as the King
should appoint. About eight hundred volumes in the national collection
represent the immediate results of this copy-tax; they are all marked
with the ambiguous cypher, which might either represent the initials of
the King and Queen or might indicate the names of Henri and Diane. Queen
Catherine de Medici was an enthusiastic collector. When she arrived in
France as a girl she brought with her from Urbino a number of MSS. that
had belonged to the Eastern Emperors, and had been purchased by Cosmo de'
Medici. She afterwards seized the whole library of Marshal Strozzi on the
ground that they must be regarded as 'Medici books,' having been
inherited at one time by a nephew of Leo X. On her death in 1589 she was
found to have been possessed of about eight hundred Greek manuscripts,
all of the highest rarity and value. There was some danger that they
would be seized by her creditors; but the King was advised that such an
assemblage could not be got together again in any country or at any cost.
The library was made an heir-loom of the Crown: and at De Thou's
suggestion the books were stripped of their rich coverings and disguised
in an official costume.

Diane de Poitiers, a true _chasseresse des bouquins_, was herself the
daughter of a bibliophile. The Comte de St. Vallier loved books in
Italian bindings, and there is a _Roman de Perceforest_ in the collection
of the Duc d'Aumale, that bears the Saint Vallier arms and marks of
ownership, though it was confidently believed to have been bound for
Grolier when it belonged to King Louis-Philippe. Henri Deux and the
Duchesse Diane kept a treasure of books between them in the magnificent
castle of Anet: and after they were dead the books remained unknown and
unnoticed in their hall until the death of the Princesse de Conde in the
year 1723. The sale which then took place was a revelation of beauty. The
books were in good condition, and were all clad in sumptuous bindings.
There was a remarkable diversity in their contents, the Fathers and the
poets standing side by side with treatises upon medicine and the
management of a household, as if they had been acquired in great part by
virtue of the tax upon the publishers. Most of them, we are told, were
bought by the 'intrepid book-hunter' M. Guyon de Sardieres, whose whole
library in its turn was engulphed in the miscellaneous collections of the
Duc de la Valliere. An article in the _Bibliophile Francais_ contains a
curious ar