o it and enters his name in 1748, and
gives it to Mr. Roger Huggett, Conduct and Librarian of the College, who
died in 1769.

This is an unusually full and clear pedigree. One more, and I have done.

This time it is a copy of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, monk of
Chester; it was the popular history of the world and of England for
anyone who could read Latin in the fifteenth century. No abbey library
could be without it, just as no gentleman's library could be without a
copy of the English Chronicle called the Brut. Here is a case in which
we know the beginning and end of the book's wanderings, but not the
middle of the story. The arms of Eton adorn the beginning of each of the
seven "books" of the Chronicle, so we may take it that it was owned from
the first by a member of the foundation. An inscription tells us that
within the fifteenth century it belonged to the Carthusians of Witham in
Somerset, and was given to them by Master John Blacman. Here is light.
John Blacman was Fellow and Chanter of Eton, then Head of a House
(King's Hall) in Cambridge, and lastly a Carthusian monk. He was also
confessor to Henry VI., and wrote a book about him. In a MS. at Oxford
there is a list of the books he gave to Witham, and among them is this
Polychronicon. More: he has prefixed to the text a pedigree of the Kings
of England from Egbert, illustrated with drawings, the last of which is
the earliest known representation of Windsor Castle. We have not, then,
to complain of lack of information about the early stages of the
history; but then comes a gap, and between the Dissolution and the early
part of the nineteenth century, when Rodd of London had it and sold it
to the fourth Earl of Ashburnham, I can (at present) hear nothing of the
book. In quite recent years it passed from the Ashburnham family to Mr.
H. Y. Thompson, from him to Mr. George Dunn, and at his death was bought
back for its first home.

There, then, are half a dozen histories of MSS., fairly typical and
fairly diverse. Naturally I have picked out books which have some
traceable story. Very many have none. We can only say of them that they
were written in such a century and such a country, and acquired at such
a date: and there an end. Rebinding and loss of leaves, especially of
fly-leaves, have carried off names of owners and library-marks, and
apart from that there are but very few cases in which we are warranted
in proclaiming from the aspect and character o