Through one of these gates our path leads us, and we find ourselves within the College, and at the door of the Library. At certain hours, usually between three and four in the afternoon, this is open to visitors; at others the escort of a Member of the College is needed. Of all the College Libraries in Cambridge this is the most interesting in its miscellaneous contents. Mounting the wide stone stair-way, we enter the long, wide, lofty, vaulted gallery, with a series of wooden book-cases projecting from either wall all along its course. The carved wreaths of flowers and leaves and fruitage which adorn these cases deserve careful notice. They are by Grinling Gibbons, probably the most wonderful wood carver who ever lived, and their intricacies bear striking testimony to his almost superhuman skill. In the recesses between the cases are to be seen sundry curios, from the College estates and other sources, while more are to be found in the long ranges of glass-covered tables topping the smaller book-shelves which line either side of the central passage way. Roman and Anglo-Saxon antiquities, and a splendid series of coins and medals, are here exhibited. Amongst the miscellaneous curios are a model of Caesar's famous bridge across the Rhine and a globe of the planet Mars. What will, however, first catch our eye on entering, will be the window at the southern end of the room, with its painted glass so unlike anything to be seen elsewhere. It is, in fact, unique, having been made in the middle of the eighteenth century by the discoverer of this particular method of staining glass, who kept the process secret--a secret which died with him and has never been recovered. The window cannot be called artistically beautiful, and the subject is weird. The University of Cambridge, represented as a lady in a somewhat scanty robe of yellow, is presenting Sir Isaac Newton to King George the Third (who did not come to the Throne till 1760, many years after the great philosopher died), while the transaction is being recorded by Francis Bacon Lord Verulam of Elizabethan fame! Beneath this window is Thorwaldsen's fine marble statue of Lord Byron, one of Trinity's greatest poets. This was originally intended for Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, but the Dean and Chapter of the period so strongly disapproved of Byron's morality that they refused it a place there. Apart from his poetical genius, he as little deserved to be honoured in Trinity library; for, as an undergraduate, he not only accomplished the apparently impossible feat of climbing by night to the roof (which others have more than once done since)[30] but abominably disfigured the statues upon it, in which he has had, happily, no imitators. Other relics of him are preserved hard by, which are supposed to bear upon the thrilling question as to how far he had or had not a club foot.[31]