Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598-A.D. 1867: With a Preliminary Notice of the earlier Library founded in the Fourteenth CenturyMacray, William Dunn
History
Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598-A.D. 1867: With a Preliminary Notice of the earlier Library founded in the Fourteenth Century
Macray, William Dunn
Bodleian Library
4. The class entitled _Miscellaneous_ numbers about 1400 volumes, and
includes the greater part of those which were discovered in 1861. They
are so entirely miscellaneous that it is impossible to give in a few
lines a real idea of their nature. History, travels, biography, and
religious controversy largely prevail. There are papers of Sir Thos.
Browne, Dr. Dee, Maittaire, Peter Le Neve, Ashmole[242], John Dunton,
and Bagford, with a very large mass of _Hearniana_. Of the Non-jurors,
there are papers of Grascome, Gandy, Spinckes, Hickes, Fitzwilliams,
Howell, and Dean Granville. Some nine or ten volumes are occupied with
the accounts of the Royal Surveyor of Works from 1532 to 1545. The
Church-wardens' accounts of Sutterton, Lincolnshire, from 1493 to 1536,
and of St. Peter's, Cornhill, from 1664 to 1689, are also found
here[243]. There is a large series of Italian MSS. (amongst other
foreign books, chiefly French) which bear on English history, as
containing copies of reports made to Rome by Papal agents and to Venice
by ambassadors, together with the proceedings at many conclaves. These
were bought by Rawlinson at Sir Jos. Jekyll's sale of the Somers' MSS.
in 1739, for £3 15_s._[244] There is also a mass of papers of J. J.
Zamboni, Venetian Resident in England, and a friend of Maittaire. A
considerable number of autograph signatures, barbarously cut out from
various books, by Thomas Rawlinson, were found in loose papers; these
have now been mounted and bound in two volumes. There are not, however,
many of interest among them, except several of Ben Jonson.
5. In _Letters_ there are upwards of 100 volumes, comprising all the
multifarious correspondence of Hearne with Anstis, Bagford, Baker,
Barnes, Dodwell, Smith, &c., the correspondence of Rawlinson, Dr. Thomas
Turner, and Bishop Francis Turner, Philip Lord Wharton, and Sir Edm.
Warcupp. One volume contains a few letters by Dryden, Pope, Edw. Young,
&c. There is also a series of letters in three vols. relating to Dr.
John Polyander, of Kerckhoven, Professor of Divinity at Leyden, and
eight or nine volumes of Vossius' correspondence, being the originals
from which the folio volume published at London in 1691 was printed.
6. The class of _Poetry_ contains 221 volumes, including Chaucer,
Hoccleve, Lydgate, Capgrave (Life of St. Catherine), and Rolle of
Hampole, with Piers Plowman and the Romance of Parthenope of Blois (both
imperfect). The majority are miscellaneous poems and plays of the
seventeenth century. One volume, containing the words of anthems with
the composers' names, is supposed to be the Chapel-book used by Charles
I.
Of the three last-mentioned classes, a brief MS. list was drawn up with
great neatness and accuracy by Dr. Bliss, in 1812 (reaching in the case
of the _Miscell._ only as far as No. 407); an index, in continuation, to
all the later additions is now in process of formation.
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