A year passed away. The proceedings in the Star Chamber proved to be almost as fruitless, as had been the vain, but repeated, searches which wearied the legs and perplexed the minds of Clerks of Council and of Messengers of the Secretary’s office. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp. Chas. I_, clxvii, § 65, seqq. (R. H.)] But the locks and seals were still kept on the Cottonian Library. Sir Robert and his son (afterwards Sir Thomas) petitioned the King over and over again. But CHARLES had set his face as a flint, and would not listen. In vain he was told that the Manuscripts were perishing by neglect; and that, as they occupied some of the best rooms, the continued locking up made their owner to be like a prisoner, in his own house. In order to go into any one of them he had to send to Whitehall, to request the presence of a Clerk of the Council. [Sidenote: COTTON’S DECLINE OF HEALTH.—THE ARTFUL QUACK AND THE WARY PATIENT.] Under such circumstances it is not surprising that his friends noticed with anxiety his changed appearance. His ruddy countenance became sallow and haggard. It grew, says his associate D’EWES, to be of ‘a blackish paleness near to the semblance and hue of a dead visage.’ His somewhat portly frame stooped and waned. Life had still some charms for him,—so long at least as he could hope even faintly, for an opportunity of returning, at last, to his beloved studies. He was told of the growing repute of a certain Dr. FRODSHAM, who combined (it seems) experiments at the retort and still of the chemist, with the clinical practice of the physician,—when he could get it. Sir Robert sent for him and desired that he would bring a certain restorative balsam, or other nostrum, that had become the talk of the town. The worthy practitioner preferred to send his answer in writing. With great frankness, he said to his correspondent: ‘I have now an extraordinary occasion for money.... Neither is it my accustomed manner to distil for any body, without some payment beforehand. So, noble Sir, if pleas you, send here, _by this berer_, £17 and 12_s._, for so much the druges will cum tow. I confes that way I worke is deare, yett must say, upon my life, that I will make’ [you] ‘as sound and able of body, as at thirty-five,—and’ [this] ‘within five weeks.’ [Sidenote: MS. Harl., 7002, fol. 318; H. Frodsam to Sir R. Cotton (B. M.).] But the eye for which this naïve epistle was meant was an eye keen enough to detect the difference between corn and chaff. [Sidenote: _Ib._] ‘I did,’ replied Sir Robert, ‘expect something of fact, to make me confident; before I could venture either my trial or my purse.... Promises I have often met and rejected. Error of judgment must be, to me, of more loss than the money.’ By way of addition to the combined anxieties of failing health, and of a bitter grief, there came now to be heaped upon COTTON’S shoulders the heavier burden of a conspiracy to assail his moral character.