Edinburgh; from St. Mary's York, at Dublin; not a few from Cirencester
at Jesus College, Oxford, and at Hereford; St. John's, Oxford, has many
from Reading and from Southwick (Hants). There must, I am sure, be many
Peterborough books to be found, but they are rarely marked as such, and
the character of the catalogue makes identification very hard.

Of all minor libraries, that of Lanthony, near Gloucester, has, I
believe, been best preserved. A great block of it was retained by the
last Prior of the house, John Hart, who retired to a country house near
by, and whose sister married a man of good position, Theyer, in the
neighbourhood. He kept the books together, and had descendants who
valued them and added largely to their number. At the end of the
sixteenth century Archbishop Bancroft conceived the idea of founding a
library at Lambeth for his successors, and he seems to have bought
about 150 Lanthony MSS. from Theyer,[D] which are now at Lambeth. Other
Lanthony books are at Trinity and Corpus Christi, Oxford. A
fourteenth-century catalogue of the books among the Harley MSS. shows
that we possess at least a third of the whole collection.

Examples of the press-marks used by the various houses have been
collected by the New Palaeographical Society, and may be seen in their
publications. They are, of course, most useful in cases where the
inscription of ownership has not been inserted or has disappeared. The
second case may be that of any book; the first is common to the
Canterbury libraries, to Dover, the London Dominicans, St. Mary's York,
Fountains, Titchfield, Ely. To the press-marks figured by the Society
more will doubtless be added. I can instance one, that of the
Franciscans of Lincoln, which is of this form: [Illustration: Symbol].

DISAPPEARANCE OF CLASSICAL AND OTHER MSS.

Passing over the painful subject of the wholesale destruction of MSS.
which must have followed the Dissolution, I will give a few lines to an
interesting question little mooted as yet. Is there evidence that
England possessed many ancient writings which have since disappeared, or
which have survived only in a few copies in other parts of Europe? Take
the classics first. Poggio, as I have said, writes in a disappointed
tone of his researches here, but these were neither long nor exhaustive.
We have better testimony from John of Salisbury, who in the twelfth
century quotes parts of the _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius which have dropped
out of