With respect to the part which the King had in sending the books to the College, Dr. Ingram seems to suspect that Dr. Parr’s “effusively loyal spirit led him erroneously to attribute this act of restitution to Charles II. His Majesty’s consent,” he adds, “would perhaps be formally necessary, but it seems to have been really the Irish House of Commons that moved in the matter. In the Journals of the House under that date, 31 Maii, 1661, appears an order ‘that the Vice-Chancellor and Provost of the College of Dublin, and Mr. Richard Lingard, with such others as they will take to their assistance, be decreed and are hereby empowered, with all convenient speed, to cause the Library formerly belonging to the late Lord Primate of Armagh, and purchased by the army, to be brought from the Castle of Dublin, where they now are, into the said College, there to be preserved for public use; and the said persons are likewise to take a catalogue of all the said Library, both manuscripts and printed books, and to deliver the same into this House, to be inserted in the Journals of the House.’”[114] I may add that in the catalogue of MSS. drawn up by George Browne (afterwards Provost) in 1688 (and printed by Dr. Bernard in his _Catalogus Manuscriptorum Angliæ et Hiberniæ_), these MSS. are stated to have been given by the “Conventus generalis habitus Dublinii an. 1666.” It seems probable, too, that Dr. Parr has somewhat exaggerated the losses from the Library when he says that most of the MSS. were lost. As far as we can judge in the absence of a catalogue earlier than the Restoration, the best MSS. would seem to be still in the collection. It still contains, happily, the most beautiful book in the world, to be presently described more particularly.