the
'bear and ragged staff,' were to freeze for ages in the galleries at
Lambeth. We should have Ascham inveighing against the ancients and their
idle and blind way of living: 'in our father's time,' he says, 'nothing
was read but books of feigned chivalry'; but Captain Cox would come forth
to meet him, attired as in the tournament at Kenilworth, or in the
picture which Dibdin has extracted from Laneham. 'Captain Cox came
marching on, clean trussed and gartered above the knee, all fresh in a
velvet cap: an odd man, I promise you: by profession a mason, and that
right skilful and very cunning in fence.... As for King Arthur and Huon
of Bourdeaux, ... the Fryar and the Boy, Elynor Rumming, and the
Nut-brown Maid, with many more than I can rehearse, I believe he has them
all at his fingers' ends.'

James I., as became a 'Solomon,' was the master of many books; but not
being a 'fancier' he gave them shabby coverings and scribbled idle notes
on their margins. He is forgiven for being a pedant, since Buchanan said
it was the best that could be made of him; it is difficult to be patient
about his hint to the Dutch that it would be well to burn the old scholar
Vorstius instead of making him a professor at Leyden. He seems to have
done more harm than good to the libraries in his own possession. We know
how he broke into a 'noble speech' when he visited Bodley at Oxford, with
the librarian trembling lest the King should see a book by Buchanan, who
had often whipped his royal pupil in days gone by: 'If I were not a King
I would be an University-man, and if it was so that I must be a prisoner
I would desire no other durance than to be chained in that library with
so many noble authors.'

The King gave Sir Thomas Bodley a warrant under the Privy Seal to take
what books he pleased from any of the royal palaces and libraries;
'howbeit,' said Bodley, 'for that the place at Whitehall is over the
Queen's chamber, I must needs attend her departure from thence, whereof
at present there is no certainty known: how I shall proceed for other
places I have not yet resolved.'

Prince Henry had a more refined taste. The dilettanti of the Prince's set
took no part in the drunken antics of the Court, where Goring was master
of the games, but Sir John Millicent 'made the best _extempore_ fool.'
The Prince bought almost the whole of the monastic library originally
formed by Henry Lord Arundel: about forty volumes had already been given
by Lord Lu