I have delayed contradicting the stories told about the Royal Library in the _Quarterly Review_ of last December, and repeated in the _Illustrated Boswell_, and, I am sorry to say, still more gravely and circumstantially reproduced by the Editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES." I have delayed, I say, until I was enabled to satisfy myself more completely as to one of the allegations of _your_ Note. I can now venture to assure you that the whole story of the projected sale to Russia is absolutely unfounded; and that the Princess Lieven, whose supposed agency is the gist of the story, never heard a syllable about it, till my inquiry brought it to her notice, and that she has given it the most absolute contradiction. As there never was any such proposition, I need not say that the interference against it attributed to Mr. Heber and Lord Sidmouth is equally unfounded. The real history of the affair is this:--Mr. Nash, the architect, had rendered himself very agreeable to George IV. by his alterations and additions to the Pavilion at Brighton, and he managed to obtain (somewhat irregularly, I believe) the job of altering old Buckingham House, which was originally intended, or at least proposed, to be only an extensive repair and more commodious arrangement of the existing edifice. Under that notion, Mr. Nash had little difficulty in persuading the king that the space occupied by so large a library could not be spared for that purpose, if the house was to be arranged as a _palace_ both for private residence and for purposes of state; and as there was a very great jealousy in Parliament of the expense of Buckingham House, he was afraid to propose the erection of an additional building to receive the books. It was then that the scheme was hit on, I know not exactly by whom (but I believe by Mr. Nash), of giving the books to the British Museum. The principal part of the library occupied three large rooms, two oblong and one an octagon. The former were to have been absorbed into the living apartments, and the octagon was to be preserved as a _chapel_, which it was proposed to adorn with the seven _cartoons_ of Raphael from Hampton Court. All these, and several other schemes, vanished before Mr. Nash's larger views and increased favour, which led by degrees to the total destruction of the old house, and the erection of an entirely new palace, which however retains strong evidence of the occasional and piecemeal principle on which it was begun. But in the meanwhile the library was gone. _I know_ that some members of the government were very averse to this disposal of the library: they thought, and _strongly represented_, that a royal residence should, not be without a library; and that this particular collection, made especially _ad hoc_, should not have been, on any pretence, and above all on one so occasional and trivial, diverted from its original destination. It is very possible that Mr. Heber may have expressed this opinion; and I think I may say