Carte, Walker, Rawlinson, Clarendon MSS.
In 1747 Fysher died and Humphrey Owen[16] succeeded, who in his twenty-one years of office saw the Library doubled in size in the department of MSS. First came, in 1753, the MSS. of Thomas Carte, which arrived by gift (and subsequently bequest) from the collector. The seventeenth century Irish papers in this collection are of enormous extent (largely Ormonde papers from Kilkenny), and many volumes are materials for Carte’s History of England. Next came, in 1756, the whole of the papers on which John Walker based his Sufferings of the Clergy in 1640-60 (printed in 1714), comprising hundreds of autograph accounts of the lives of dispossessed ministers under the Commonwealth.
In this year arrived 5206 volumes of MSS., with a large printed collection, by the bequest of Dr. Richard Rawlinson, Bishop among the Nonjurors, who died in 1755. The extent of the gift entirely overwhelmed the Library staff, and it remained almost undescribed till 1862. Rawlinson picked up everything from everywhere, like Sir Thomas Phillipps, but while the ghost of the latter sees all that he lived for in process of dispersal, the Rawlinson collection is absolutely intact and worthily honoured. History and topography are the chief subjects, but Classics, English poetry, Service books, Oxford authors since Wood’s death, and the whole of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary’s papers, are among the rest. The Thurloe State Papers in sixty-seven volumes, Samuel Pepys’s Admiralty and other papers in twenty-eight volumes are here, and some most valuable ancient Irish MSS. worthy of a place by the side of Laud’s, with numerous volumes of literary correspondence, which in conjunction with the Ballard collection received in the same year (1756) contain perhaps one-half of the literary letters of 1660-1750.
In 1759 came the series of Clarendon State Papers, presented by the grand-daughters of the author of the History of the Rebellion, in fulfilment of their brother’s wish. They may be described as the bulk of the original Royalist sources for the history of the Civil War. Many additional parts of the Clarendon collections have been gathered to the rest in later years and from various sources. The original gift, by its condition that the profits of any Clarendon publication should belong to the University, has resulted, not only in the University Press being called by Clarendon’s name, but also in the building of the Clarendon Laboratory in 1869, and in the creation of that rare privilege, a perpetual copyright in the History of the Rebellion. It may be said that the history of the period 1640-1700 in Great Britain and Ireland cannot be written without reference to the Clarendon, Carte, Walker and Rawlinson collections.
The minor acquisitions of the rest of the eighteenth century (the Dawkins and Hunt Oriental MSS. in 1759 and 1774, the Browne Willis (Buckinghamshire, and English Cathedral) MSS. in 1760, and the Bridge’s Northamptonshire papers in 1795) were all by gift and bequest, and of the nineteen large collections received between 1700 and 1800 not one was purchased. When Dr. Owen died in 1768, Dr. John Price[17] succeeded. He had been Janitor from some time before 1757, and Sub-Librarian from 1761. His long reign ended in 1813, and his successor, Dr. Bulkeley Bandinel, held the office still longer, dying in 1860 (see p. [34]).
Catalogue of Oriental MSS.
A great effort was made from 1766 to 1787 to accomplish a catalogue of the Oriental MSS. which were a notable feature of the Library, thanks to the Laud, Marshall, Pococke, Huntington, Marsh and Hunt collections. The Catalogue of 1787, containing the Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Coptic MSS., was the work of Johann Uri, a Hungarian, who resided at Oxford for this purpose, and died there in 1796. The Arabic catalogue was continued by a second part undertaken by Alexander Nicoll and E. B. Pusey, and issued in 1835. Other parts have been continued by volumes in the Quarto series.
Modern Expansion.
In 1789 the first, modern extension of the Library began. How it managed to contain the accessions of the eighteenth century within the compass of the Old Reading Room, Arts End and Selden End, which it possessed in 1640, it is difficult to imagine; but no doubt much uncatalogued matter was stacked in the Picture Gallery and adjacent rooms. At last the pressure became so great that the books simply burst into the Anatomy School, thenceforward known as the Auctarium, on the first floor of the Schools Quadrangle. The gradual annexation of the whole of the Quadrangle, 1789-1882, is too much a matter of detail to be narrated here.[18] The whole of the first floor was annexed by 1835, and the loan of the Radcliffe Camera, in 1860, greatly eased the situation. The first ground floor-room acquired was the Logic School in 1845. The progress of bibliography can be traced in the large purchases made in 1789 at the Pinelli sale and in 1780 at the Crevenna sale, in Florence and Amsterdam respectively. The books bought were chiefly Editiones Principes and other early printed books, and £1550 was borrowed from the Colleges for the purpose, all faithfully repaid by 1795. The Mazarine Bible, a copy of which fetched £5800 in 1911, was bought for £100 in 1793.