Recollections of Oxford - G V Cox

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 Excerpt: ...How simple must have been the state of things when the University Library was contained in the structure over the Divinity School in 1480 I How sad to think that before the end of the reign of Edward VI that small collection of books was dispersed, and that at the close of the sixteenth century the University had no Public Library at all. The very bookshelves were sold and the walls left bare. (Hallam's Lit. Hist. ii. 358.) That Bodley built on to the Divinity School (more than a hundred years later) is sufficiently evident from windows, buttresses, &c., now inclosed, but originally external. It does not appear that he ever did or wrote anything 'memoria dignum peculiari;' but, at all events, he possessed a first-rate quality in a Proto-Bibliothecarius, that of being always at his post, --and this when no attempt had been made, or even thought of, to warm the Library and make it really a place of comfortable study, instead of a very rare resort for a hasty and unsatisfactory reference to damp books with chilled fingers. The absence of a fire-place, chimney, stove, or flue in the building would by itself show that a fire by day was as much forbidden by implication, as it was literally and elaborately forbidden for any one (even ipse Bibliothecae Custos) to introduce 'per noctem, funale, lychnum, lampadem, lucernam aut quodvis luminare accensum.' From 1806 to 1813 I was officially brought into contact with the Librarian, and on two different occasions: one was at the end of each Term, when I paid him the fees, then appropriated to his office, from Degrees, especially from Grand-Compounders. On that occasion, if I did not find him in his Bodleian 'sanctum' or closet (for age was beginning to tell upon him), I paid him a visit at his little tenement in St. G..