which I might have
imagined without the trouble of a research, for if it was, they surely
would not have forgotten to mention its celebrated coopertoria.

Passing a splendid array of Scriptures whole and in parts, for there was
no paucity of sacred volumes in that old monkish library, and fathers,
doctors of the Church, schoolmen, lives of saints, chronicles, profane
writers, philosophical and logical treatises, medical works, grammars,
and books of devotion, we are particularly struck with the appearance of
so many fine classical authors. Works of Virgil (including the AEneid),
Pompeius Trogus, Claudius, Juvenal, Terence, Ovid, Prudentius,
Quintilian, Cicero, Boethius, and a host of others are in abundance,
and form a catalogue rendered doubly exciting to the bibliophile by the
insertion of an occasional note, which tells of its antiquity,[208]
rarity, or value. In some of the volumes a curious inscription was
inserted, thundering a curse upon any who would dare to pilfer it from
the library, and for so sacrilegious a crime, calling down upon them the
maledictions of Saints Maria, Oswald, Cuthbert, and Benedict.[209] A
volume containing the lives of St. Cuthbert, St. Oswald, and St. Aydani,
is described as "_Liber speciales et preciosus cum signaculo deaurato_."

Thomas Langley, who was chancellor of England and bishop of Durham in the
year 1406, collected many choice books, and left some of them to the
library of Durham church; among them a copy of Lyra's Commentaries stands
conspicuous; he also bequeathed a number of volumes to many of his
private friends.

There are few monastic libraries whose progress we can trace with so much
satisfaction as the one now under consideration, for we have another
catalogue compiled during the librarianship of John Tyshbourne, in the
year 1416,[210] in which many errors appearing in the former ones are
carefully corrected; books which subsequent to that time had been lost or
stolen are here accounted for; many had been sent to the students at
Oxford, and others have notes appended, implying to whom the volume had
been lent; thus to a "_Flores Bernardi_," occurs "_Prior debit, I Kempe
Episcopi Londoni_." It is, next to Monk Henry's of Canterbury, one of the
best of all the monkish catalogues I have seen; not so much for its
extent, as that here and there it fully partakes of the character of a
catalogue _raisonne_; for terse sentences are affixed to some of the more
remarkable volum