We would call to our meeting Gabriel Harvey with his new Italian books and pamphlets; and Spenser, if possible, should be there; Dr. Dee would tell the piteous story of his four thousand volumes, printed and unprinted, Greek, in French, and High-Dutch MSS., etc., and of forty years spent in gathering the books that were all on their way to the pawnshop. He might have told the fortunes of all the books with the help of his magical mirrors and crystals. Francis Bacon's store was to increase and multiply, to adorn the library at Cambridge and fill the shelves at Gray's Inn; Lord Leicester's books, with their livery of the 'bear and ragged staff,' were to freeze for ages in the galleries at Lambeth. We should have Ascham inveighing against the ancients and their idle and blind way of living: 'in our father's time,' he says, 'nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry'; but Captain Cox would come forth to meet him, attired as in the tournament at Kenilworth, or in the picture which Dibdin has extracted from Laneham. 'Captain Cox came marching on, clean trussed and gartered above the knee, all fresh in a velvet cap: an odd man, I promise you: by profession a mason, and that right skilful and very cunning in fence.... As for King Arthur and Huon of Bourdeaux, ... the Fryar and the Boy, Elynor Rumming, and the Nut-brown Maid, with many more than I can rehearse, I believe he has them all at his fingers' ends.' James I., as became a 'Solomon,' was the master of many books; but not being a 'fancier' he gave them shabby coverings and scribbled idle notes on their margins. He is forgiven for being a pedant, since Buchanan said it was the best that could be made of him; it is difficult to be patient about his hint to the Dutch that it would be well to burn the old scholar Vorstius instead of making him a professor at Leyden. He seems to have done more harm than good to the libraries in his own possession. We know how he broke into a 'noble speech' when he visited Bodley at Oxford, with the librarian trembling lest the King should see a book by Buchanan, who had often whipped his royal pupil in days gone by: 'If I were not a King I would be an University-man, and if it was so that I must be a prisoner I would desire no other durance than to be chained in that library with so many noble authors.' The King gave Sir Thomas Bodley a warrant under the Privy Seal to take what books he pleased from any of the royal palaces and libraries; 'howbeit,' said Bodley, 'for that the place at Whitehall is over the Queen's chamber, I must needs attend her departure from thence, whereof at present there is no certainty known: how I shall proceed for other places I have not yet resolved.'