“Covetousness was at that time so busy about private interest, that public wealth was not anywhere regarded. A number of them which purchased those superstitious Mansions reserved of those Library Books some to serve their Jakes, some to scowr their candlesticks, and some to rub their Boots, and some they sold the Grocers and Soap sellers, and some they sent over sea to the Bookbinders: not in small number, but, at times, whole ships full. Yea, the Universities of this Realm are not all clear in this Fact; but cursed is the belly which seeks to be fed with so ungodly gains, and so deeply shameth his natural country. I know a Merchant man (which shall at this time be nameless) that bought the Contents of two noble Libraries for forty shillings price; a shame it is to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied, instead of grey paper, by the space of more than these ten years, and yet he hath store enough for as many years to come. A prodigious example is this, and to be abhorred of all men which love their nation as they should do. Yea, what may bring our realm to more shame and rebuke than to have it noised abroad that we are despisers of learning? I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness, that neither the Britons under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans had ever such damage of their learned Monuments as we have seen in our time. Our posterity may well curse this wicked fact of our age, this unreasonable spoil of England’s most noble Antiquities.”... “How many admirable manuscripts of the Fathers, Schoolmen, and Commentators were destroyed by this means? What number of historians of all ages and Countries? The Holy Scriptures themselves, as much as these Gospellers pretended to regard them, underwent the fate of the rest. If a Book had a cross on it it was condemned for Popery, and those with lines and circles were interpreted the Black Art and destroyed for Conjuring. And thus, as Fuller goes on, Divinity was profaned, Mathematicks suffered for Corespondence with Evil Spirits, Physick was maimed, and a Riot committed on the Law itself.”