am, and in recent years has gone to America.
Fine Gospels and other service-books from Weingarten are at Holkham;
they appeal to the Englishman, for they contain pictures of our sainted
King Oswald, of whom Weingarten owned a relic.

North Germany's contribution is far inferior to that of Bavaria and the
Rhine provinces. The inhabitants of large regions were pagans till a
late date (some might say they were so still), and have never, we
conceive, been really civilized. Few books were made there before the
fourteenth century, and I know of no good libraries that existed there
in the medieval period. A good part of the contents of one at Elbing,
near Dantzic, came somehow to Cambridge (Corpus Christi) in the
seventeenth century; it is a dreary collection, mostly on paper, of
scholastic theology, sermons, meditations, and a little medicine.

In Austria the abbeys were let alone till 1918. Such houses as Melk on
the Danube, St. Florian, St. Paul in Carinthia, Admont in Styria, still
owned their estates, their revenues, and their libraries. That of Melk
is noticeable, and at St. Paul is, oddly enough, one of the very
earliest Irish vernacular MSS. I believe it came thither in fairly
recent times from St. Blasien in the Black Forest. But, on the whole,
these places were too remote from the main stream to accumulate many
treasures of the very first quality.

LATIN MSS. IN ENGLAND

Let me now turn to England, and treat in greater detail of the monastic
and cathedral libraries there, and what happened to them. The
Dissolution, as we know, occurred here near on 400 years ago, which
makes the task of tracing the books at once harder and more fascinating
than in the case of France or Germany, where a whole library may be
found practically intact in a town near its old home. Of course, what
was done there ought to have been done here. Leland, the King's
antiquary, the abusive Protestant, John Bale, and the foolish but
learned Dr. John Dee, begged that it might be done. Yet, whatever Henry
VIII's or Mary's or Elizabeth's intentions may have been at times as to
the foundation of a "solempne library" where the ancient books of the
realm might be stored, they got but a very little way. Leland did secure
some MSS. for the Royal Library, perhaps most from Rochester, but upon
the whole the work was left in Elizabeth's days to individual
enthusiasts--Sir Robert Cotton, Archbishop Parker, and Dee and Bale
themselves. Others who did goo