ishop Theodore brought one over
in the seventh century. Archbishop Parker thought that he had, and the
MS. which he fondly believed to be Theodore's was in his view the pearl
of the collection he left to Corpus Christi. Certainly it has the name
_Theodorus_ in it in letters of gold; but, as certainly, it is a
fifteenth-century book, and the Theodore for whom it was written was I
believe Theodore Gaza, a humanist who lived in Italy.

An instance of a man interested in books and not unaffected by the
Renaissance, though not himself a collector, may be introduced here.
William Wyrcestre (or Botoner, or Worcester) is the man, and he deserves
a special study. Some have called him the father of English antiquaries,
in virtue of one of his notebooks which has been preserved, and which
contains jottings about his travels in England; it is a sort of rude
elementary Leland's _Itinerary_. It is by no means the only book of his
compiling, nor the only one owned by him that we have. There are
historical and literary collections of his, and not a few MSS. with his
name in them. He knew John Free, the translator (reputed) of Diodorus
Siculus, and he had read Cristoforo Buondelmonte's book on the islands
of the Greek archipelago.

A long list of the Elizabethan book-collectors could be made, but I
shall not attempt one here. Two libraries of the time, Sir Robert
Cotton's and Archbishop Parker's, stand out. The main object of both men
was to preserve English antiquities, and it is no exaggeration to say
that if these two collections, which together number less than 1,500
volumes, had been wiped out, the best things in our vernacular
literature and the pick of our chronicles would be unknown to us now. We
should have no _Beowulf_ or _Judith_, only inferior copies of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and of Matthew Paris, no Layamon, no _Pearl_--not
to speak of the mass of invaluable State-papers gathered by Cotton, and
the Reformation documents and letters stored up by Parker. One touch of
blame rests on Sir Robert Cotton. 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. Less is generally known
of two dispersed collections, those of John Bale and John Dee.

Bale must, I fe