So one might go on through Ussher, Laud, Selden, Rawlinson, Harley, Askew, Drury, Heber, etc., to Sir Thomas Phillipps, whose 30,000 MSS., good and bad, must be the largest mass of such things ever owned by a single collector. But I think I have said enough of the public and private accumulations of this country to give an adequate idea of the kind of results that attend research, and of the ways in which large blocks of MSS. have been handed on to us. The epoch of the sale-room I have not really touched; it demands special tools and a special historian, and it concerns individual books. Nor, I will confess, do I feel quite at ease in touching upon the private collections of the present day. There is less objection to surveying such things when they have passed as wholes into public institutions. For example, the MSS. collected by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres were acquired in 1892 for the John Rylands Library at Manchester. The Latin section of these I have had occasion to examine. It consists of nearly 120 items. The earliest and most remarkable of these almost all own the pedigree of Libri-Bateman-Crawford. Of Libri enough has been said to make it necessary to note here that none of the Crawford MSS. owned by him were pilfered from French libraries. The library of Bateman of Youlgrave was dispersed in 1893; the Libri purchases in it are mostly traceable in the Libri sale catalogue of 1859. Three tenth-century Spanish MSS., two from the Abbey of S. Pedro de Cardeña, one from Silos, happen, by an odd and lucky accident, to be elaborately described in Berganza's _España Sagrada_; how it was that exactly these books came into Libri's hands it is not likely that we shall discover. For the rest, Lord Crawford's purchases at the Howell Wills sale of 1894 were considerable in quantity, and he acquired three fine books at that of Ambroise Firmin Didot in 1878. Three others came from the Bollandist Fathers' Library at Brussels. One of these had for some years formed part of the very choice collection of the Fountaines at Narford, in Norfolk, scattered in 1894. Of less choice quality, but of extreme usefulness to the student, are the 200 MSS. bequeathed by Frank McClean in 1904 to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and collected by him in the ten or fifteen years before that. Here we have few coherent groups of books, unless we reckon as such a certain number of volumes from the Cistercian Abbey of Morimund in North Italy, acquired singly, perhaps, by Mr. McClean from Hoepli of Milan. The Phillipps sales account for a good many, the Barrois and Ashburnham Appendix (1901 and 1897) for a few more, but most of the books were picked up one by one in auction-rooms or from dealers' catalogues.