ered meed of admiration. You wander
through their gardens, and pace their quadrangles with no sense of
co-ownership; not for you are their clustered memories. In the
Bodleian every lettered heart feels itself at home.

Bodley drafted with his own hand the first statutes or rules to be
observed in his library. Speaking generally, they are wise rules. One
mistake, indeed, he made--a great mistake, but a natural one. Let him
give his own reasons:

'I can see no good reason to alter my rule for excluding such books
as Almanacks, Plays, and an infinite number that are daily printed
of very unworthy matters--handling such books as one thinks both
the Keeper and Under-Keeper should disdain to seek out, to deliver
to any man. Haply some plays may be worthy the keeping--but hardly
one in forty.... This is my opinion, wherein if I err I shall err
with infinite others; and the more I think upon it, the more it
doth distaste me that such kinds of books should be vouchsafed room
in so noble a library.'[A]

[Footnote A: See correspondence in _Reliquiae Bodleianae_, London,
1703.]

'Baggage-books' was the contemptuous expression elsewhere employed to
describe this 'light infantry' of literature--_Belles Lettres_, as it
is now more politely designated.

One play in forty is liberal measure, but who is to say out of the
forty plays which is the one worthy to be housed in a noble library?
The taste of Vice-Chancellors and Heads of Houses, of keepers and
under-keepers of libraries--can anybody trust it? The Bodleian is
entitled by imperial statutes to receive copies of all books published
within the realm, yet it appears, on the face of a Parliamentary
return made in 1818, that this 'noble library' refused to find room
for Ossian, the favourite poet of Goethe and Napoleon, and labelled
Miss Edgeworth's _Parent's Assistant_ and Miss Hannah More's _Sacred
Dramas_ 'Rubbish.' The sister University, home though she be of nearly
every English poet worth reading, rejected the _Siege of Corinth_,
though the work of a Trinity man; would not take in the _Thanksgiving
Ode_ of Mr. Wordsworth, of St. John's College; declined Leigh Hunt's
_Story of Rimini_; vetoed the _Headlong Hall_ of the inimitable
Peacock, and, most wonderful of all, would have nothing to say to
Scott's _Antiquary_, being probably disgusted to find that a book with
so promising a title was only a novel.

Now this is altered, and everything is co