Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, made a great purchase in 1705, and spent
the next twenty years in building on that foundation. His son, Earl
Edward, threw himself with zeal into the undertaking, and left at his
death about 50,000 books, besides a huge body of manuscripts and an
incredible number of pamphlets. We shall quote from the sketch by Oldys,
who shared with Dr. Johnson the task of compiling the catalogue. 'The
Earl had the rarest books of all countries, languages, and sciences':
thousands of fragments, some a thousand years old: vellum books, of which
some had been scraped and used again as 'palimpsests': 'a great
collection of Bibles, and editions of all the first printed books,
classics, and others of our own country, ecclesiastical as well as civil,
by Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Berthelet, Rastall, Grafton, and the
greatest number of pamphlets and English heads of any other person:
abundance of ledgers, chartularies, etc., and original letters of eminent
persons as many as would fill two hundred volumes; all the collections of
his librarian Humphrey Wanley, of Stow, Sir Symonds D'Ewes, Prynne,
Bishop Stillingfleet, John Bagford, Le Neve, and the flower of a hundred
other libraries.'
A few of these collections ought to be separately mentioned. Stow had
died in great poverty, and indeed had been for many years a licensed
beggar or bedesman; but in his youth he had been enabled by Parker's
protection to make a good collection out of the spoils of the Abbeys;
during the Elizabethan persecution he was nearly convicted of treason for
being in possession of remnants of Popery, and found it very hard to
convince the stern inquisitor that he was only a harmless antiquary.
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