however, an undoubted relic, valuable alike for its liturgical contents, its romantic history and its associations. [Sidenote: The Turbutt Shakespeare.] A worn and tattered copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1623), plainly bound in contemporary calf, was brought up to the Library on January 23, 1905, from a Mr. Turbutt’s library at Ogston Hall, Derbyshire, for advice about repairs to the binding. Fortunately Mr. Strickland Gibson, a Senior Assistant, who studies Oxford bindings, had not neglected, as so many do, the poorer and mediocre covers, such as the one described; and he soon recognized on it the peculiarities of Oxford binders, and was able after a little investigation to establish the fact that the long-lost original First Folio, sent in sheets from the publisher in 1623 under Sir Thomas Bodley’s Agreement (see p. 20), had revisited its old home in the guise of a dubious stranger, but wearing still its ancient coat, much out at elbows. The identification is complete, and there is no doubt that the book had been sold after the Restoration as superseded. The special interest of the volume is two-fold—first, it is the only copy which went straight from the publisher to a public institution, and is therefore in some respects the only standard copy in existence; secondly, that the wear and tear of the book when it was chained in Bodley as S. 2.17 Art. (which can be proved to have been occasioned in the Library, and not at a later period) indicates, as nothing else can, which plays were most to the taste of the Bachelors of Arts before the Civil War. An estimate has been made from the comparative deterioration of each leaf, and the result is the following list of preferences: _Romeo and Juliet_; _Julius Cæsar_; _The Tempest_. Next: _Henry IV, part i_; _Macbeth_ and _Cymbeline_ equal. The Tragedies were most read, and the Histories least; the Comedies being intermediate. [Sidenote: Milton and Rouse.] John Rouse, who steered the Bodleian through the stormy waters of the Civil War, was a personal friend of Milton, and wrote to him to complain that no copy of his (Milton’s) _Poems_, London, 1645, was to be found in the Library. Milton sent a copy, and inserted in it a long Latin poem “ad Joannem Rousium ... de libro poematum ... Ode Joannis Miltonij.” Milton at this time was only Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, so the book was allowed to go up in the ordinary course, as 8ᵒ M. 168 Art., to one of the Galleries of the Arts End. After about a hundred and fifty years, it was rediscovered as a valuable autograph of the great poet, and is now exhibited in the glass cases. [Sidenote: The smallest MS.]