While Burghley was Chancellor of Cambridge, Dudley, Earl of Leicester, held the Oxford Chancellorship, and doubtless felt that, charter or no charter, it concerned his honour to see that his University should be allowed all the privileges possessed by the other. Under his auspices a press was started late in 1584 or early in 1585 by Joseph Barnes, an Oxford bookseller, to whom the University lent L100 to enable him to procure the necessary equipment, and on Leicester's visiting the University on 11 January, 1585, a _Carmen gratulatorium_ in four elegiac couplets was presented to him, printed on an octavo leaf at the new press. The first book to appear was a _Speculum Moralium Quaestionum in uniuersam Ethicen Aristotelis_, by John Case, a former fellow of S. John's, with a dedication to Leicester by the author and another by the printer. In the latter the promise was made "ea solum ex his praelis in lucem venient que sapientum calculis approbentur & Sybille foliis sint veriora," but the remaining publications of the year were a polemical treatise by Thomas Billson, two issues of a Protestant adaptation of the _Booke of Christian exercise appertaining to Resolution_, by Robert Persons, the Jesuit, and two sermons. In 1586 no fewer than seventeen books were printed (a number not again attained for several years), and among them was an edition of six homilies of S. Chrysostom, "primitiae typographi nostri in graecis literis preli." After this the press settled down to an average production of from eight to a dozen books a year, including a fair number of classical texts and translations, with now and then a volume of verse which brings it into connection with the stream of Elizabethan literature. Among the more interesting books which it produced, mention may be made of the _Sixe Idillia_ of Theocritus (1588), poems by Nicholas Breton and Thomas Churchyard (1592), Richard de Bury's _Philobiblon_ (1599), the _Microcosmus_ of John Davies of Hereford (1603), Captain John Smith's _Map of Virginia, with a description of the Countrey_ (1612), and Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1621). In the 'twenties of the seventeenth century the average annual output was still only 14; in the 'thirties, under the fostering care of Laud, it had risen as high as 25. In 1641 it was but 19. Then, on the outbreak of the Civil War, the King came to Oxford, and under the stress of official publications and royalist controversy the numbers shot up to about 147 in 1642, followed by 119 in 1643, about 100 in 1644, and 60 in 1645. Then they become normal again, and in 1649 under the Parliamentary _regime_ sink as low as seven. These statistics are taken from the various works of Mr. Falconer Madan, mentioned in our bibliography, and from the same source we learn that until the nineteenth century the annual average of production, calculated by periods of ten years, never exceeded thirty-two.