Manuscripts and printed books when lent out of Oxford are as a rule not lent to private houses but deposited in some library. What happens abroad I do not know, though I confess to having my suspicions. If a manuscript were lent to some one in a Cathedral town, it would be deposited in the Cathedral library; and we comfort ourselves with the belief that in such a place it would be secure, and that it would not on any account be removed from that library elsewhere. An acquaintance of my own, a very safe man, has had a Bodleian manuscript of great value out for some years, and it is lent not to him directly, but to a library where alone he is to use it. It may be that this arrangement is actually carried out, and I do not know that it is not, yet I would bet five pounds to a penny that if I went to his house I should find the Bodleian book kicking about in his study, where, in fact, though exposed to a thousand risks of damage and even destruction, it is really safer than in the library where we suppose it to be. For one Cathedral library I can answer: a book would hardly be safer there than it would be on a public and unwatched book-stall, and such I have no doubt whatever is the case with more than half the places to which we send books for safe custody. There is as little conscience about books in this stupid and wicked world as there is about umbrellas, and one of the most important and most useful functions of a body like the Curators of the Bodleian is to set up a high standard in such matters. It is our duty as trustees to take lofty ground, and to be sensitive where the world is listless and careless; and even if we do not really feel exactly as we ought, we are bound, like Gertrude, to 'assume a virtue though we have it not'; it is very laudable hypocrisy if the real article cannot be had. Yet I hope that it can, and that upon consideration we may all see that the convenience of a few is not for a moment to be compared with the convenience of many, and that we shall awake to the fact that we, of all people, ought not to countenance in any way whatever any practice which may tend in the remotest degree to damage the only institution in Oxford of which any rational being can in the present day be justly proud.