t; and to his good service there as King's proctor he
probably owed his advancement to Durham. Whilst at Rome, he bought
great numbers of the Latin classics, especially those which were
coming fresh from the press of Sweynheym and Pannartz. Cicero seems to
have held the first place in his affections, six volumes out of
forty-two; the Orations, the Epistles, _de Finibus_ and _de Oratore_,
the two last being duplicated. History is well represented with Livy,
Suetonius, Josephus, Plutarch, Polybius, and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus; the last four in translations. In poetry he had Plautus
and Terence, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, and Statius; in
archaeology Vitruvius and Frontinus; of the Fathers, Jerome,
Lactantius, and the Confessions of Augustine.

Twice after becoming Bishop Shirwood went to Rome again, as
ambassador; once in 1487 in company with Selling and Linacre: on the
second occasion, in 1492-3, he died. His books, however, had already
found their way home to Durham, where they were acquired by Foxe,
Shirwood's successor in the see; and Foxe subsequently presented them
to his newly-founded college of Corpus Christi in Oxford. It is
interesting to contrast Shirwood's collection with books presented to
the library of Durham monastery by John Auckland, who was Prior
1484-94. Not a single one of them is classical, not one printed;
Aquinas, Bernard, Anselm, Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Chrysostom in
Latin, Vincent de Beauvais, _Summa Bibliorum, Tractatus de scaccario
moralis iuxta mores hominum, Exempla de animalibus_. The Prior's
outlook was very different from the Bishop's.

Leland tells us that Shirwood had also a number of Greek books, which
Tunstall found at Auckland in 1530; but only one of these has been
traced, a copy of Gaza's Grammar written by John Rhosus of Crete in
1479, and bought by Shirwood at Rome. Where the rest are no one knows;
doubtless scattered in many libraries, among people to whom the name
of Shirwood has no meaning. One wonders why Foxe did not secure them
for Corpus when he took the Latin books. He wanted Greek, but perhaps
he considered the set of Aldus' Greek texts which he actually gave to
Corpus, more worth having than Shirwood's manuscripts (for when
Shirwood was collecting in Italy, the first book printed in Greek, the
Florentine Homer, 1488, had not yet appeared): possibly he never saw
them.

Time would fail us to tell of all the famous Englishmen who went to
study in Italy in