But the passage on which he lit dealt with the untimely death of Pallas:
“O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom,
Prelude of bloody deeds and fights to come.”
To this library Bacon sent his new book, “The Advancement of Learning,” and here Milton, leaving the allegro of Horton or Forest Hill for the penseroso of Oxford’s cloisters, made friends with the librarian, and added his own poems to those treasures which were soon to be defended by the “unshaken virtue” of his friend, Fairfax, and increased by the Chancellor, Oliver Cromwell. This is not the place to catalogue the list of those treasures, the wealth of European literature and the MSS. of the nearer and the farther East; the great collections which immortalise the names of the donors, like Laud and Selden, Rawlinson, Gough, Douce and Sutherland; the books which belonged to Queen Elizabeth and Queen Margaret, to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Addison and Shelley; the curios and objets-d’art, princely gifts, like the Arundel and Selden marbles, coins and portraits, minor curiosities, like stuffed alligators and dried negro boys, or the lantern of Guy Fawkes, which have all found a resting-place in
“this goodly Magazine of witte,
This Storehouse of the choicest furniture
The world doth yeelde, heere in this exquisite
And most rare monument, that doth immure
The glorious reliques of the best of men.”[36]
In such a place, with such a history, it would be strange indeed if we did not feel something of the charm that breathes from the very stones of Bodley.
From the hot and noisy street you pass into the peaceful Schools’ quadrangle, lying beneath the shade of that curious tower, which, as it were an academic conceit in stone, blends the five orders of classic architecture with Gothic turret and pinnacle. Architecturally the “Schools” are plain and poor, but you remember that Bodley conceived the idea of rebuilding them, and that it was the day after his body had been put to rest in Merton Chapel (29th March 1613) that the first stone was laid. The Bodleian forms the west side of this quadrangle. The east wing of the great library, built (1610-1613) by Bodley when already there was “more need of a library for the books than of books for the library,” is panelled like the Divinity School, and stretches over the entrance to it, the Proscholium or “Pig Market,” where candidates for degrees were obliged to wait. The west wing extends over Laud’s late Gothic Convocation House (1634-1640); the books have usurped the third story of the Schools and the Clarendon building; they are filling the mighty camera beyond and overflowing into the Ashmolean. But the entrance to the heart of this grand collection is a modest portal. It opens on a long winding stair, so long and so wearisome that you seem to have trodden the very path by which true knowledge is gained ere you pass through a simple green baize door and see the panorama of all learning, lit by the glass of the east window, outspread before your eyes.
So to approach it, and passing by the outer library through the yielding wicket, into Duke Humphrey’s gallery, there to turn into one of the quiet recesses, and calling for book after book, to summon spirits from the deep of the past, to hold quiet converse with them, while the breeze and sunlight flow gently in across Wren’s huge buttresses from the green garden of Exeter, till Bodley’s own solemn bell calls them back to their resting-place; this, as has been well said, is the very luxury, or rather the very poetry of study. “What a place,” exclaimed Elia, “What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”