Chap. III. BOOK BOOK II, century, and two very choice copies of the Greek Gospels, one of which is of the tenth, and the other of the twelfth LOVERS AND centuries. PUBLIC TORS. DOCTOR In Latin classics, the BURNEY Manuscripts include a fourteenth century Plautus, containing no fewer than twenty plays-whereas a manuscript containing even twelve plays has long been regarded as a rarity. A fifteenth century copy of the mathematical tracts collected by PAPPUS ALEXANDRINUS, a Callimachus of the same date, and a curious Manuscript of the Asinus Aureus of APULEIUS, are also notable. The whole number of Classical Manuscripts which this Collector had brought together was stated, at the time of his death, to be three hundred and eighty-five. Dr. BURNEY died on the twenty-eighth of December, 1817, having just entered upon his sixty-first year. He was buried at Deptford, amidst the lamentations of his parishioners at his loss. For in BURNEY, too, the scholar and the Collector had CHARACTER. not been suffered to dwarf or to engross the whole man. His parishioners assembled, soon after his death, to evince publicly their sense of what Death had robbed them of. The testimony then borne to his character was far better, because more pertinent, laudation, than is usually met with in the literature of tombstones. Those who had known the man intimately then said of him: His attainments in learning were united with equal generosity and kindness of heart. His impressive discourses from the pulpit became doubly beneficial from the influence of his own example.' The parishioners agreed to erect a monument to his memory, as a record of their affection for their revered pastor, monitor, and friend; of their gratitude for his services, and of their unspeakable regret for his loss.' Chap. III. Book LOVERS AND TORS. Biography and Obituary, vol. iii, p. 225. Another meeting was called shortly afterwards, with a BOOK II, like object, but of another sort. Despite his reverence for Busbeian traditions, Dr. BURNEY had known how to win PUBLIC the love of his pupils. A large body of them met, under BENEFACthe chairmanship of the excellent John KAYE, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and afterwards Bishop Annual of Lincoln, and they subscribed for the placing of a monument to their old master in Westminster Abbey. On the twenty-third of February, 1818, the Trustees of the British Museum presented to the House of Commons a petition, praying that Dr. BURNEY'S Library should be acquired for the Public. The prayer of the petition was supported by Mr. BANKES and by Mr. VANSITTART, and a Select Committee was appointed to inquire and report upon the application. In order to an accurate estimate of the value of the Library, a comparison was instituted, in certain particulars, between its contents and those of the Collection already in the national Museum. In comparing the works of a series of twenty-four Greek authors, it was found that of those authors, taken collectively, the Museum possessed only two hundred and thirty-nine several editions, whereas Dr. Charles BURNEY had collected no fewer than seven hundred and twenty-five editions.* His Collection of the Greek dramatists was not only, as I have said, extensive, but it was arrayed after a peculiar and interesting manner. By making a considerable sacrifice of duplicate copies, he had brought his series of editions into an order which exhi *This small fact in classical bibliography is remarkable enough to call for some particular exemplifications, beyond those given in the text, on a former page. Of the three greatest Greek dramatists, Burney had 315 editions against 75 in the Library of the British Museum. Of Homer he had 87 against 45; of Aristophanes, 74 against 23; of Demosthenes, 50 against 18; and of the Anthologia, 30 against 19. CATION OF THE APPLI- TEES OF THE MUSEUM TO PURCHASE OF LIBRARY. ACQUISITION BURNEY LIBRARY BY THE NATION. BOOK II, LOVERS AND like manner. PUBLIC BENEFAC TORS. Report of Select Com mittee, 1818; passim. OF P. L. (Died 11 Nov., bited, at one view, all the diversities of text, recension, and It was estimated that the Collection had cost Dr. BURNEY a much larger sum, and that, possibly, if sold by public auction, it might have produced to his representatives more than twenty thousand pounds. In the same year with the acquisition of the Burney Library, the national Collections were augmented by the purchase of the printed books of a distinguished Italian scholar long resident in France, and eminent for his conCOLLECTION tributions to French literature. Pier Luigi GINGUENÉ— author of the Histoire Littéraire d'Italie and a conspicuous contributor to the early volumes of the Biographie Universelle -had brought together a good Collection of Italian, French, and Classical literature. It comprised, amongst the rest, the materials which had been gathered for the book by which the Collector is now chiefly remembered, and extended, in the whole, to more than four thousand three hundred separate works, of which number nearly one thousand seven hundred related to Italian literature, or to its history. This valuable Collection was obtained by the Trustees owing to the then depressed state of the Continental book-market-for one thousand pounds. And, in point of literary value, it may be described as the firstin point of price, as the cheapest-of a series of purchases which now began to be made on the Continent. Chap. 1II. Book LOVERS AND TORS. A more numerous printed Library had been purchased BOOK II, together with a cabinet of coins and a valuable herbarium, at Munich, three years earlier, at the sale of the Collections of Baron VON MOLL. His Library exceeded fourteen BENEFACthousand volumes, nearly eight thousand of which related to the physical sciences and to cognate subjects. The cost COLLECTION of this purchase, with the attendant expenses, was four VON MOLL. thousand seven hundred and seventy pounds. The whole sum was defrayed out of the fund bequeathed by Major Arthur EDWARDS.* These successive purchases, together with the Hargrave Collection-acquired in 1813-increased the theretofore much neglected Library by an aggregate addition of nearly thirty-five thousand volumes. And for four successive years (1812-15) Parliament made a special annual grant of one thousand pounds† for the purchase of printed books relating to British History. OF BARON (1815.) HARGRAVE AND HIS TIONS IN TURE. The peculiar importance of the Hargrave Collection FRANCIS consisted in its manuscripts and its annotated printed books. The former were about five hundred in number, and were works of great juridical weight and authority, not merely the curiosities of black-letter law. Their Collector was the most eminent parliamentary lawyer of his day, but his devotion to the science of law had, to some degree, impeded his enjoyment of its sweets. During some of the best years of his life he had been more intent on increasing his legal lore than on swelling his legal *It was also from the Edwards fund that the whole costs of the Oriental MSS. of Halhed, and of the Minerals of Hatchett, together with those of several other early and important acquisitions, were defrayed. That fund, in truth, was the mainstay of the Museum during the years of parliamentary parsimony. + Of these four thousand pounds, two thousand three hundred and forty-five pounds seem to have been expended in Printed Books; the remainder, probably, in Manuscripts. Book II, Chap. III, LOVERS AND PUBLIC BENEFAC- THE BEQUEST. profits. And thus the same legislative act which enriched the Museum Library, in both of its departments, helped to smooth the declining years of a man who had won an uncommon distinction in his special pursuit. Francis HARGRAVE died on the sixteenth of August, 1821, at the age of eighty. Leaving now this not very long list of acquisitions made by the National Library, in the way of purchase, either at the public cost or from endowments, we have again to turn to a new and conspicuous instance of private liberality. Like CRACHERODE, and like BURNEY, Francis Henry EGERTON belonged to a profession which at nearly all periods of our history-though in a very different degree in different ages has done eminent honour and rendered large services to the nation, and that in an unusual variety of paths. Each of these three clergymen is now chiefly remembered as a 'Collector.' Each of them would seem to have been placed quite out of his true element and sphere of labour, when assuming the responsibilities of a priest in the Church of England. CRACHERODE was scarcely more fitted for the work, at all events, of a preacher-save by the tacit lessons of a most meek and charitable life-than he was fitted to head a cavalry charge on the field of battle. BURNEY was manifestly cut out by nature for the work of a schoolmaster; although, as we have seen, he was ablelate, comparatively, in life-so to discharge (for a very few years) the duties of a parish priest as to win the love of his flock. EGERTON was unsuited to clerical work of almost any and every kind. Yet he, too, with all his eccentricities and his indefensible absenteeism, became a public benefactor. The last act of his life was to make a provision which has been fruitful in good, having a bearing-very |