cates of indispensable and common
works, which the abbey libraries possessed in great numbers, and often
parted with, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to colleges and
private purchasers.

Next we take out a thin folio written on paper. This time it is a Greek
book which we open; it has the works of the Christian apologists
Athenagoras and Tatian, and a spurious epistle of Justin Martyr, copied
in 1534 by Valeriano of Forli. A single MS. now at Paris, written in
914, is the ancestor of all our copies of these texts; but it has been
shown that this Eton book is not an immediate copy of that, but of one
now at Bologna. Obviously it was written in Italy. How does it come to
be here? Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of the college, spent the best part
of twenty years in Italy, mainly as Ambassador to the Court of Venice
for James I., and left all his MSS. to the college at his death in 1639.
There are numbers of MSS. from Italy in this bookcase, and, though
hardly any of them have Wotton's name in them, it is not to be doubted
that they came from him. A good proportion of them, too, can be traced
back a step farther, for they have in them the name or the arms or the
handwriting of Bernardo Bembo of Venice, the father of the more famous
Cardinal Pietro Bembo. This Justin volume is not of that number, but we
have a clue to its history which may be deemed sufficient.

I turn to another shelf and open a large book written somewhere about
the year 1150, which was given to the college in 1713 by one of the
Fellows; in 1594 it belonged to John Rogers (if I read the name right).
It contains St. Jerome's Commentary on Daniel and the Minor Prophets,
followed by a tract of St. Ambrose, and another ascribed to Jerome
(subject, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart), which was in reality, we
are now told, written by a Pelagian. It is a very uncommon text. After
that we have Jerome's (so-called) prophecy of the fifteen signs which
are to precede the last judgment--of which signs, let it be said in
passing, there is a fine representation in an ancient window in the
Church of All Saints, North Street, at York. Can we trace this volume
any farther back than 1594? I think so; the Ambrose and the two spurious
tracts of Jerome (one, as I said, being of very rare occurrence) are
entered, in that order, in the catalogue of the library of Peterborough
Abbey. The library has long been dispersed, but the catalogue remains,
and was printed by Gunton i