Lord SHELBURNE’S retirement had been followed, in 1784, by his creation as Earl Wycombe and Marquess of Lansdowne. In the following year, he sold the Wycombe mansion and its charming park to Lord CARRINGTON. Thenceforward, Bowood had the benefit, exclusively, of his taste and skill in landscape-gardening. Unfortunately, his next successor, far from continuing his father’s work, did much to injure and spoil it. But the third Marquess, in whom so many of his father’s best qualities were combined with some that were especially his own, made ample amends. The exciting debates which grew out of the French Revolution and the ensuing events on the Continent, called Lord LANSDOWNE, now and then, into the old arena. But the domestic employments which have been mentioned, together with that which was entailed by a large and varied correspondence, both at home and abroad, were the things which chiefly filled up his later years. The Marquess died in London on the seventh of May, 1805. He was but sixty-eight years of age, yet he was then the oldest general officer on the army list, having been gazetted as a major-general just forty years before. [Sidenote: THE PURCHASE OF THE LANSDOWNE MANUSCRIPTS.] In order to acquire for the nation that precious portion of Lord LANSDOWNE’S Library which was in manuscript, the national purse-strings were now, for the first time, opened on behalf of the literary stores of the British Museum. Fifty-three years had passed since its complete foundation as a national institution, and exactly twice that number of years since the first public establishment of the Cottonian Library, yet no grant had been hitherto made by Parliament for the improvement of the national collections of books. Four thousand nine hundred and twenty-five pounds was the sum given to Lord LANSDOWNE’S executors for his manuscripts. Besides the successive accumulations of State Papers heretofore mentioned, the LANSDOWNE Collection included other historical documents, extending in date from the reign of HENRY THE SIXTH to that of GEORGE THE THIRD; the varied Collections of William _Petyt_ on parliamentary and juridical lore; those of WARBURTON on the topography and family history of Yorkshire, and of HOLLES, containing matter of a like character for the local concerns of the county of Lincoln; the Heraldic and Genealogical Collections of SEGAR, SAINT GEORGE, DUGDALE, and LE NEVE; and a most curious series of early treatises upon music, which had been collected by John WYLDE, who was for many years precentor of Waltham Abbey, in the time of the second of the Tudor monarchs. [Sidenote: THE ACQUISITION OF THE HARGRAVE AND BURNEY LIBRARIES.]