hness that under other circumstances would
have been worthy of commendation. Anthony Wood[444] has told us in
eloquent periods, where sorrow struggles with indignation, how the college
libraries were treated; how manuscripts which had nothing superstitious
about them except a few rubricated initials, were carried through the city
on biers to the market-place and there consumed. Of the treatment meted
out to the public library of the University he gives an almost identical
account[445]. This library--now the central portion of the Bodleian--had
been completed about 1480. It was well stocked with manuscripts of value,
the most important of which, in number about 600[446], had been given by
Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, between 1439 and 1446. His collection was
that of a cultivated layman, and was comparatively poor in theological
literature. Yet in this home of all that was noble in literature and
splendid in art (for the Duke's copies are said to have been the finest
that could be bought) did this crew of ignorant fanatics cry havoc, with
such fatal success that only three MSS. now survive; and on January 25,
1555-56, certain members of the Senate were appointed "to sell, in the
name of the University, the book-desks in the public library. The books
had all disappeared; what need then to retain the shelves and stalls, when
no one thought of replacing their contents, and when the University could
turn an honest penny by their sale[447]?"

I suppose that in those collegiate and cathedral libraries of which some
fragments had been suffered to remain, the gaps caused by the destruction
of manuscripts were slowly filled up by printed literature. No new
bookcases would be required for many years; and in fact, nearly a century
passed away before any novelty in the way of library-fittings makes its
appearance. Further, when new libraries came to be built, the provision of
suitable furniture was not easy. The old stall, with two shelves loaded
with books attached to them by chains, and a desk and seat for the use of
the reader, was manifestly no longer adequate, when books could be
produced by the rapidity of a printing-press, instead of by the slowness
of a writer's hand. And yet, as we shall see, ancient fashions lingered.

So far as I know, the first library built and furnished under these new
conditions in England was that of S. John's College, Cambridge. This
"curious example of Jacobean Gothic[448]" was built between 1623 and