"SIR THOMAS MORE.--'How many such dispersions must have taken place to have made it possible that these books should be thus brought together here among the Cumberland mountains!' "MONTESINOS.--'Many, indeed; and in many instances, most disastrous ones. Not a few of these volumes have been cast up from the wreck of the family or convent libraries, during the Revolution. Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchins, at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget's Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was colored, came from the Carmelite nunnery at Bruges. That copy of Alain Chartier, from the Jesuits' College at Louvain; that _Imago Primi Sæculi Societatis_, from their college at Ruremond. Here are books from Colbert's library; here others from the Lamoignon one. And here are two volumes of a work--Chronicles of the barefooted Franciscans in the Philippines, China, Japan, etc.--for which I am indebted to my friend Sir Robert Harry Inglis; a work, not more rare than valuable for its contents, divorced, unhappily, and it is to be feared forever, from the volume which should stand between these. They were printed in a convent at Manilla, and brought from thence when that city was taken by Sir William Draper. They have given me, perhaps, as many pleasurable hours, passed in acquiring information which I could not otherwise have obtained, as Sir William spent years of anxiety and vexation in vainly soliciting the reward of his conquest.' "'About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession, belonged to some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned the bookstalls a little before and after the year 1790. He marked them with certain ciphers, always at the end of the volume. They are in various languages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worth buying, or that I should not have bought without that indication to induce me. All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed on the owner's death, probably as of no value, to the stalls they had returned; and there I found this portion of them, just before my old haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room for improvements between Westminster and Oxford-road. I have endeavored, without success, to discover the name of their former possessor.' * * * *