ne the accounts of the fanatic.

Laud was not the first to seek for the treasures of the East. Before his
gifts began Sir Thomas Roe, who sat for Oxford with Selden, had presented
to the Bodleian a number of MSS. acquired during his embassy to
Constantinople. Joseph Scaliger, the restorer of Arabic learning in the
West, had been especially interested in Samaritan literature, and had
corresponded about a copy of the Pentateuch with one Rabbi Eleazar, 'who
dwelt in Sichem'; and, though the papers fell into the hands of robbers,
they were afterwards delivered to Peiresc. The traveller Minutius had
returned with Coptic service-books, and Peiresc, captivated with a new
branch of learning, established an agency for Eastern books at Smyrna.
The Capucin Gilles de Loche averred that he had seen 8000 volumes in a
monastery of the Nitrian Desert,'many of which seemed to be of the age of
St. Anthony': he had pushed into Abyssinia and had heard the 'uncouth
chaunts and clashing cymbals,' as Mr. Curzon heard them in a later age;
and he had even cast his eyes on the _Book of Enoch_ with pallid figures
and a shining black text; and Peiresc was so inflamed with a desire to
buy it at any price that in the end he acquired it. The books seen by the
Capucin in the Convent of the Syrians, stored 'in the vault beyond the
oil-cellar,'have become our national property; and if there are not many
of the age of St. Anthony we have at least the volume, completed by the
help of a monk's note of the eleventh century, and originally written in
the year 411 'at Ur of the Chaldees by the hand of a man named Jacob.'

Much less attention seems to have been paid to the collection of Hebrew
books than to those in Coptic and Arabic. Selden, it is true, gave to
the University Library 'such of his Talmudical and Rabbinical books as
were not already to be found there,' and purchases were made at the
Crevenna sale in Amsterdam and at a sale during the present century of
the MSS. of Matheo Canonici at Venice. The chief source from which the
Bodleian was supplied was the collection formed before 1735 by David
Oppenheimer, the Chief Rabbi at Prague. In the British Museum are the
Hebrew books presented by Solomon da Costa in 1759. The donor's letter
contained a few interesting details. There were three Biblical MSS. and a
hundred and eighty printed books, all in very old editions: 'They were
bound by order of King Charles II., and marked with his cypher, and were
pu