Copies of a Commelinus Tacitus (1595) and a Horace, Persius and Juvenal (London, 1614-15) bear the arms of John Maitland, created Viscount Lauderdale in 1616; those of the Earl of Huntingdon are found on a Camden's 'Britannica' of 1627; those of William Covert of Sussex, on the 1615 edition of the works of Gervase Babington; The Right Hon.ble Mary Wife of Charles Earle of Carnarvon & Sister of James Earle of Abingdon those of Chetwynd, on Matthew of Westminster's 'Flores Historiarum' (Frankfort, 1601); those of Wilmer on Stowe's 'Survey of London,' 1618. Further investigation would no doubt yield a tale as to each of these volumes, but we may not linger over them. We must stop, however, to note that the arms of Archbishop Laud, on a copy of his 'Relation of a conference with Fisher the Jesuit,' do not clearly indicate that this was his own library copy, since an inscription (apparently in Laud's handwriting) informs us that the book was 'presented by ye author to Sr Jo. Bramston, Ch[ief] Ju[stice] of the K[ing's] B[ench],' a book-plate of one of whose descendants, 'Thomas Bramston, Esq., of Skreens,' is found in the volume. In the same way, in the next century, we find Speaker Onslow possessed of a copy of Locke's 'Letters concerning Toleration,' presented to him by Thomas Hollis, and bearing some of the donor's favourite emblems, the cap of liberty, the owl of Minerva and a pen, with the motto 'Placidam sub libertate quietem.' There is no special reason to suppose that either Archbishop Laud or Hollis intended these volumes originally for their libraries, and after having had them bound with that intention subsequently gave them away. It may, of course, have been so, but we should not entirely exclude the supposition that books were also sometimes impressed with the arms or device of the donor, in order to remind the recipient of the source whence the gift came, just as we find gift-plates alongside of the more usual book-plates denoting personal ownership.
ARMS OF SIR KENELM DIGBY AND VENETIA STANLEY, HIS WIFE
Owing to the library of Sir Kenelm Digby having been seized after his death in France under the inhospitable French law which gave to the king the chattels of strangers dying in his country, books with his arms are not often found in England. Sir Wollaston Franks was, therefore, fortunate in obtaining three volumes thus decorated, two of them showing his coat with that of his first wife, Venetia Stanley on an escutcheon of pretence, as figured in Mr. Fletcher's article, while the third bears his coat impaled with hers, and is much more finely cut.
SIR KENELM DIGBY'S ARMS
The arms of the Duke of Albemarle are found on the 1634 edition of Harrington's 'Orlando Furioso,' those of the Earl of Arlington on a copy of a Spanish religious work, 'Trabajos de Iesus,' printed at Madrid in 1647, those of Lord Cornwallis, with a cipher imitated from that of Charles II., on a 1669 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Other seventeenth-century collectors of minor note might be mentioned, but we must pass on now beyond the Revolution of 1688, and notice a few coats of later date. A copy of Dryden's 'Miscellany Poems' of 1702 bears the arms of Charles, Lord Halifax ('the Treasurer'), as well as a book-plate dated with the same year, 1702; a Roman History of 1695 and a Prayer Book of 1700 carry two different stamps of the arms of John, Lord Somers; there are three books with the stamp and name of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and three with the Carteret arms. Of these last two, Hammond's 'Sermons' and the 'Divi Britannici,' both published in 1675, bear 'the bloody hand' that marks a baronet, while a Horace of Paris, 1567, shows Lord Carteret's arms as a peer. On Sanderson's 'Nature and Obligation of Conscience' (1722) we have another instance of a lady's book-stamp, that of Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos; the arms and book-plate of the Duke of Montagu are found on a copy of Bishop Berkeley's famous treatise on the virtues of tar-water (1744); lastly, a Utrecht Callimachus of 1697 is adorned with the arms of Sir Philip Sydenham, Bart., and with the book-plate of John Wilkes, who, if a demagogue, was a demagogue of classical tastes.
These eighteenth-century books and their owners are somewhat less interesting than the earlier ones to which most of this article has been devoted, and in attempting to enumerate them it is difficult to avoid the style of a catalogue. The danger is all the greater when we turn to the French books, for here Guigard has been before us, and there is no purpose to be served by making extracts from his pages. As might be expected, the collection contains more than one specimen of the books of De Thou, in which the British Museum was already fairly rich. Among other notable stamps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may mention that of Antoine de Leve, Abbé de l'Isle en Barrois, on three books published between 1574 and 1624; of Estampes de Valency on a book of 1557; of Peiresc (on a 'Harpocrationis Dictionarium,' 1614), and of Louis Philippeaux, Seigneur de la Vaillière. Of later date are those of the Comtesse de Verrue, Beatrix de Choiseul, La Rochefoucald, President Seguier, Turgot, Montausier, Marie Leczinska, and a host of others too numerous to mention.
The German books are few and apparently unimportant, the Italian mostly ecclesiastical, those from the Low Countries mostly school-prizes. There are also two or three Spanish books, all the more welcome because Spanish bindings are so seldom met with in England, and a few fairly good specimens of the bookbinder's craft without armorial stamps. But the English books are the main feature of the collection.