No soil of fingers, nor such ugly things,
Expect to find, Sirs, for it was the King's.'
The most distinguished Metropolitan book-collector of the period was Sir Robert Cotton, who began as early as 1588, and who had assistance from such antiquaries as William Camden and Sir Henry Spelman. This library, after being closed on account of the treasonable character of the documents contained in it, passed into the possession of Cotton's son, Sir Thomas, whose house was almost adjoining Westminster Hall. Anthony à Wood gives a curious account of a visit he paid it, when he found its owner practising on the lute. The key of the library was in the possession of one Pearson, who lodged with a bookseller in Little Britain. Wood was 'forced to walk thither, and much ado there was to find him.' This library was removed to Essex Street, and again back to Westminster to Ashburnham House in Little Dean's Yard, where it suffered greatly from a fire in 1731, and what remains of it is now in the British Museum. Sir Thomas Bodley was another collector, but few of his accumulations appear to have come from London. The extraordinary collection of pamphlets got together by Tomlinson, and now stored in the British Museum, is too well known to need more than a passing reference. It is not so generally known that Narcissus Luttrell was a very voracious collector of broadsides, tracts, and so forth. To nearly every one of the items he affixed the price he paid for it. In 1820, at the Bindley sale, this extraordinary collection, ranging in date from 1640 to 1688, and comprising twelve volumes, realized the then large amount of £781.
Sir Julius Cæsar, Master of the Rolls under James I., was a book-collector of the right sort, and his box of charming little editions of the classics, with which he used to solace himself on a journey, is now in the safe keeping of the British Museum. Sir Julius was born in 1557, and died in April, 1636; he possessed a fine collection of highly interesting manuscripts, which had the narrowest possible escape from being destroyed at the latter part of the last century. The collection was rescued in time by Samuel Paterson, the auctioneer, and it is now in the British Museum.
Robert Burton (the author of the 'Anatomy of Melancholy') was, like Luttrell, also a great collector of tracts, and his library, now in the Bodleian, is peculiarly rich in historical, political, and poetical pamphlets, and in miscellaneous accounts of murders, monsters, and accidents. He seems to have purchased and preserved a copy of everything that came out. 'There is no nation,' says Johnson, 'in which it is so necessary as in our own to assemble the small tracts and fugitive pieces.' 'The writers of these' frequently have opportunities 'of inquiring from living witnesses, and of copying their representations from the life, and preserve a multitude of particular incidents which are forgotten in a short time, or omitted in formal relations, and yet afford light in some of the darkest scenes of state.' 'From pamphlets,' says the same writer, 'are to be learned the progress of every debate, and of every opinion.' And he compares the impression produced on the mind of him who shall consult these tracts, and of another that refers merely to formal historians, to the difference of him who hears of a victory, and him who sees the battle. Archbishop Laud collected from far and wide. John Selden, like Laud, had a distinct weakness for learned books, and consequently could have found little to satisfy his cravings in London. Selden, when disturbed, put his spectacles into the book he was busy with by way of marking the place; and after his death numbers of volumes were found with these curious book-markers. John Felton, who murdered Buckingham, was also a book-collector in a small way. In Lilly's catalogue for 1863 there was a copy of Peacham's 'Compleat Gentleman,' 1622, with the following on the fly-leaf: 'John Felton, vicessimo secundo die Junii, 1622.'
