_The Libraries of the East.—The Monasteries of the Nitrian Desert, and their Explorers.—William_ CURETON _and his Labours on the MSS. of Nitria, and in other Departments of Oriental Literature.—The Researches in the Levant of Sir Charles_ FELLOWS, _of Mr._ LAYARD, _and of Mr. Charles_ NEWTON.—_Other conspicuous Augmentors of the Collection of Antiquities._ We have now to turn to that vast field of research and exploration, from which the national Museum of Antiquities has derived an augmentation that has sufficed to double, within twenty-five years, its previous scientific and literary value to the Public. In this chapter we have to tell of not a little romantic adventure; of remote and perilous explorations and excavations; sometimes, of sharp conflicts between English pertinacity and Oriental cunning; often, of great endurance of hardship and privation in the endeavour at once to promote learning—the world over—and to add some new and not unworthy entries on the long roll of British achievement. Two distinct groups of explorers have now to be recorded. The labours of both groups carry us to the Levant. [Sidenote: THE LIBRARIES OF THE EAST.] What has been done of late years by the searchers after manuscripts, in their effort to recover some of the lost treasures of the old Libraries of the East, will be most fairly appreciated by the reader, if, before telling of the researches and the studies of CURZON, TATTAM, CURETON, and their fellow-workers in Eastern manuscript archæology, some brief prefatory notice be given of the earlier labours, in the same field, of HUNTINGTON, BROWNE, and other travellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mention must also be made of the explorations of SONNINI and of ANDRÉOSSI. [Sidenote: THE RESEARCHES OF ROBERT HUNTINGTON IN THE NITRIAN MONASTERIES;] About the year 1680, Robert HUNTINGTON, afterwards Bishop of Raphoe, visited the Monasteries of the Nitrian Desert, and made special and eager research for the Syriac version of the _Epistles of St. Ignatius_, of the existence of which there had been wide-spread belief amongst the learned, since the time of Archbishop USSHER. But his quest was fruitless, although, as it is now well known, a Syriac version of some of those epistles did really exist in one of the monasteries which HUNTINGTON visited. The monks, then as afterwards, were chary of showing their MSS., very small as was the care they took of them. The only manuscripts mentioned by HUNTINGTON, in recording his visits to three of the principal communities—St. Mary Deipara, St. Macarius, and El Baramous—are an _Old Testament_ in the Estrangelo character; two volumes of Chrysostom in Coptic and Arabic; a Coptic Lectionary in four volumes; and a _New Testament_ in Coptic and Arabic.