Mr. Ellis thinks that the tone of my pamphlet ‘is, to say the very least, reactionary’, and he describes me as the exponent of ‘a reactionary movement against the study and use of MSS.’ The pamphlet says in effect that the Curators have for years past been doing a wrong thing, and a thing for which they had no statutable warrant; it gives reasons why the thing is both wrong and foolish, and it begs the University to put a stop to the wrong doing. This Mr. Ellis calls ‘reactionary’; a violent misuse of an adjective, as it seems to me. Then he makes out entirely to his own satisfaction, though hardly, it is to be thought, to that of his readers, that I object to the presence of an undergraduate in the Bodleian. Anybody who reads the ‘Remarks’ with ordinary attention will see that in the passage where alone the word occurs (p. 46) it is used to denote a species of the unlearned, and surely no one will deny that it is rightly so used; for not one undergraduate in five hundred could be properly described as learned. But if any undergraduate is learned, I have never objected to his presence in the library. How could I object when I have said more than once that the Bodleian was founded and endowed by learned men for learned men? Not a year ago I introduced to the library a very young Cambridge man, whom I firmly believed to be an undergraduate; and I congratulated myself on having turned loose into that glorious place exactly the sort of person that Bodley, Laud, and Selden would have welcomed, for he was at once a scholar and a lover of books. It turned out that my young friend was not an undergraduate at all, but a recently made Bachelor of Arts; but that makes no difference as far as I am concerned; I believed him to be an undergraduate when I offered to be his sponsor. So much for the charge that I would exclude undergraduates from the Bodleian. I would exclude (just as Bodley ordered) all unlearned people, and therefore almost all undergraduates; I would welcome all learned men (and women too), and therefore any one, graduate or undergraduate, who is learned; nor should I take ‘learned’ in a very strict sense. Mr. Ellis declares that he should regard the change of practice which I advocate ‘not only with grave distrust, but with a quite lively resentment, as an outrage and desecration’ to the memory of the late Mr. Coxe. I understand this rather tall talk (and others do the same) to mean that Mr. Coxe approved of the practice of lending books and MSS. Now I have uncommonly good authority for saying that Mr. Coxe viewed the lending system with as much disfavour as I do myself. How could it have been otherwise? Mr. Coxe was a librarian who knew his business, and what the practice of such a library as the Bodleian should be. The Curators, the greater number of whom were profoundly ignorant both of books and of book management, coerced him; he was obliged to yield, but I am assured that he detested their barbarism quite as much as I do.