Pluto, King of Hel,' are noted as 'neighbore to Scottz.' No such benefactor as Selden appeared until the year 1755, when Richard Rawlinson, a bishop of the Nonjurors (he was consecrated in 1728), left by will to the Library the whole of his collections-printed books, manuscripts, and antiquities. There were about 1,900 printed books, and 4,800 manuscripts. The collection is especially strong in history, biography, and topography, and had been gathered at the dispersal of many famous libraries. It was from Rawlinson that the Bodleian acquired the acknowledgment of the Duke of Monmouth, signed and sealed on the day of his execution, that Charles II. had declared to him that he had never been married to his mother. This acknowledgment is now displayed in one of the glass cases in the Library. The diary and note-books of Hearne the antiquary, Who snatched old stories from the jaws of time, And drove the spiders from much prose and rhyme, were also among Rawlinson's treasures. Extracts from them were published by Dr. Bliss in 1857; and they are full of such curious personal anecdote, gossip, and denunciations of anti-monarchical Whigs,' as might have been looked for from so thorough-paced a Jacobite and Nonjuror. In 1701 Hearne had been appointed Janitor or Assistant in the Bodleian. He resigned this office in 1716, when an Act was passed compelling all office-holders to take the oaths to the existing Government. His Jacobitism had already brought him into trouble, and he had been reported' to the Vice Chancellor by a certain Whiggish visitor, to whom he imprudently exhibited a portrait of the Pretender. He fell upon hard times, for his love for the great Library, and his zeal in caring for its treasures, could not well have been exceeded. Whenever, in his explorations among the manuscript volumes, he came upon the handwriting of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester-the founder, as we have seen, of the first Library at Oxford— he was wont, as he tells us, 'to show a sort of particular respect to it.' Probably,' suggests Mr. Macray, by such a reverential kiss as he once bestowed on a certain pavement of sheep's trotters, believing it to be a Roman tesselation.' The 'religious, good, and learned Prince,' as Hearne calls the Duke, wrote his motto, 'moun bien mondaine,' in many volumes which have found their way to the Bodleian. The To the present time the only rivals of Rawlinson in the extent of their donations have been Gough and Douce. Gough's collections, received in 1809, related chiefly to Anglo-Saxon and Northern literature, and to the topography of Great Britain and Ireland. There were about 3,700 volumes. library of Francis Douce, consisting of 16,480 printed books, 393 MSS. and a large collection of early and valuable prints and drawings, was bequeathed to the Bodleian in 1834. This library is the delight of antiquaries. Among the manuscripts are some of the finest illuminated service books in the world; Horæ, executed by the chief artists of their day for emperors and princesses, and volumes of earlier date, which, if less elaborately enriched, are of still greater historical inte rest. These are the memories-not only of the founder and the great donors, or of men who, like Hearne, have found their chief 'bien mondaine' in the diligent study of its stores, but more especially of the books themselves, with their varied and often eventful histories-that give such a charm to a stroll through the chambers of a great library like the Bodleian. Massive volumes, which grew slowly, year after year, in the scriptorium' of many a noble monastery, long ruined, or, it may be, utterly swept away from the face of the earth; spoils of war, like the Wurtzburg manuscripts, rescued from troopers of Gustavus Adolphus, and given to the Library by Laud, or like the books of Osorius, Bishop of Faro, carried off when that town was captured by the English fleet under the Earl of Essex in 1598, and bestowed on Bodley's new foundation, it is said, by the influence of Raleigh, who was a captain in the squadron; the choicest treasures of great princes, dispersed, like the library of Charles I., in the storm of revolution; or volumes which have been handled and pored over by possessors whose names alone would give distinction to the simplest old tractate,'' dark with tarnished gold;'-it is, in truth, under a ( weight of time and of history' that the 'groaning shelves' are bending. What changes and what dispersions, wrote Southey of his own library, 'must have taken place, to make it possible that these books should be brought together here among the Cumberland mountains!' What changes, what dispersions, what revolutions, and what passing away of whole worlds of thought and of action, tell their silent stories in the collections which make up the great Library of Oxford! Here, for example, among the Laudian manuscripts is the Peterborough copy of that old English chronicle which before, and for a short time after, the Norman Conquest was regularly compiled in certain of the greater monasteries. This record was continued for nearly a century after the others; and neither the great existing church of 'Peterborough the Proud' nor the fragments of its once stately monastery take us back so completely into the days of the 'alien king,' and of the struggle between Norman and Englishmen, as those leaves of grey parchment on which the monk entered his record of the troubles that had fallen on England. Here, again, one of many precious manuscripts bequeathed to the Library by Francis Junius in 1678 is the famous poem of Cadmon, the 'ceorl' attached to St. Hilda's Abbey on the Whitby headland, whose first verses (so Bede asserts) were composed in his sleep, and who afterwards elabo rated this long paraphrase of the Scriptures. This is the solitary manuscript of what is the earliest English poem; and its adventures, could they be recovered, might well prove as remarkable as the poem itself. The Codex Rushworthianus, given in 1681 by John Rushworth, the historian of the Long Parliament, carries us across the Irish Sea and back to the days when Ireland was in truth a land of learning. It is a MS. of the Latin Gospels, writter by an Irish scribe, MacRegol, whe records his name on the last leaf; and is glossed with an interlinear Anglo-Saxon translation. It is said, though improbably, to have been in Bede's possession; but the Saxon gloss tells its own story, and quietly asserts the intercourse between the Churches. Not one of the superb manuscripts which, displayed under glass, immediately attract the attention of the visitor as he enters the Library, but is worth dwelling upon, not only for its beauty as a work of high art, but for its actual history, and, not less, for the associations which it suggests and illustrates. It may be mentioned that some of the finest of these manuscripts formed part of a collection made by a Venetian Jesuit named Canonici, who died in 1806. In 1817 the Bodleian bought the whole of his manuscripts, about 2,045 in number, for the sum of "Colloquies, Vol. II. 'The Library.' 5,4441., a larger sum than has been of the Dartmoor hills. Whatever expended at one time by the trustees of the Library before or since. In this collection came fifteen = manuscripts of Dante, the first which the Bodleian possessed, not withstanding a wonderful story told by a certain Girolamo Gigli about 1717-how in the Bodleian Library at Osfolk' there was a MS. of the Divina Commedia which had been used for wrapping up Florentine cheeses, and so had been brought into England. The odour of the cheese (says this veracious chronicler) had so penetrated the manuscript that it was necessary to protect it from mice by a brace of traps constantly placed near it. Hence it was known as the 'Book of the Mousetrap.' The Bodleian is famous for its vast assemblage of Oriental manuscripts, collected at various times, but begun by Bodley himself, who had desired the Consul at Aleppo of the Company of English Merchants to procure for him such books. But it would be idle to attempt any further delving among the treasures of this great storehouse. Two additional books only shall find a place here-the first because it is the handywork of a countryman of Bodley's, and deserves the respect of all Devonians; the second because it is in itself unique, and is one of the great marvels of the Library. The Rev. William Davy, vicar of Lustleigh, in Devonshire, wrote and printed with his own hands, between the years 1795 and 1807, twenty-six volumes of A System of Divinity, in a Course of Sermons on the First Institutions of Religion. Fourteen copies only were printed, in a very indifferent type, of which the author possessed only sufficient to print two pages at once. It must have been with no small zeal that he worked-arte meâ,' he says, 'diurno nocturnoque labore '-in his remote parsonage under the shadow the merits of the System may be, the book so laboriously elaborated well deserved a place among the 'Curiosities of Literature' in the Bodleian. The second book or 'collection' is of very different quality. In 1839 Mrs. Sutherland presented to the Library the folio editions of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, of his Life, and of Burnet's History of his own times. These are inlaid and bound in sixty-one elephant folio volumes, and illustrated with no less than 19,224 drawings and engravings: portraits of every person and views of every place in any way mentioned in the text or connected with the subject matter.' The collection was begun in 1795 by the husband of the donor, who continued it after his death. It is enough to say that there are 743 portraits of Charles I., 373 of Cromwell, and 552 of Charles II. The views of London are in number 309, and there are 166 of West minster. Such curiosities as are frequently assembled under the wing of a great library, are not wanting in the Bodleian. The founder himself procured from Sir Richard Lee, to whom it had been given by the Czar of Muscovy, a cloak lined with the wool of 'certaine livinge creatures in the shape of lambes, which grow out of the ground in Tartaria," the wool being of excellent use and vertue, especially against the plague and other noysome diseases of those cuntries.' This was, of course, the famous Agnus Scythicus, the mystery of which is explained by the remarkable woolly growth which is found on the large Polypodium Barometz-a Tartarian fern, of which specimens may be seen at Kew and elsewhere. Sir Richard Lee's cloak was greatly envied by the 'Kinge of Swethland,' whom he visited on his homeward journey. He brought back 'divers other rich furres and rari ties... the greatest part whereof the Queene tooke of him, and promised him recompense for them, which she never performed; which was partly the cause that he concealed this garment from her during her life.' Thus it came to the Bodleian, where it is no longer to be found, although an ark of sweet-smelling wood' was prepared for its reception. This was a more worthy marvel than Guy Faux's lantern-still to be admired in the Picture Gallery. It was given to the University in 1639 by Robert Heywood, the son of a Justice Heywood' who assisted in searching the cellars of the Parliament House, and arrested Faux with the lantern in his hand. It has a neighbour in a chair made from the wood of the Golden Hind, the ship in which Sir Francis Drake sailed round the world. It is hardly fair to number among similar curiosities the fragment of Charles the First's waistcoat (so called) in which a New Testament exhibited in one of the glass cases is bound. More interesting, because certainly authentic, are the specimens of Queen Elizabeth's skill in embroidery. A New Testament which belonged to her is bound in a covering worked by herself, with various mottos-as 'Celum patria,' 'Scopus vitæ Xpus.' Another book, sent by her from Ashridge in 1644, to our most noble and vertuous Quene Katherin (Katherine Parr), is embroidered with the Queen's initials, on a ground of blue silk. An annual speech, in honour of Sir Thomas Bodley, is still made in scholâ linguarum.' But it is little needed. His memorial will endure so long as Oxford stands where it does,' and while one stone of his great Library remains on another. RICHARD JOHN KING. FRASER'S MAGAZINE. JUNE 1873. LECTURES ON MR. DARWIN'S PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. BY PROFESSOR MAX MÜLLER. SECOND LECTURE, DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, MARCH 29, 1873. F we want to understand the restorer of another empire, 'Il n'est I history of the Norman Conquest, pas pervenu, il est privé. the Reformation, the French Re- VOL. VII.-NO. XLII. NEW SERIES. The philosophical empire of Locke and Hume had fallen under the blows of Kant's Criticism of Pure Reason. But the successors of Kant-Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel-disregarding the checks by which Kant had so carefully defined the legitimate exercise of the rights of Pure Reason, indulged in such flights of transcendent fancy, that a reaction became inevitable. First came the violent protest of Schopenhauer, and his exhortation to return to the old fundamental principles of Kant's philosophy. These, owing to their very violence, passed unheeded. Then followed a complete disorganisation of philosophic thought, and this led in the end to a desperate attempt to restore the old dynasty of Locke and Hume. During the years immediately preceding the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1860) and his Descent of Man, the old problems which had been discussed in the days of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, turned up again in full force. We had to read again that sensuous impressions were the sole constituent elements of the human intellect; that general ideas were all developed sponta Z22 |