“‘I am glad, Mr. Panizzi, that we are alone, as I have something to tell you, which I wish to be considered strictly confidential, and that you will not mention to any human being as long as I live. There is nothing, perhaps, that renders secrecy strictly necessary in what I am going to say; but it is as well to keep it to ourselves, as it concerns nobody but me. I have often perceived that you wished to know what would become of my library after my death, and I have often seen also that you wished it should go to the British Museum. That wish is very natural as well as very creditable to you; for, treated as you have been by the Trustees, had you been a less zealous officer, and not so thoroughly honest a man, you would not so easily have forgiven their conduct towards you, and felt so warm an interest in the welfare of that Institution as you have. “I have admired your conduct in that respect, and been extremely pleased by it. I have not imitated you for years I confess. The minute of which I gave you the copy in Mr. Forshall’s handwriting, and which conveys an ample and deserved acknowledgment of your good services, was a disgraceful and unjust act towards you, and insult to me. They reserved for me to do what they never had done to any one else, and they behaved ill to you to vex me, I believe ... (as I dissented, he added). Well, well, may be they or some one who had influence on them, counselled them to punish you. I felt so much their conduct that, as you know, I left the room when I saw what they were bent upon doing, and never went again to their meetings, and I felt very much inclined never to speak again to Lord Farnborough, who, after having both in private to me and at a Committee agreed with the justice of doing what the Committee suggested, got up at the general meeting which he and Mr. Forshall had packed to move the rejection of the Committee’s report. I then was more than ever determined to leave my library to the Duke of Buckingham, to be kept at Stowe as a heirloom. But your generous conduct made me think that if you, who had been much more injured than I was, forgave them, I ought. “I knew, moreover, that you would be delighted to have my books, and I often thought that the coming into your hands from mine was the very best thing that could happen to them, as well as the most pleasing to me. I was determined partly by these considerations to alter my will, and still more so—or rather much more so—by another circumstance.