Southey’s Spanish and Portuguese collection—if Heber’s great library be set aside—was probably the most remarkable gathering of such books in the possession of any private person in this country. It included several manuscripts, some of which were displayed with due distinction upon brackets. Books in white and gold—vellum or parchment bound, with gilt lettering in the old English type which Southey loved—were arranged in effective positions pyramid-wise. Southey himself had learned the mystery of book-binding, and from him his daughters acquired that art; the ragged volumes were decently clothed in coloured cotton prints; these, presenting a strange patch-work of colours, quite filled one room, which was known as the Cottonian Library. “Paul,” a book-room on the ground-floor, had been so called because “Peter,” the organ-room, was robbed to fit it with books. “Paul is a great comfort to us, and being dressed up with Peter’s property, makes a most respectable appearance, and receives that attention which is generally shown to the youngest child. The study has not actually been Petered on Paul’s account, but there has been an exchange negotiated which we think is for their mutual advantage. Twenty gilt volumes, from under the ‘Beauties of England and Wales,’ have been marched down-stairs rank and file, and their place supplied by the long set of Lope de Vega with green backs.” Southey’s books, as he assures his ghostly monitor in the _Colloquies_, were not drawn up on his shelves for display, however much the pride of the eye might be gratified in beholding them; they were on actual service. Generations might pass away before some of them would again find a reader; in their mountain home they were prized and known as perhaps they never had been known before. Not a few of the volumes had been cast up from the wreck of family or convent libraries during the Revolution. “Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchines at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget’s Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges.... Here are books from Colbert’s library; here others from the Lamoignon one.... Yonder Chronicle History of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes; and yonder General History of Spain, by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors.... This Copy of Casaubon’s Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor. He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations.... Here is a book with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kept him in prison in Windsor Castle.... Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of many generations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to the window, there is the lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the illimitable sky.”