' Bodley has left us his own
account of the matter:--'I concluded at the last to set up my staff at
the library-door in Oxon. I found myself furnished with such four kinds
of aids as, unless I had them all, I had no hope of success. For without
some kind of knowledge, without some purse-ability to go through with the
charge, without good store of friends to further the design, and without
special good leisure to follow such a work, it could not but have proved
a vain attempt.' When Meric Casaubon visited Oxford a few years
afterwards he found the hall filled with books. 'Do not imagine,' he
wrote, 'that there are as many MSS. here as in the royal library at
Paris. There are a good many in England, though nothing to what our King
possesses; but the number of printed books is wonderful, and increasing
every year. During my visit to Oxford I passed whole days in this place.
The books cannot be taken away, but it is open to scholars for seven or
eight hours a day, and one may always see a number of them revelling at
their banquet, which gave me no small pleasure.' Bodley was not one of
those who like libraries to be open to all comers. 'A grant of such
scope,' said his statute, 'would but minister an occasion of pestering
all the room with their gazing; and the babbling and trampling up and
down may disturb out of measure the endeavours of those that are
studious. Admission, from the first, was granted only to graduates, and
every one on his entrance had to take the oath against 'razing, defacing,
cutting, noting, slurring, and mangling the books.
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