collecting, by that which we mentioned a short time ago. At the
head, and the survivor of these three,[368] was Thomas Hearne; who,
if I well remember, has been thus described by Pope, in his Dunciad,
under the character of Wormius:

But who is he, in closet close ypent,
Of sober face, with learned dust besprent?
Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight,
On parchment scraps y-fed, and WORMIUS hight.

[Footnote 368: The former bibliomaniacal triumvirate is
noticed at p. 217, ante. We will now discuss the merits of
the above, _seriatim_. And first of JOHN BAGFORD, "by
profession a bookseller; who frequently travelled into
Holland and other parts, in search of scarce books and
valuable prints, and brought a vast number into this
kingdom, the greater part of which were purchased by the
Earl of Oxford. He had been in his younger days a shoemaker;
and for the many curiosities wherewith he enriched the
famous library of Dr. John More, Bishop of Ely, his Lordship
got him admitted into the Charter House. He died in 1716,
aged 65; after his death, Lord Oxford purchased all his
collections and papers for his library: these are now in the
Harleian collection in the British Museum. In 1707 were
published, in the Philosophical transactions, his Proposals
for a General History of Printing."--Bowyer and Nichol's
_Origin of Printing_, pp. 164, 189, note. It has been my
fortune (whether good or bad remains to be proved) not only
to transcribe, and cause to be reprinted, the slender
Memorial of Printing in the Philosophical Transactions,
drawn up by Wanley for Bagford, but to wade through
_forty-two_ folio volumes, in which Bagford's materials for
a History of Printing are incorporated, in the British
Museum: and from these, I think I have furnished myself with
a pretty correct notion of the collector of them. Bagford
was the most hungry and rapacious of all book and print
collectors; and, in his ravages, he spared neither the most
delicate nor costly specimens. He seems always to have
expressed his astonishment at the most common productions;
and his paper in the Philosophical Transactions betrays such
simplicity and ignorance that one is astonished how my Lord
Oxford, and the learned Bishop of Ely, could have employed
so credulous a bibliographica