by direction
thereof to find such straggling acres as belonged unto them, they cared
not to preserve any other monuments. The covers of books, with curious
brass bosses and clasps, intended to protect, proved to betray them,
being the baits of covetousness. And so many excellent authors, stripped
out of their cases, were left naked, to be buried or thrown away. . . .
What soul can be so frozen as not to melt into anger thereat? What
heart, having the least spark of ingenuity, is not hot at this indignity
offered to literature? I deny not but that in this heap of books there
was much rubbish; legions of lying legends, good for nothing but fuel
. . . volumes full fraught with superstition, which, notwithstanding,
might be useful to learned men; except any will deny apothecaries the
privilege of keeping poison in their shops, when they can make antidotes
of them. But, beside these, what beautiful Bibles, rare Fathers, subtile
Schoolmen, useful Historians--ancient, middle, modern; what painful
Comments were here amongst them! What monuments of mathematics all
massacred together; seeing every book with a cross was condemned for
Popish; with circles for conjuring.'

The calamities bewailed in such picturesque language by Bale and Fuller
would have been much more serious but for the labours of one of our
earliest antiquaries and book-lovers, John Leland. 'The laboryouse
Journey and serche of Johan Leylande for Englandes Antiquities geven of
hym as a newe yeares gyfte to kynge Henry the viii in the xxxvij yeare
of his Reygne,' 1549, is a remarkable publication, of great interest to
the book-hunter and the antiquary.

But the fruits of Leland's researches cannot now be fully known, for he
was too intent on accumulating material to draw up an adequate
inventory. Much that he preserved from destruction is now in the British
Museum, and some is in the Bodleian at Oxford. Some of the fragments
which he had saved from the general destruction had been placed in the
King's own library in Westminster.

The dissolution of the monasteries had among its many effects the
creation, so to speak, of a large number of collectors. One of the most
famous of the early sixteenth-century collectors, Sir Thomas More,
however, died (in 1535) before he could have availed himself of the many
treasures scattered to all quarters of the earth.

Dibdin records a bibliomaniacal anecdote which is well worth repeating
here, as it shows how More's love of b