Mr. Sanday’s letter is printed in the _Oxford Magazine_ of February 23, 1887. He sees ‘two great, if not fatal, flaws’ in my argument against lending out books. They are: 1. that I ‘look only at one of the uses of a MS.,’ and 2. that I ‘immensely under-estimate the value of the work that has been done upon MSS. in recent years.’ I plead an emphatic not-guilty to both these charges. On what evidence do they rest? As to the first, the evidence offered is that ‘my idea of a MS. appears to be that it should exist beautifully, occasionally inspected by a _connoisseur_ who strolls down to the library purely for his own amusement and with no further result worth speaking of.’ Then I am told that a great number of manuscripts are ‘valuable chiefly for their text,’ and that when ‘they have been collated and the collation thoroughly tested their work in the world is to a great extent done.’ Very good: now let us dismiss as extraneous to the present question manuscripts which are ‘works of art,’ and calligraphic or palæographical specimens or curiosities, and then let me ask whence my kindly opponent derives his information as to ‘my idea of a MS.’? I am curious to know, because he certainly cannot have got it out of my ‘Remarks’; he must have other sources of information, only, I can assure him, that he has been most woefully misled: in short, his notion of ‘my idea’ is wholly fictitious. That a great number of manuscripts are ‘valuable chiefly for their text’ is a proposition so self-evidently true, that it might have been thought difficult to find any one out of a lunatic asylum who ever doubted it. Will Mr. Sanday point out to me in anything I have ever written any passage which, by any interpretation however forced, could be made to say that the great proportion of manuscripts are valuable for much except their texts? In the greatest libraries--even in the Bodleian--the number of splendid manuscripts--of manuscripts valuable as works of art or as palæographic monuments--is comparatively small.