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I. Doubts on the authenticity of the Latin, but not the Greek Classics. II. At the revival of letters Popes and Princes offered large rewards for the recovery of the ancient classics. III. The labours of Bracciolini as a bookfinder. IV. Belief put about by the professional bookfinders that MSS. were soonest found in obscure convents in barbarous lands.
My own belief is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summers of 1819 and 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years, and it was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.
As for the trials in Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire, it is fairly safe to reason that they were conducted by the justices of the peace from other evidence which we have that there were no assizes during the last half of 1645 and the first five months of 1646; see Whitelocke, Memorials, II, 31, 44, 64. MSS. Comm.
We know that Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln owned such things, and that he bequeathed his books to the Franciscans of Oxford at his death in 1254; and when we examine the Psalter again, we find that it is full of notes in a hand which occurs in other Greek MSS. known to have belonged to Grosseteste, and which I take to be Grosseteste's autograph.
That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of them, and the sale and export went on at a great rate. Thus the drafting of Greek MSS. into the libraries of Western Europe has been a long and gradual process.
In 1773 he made a tour in Westphalia in quest of MSS., and on his return, by way of completing his education, he turned journalist, and commenced a periodical called the Cassel Spectator, with Mauvillon as his co-editor.
In his larger one, Scriptorum Britannicorum Centuriæ, he inserts a list of the MSS. he had once owned; they were no longer in his hands, but, it is to be supposed, in Ireland, left there when he fled from his bishopric of Ossory on Mary's accession.
As it was with printed books and larger MSS., so it was with articles submitted for the 'Review; but he did not encourage casual contributions, and seldom perhaps never accepted any without some previous understanding.
After she had gone Haldane offered the money to Mr. Growther, but the old man only growled: "Chuck it in a drawer, and the one of us who wants it first can have it." For the next two or three weeks Mrs. Arnot, by the dint of considerable effort, kept up a supply of MSS., of which copies were required, and she supplemented the prices which the parties concerned were willing to pay.
He had a vicious habit of breaking up MSS. and binding together sections from different volumes. This disguises the provenance of the books, and by consequence obscures the history of their contents. Enough information about the Cotton and Parker MSS. is easily accessible to absolve me from writing much about them here.
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