Another meeting was called shortly afterwards, with a like object, but of another sort. Despite his reverence for Busbeian traditions, Dr. Burney had known how to win the love of his pupils. |Annual Biography and Obituary, vol. iii, p. 225.| A large body of them met, under the chairmanship of the excellent John Kaye, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, and they subscribed for the placing of a monument to their old master in Westminster Abbey.
The application of the Trustees of the British Museum to Parliament for the purchase of Burney’s Library.
On the twenty-third of February, 1818, the Trustees of the British Museum presented to the House of Commons a petition, praying that Dr. Burney’s Library should be acquired for the Public. The prayer of the petition was supported by Mr. Bankes and by Mr. Vansittart, and a Select Committee was appointed to inquire and report upon the application.
In order to an accurate estimate of the value of the Library, a comparison was instituted, in certain particulars, between its contents and those of the Collection already in the national Museum. In comparing the works of a series of twenty-four Greek authors, it was found that of those authors, taken collectively, the Museum possessed only two hundred and thirty-nine several editions, whereas Dr. Charles Burney had collected no fewer than seven hundred and twenty-five editions.[[6]] |Acquisition of the Burney Library by the Nation.| His Collection of the Greek dramatists was not only, as I have said, extensive, but it was arrayed after a peculiar and interesting manner. By making a considerable sacrifice of duplicate copies, he had brought his series of editions into an order which exhibited, at one view, all the diversities of text, recension, and commentary. His Greek grammarians were arrayed in like manner. And his collection of lexicographers generally, and of philologists, was both large and well selected.
Report of Select Committee, 1818; passim.
The total number of printed books was nearly thirteen thousand five hundred volumes, that of manuscripts was five hundred and twenty; and the total sum given for the whole was thirteen thousand five hundred pounds.
It was estimated that the Collection had cost Dr. Burney a much larger sum, and that, possibly, if sold by public auction, it might have produced to his representatives more than twenty thousand pounds.
In the same year with the acquisition of the Burney Library, the national Collections were augmented by the purchase of the printed books of a distinguished Italian scholar long resident in France, and eminent for his contributions to French literature. |Collection of P. L. Ginguené. (Died 11 Nov., 1816.)| Pier Luigi Ginguené—author of the Histoire Littéraire d’Italie and a conspicuous contributor to the early volumes of the Biographie Universelle—had brought together a good Collection of Italian, French, and Classical literature. It comprised, amongst the rest, the materials which had been gathered for the book by which the Collector is now chiefly remembered, and extended, in the whole, to more than four thousand three hundred separate works, of which number nearly one thousand seven hundred related to Italian literature, or to its history. This valuable Collection was obtained by the Trustees—owing to the then depressed state of the Continental book-market—for one thousand pounds. And, in point of literary value, it may be described as the first—in point of price, as the cheapest—of a series of purchases which now began to be made on the Continent.
A more numerous printed Library had been purchased together with a cabinet of coins and a valuable herbarium, at Munich, three years earlier, at the sale of the Collections of Baron Von Moll. His Library exceeded fourteen thousand volumes, nearly eight thousand of which related to the physical sciences and to cognate subjects. |Collection of Baron von Moll. (1815.)| The cost of this purchase, with the attendant expenses, was four thousand seven hundred and seventy pounds. The whole sum was defrayed out of the fund bequeathed by Major Arthur Edwards.[[7]]
These successive purchases, together with the Hargrave Collection—acquired in 1813—increased the theretofore much neglected Library by an aggregate addition of nearly thirty-five thousand volumes. And for four successive years (1812–15) Parliament made a special annual grant of one thousand pounds[[8]] for the purchase of printed books relating to British History.