orian, 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 Cardena, one from Silos,
happen, by an odd and lucky accident, to be elaborately described in
Berganza's _Espana 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.

In both these cases examples of illumination and calligraphy have been
primary objects in the collectors' eyes, and that is the ruling passion
with most of those who buy MSS. nowadays. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century what was more coveted was the accumulation of co