ed influence
there, repeated the proposition, at the suggestion of that
most accomplished scholar, Justin Winsor. But his appeal
had the same fate. The Bishop gave no encouragement, and said,
as had been said nine years before, that the property could
not be alienated without an Act of Parliament. Mr. Winsor
planned to repeat the attempt on his visit to England in 1887.
When he was at Fulham the Bishop was absent, and he was obliged
to go home without seeing him in person.

In 1881, at the time of the death of President Garfield,
Benjamin Scott, Chamberlain of London, proposed again in
the newspapers that the restitution should be made. But
nothing came of it.

When I went abroad I determined to visit the locality on
the borders of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, from which Bradford
and Brewster and Robinson, the three leaders of the Pilgrims,
came, and where their first church was formed, and the places
in Amsterdam and Leyden where the emigrants spent thirteen
years. But I longed especially to see the manuscript of Bradford
at Fulham, which then seemed to me, as it now seems to me,
the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recover
one of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from the
pen of the Evangelist.

The desire to get it back grew and grew during the voyage
across the Atlantic. I did not know how such a proposition
would be received in England. A few days after I landed
I made a call on John Morley. I asked him whether he thought
the thing could be done. He inquired carefully into the story,
took down from his shelf the excellent though brief life of
Bradford in Leslie Stephen's "Biographical Dictionary," and
told me he thought the book ought to come back to us, and
that he should be glad to do anything in his power to help.
It was my fortune, a week or two after, to sit next to Mr.
Bayard at a dinner given to Mr. Collins, by the American consuls
in Great Britain. I took occasion to tell him the story,
and he gave me the assurance, which he afterward so abundantly
and successfully fulfilled, of his powerful aid. I was compelled,
by the health of one of the party with whom I was travelling,
to go to the Continent almost immediately, and was disappointed
in the hope of an early return to England.

After looking at the volume and reading the records on the
flyleaf, I said: "My Lord, I am going to say something which
you may think rather audacious. I think this book ought to
g