From hence we proceeded to Henry the Eighth's Library, preserved, externally and internally, in nearly its original state, and containing not less than three hundred thousand volumes. The 'locale' is like no other of the kind, and transports one completely into past ages. The cruciform room; the strange shelves; the iron gratings, half blue, half gilded, and of a form no longer seen; the enormous windows, as broad as three church windows together and ornamented with beautiful coloured glass; the gay gilded ceiling, with numberless panels, each containing the picture of an open Bible with four crowns; even the Doctors sitting at the tables in the dress of Luther, which they still wear,--how strangely is the fancy excited by such a scene! A gallery runs round midway of the high shelves, for the purpose of reaching the books above. On the railing of this gallery are hung the portraits of the various librarians, from the first to the last; some, unhappily, in modern dresses, who look like apes among their venerable predecessors. In the middle of the room the shelves are so arranged on either side, that they form a long alley of enclosed closets, in which every man who wishes to use the library can work completely undisturbed,--an old and most exemplary arrangement. There are also books in the rooms which occupy the whole ground-floor of this quadrangular edifice. Here are some very curious manuscripts and specimens of early printing. I saw with sorrow how large a tribute the poverty of Germany has been compelled to pay to the wealth of England; among other things, a magnificent copy of Faust's first Bible, of the year 1440, which I think belonged to our Doctor Barth, and is inscribed with a number of notes in his handwriting. I was delighted to find a manuscript so exactly like a volume of Froissart in our library, (that with the miniatures in every leaf,) embellished with the same arabesques of fruit and flowers on a gold ground, the style and colouring of the figures so precisely the same, that it is scarcely to be doubted they are by the same painter. Unfortunately there is neither name nor date. The text is Quintus Curtius,--all the figures exactly in the costume of the time of the illuminator: Alexander, cased in iron from head to foot, breaks a lance with Darius, and throws him from his saddle, just in the style of the French and English Knights in Froissart.