[2] We have Caxton's own confession in his preface to "The Book of Æneydos," or the Æneid of Virgil, where, in soliciting the late-created poet-laureat in the University of Oxford, John Skelton, to oversee his prose translation of the French translation, he notices the translations of Skelton of "The Epistles of Tully," and the "History of Diodorus Siculus," _out of Latin into English_, and as "one that had read Virgil, Ovid, Tully, and all the other noble poets and orators to _me unknown_." EARLY LIBRARIES. There probably was a time when there existed no private libraries in the kingdom, nor any save the monastic; that of Oxford, at the close of the thirteenth century, consisted of "a few tracts kept in chests." In that primeval age of book-collecting, shelves were not yet required. Royalty itself seems to have been destitute of a royal library. It appears, by one of our recently published records, that King John borrowed a volume from a rich abbey, and the king gave a receipt to Simon his Chancellor for "the book called Pliny," which had been in the custody of the Abbot and Convent of Reading. "The Romance of the History of England," with other volumes, have also royal receipts. The king had either deposited these volumes for security with the Abbot, or, what seems not improbable, had no established collection which could be deemed a library, and, as leisure or curiosity stimulated, commanded the loan of a volume. The borrowing of a volume was a serious concern in those days, and heavy was the pledge or the bond required for the loan. One of the regulations of the library of the Abbey of Croyland, Ingulphus has given. It regards "the lending of their books, as well the smaller without pictures as the larger with pictures;" any loan is forbidden under no less a penalty than that of excommunication, which might possibly be a severer punishment than the gallows. Long after this period, our English libraries are said to have been smaller than those on the Continent; and yet, one century and a half subsequently to the reign of John, the royal library of France, belonging to a monarch who loved literature, Jean le Bon, did not exceed ten volumes. In those days they had no idea of establishing a library; the few volumes which each monarch collected, at great cost, were always dispersed by gifts or bequests at their death; nothing passed to their successor but the missals, the _heures_, and the _offices_ of their chapels. These monarchs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, amid the prevailing ignorance of the age, had not advanced in their comprehension of the uses of a permanent library beyond their great predecessor of the ninth, for Charlemagne had ordered his books to be sold after his death, and the money given to the poor.