two hundred and forty years, when Sir Frederick Madden restored the miniature to its more legitimate place (Domitian A. xvii, fol. 96*.) Had this Nero volume chanced to have been scrutinized at the moment when it was Sir Robert’s fate to be stigmatized as ‘an embezzler of records,’ it is very possible that it might have been called to bear witness for the charge. For it is undeniable that the ‘RO. COTTON BRUCEUS’ is written _over an erasure_. (The signature occurs on the beautiful dedicatory page—‘_Beatissimo Papæ Damaso Hieronymus_.’) But, fortunately, the descent of the book can be traced clearly. Footnote 20: Take, for example, these few lines: ‘Sweete Sainte whome I soley addore,—at whooes srine I offer myself; I reseived your loving lines.... Without them, I could not live at all;—being deprived of your blessed sight, ... I live yet, but most miserably. Use means, if it be possible, that we may come to the speech of one another; and the Heavens of Hope may be yet auspitious unto us.... Those deviles have again been writing letters unto my mother.’ In 1679, it would seem, the two ardent lovers were kept in a sort of honourable imprisonment. On COTTON’S coming to Cotton House, in the spring of that year, an upper servant of the family writes thus to a correspondent: ‘I advised him to call for money; take a coach and go about to take the air, and to visit his friends that are in or about the town; and not to be mewed up in a room, without money or company.’—John SQUIRES, to a person unnamed; in _Appendix to Cotton MSS._ ‘16, 1.’ (B. M.) Footnote 21: By this William HANBURY, son-in-law of John COTTON (great grandson of the Founder), many COTTON MSS. were alienated—partly by sale and partly by gift—to Robert, Earl of OXFORD. _See_ hereafter, Chapter V. Footnote 22: Stukeley’s _Itinerary of Great Britain_ (2nd edit. 1776). Footnote 23: Some of the burnt MSS., regarded, until Mr. Forshall’s time, as hopelessly illegible, have been found very helpful to the preparation of the volume now in the reader’s hands. Footnote 24: