masbury" (which I take to be Malmesbury), lent to him by Leland.

More instances could no doubt be collected, but not, I think, very many more. When we come to enquire what English books are to be found now in Continental libraries, the results are not very impressive. I exclude the very early exportations, some of which have been mentioned, and confine myself to the books which were taken over at and after the Dissolution. There is a Bury Psalter with drawings at the Vatican, a St.

Albans Psalter at Hildesheim, a fine Book of Hours at Nuremberg, a Winchester Pontifical at Rouen, a Sherborne Book at Paris, a Ramsey Psalter at an Austrian abbey, another English Psalter at the Escurial.

The Canterbury _Codex Aureus_ is at Stockholm. The famous Utrecht Psalter, written, perhaps, in the Rheims district, strayed from the Cotton collection to its present home in Holland, we do not know how.

All these, and some other remarkable illuminated books that could be named (I ought not to omit a Peterborough Psalter at Brussels), are not library books, but rather properties of great ecclesiastics or n.o.bles.

The largest collections have never yet been thoroughly searched. I myself have made many enquiries and some examinations with small result.

One case there is, however, brought to light by the late Rev. H. M.

Bannister, which gives hope of better things when a systematic search is carried out. He found that in the Vatican Library there are quite a large number of MSS. from the libraries of the Friars at Cambridge. They are late and not very important books, but no matter for that: the point is that they are there. Other instances known to me are--one at least of Sir Kenelm Digby's MSS. and one of Lord Burleigh's (a fourteenth-century volume of English historians) at Paris; the Greek Demosthenes already noticed at Leyden, and a MS. from Pembroke College (Seneca), also there.

The Vossian collection at the same place has other books which I suspect were once in England; most notable is its Suidas, which is said by M.

Bidez to be the parent of the English copies I mentioned, and which I think must be Grosseteste's own copy. This, however, is a Greek MS. A volume containing poems of Milo of St. Amand is most likely a Canterbury book. But the early books in Irish script, of which there are several, were probably written on the Continent.

At Wolfenb.u.t.tel is a "Wycliffe" Bible, large and handsome, which belonged to Lord Lumley (d. 1609), and also a copy of Gervase of Tilbury (that from which the text was first printed by Leibnitz) from the library of St. Augustine of Canterbury. There, too, are many MSS.

collected by Flacius Illyricus, who made purchases in England. He printed many of the rhyming Latin poems attributed to Walter Map; for a good many his edition is the only authority, his MSS. having disappeared. I had hoped to find some of them at Wolfenb.u.t.tel, but they do not seem to be there. What I did find was a small group of MSS. from St. Andrews in Scotland, containing rhyming poems set to music; they are books of the thirteenth century, well written and decorated. Scotch monastic MSS. are of rare occurrence. There are few enough in Scotland itself, not many in England, and, of course, still fewer anywhere else.

At Upsala is a book written by Clement Maydestone of Sion for Wadstena, the Swedish mother-house of the Brigittine Order to which he belonged.

There were probably some English books at Turin, which was a mixed collection, but the fire of 1904 has made away with them. The old catalogue by Pasini notices at least one service-book with English saints. But it is time to bring this excursus to an end. Let me only add that the most famous English book on the Continent--the Vercelli MS. of Anglo-Saxon poems and homilies--seems to have been where it is now since the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

REMAINS OF MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES

Once again we return to these sh.o.r.es, and now we will enquire what medieval libraries, besides those we have glanced at, have left really considerable remains. Some few have kept their books _in situ_--the monastic cathedrals of Durham and Worcester best of all; each has some hundreds of MSS. The secular cathedrals, Lincoln, Hereford, Salisbury, come next. Rochester has nothing on the spot, but a great many MSS. in the old Royal Library in the British Museum. The two great libraries of Canterbury (Christchurch and St. Augustine's) are well represented, but their books are much scattered. Winchester, York, Exeter, have few but precious books.

There are important MSS. from Thorney at the Advocates Library, Edinburgh; from St. Mary's York, at Dublin; not a few from Cirencester at Jesus College, Oxford, and at Hereford; St. John's, Oxford, has many from Reading and from Southwick (Hants). There must, I am sure, be many Peterborough books to be found, but they are rarely marked as such, and the character of the catalogue makes identification very hard.

Of all minor libraries, that of Lanthony, near Gloucester, has, I believe, been best preserved. A great block of it was retained by the last Prior of the house, John Hart, who retired to a country house near by, and whose sister married a man of good position, Theyer, in the neighbourhood. He kept the books together, and had descendants who valued them and added largely to their number. At the end of the sixteenth century Archbishop Bancroft conceived the idea of founding a library at Lambeth for his successors, and he seems to have bought about 150 Lanthony MSS. from Theyer,[D] which are now at Lambeth. Other Lanthony books are at Trinity and Corpus Christi, Oxford. A fourteenth-century catalogue of the books among the Harley MSS. shows that we possess at least a third of the whole collection.

Examples of the press-marks used by the various houses have been collected by the New Palaeographical Society, and may be seen in their publications. They are, of course, most useful in cases where the inscription of owners.h.i.+p has not been inserted or has disappeared. The second case may be that of any book; the first is common to the Canterbury libraries, to Dover, the London Dominicans, St. Mary's York, Fountains, t.i.tchfield, Ely. To the press-marks figured by the Society more will doubtless be added. I can instance one, that of the Franciscans of Lincoln, which is of this form: [Ill.u.s.tration: Symbol].

DISAPPEARANCE OF CLa.s.sICAL AND OTHER MSS.

Pa.s.sing over the painful subject of the wholesale destruction of MSS.

which must have followed the Dissolution, I will give a few lines to an interesting question little mooted as yet. Is there evidence that England possessed many ancient writings which have since disappeared, or which have survived only in a few copies in other parts of Europe? Take the cla.s.sics first. Poggio, as I have said, writes in a disappointed tone of his researches here, but these were neither long nor exhaustive.

We have better testimony from John of Salisbury, who in the twelfth century quotes parts of the _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius which have dropped out of all the MSS. we now have. He also read a tract attributed to Plutarch, called the _Instruction of Trajan_; it was probably not by Plutarch, but it was an ancient work, and is now lost. Petronius Arbiter was known to him, even that longest and most interesting piece of Petronius called the _Supper of Trimalchio_, for which our only authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, aelfric knew, and rejected, a poem on the adventures of St. Thomas in India). In one of its Homilies the same Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St.

Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes, a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost _Book of Jannes and Jambres_; another a chapter of the _Book of Enoch_, valuable as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current.

John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if subsequently lost) is a t.i.tle _Proverbia Grecorum_. What this book was is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call him the _Yorker anonymus_) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The work of Irenaeus _Against Heresies_ (we only have it complete in Latin) was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England, one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the treatise _On Baptism_ which it contained depends wholly on his printed text.

I cannot doubt that among the books imported in the seventh century from Italy by Benedict Biscop and Theodore and Hadrian, and in the great library of York, which Alcuin panegyrizes in his poem on the saints of York, there were texts now lost. But the Danes made a clean sweep of all those treasures, as they did of the whole vernacular literature of Northumbria, undoubtedly a rich one. The scattered indications I have collected in the preceding paragraphs point to the fact that some strange and rare books did lurk here and there in English libraries. It is almost a relief that catalogues do not tell us of supremely desirable things, such as Papias on the Oracles of the Lord, or the complete Histories or Annals of Tacitus.

Another word on a topic akin to the last. I have said more than once that the men of the later Middle Ages did not value early books as such; they were difficult to read, and often in bad condition. At first they were apt to be made into palimpsests; but when good new parchment became abundant and comparatively cheap, this practice was dropped. I conjecture that there is no important palimpsest whose upper writing is later than the eleventh century. The fate of the early books is rather obscure to me, but I see that bits of them were not uncommonly used for lining covers and fly-leaves for MSS. of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and perhaps still oftener as wrappers for doc.u.ments. Binders of the sixteenth century, and especially those who lived after the Dissolution, used up service-books and scholastic theology and Canon law to a vast extent, but early books not so lavishly. There are cases in which one is left doubtful as to whether the binder or his employer did not insert the old leaves with the definite wish to preserve them. I think of the leaves of a Gospel book bound at the end of the Utrecht Psalter, of a fragment of another fine Gospels in an Arundel MS. at the College of Arms, of some splendid Canons of the Gospels in the Royal MS.

7. C. xii; but in the cases that follow I think that accident and not design has been at work, viz.: the fragments of several venerable volumes at Worcester, admirably edited of late by Mr. C. H. Turner; the leaves of a great sixth-century Bible found by Mr. W. H. Stevenson wrapping up Lord Middleton's doc.u.ments at Wollaton; uncial fragments of Eucherius in the Cambridge University Library; other uncial leaves at Winchester College; bits of aelfric's Grammar at All Souls'; of a Gallican Missal at Gonville and Caius; of an early Orosius (from Stavelot) in the British Museum and elsewhere; of an Orosius and Fortunatus at Pembroke College, Cambridge; and so on. My examples are set down almost at random.

COLLECTORS OF BOOKS

We pa.s.s now from the monastic circle to that of the learned book collectors before and after the Dissolution. Many of the best medieval book-buyers were Abbots or Priors, and the history of their collections is merged in that of their abbeys. Leaving them aside, we find in fourteenth-century England one name which everyone has heard--that of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, and author of the _Philobiblion_. I am inclined to think that he was a humbug; his book is of the kind that it is proper to translate, print on hand-made paper, and bind in a vellum wrapper, but it tells us just nothing of what books De Bury had or read, and I could not point to a single work of any importance which he was instrumental in bringing to light or preserving. Persons who take pains to advertise themselves as book-lovers or bibliomaniacs are rarely those who render great services to literature.

Perhaps the libraries of the pre-Reformation colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are the best hunting-grounds for traces of the early collectors. At Peterhouse, Cambridge is a large bequest from John Warkworth, Master late in the fifteenth century; another from J.

Dyngley, Fellow, whose books were written expressly for him; yet another from H. Deynman, Master, who was interested in medicine. Here, too, we come upon the tracks of Roger Marchall, who must rank, on the whole, as a student of natural science. Books with his name and his carefully written tables of contents are at Peterhouse, Gonville and Caius, Lambeth, the British Museum, King's College; one at Magdalene College (Pepys Library) came thither from Peterhouse via Dr. John Dee. Walter Crome was another fifteenth-century benefactor of the University Library and of Gonville Hall, who, like Dyngley, had books written to his order. These are Cambridge _data_. Just such another list could be made out for some Oxford colleges, particularly Merton, Balliol, and New College. In this Bishops William Rede of Chichester, and John Trillek of Hereford, and William Gray of Ely, would figure prominently. The mention of this last name will serve as a pretext for introducing the Renaissance scholars. Gray, we saw, was one of those who dealt with Vespasiano Bisticci of Florence, though not nearly all of the many MSS.

of his giving which are at Balliol are Italian-written; a good number are by Flemish and German scribes. The other men to whom I alluded in the same connection were for the most part benefactors of Oxford. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, beheaded in 1470 for treason, promised a large gift of books to the University, but they never reached it, nor do I know a single MS. to-day that was Tiptoft's property, though there can be no doubt that he was a considerable book-buyer. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (whom we are now forbidden to call "the Good"), did give the University what was then a large library; his name is inseparably a.s.sociated with the great room of the Bodleian, but his books were swept away in Edward VI.'s days. Some few have come back to their old home, and others are in London and in Paris: twenty-nine is said to be the total. He intended further gifts, but he was cut off in 1444, and it is thought that one collection, perhaps his travelling library, was diverted to King's College, Cambridge. It is certain that soon after 1450 that college possessed some 174 MSS., among which such t.i.tles as Plato's _Republic_ in Latin and a Greek-English dictionary betray a humanistic influence which is not likely to have been that of our founder, Henry VI. Moreover, the only one of those MSS. that remains is a Latin version of some orations of St. Athanasius, made by a secretary of the Duke, and dedicated _to_ the Duke; and in the British Museum is another volume of Athanasius translated by the same man, which actually has Duke Humphrey's inscription in it. This is respectable evidence in support of the King's College story.

William Flemming, Dean of Lincoln, and founder of Lincoln College, Oxford, gave a number of books to that society which show him to have been interested in the revival of learning; Greek MSS. are among them.

John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells (d. 1498), is said by Leland to have bequeathed the large collection he brought from Italy to Jesus College, Cambridge. It is scattered and gone from there, but books of Gunthorpe's survive in a good many libraries. One deserves special mention--a Latin prose version of the Odyssey, which he picked up (not in Italy, though it is an Italian book, but at Westminster) in 1475. Probably it was the first copy of the Odyssey in any form that had come to this country since Roman times, unless, indeed, Archbishop Theodore brought one over in the seventh century. Archbishop Parker thought that he had, and the MS. which he fondly believed to be Theodore's was in his view the pearl of the collection he left to Corpus Christi. Certainly it has the name _Theodorus_ in it in letters of gold; but, as certainly, it is a fifteenth-century book, and the Theodore for whom it was written was I believe Theodore Gaza, a humanist who lived in Italy.

An instance of a man interested in books and not unaffected by the Renaissance, though not himself a collector, may be introduced here.

William Wyrcestre (or Botoner, or Worcester) is the man, and he deserves a special study. Some have called him the father of English antiquaries, in virtue of one of his notebooks which has been preserved, and which contains jottings about his travels in England; it is a sort of rude elementary Leland's _Itinerary_. It is by no means the only book of his compiling, nor the only one owned by him that we have. There are historical and literary collections of his, and not a few MSS. with his name in them. He knew John Free, the translator (reputed) of Diodorus Siculus, and he had read Cristoforo Buondelmonte's book on the islands of the Greek archipelago.

A long list of the Elizabethan book-collectors could be made, but I shall not attempt one here. Two libraries of the time, Sir Robert Cotton's and Archbishop Parker's, stand out. The main object of both men was to preserve English antiquities, and it is no exaggeration to say that if these two collections, which together number less than 1,500 volumes, had been wiped out, the best things in our vernacular literature and the pick of our chronicles would be unknown to us now. We should have no _Beowulf_ or _Judith_, only inferior copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and of Matthew Paris, no Layamon, no _Pearl_--not to speak of the ma.s.s of invaluable State-papers gathered by Cotton, and the Reformation doc.u.ments and letters stored up by Parker. One touch of blame rests on Sir Robert Cotton. He had a vicious habit of breaking up MSS. and binding together sections from different volumes. This disguises the provenance of the books, and by consequence obscures the history of their contents.

Enough information about the Cotton and Parker MSS. is easily accessible to absolve me from writing much about them here. Less is generally known of two dispersed collections, those of John Bale and John Dee.

Bale must, I fear, have been an unamiable man--certainly a very queer Christian. But his controversial works, on which he doubtless prided himself most, are dead and very rotten, while those devoted to the more peaceful science of bibliography are of abiding value. In his larger one, _Scriptorum Britannicorum Centuriae_, he inserts a list of the MSS.

he had once owned; they were no longer in his hands, but, it is to be supposed, in Ireland, left there when he fled from his bishopric of Ossory on Mary's accession. It is not a very scientific list, not one that gives the contents of each volume, but merely names of treatises, groups of which no doubt went to make up volumes, and this makes it difficult to determine how much of his library is in existence now.

After his death it was in England, and a syndicate of Germans, including, as was said above, Flacius Illyricus, were negotiating for the purchase of it. Archbishop Parker also had an eye upon it; he had received books as gifts or loans from Bale in former years. I have not been able to make sure whether any of the books did actually go to the Continent; I doubt it, in fact. Many distinguished by Bale's curious small, "flat" handwriting are traceable among Cotton's and Parker's books, at Lambeth, at Cambridge, and doubtless also at Oxford (where there is at least the MS. of his _Index Scriptorum_, admirably edited by Mr. R. L. Poole and Miss Bateson). Bale was a Carmelite in his youth and interested in the history of his Order, and there is an _a priori_ probability that any book dealing with Carmelite affairs will contain marks of his owners.h.i.+p.