Curzon heard them in a later age;
and he had even cast his eyes on the _Book of Enoch_ with pallid figures
and a shining black text; and Peiresc was so inflamed with a desire to
buy it at any price that in the end he acquired it. The books seen by the
Capucin in the Convent of the Syrians, stored 'in the vault beyond the
oil-cellar,'have become our national property; and if there are not many
of the age of St. Anthony we have at least the volume, completed by the
help of a monk's note of the eleventh century, and originally written in
the year 411 'at Ur of the Chaldees by the hand of a man named Jacob.'
Much less attention seems to have been paid to the collection of Hebrew
books than to those in Coptic and Arabic. Selden, it is true, gave to
the University Library 'such of his Talmudical and Rabbinical books as
were not already to be found there,' and purchases were made at the
Crevenna sale in Amsterdam and at a sale during the present century of
the MSS. of Matheo Canonici at Venice. The chief source from which the
Bodleian was supplied was the collection formed before 1735 by David
Oppenheimer, the Chief Rabbi at Prague. In the British Museum are the
Hebrew books presented by Solomon da Costa in 1759. The donor's letter
contained a few interesting details. There were three Biblical MSS. and a
hundred and eighty printed books, all in very old editions: 'They were
bound by order of King Charles II., and marked with his cypher, and were
purchased by me in the days of my youth, and the particulars are they not
written in the book that is found therewith?' They had been collected
under the Commonwealth, and had afterwards been sent to the binder by
King Charles; but as the bill was never paid they lay in the shop until
the reign of George I.
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