[279] The County Histories are in many instances enriched with various notes and papers in print and MS. The Berkshire MSS. have been increased in the present year (1868) by the addition of the collections of the late Will. Nelson Clarke, D.C.L., of Ch. Ch., author of the History of the Hundred of Wanting (4o. 1824), which have been presented to the Library by Mr. Coxe, to whom they were given by his cousin, the collector, when the latter relinquished the idea of writing a history of Berks. They consist of a Parochial History of the county, transcripts of Heralds' Visitations and of early records, and miscellaneous note-books and papers.
[280] The splendid and, as it is believed, unique vellum copy of the Hereford Missal ('ad usum eccl. Helfordensis,' fol. Rouen, 1502) which the Library possesses, came to it from Rawlinson among the books of T. Hearne, to whom it had been given by Charles Eyston, Esq., of East Hendred, Berks. (Hearne's pref. to Camden's Annales Eliz. 1. xxvii.) This Hereford volume is described, together with many of Gough's books, in a book by Ed. Frère, entitled Des Livres de Liturgie des Eglises d'Angleterre imprimés à Rouen dans les xv. et xvi. Siècles, 8o Rouen, 1867.
[281] See Gent. Magaz. for 1860, p. 406.
[282] So in the Library Register of accounts. Nichols (Lit. Hist. vol. v. p. 559) says £100.
[283] In his MS. Collectanea, in the possession of Rev. H. O. Coxe.
A.D. 1810.
In March, the Prince Regent forwarded to the University four rolls of papyrus, brought from Herculaneum, burned to a state resembling charcoal, together with engravings of rolls hitherto deciphered, and many facsimile copies, in pencil, of inedited rolls. A committee was appointed from the Curators of the Library and the Delegates of the Press, at the beginning of the year 1811, to have the charge of this gift, and £500 were granted towards publication. Two volumes of lithographed facsimiles were in consequence published at the Clarendon Press, in 1824-5. Some further selections from these papers have recently been published by a German scholar, Dr. Th. Gompertz.
On Nov. 15, it was resolved in Convocation to restore to the Chancery at Durham, on the application of the Bishop of Durham, the MS. Register of Richard Kellow, Bishop of Durham, 1310-16, containing also a portion of the Register of Rich. Bury, 1338-42, which had come to the Library among Rawlinson's collections, and was the only volume wanting at Durham in an unbroken series of Episcopal Registers, of which this was the first. It was borrowed in 1639/40, as it appeared, by an agent of the Marquis of Newcastle, for the purpose of production in some law-suit affecting his property; remained through the Civil War in his hands; fell subsequently into those of the Earl of Oxford, and was bought by Rawlinson from Osborne the bookseller, in whose sale-catalogue of the Harleian Library in 1743 it was numbered 20734.
In this year Dr. Philip Bliss, the editor of Wood's Athenæ, appears to have entered the Library as an assistant, the entries in the register of books received from Stationers' Hall being partly made by him, in his very clear and neat hand. In 1812 he drew up short catalogues of the St. Amand MSS. and of a portion of the Rawlinson collection (the Poetry, the Letters, and the commence
ment of the Miscell.) for which a payment was made to him of £21. He afterwards quitted the Library for the British Museum, but returned in 1822, as Sub-librarian, for a short time.