Italian public libraries, and when this was proved to have been the
case, principally through the researches of M. Delisle, the Director of
the Bibliotheque Nationale, it was arranged between the Trustees of the
British Museum and the French authorities that should the former become
possessors of the manuscripts, they would return the stolen volumes for
the sum of twenty-four thousand pounds. As the Treasury refused to
sanction the purchase of the whole of the Ashburnham manuscripts, this
arrangement could not be carried out, and in 1887 the manuscripts, one
hundred and sixty-six in number, stolen from the French and Italian
libraries, were bought by Mr. Karl Truebner, acting as agent for the
Grand Duke of Baden and the German Imperial authorities, for the same
sum as the French had been willing to pay for them. The primary object
of this transaction, says Mr. F.S. Ellis in his excellent account of the
library in Quaritch's _Dictionary of English Book-Collectors_, 'was to
recover the famous Manesse Liederbuch, a thirteenth century MS. carried
away by the French from Heidelberg in 1656, the loss of which had ever
since been regarded as a national calamity in Germany. For L6000 in cash
and this precious volume, he handed over the 166 Libri and Barrois MSS.
to the Bibliotheque Nationale. By a simple arithmetical process, we can
conclude that L18,000 was the net cost to the German Exchequer of a
single volume of old German ballads--the highest price ever paid for a
book.' The stolen manuscripts which were not required to replace those
taken from the French libraries, were purchased by the Italian
Government.

Mr. Yates Thompson is understood to have purchased that portion of the
other manuscripts in the library known as 'The Appendix,' for about
forty thousand pounds, and after selecting those he required for his own
collection, to have sent the remainder to the auction rooms of Sotheby,
Wilkinson and Hodge, where they were sold on May the 1st, 1899. There
were one hundred and seventy-seven lots in the sale, which realised
eight thousand five hundred and ninety-five pounds, five shillings. The
choicest manuscript in the catalogue was an important text of the later
version (1400-40) of 'Wycliffe's English Bible,' known as the 'Bramhall
Manuscript,' which was knocked down to Mr. Quaritch for seventeen
hundred and fifty pounds. Other fine manuscripts were a copy of the
_Historia Ecclesiastica_ of the Venerable Bede, written in