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Chap. III.

HENRY,

royal library, and truly as it may be said that Prince BOOK I. HENRY's acquisitions amounted virtually to its re-founda- LIFE OF tion, many of the finest books of long anterior date had PRINCE OF 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.

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BOOK 1,
Chap. IV.
THE COL-

LECTOR OF
THR ARUN-

THE COLLECTOR OF THE ARUNDELIAN MSS.

'The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated
men, born to wealth and power, who have run through
every country and have kept, in every country, the best
company; have seen every secret of art and nature; and
--when men of any ability or ambition-have been con-
sulted in the conduct of every important action. You
cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to
them. When it happens that the spirit of the Earl meets
his rank and his duties, we have the best examples.

These are the men who make England
that strong-box and Museum it is; who gather and pro-
tect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and
revolutionary countries, and brought hither, out of all the
world.
When I saw that, besides deer and
pheasants, these men have preserved ARUNDEL MARBLES,
TOWNLEY GALLERIES, HOWARD and SPENCER LIBRA-
RIES, WARWICK AND PORTLAND VASES, SAXON MANU-
SCRIPTS, MONASTIC ARCHITECTURES, AND MILLENIAL
TREES, I pardoned their high park-fences.'-

R. W. EMERSON, (English Traits, § xi).

Political Exile and Foreign Travel under Elizabeth, and
under James.-Life of Thomas HOWARD, Earl of
Arundel.-The Consolations of Connoisseurship.
Vicissitudes of the Arundel Museum. - The gifts of
Henry HOWARD to the Royal Society.

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,

UNDER
TUDORS AND
STUARTS.

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,
Chap. IV.

THE COL

whose free movements would have been fruitful in good alike to the countries they visited and to their own. The altered circumstances which ensued upon the accession of DELIAN MSS. JAMES notoriously gave facilities to wider Continental in

LECTOR OF
THE ARUN-

Thomas,

D. of Norfolk
to his son
Philip, &c.,
MS. Harl.,

787.

tercourse; and it was by men who followed very much in Lord ARUNDEL'S track that some of the best social results of that intercourse were won.

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 HowWARDS, 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,

Chap. IV.

LECTOR OF

THE ARUN

Duke of NORFOLK, in 1572. But the dignities were Book I, restored without the lands. His nearest relations profited THE COL by their influence at Court to obtain grants of his chief ancestral estates. The Earls of NOTTINGHAM, NORTH- DELIAN MSS. AMPTON, and SUFFOLK had each of them a share in the spoil;-salving their consciences, probably, by the reflection that, despite his poverty, their young kinsman had made a great marriage. For his alliance, in 1606, with Lady Aletheia TALBOT, daughter and co-heir of Gilbert, Earl of SHREWSBURY, had already brought to him considerable means in hand, and a vast estate in prospect. The marriage, in higher respects, was also a happy one. natural and eager desire to recover what his father had forfeited cast much anxiety over years otherwise felicitous. He could not regain even Arundel House in London, until he had paid £4000 for it to the Earl of NOTTINGHAM.

But a

AT COURT.

Lord ARUNDEL made his first appearance at Court in ARUNDEL 1605. In May, 1611, he was created a Knight of the Garter. Thirteen years of JAMES' reign had passed before the Earl was admitted to the Privy Council. This honour was conferred upon him in July, 1616. Five years more were to pass before his restoration to his hereditary office

* Part of Lord Northampton's large estates came eventually to Lord Arundel by bequest. He also inherited Northampton's house. at Greenwich, and occasionally resided there, until its destruction by fire in January, 1616. Chamberlain's account of the incident, given to Sir Dudley Carleton, is worth quotation for the comment with which it ends: 'There fell a great mischance to the Earl of Arundel by the burning of his house . . . at Greenwich, where he lost a great deal of household stuff and rich furniture; the fury of the fire being such that nothing could be saved. No doubt the Papists will ascribe and publish it as a punishment for his deserting or falling from them.' Ten days before the fire, Arundel had testified, publicly, his conformity with the Church of England. But he had shewn long before that his religious views and convictions differed widely from those in which he had been brought up.

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