Under the Commonwealth, the librarianship had been combined, first with the keepership of the Great Seal, and then with an Embassy to Sweden. Under the Restoration, it was held in plurality with an active commission in the Royal Navy. [Sidenote: ACQUISITION OF THE THEYER LIBRARY.] CHARLES II, however, caused some valuable additions to be made to the library. Of these the most important was the manuscript collection which had belonged, successively, to John and Charles THEYER. The sum given was £560. The collection came to St. James’ Palace in 1678. It was rich in historical manuscripts and in the curiosities of mediæval science. It embraced many of the treasured book-possessions of a long line of Abbots and Priors of Llanthony,[29] and the common-place-books of Archbishop CRANMER. At CHARLES THE SECOND’S death the number of works in the royal collection had increased to more than ten thousand. No doubt, in that reign, the books could have brought against their owner the pithy complaint to which PETRARCH gave expression, on behalf of some of their fellows, at an earlier day: ‘Thou hast many books tied in chains which, if they could break away and speak, would bring _thee_ to the judgment of a private prison.... [Sidenote: Petrarch, _De remediis utriusque fortunæ_.] They would weep to think that one man—ostentatious of a possession for which he hath no use—should own a host of those precious things that many a passionate student doth wholly lack.’ No true lover of books, for their own sake, indeed, was ever to possess that rich collection, until it passed into the ownership of the nation. Its entail, so to speak, as a heirloom of the Crown, was cut off, just as it was about to pass into the hands of the one English King who alone, of all the Monarchs since CHARLES THE FIRST, cared about books. That it should pass to the Nation had been proposed by Richard BENTLEY, when himself royal librarian, sixty years before the proposal became a fact. ‘’Tis easy to foresee,’ said BENTLEY, ‘how much the glory of our Nation will be advanced by erecting a Free Library of all sorts of books.’ In his day, he saw no way to such an establishment, otherwise than by transfer of the royal collection. There is a reasonable, perhaps it might be said a strong, probability that when BENTLEY gave expression to this wish, at the close of the seventeenth century, he was unconsciously reviving one among many projects for the public good which had been temporarily buried in the grave of Prince HENRY. For under the Commonwealth, the Library at St. James’ had been ‘Public’ rather in name than in fact. [Sidenote: THE ULTIMATE INCORPORATION OF THE ROYAL LIBRARY WITH THE COLLECTIONS OF SLOANE AND OF COTTON.]