'
Prince Henry had a more refined taste. The dilettanti of the Prince's set
took no part in the drunken antics of the Court, where Goring was master
of the games, but Sir John Millicent 'made the best _extempore_ fool.'
The Prince bought almost the whole of the monastic library originally
formed by Henry Lord Arundel: about forty volumes had already been given
by Lord Lumley to Oxford.
There was some danger that the books at Whitehall would be destroyed in
the fury of the Civil War; but almost all of them were saved by the
personal exertions of Hugh Peters, when Selden had told him that there
was not the like of these rare monuments in Christendom, outside the
Vatican. Whitelocke was appointed their keeper, and to his deputy, John
Dury, we owe the first English treatise on library management. Thomas,
Lord Fairfax, did a similar good service at Oxford. When the city was
surrended in 1646 the first thing that the General did was to place a
guard of soldiers at the Bodleian. There was more hurt done by the
Cavaliers, said Aubrey, in the way of embezzlement and cutting the chains
off the books, than was ever done afterwards. Fairfax, he adds, was
himself a lover of learning, and had he not taken this special care the
library would have been destroyed; 'for there were ignorant senators
enough who would have been content to have it so.' As a rule, we must
admit that the Puritans were friendly to literature, with a very natural
exception as to merely ecclesiastical records.
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