BOOK I, Chap. III. LIFE OF PRINCE OF WALES. THE ULTI- PORATION OF THE ROYAL LIBRARY WITH THE COLLEC TIONS OF SLOANE AND probability that when BENTLEY gave expression to this wish, at the close of the seventeenth century, he was unconsciously reviving one among many projects for the public good which had been temporarily buried in the grave of Prince HENRY. For under the Commonwealth, the Library at St. James' had been 'Public' rather in name than in fact. When the time came, the number of volumes of the Royal Collection which remained to be incorporated with the Museum of SLOANE and with the Library of Sir Robert COTTON was somewhat more than twelve thousand. The number of separate works-printed and manuscript toge OF COTTON. ther-probably exceeded fifteen thousand. Amongst the acquisitions so gained by the nation the first place of honour belongs to the Codex Alexandrinus. It stands, by the common consent of biblical palæographers, in a class of manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures into which only two or three other codices in the world can claim to be admitted. Of early English chronicles there is a long series which to their intrinsic interest as primary materials of our history add the ancillary interest of having been transcribed-sometimes of having been composedexpressly for presentation to the reigning Monarch. Here also, among a host of other literary curiosities, is the group of romances which John TALBOT, Earl of Shrewsbury, caused to be compiled for MARGARET of Anjou; and the autograph Basilicon, written for Prince HENRY. Among the innumerable printed treasures are choice books which accrued as presentation copies to the sovereigns of the House of TUDOR, beginning with a superb series of illuminated books on vellum, from the press of Anthony VERARD of Paris, given to HENRY THE SEVENTH. For large as had been the losses sustained by the original Chap. III. LIFE OF HENRY, royal library, and truly as it may be said that Prince BOOK I, HENRY'S acquisitions amounted virtually to its re-foundation, many of the finest books of long anterior date had survived their varied perils. And some others have rejoined, from time to time, their old companions, after long absence. The royal collection has also an adventitious interest -in addition to the main one-from another point of view. It includes results of the strong-handed confiscations of our kings, as well as of the purchases they made, and the gifts they received. Both the royal manuscripts and the royal printed books contain many memorials of careers in which our poets no less than our historians have found, and are likely to find, an undying charm. WALES. BOOK 1, LECTOR OF CHAPTER IV. THE COLLECTOR OF THE ARUNDELIAN MSS. 'The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated These are the men who make England R. W. EMERSON, (English Traits, § xi). Political Exile and Foreign Travel under Elizabeth, and THE Collector of the Arundel Marbles and Founder of the Arundel Library was the great-grandson of that twenty-first Earl of ARUNDEL (Henry FITZALAN) by DELIAN MSS. whom had been collected the choicest portion of the library which passed, in 1609, from the possession of John, Lord LUMLEY, to that of HENRY, Prince of Wales. chap. iii, p. 162. Book I, THE COL Chap. IV. LECTOR OF THE ARUN That Earl had profited by the opportunities which the dissolution of the monasteries presented so abundantly to collectors at home. The new Earl profited, in his turn, by larger and far more varied opportunities, offered to him DELIAN MSS. during a long course of travel abroad. For himself, his travels ripened and expanded a somewhat crude and irregular education. He attained, at length, and in a much greater degree (as it seems) than any of his contemporaries, to that liberal culture which enabled him to appreciate, and to teach his countrymen to appreciate, the arts from which Greece and Italy had derived so much of their glory; whilst in England those arts had, as yet, done very little either to enhance the enjoyments and consolations of human life, or to call into action powers and aptitudes which had long lain dormant. It is not claiming too much for the Earl of ARUNDEL to say that of whatever, upon a fair estimate, England may be thought to owe to its successful cultivation of the Arts of Design, he was the first conspicuous promoter. Nor is his rank as a pioneer in the encouragement of the systematic study of archæology-a study so fruitful of far-reaching result-less eminent. Under TRAVEL, He may also be regarded as setting, by the course he FOREIGN took with his own children, the fashion of foreign travel, as a necessary complement of the education of men of rank and social position. The example became very influential, and in a sphere far broader than the artistic one. ELIZABETH, the Englishmen best known on the Continent had been political exiles. Most of them were men selfbanished. Many of them passed their lives in defaming and plotting against the country they had left. The jealous restrictions upon the liberty of travel imposed by the Government rarely kept at home the men of mischief, but were probably much more successful in confining men BOOK I, The whose free movements would have been fruitful in good alike to the countries they visited and to their own. altered circumstances which ensued upon the accession of DELIAN MSS. JAMES notoriously gave facilities to wider Continental in LECTOR OF Thomas, D. of Norfolk to his son Philip, &c., MS. Harl., 787. tercourse; and it was by men who followed very much in Thomas HOWARD, Earl of Arundel, Surrey, and Norfolk, was twentieth in lineal descent from that William de ALBINI who, in the year 1139, had acquired the Castle and Earldom of Arundel by virtue of his marriage with the widow of King HENRY THE FIRST. He was born at Finchingfield, in Essex, in 1585,-a date which nearly marks the period of lowest depression in the strangely varied fortunes of an illustrious family. Philip, Earl of ARUNDEL, the father of Earl Thomas, was already in the Tower, and was experiencing, in great bitterness, the truth of words written to him by his own father, when in like circumstances:-Look into all Chronicles, and you shall find that, in the end, high degree brings heaps of cares, toils in the State, and most commonly (in the end) utter overthrow.' Before Thomas HOWARD had reached his fifth year his mother-co-heiress of the DACRES of the North' -had to write to the Lord Treasury BURGHLEY: Extremytye inforceth me to crave succour,' and to illustrate her assertion by a detail of miseries. The hopes with which the STUART accession was naturally anticipated by all the HOWARDS, were by some of them more than realized, but the heir of Arundel was not of that number. He was, indeed, restored in blood to such honours as his father, Earl Philip, had enjoyed, and also to the baronies forfeited by his grandfather, Thomas, |