' 'Jo. Bill hath
gotten everywhere what the place would afford, for his commission was
large, his leisure very good, and his payment sure at home.' The agent
bought largely at Seville; 'but the people's usage towards all of our
nation is so cruel and malicious that he was utterly discouraged.'
[Illustration: SIR THOMAS BODLEY.]
Sir Thomas Bodley would accept a very small contribution or the gift of a
single volume of any respectable sort. But he would have no 'riff-raff,'
as he told Dr. James, and would certainly have scorned the almanacs and
play-books acquired after his death under a bequest from the melancholy
Burton, and the ships' logs and 'pickings of chandlers' and grocers'
papers' which were received long afterwards as part of Dr. Rawlinson's
great donation. He was always grateful for a well-meant present. He
writes to his librarian: 'Mr. Schoolmaster of Winton's gift of
Melanchthon and Huss I do greatly esteem, and will thank him, if you
will, by letter.' Some of the earliest gifts were of a splendid kind.
Lord Essex sent three hundred folios, including a fine Budaeus from the
library of Jerome Osorio, captured at Faro in Portugal when the fleet was
returning from Cadiz. Bodley himself gave a magnificent _Romance of
Alexander_ that had belonged in 1466 to Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers.
The librarian contributed about a hundred volumes, including early MSS.
procured from Balliol and Merton by his persuasion. Merton College, for
its own part, sent nearly two-score volumes of 'singular good books in
folio.
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