King George III in his famous interview with Dr. Johnson asked whether there were better libraries at Oxford or at Cambridge. The sage replied that he believed the Bodleian was larger than any library they had at Cambridge, at the same time adding, "I hope whether we have more books or not than they have at Cambridge we shall make as good use of them as they do,"--a reply which I always like to associate with the remark of Dr. Cogswell: "I would as soon tell you how many tons the Astor Library weighs, as how many volumes it contains." While the university library at Cambridge has never been the recipient of such large and rich donations as has the Bodleian, it is today one of the best stocked university libraries in the world. Its first benefactor was Thomas Scott of Rotheram, archbishop of York, who not only gave 200 books and manuscripts, but also the first library building. Despite other benefactions the collection appeared "but mean" in the eyes of John Evelyn when he visited it in 1654. Among the earliest gifts to one of the college libraries at Cambridge there are some volumes which raise curious questions. According to Dr. Montague R. James, the provost of King's College, Cambridge, one book has the Bury bookmark and evidently came from that source; another belonged to the canons of Hereford, another to Worcester, and another to Durham. How and under what conditions did the early collegiate and monastic bodies part with these? "Was there not very probably an extensive system of sale of duplicates? I prefer this notion," writes Dr. James, "to the idea that they got rid of their books indiscriminately, because the study of monastic catalogs shows quite plainly that the number of duplicates in any considerable library was very large. On the other hand it is clear that books often got out of the old libraries into the hands of quite unauthorized persons: so that there was probably both fair and foul play in the matter." The most famous librarian of Cambridge University library was Henry Bradshaw, who not only left a strong impress upon the paleographers and historians of his day, but did much for librarianship by his contributions to bibliography and his work on the printed catalogs issued by the Cambridge University library. He believed in making the library as accessible as possible to those who were entitled to its use. The watchwords of his administration were "liberty and discretion," liberty for the people to go freely about the whole library, examining and borrowing such books as they liked, and discretion on the part of the administration in putting such extremely moderate restrictions upon this freedom that the security of its most precious books were safeguarded and the presence of the books most constantly needed for reference was assured without undue interference with freedom of access to the shelves or the borrowing of books from the library.