[Sidenote: Corresp., in _Works_, vol. xvi, p. 438.] When condoling with the new Earl upon his father’s death, SWIFT wrote to him:—‘You no longer wanted his care and tenderness, ... but his friendship and conversation you will ever want, because they are qualities so rare in the world, and in which he so much excelled all others. It has pleased me, in the midst of my grief, to hear that he preserved the greatness, the calmness, and intrepidity, of his mind to his last minutes; for it was fit that such a life should terminate with equal lustre to the whole progress of it.’ It is honourable alike to the man who was thus generously spoken of, and to the friend who mourned his loss, that the testimony so borne was a consistent testimony. The failings of HARLEY were well known to SWIFT. In the days of prosperity they had been freely blamed; and face to face. When those days were gone, the good qualities only came to be dwelt upon. To the unforgiving enemy, as to the bereaved son, SWIFT wrote about the merits of the friend he had lost. ‘I pass over that paragraph of your letter,’ said BOLINGBROKE, in reply, ‘which is a kind of an elegy on a departed minister.’ When the Harleian Library was inherited by the second Earl of OXFORD (of this family) it included more than six thousand volumes of Manuscripts, in addition to about fourteen thousand five hundred charters and rolls. By him it was largely augmented in every department. [Sidenote: INCREASE OF THE HARLEIAN LIBRARY BY EDWARD, EARL OF OXFORD. 1724–1741.] [Sidenote: See MS. ADDIT., 5338. (B. M.)] He made his library most liberally accessible to scholars; and when, by a purchase made in Holland, he had acquired some leaves of one of the most precious biblical manuscripts in the world—leaves which had long before been stolen from the Royal Library at Paris—he sent them back to their proper repository in a manner so obliging as made it apparent that his sense of the duties of collectorship was as keen as was his sense of its delights. At his death, on the 16th of June, 1741, the volumes of manuscripts had increased to nearly eight thousand. The printed books were estimated at about fifty thousand volumes, exclusive of an unexampled series of pamphlets, amounting to nearly 400,000, and comprising, like the manuscripts, materials for our national history of inestimable value. The only daughter and heiress of the second Earl, Margaret, by her marriage with William, Duke of PORTLAND, carried her share in a remnant of the fortunes of the several families of CAVENDISH, HOLLES, and HARLEY, into the family of BENTINCK. The magnificent printed library which formed part of her inheritance was sold and dispersed. [Sidenote: Johnson, _Account of the Harleian Library_; _Works_, vol. v, p. 181.] It was of that collection that JOHNSON said, ‘It excels any library that was ever yet offered to sale in the value as well as in the number of the volumes which it contains.’