violets, roses, and quadrifoils." A moist hand leaving a nasty mark on the page is to the prelate the very symbol of abomination, and he has equal contempt for the reader who "beats the white parchment all over with his dusty gloves, or hunts over the page line by line with his forefinger covered with dirty leather." All that the owner of this famous collection required was care on the part of readers. Laymen he would not admit under any circumstances, but the lowest brother in a religious house was welcome, under regulation. "Let the clerk," he writes, "take order that the dirty scullion, stinking from the pots, do not touch the leaves of books unwashed."

De Bury is to be remembered with affection and reverence by all who have love and respect for books. The men who met in his library were, under him, the founders of book clubs; and by the care with which the bishop guarded his treasures he preserved, as far as in him lay, those ancient works which more modern and otherwise organised clubs rejoice in possessing or republishing. The one blot in the bishop's character is the unscrupulousness of his acquisitiveness. As long as he got the volume he wanted, he little cared by what means it was obtained. If he could not buy, he would beg or borrow it; and to borrow a book was to appropriate it. But we must construe mildly" this inordinate affection for books. The Cottonian collection was not made without some suspicion as to the manner of the making. De Bury was not ashamed of his manner; he justified it. There was no remembering a passage, he said, unless you could refer to it; and how could the reference be made unless you kept the book which contained it, whether it was your own or not? These are his words:

"Quisquis theologus, quisquis legista peritus

Vis fieri; multos semper habete libros.
Non in mente manet quicquid non vidimus ipsi,
Quisque sibi libros vendicet ergo. Vale."

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Lord Cambpell, in his 'Lives of the Chancellors,' states that " modern deceased Lord Chancellor was said to have completed a very considerable law library by borrowing books from the bar, which he forgot to return." He who has put this on record was accused of having stolen half the materials for his Lives' without acknowledgment.

We think we see the love of literature flow from the churchmen to the laity, whom De Bury so despised, in the formation of perhaps the earliest club in England. The word "club," indeed, was not then known, but the thing existed in that famous society called “La Cour de bonne Compagnie," which, in the reign of Henry the Fourth, met in Cheapside. Chaucer is supposed to have been a member; his rather weakly disciple, Occlive, certainly was. The latter wrote a ballad, as the congratulatory epistle of all the companions, to Henry

Somer on his being appointed sub-treasurer of the Exchequer. In another ballad Occlive refers to the rules and regulations of the company, and announces that Somer is expected to take the chair at the next Thursday's dinner. Literature and jovialty went arm in arm in Cheapside.

And so literature and literary tastes were cultivated.

Aristotle is

the first upon record as a collector. De Bury in England was his worthy disciple. The Court of Good Company seems to have made the laity citizens of the republic of letters. This citizenship flourished. The best sign of that fact is that in 1595 there appeared the first printed catalogue of books for sale in England. It was a folio catalogue in two parts, published in London, by Andrew Maunsell. Thus the publishers came to the front, and down to the last century fed authors at their tables, and often to very good purpose.

If we go back a little to the more ancient days in England, there will be seen moving with the ever restless king a pack-horse, on whose back was strapped a burthen more or less heavy, of rolls-rolls of court. They were the documents of the King's Chancery. At that time, his Grace's officers of Chancery lived together in an inn, and received the royal fees for food, and warrants for their clothes. Whenever the king changed his quarters, there was a stir in the inn, a hurry among the officers, a trotting out of the pack-horse, a strapping on of the rolls of court, and an issuing forth to follow the sovereign and to be near him in all legal inquiries. So they journeyed from town to town when justice was to be administered; and, says Mr. Ewald, in his handbook to our public records, "At every town where the king rested, an hospitium" (or inn) " was assigned to the Chancery, and it was the duty of the religious houses to furnish the pack-horse for the carriage of the rolls." The course of time has changed that packhorse into the splendid edifice in Fetter Lane, where there is the most wonderful collection of rolls, papers, documents, charters, books, &c., &c., to be found in the world. Magnificent as the collection is, it is only the wreck, or rather the salvage from the great wreck, of the national ship, laden with materials for the social, religious, political, real, and fanciful history of England.

As those books and papers grew in bulk, no string of pack-horses could have carried a tithe of those belonging to the Chancery alone. To these were added every possible sort of document, home and foreign, which necessarily gathers round a government and its administrators. The question of where they should be kept became serious. While it was being agitated, and large salaries paid to commissioners, who sat through long years, and received their salaries, these precious documents were put away, anywhere, temporarily. Some were placed where damp threatened soon to damage them. Some were tossed into receptacles where rats and other vermin lived upon the books and

papers. Others were put where fire was pretty sure to make an end of them. Others, again, were stowed away so carefully as to be entirely forgotten. Not a few, when they were recovered, stuck so to the slimy walls of their prison house, that they could not be got away without laceration. Of very many the leaves adhered so closely, that they could not be separated at all. Large masses of these papers were all but consumed by the lime of the walls against which they were flung rather than deposited. All the documents and books that have been saved are now safely stored in Fetter Lane, and are easy of access. This facility given to students has been long acoming. There was once good reason why such facility should be withheld. There were men, even in more recent times, who were as unscrupulous in stealing books and documents as De Bury himself.

In what way some of our national documents have been disposed, has been described by Mr. H. T. Riley, in the introduction to his 'Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries.' Mr. Riley refers to the liberal and indulgent spirit of the City authorities, in allowing two of their early volumes, the Liber Custumarum,' and the 'Liber Legum Regum Antiquorum,' to be lent to Francis Tate, F.S.A., and Sir Robert Cotton, the wellknown collector of manuscripts. The result of this loan was that, after reiterated demands, spreading over no less than eight years, one half of each of those volumes was returned to its rightful owners, while the other two halves, bound up together, and made refulgent in many a page with the quarterings of the Bruce and Cotton arms, found a permanent resting-place on the shelves of the Cottonian Library, and now conjointly figure as manuscript, Claudius D. II.’ of that collection in the British Museum. By such meanness, dishonesty, peculation-stealing, in fact-persons who ought to have known better increased their collections, and became the causes why honest students, who were desirous of consulting similar documents, were denied access to them by naturally jealous and suspicious possessors of such treasures.

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Sir Robert Cotton's kleptomania was not confined to stealing one book, or a particular set of books. "It appears," says Mr. Isaac D Israeli, "by the manuscript note-book of Sir Nicholas Hyde, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, from the second to the seventh year Charles the First, that Sir Robert Cotton had in his library, records, evidences, ledger-books, original letters, and other papers belonging to the King; for the attorney-general at that time, to prove this, showed a copy of the pardon which Sir Robert had obtained from King James, for embezzling letters, &c." Cotton, it is to be supposed, was unsuspected by his friends. Yet he must have winced when Sir Robert Saville, announcing to Cotton that Sir Thomas Bodley (founder of the Bodleian Library) was about to call on him, added that, if he

held any book so dear as that he would be loth to lose it, he should not let Sir Thomas out of his sight, but set his books aside beforehand. James the First, who pardoned Cotton, knighted Bodley. The elder D'Israeli further writes, that one who had too nice a sense to call his felonious appropriation of books by its proper name, called it "book-coveting." He probably thought that, as he who breaks one commandment breaks both the tables, he might as well steal his neighbours' books as covet them-which he did. We further learn that Pinelli was also in this nefarious line; but see how prettily D'Israeli softens down the ruder term: "Pinelli made occasional additions to his literary treasures, sometimes, by his skill in an art which lay much more in the hand than in the head." Grove is naturally not near so nice in speaking of Bishop Moore's famous collection. "The bishop," he says, "made his famous collection by plundering those of the clergy in his diocese; some he paid with sermons or more modern books, others less civilly, only with a 'quid illiterati cum libris?' 'What have the ignorant to do with books?'" Moore seems to have had a small rag of conscientiousness, if that may be said of a man who would cajole a poor parson out of his books as coolly as a Yorkshire horse-dealer would cajole a farmer into swapping horses to the farmer's great disadvantage. When cajoling was not in question, the bishop would contrive to carry off what he coveted. A friend of the bishop's was one day seen, says D'Israeli, hiding his rarest books, and locking up as many as he could. On being asked the reason of this odd occupation, the bibliopolist ingenuously replied, "The Bishop of Ely dines with me to-day." Moore enjoyed the episcopal distinction first, as Bishop of Norwich, from 1691 to 1707, when he was transferred to Ely, of which diocese he died bishop, in 1714, at the age of sixty-eight.

Pope Innocent the Tenth, according to De La Houssaie, hated the French, simply because, when a cardinal, and being in the library of a French collector, he was accused by the collector of having purloined a valuable book! On the cardinal's denial, he and the collector came into personal collision, and in the struggle the book fell from the cardinal's robes! An example of even more shameless quality is offered us in the case of Camden. As the historian lay adying, he had by him the manuscript minutes of his own life. He was visited by a Dr. Thorndyke, and the doctor is said to have filched the documents, as they lay by the side of the moribund Camden, and to have carried them off.

Other men have displayed an exactly opposite feeling, or an absolute indifference for books. Once upon a time, the books in the chief library at Madrid were covered with dust. It was suggested to the King that he should make the librarian Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the ground that this official would never lay a finger on the

treasures committed to his charge. On the other hand, there was recently a case, in Russia, of a librarian, well qualified, and above suspicion in every respect-an official to whom the books and manuscripts in the library were as much at his disposal as if they were his own; and yet he plundered the library almost daily during many years. Books and papers were missed, but he was never suspected; till it was observed that he always wore a cloak, and that the cloak always hung more heavily about him on leaving than on coming to the library. At last he was stopped, was examined, and was found to have a cloak ingeniously provided with pockets of various sizes, in which he could carry off plunder as various. This seems almost an insane practice, that a man should steal, to hide away in his own house, works of literary and historical value which he could read undisturbedly all day long, and every day in the year, in his own official room in the public library!

In the last century, among the most useful of book clubs were those dinners that used to be given by booksellers and publishers, whose guests were chiefly literary men, and whose conversation was of books. Boswell has recorded one of these dinners, at Dilly's, in 1784. Dilly used to give capital dinners, and had the art of mixing his guests, so as to get the combined pleasant intellectual flavour of all, just as one or two gifted persons have in the mixing of a salad. Johnson, of course, was with Boswell, and there were also Colonel Vallancy, the Rev. D. Gibbons, Capel Lofft, and Mr. Braithwaite, of the Post Office. Boswell's remark on Lofft is so contrived as to disparage as much as exalt him. "Mr. Capel Lofft, who, though a most zealous Whig, has a mind so full of learning and knowledge, and so much exercised in various departments, and withal so much liberality, that the stupendous powers of the literary Goliath, though they did not frighten this little David of popular spirit, could not but excite his admiration." Mr. Braithwaite is gently patted on the back as that amiable and friendly man, with modest and unassuming manners, has associated with many wits of the age." The chronicler shows his own manners and his self-appreciation, by recording, "Johnson was very quiescent to-day; perhaps, too, I was indolent." A sample is then given of the talk about books. "I mentioned that I had seen in the King's library sixty-three editions of my favourite Thomas à Kempis,' amongst which, it was in eight languages, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Armenian. Johnson said he thought it unnecessary to collect many editions of a book which were all the same, except as to the paper and print; he would have the original, and all the translations, and all the editions that had any variations in the text. He approved of the famous collection of editions of Horace,' by Douglas (mentioned by Pope), who is said to have had a closet filled with them; and he added: Every