and deeds. This noble collection was
inherited by Lord Oxford's son Edward, second Earl, by whom it was very
considerably augmented in every department; and when he died in June
1741, the volumes of manuscripts amounted to seven thousand six hundred
and thirty-nine volumes, exclusive of fourteen thousand two hundred and
thirty-six original rolls, deeds, charters, and other legal documents.
The printed books were estimated at about fifty thousand volumes, the
pamphlets at about three hundred and fifty thousand, and the prints at
forty-one thousand. In the _Account of London Libraries_, by Bagford and
Oldys, it is stated:--

[Illustration: ROBERT HARLEY'S BOOK-STAMP.]

'For libraries in more expressly particular hands, the first and most
universal in England, must be reckoned the Harleian, or Earl of Oxford's
library, begun by his father and continued by himself. He has the rarest
books of all countries, languages, and sciences, and the greatest number
of any collector we ever had, in manuscript as well as in print,
thousands of fragments, some a thousand years old; vellum books, some
written over; all things especially respecting English History, personal
as well as local, particular as well as general. He has a great
collection of Bibles, etc., in all versions, and editions of all the
first printed books, classics, and others of our own country,
ecclesiastical as well as civil, by Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson,
Berthelet, Rastall, Grafton, and the greatest number of pamphlets and
prints of English heads of any other person. Abundance of ledgers,
chartularies, old deeds, charters, patents, grants, covenants,
pedigrees, inscriptions, etc., and original letters of eminent persons,
as many as would fill two hundred volumes; all the collections of his
librarian Humphrey Wanley, of Stow, Sir Symonds D'Ewes, Prynne, Bishop
Stillingfleet, John Bagford, Le Neve, and the flower of a hundred other
libraries.'

The library was remarkably rich in early editions of the Greek and Latin
classics (there were as many as one hundred and fifteen volumes of
various works by Cicero printed in the fifteenth century), English early
poetry and romances, and books of prints, sculpture and drawings. The
collection of Caxtons was both large and fine, and it comprised the only
perfect copy known of the _Book of the Noble Histories of King Arthur_,
which, nearly a century and a half after the dispersion of the Harleian
library, was purchased fo