‘The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to wealth and power, who have run through every country and have kept, in every country, the best company; have seen every secret of art and nature; and—when men of any ability or ambition—have been consulted in the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them. When it happens that the spirit of the Earl meets his rank and his duties, we have the best examples.... These are the men who make England that strong-box and Museum it is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and brought hither, out of all the world.... When I saw that, besides deer and pheasants, these men have preserved ARUNDEL MARBLES, TOWNLEY GALLERIES, HOWARD and SPENCER LIBRARIES, WARWICK AND PORTLAND VASES, SAXON MANUSCRIPTS, MONASTIC ARCHITECTURES, AND MILLENIAL TREES, I pardoned their high park-fences.’— R. W. EMERSON, (_English Traits_, § xi). _Political Exile and Foreign Travel under Elizabeth, and under James.—Life of Thomas_ HOWARD, _Earl of Arundel_.—_The Consolations of Connoisseurship.—Vicissitudes of the Arundel Museum.—The gifts of Henry_ HOWARD _to the Royal Society_. [Sidenote: BOOK 1, Chap. IV. THE COLLECTOR OF THE ARUNDELIAN MSS.] The Collector of the Arundel Marbles and Founder of the Arundel Library was the great-grandson of that twenty-first Earl of ARUNDEL (Henry FITZALAN) by whom had been collected the choicest portion of the library which passed, in 1609, from the possession of John, Lord LUMLEY, to that of HENRY, Prince of Wales. [Sidenote: chap. iii, p. 162] That Earl had profited by the opportunities which the dissolution of the monasteries presented so abundantly to collectors at home. The new Earl profited, in his turn, by larger and far more varied opportunities, offered to him during a long course of travel abroad. For himself, his travels ripened and expanded a somewhat crude and irregular education. He attained, at length, and in a much greater degree (as it seems) than any of his contemporaries, to that liberal culture which enabled him to appreciate, and to teach his countrymen to appreciate, the arts from which Greece and Italy had derived so much of their glory; whilst in England those arts had, as yet, done very little either to enhance the enjoyments and consolations of human life, or to call into action powers and aptitudes which had long lain dormant. It is not claiming too much for the Earl of ARUNDEL to say that of whatever, upon a fair estimate, England may be thought to owe to its successful cultivation of the Arts of Design, he was the first conspicuous promoter. Nor is his rank as a pioneer in the encouragement of the systematic study of archæology—a study so fruitful of far-reaching result—less eminent. [Sidenote: FOREIGN TRAVEL, UNDER TUDORS AND STUARTS.]