A.D. 1700.
Considerable fears were entertained for the safety of the Divinity School and that portion of the Library which is built over it. About thirty-two years before, some failure had been observed in the roof of the former, which was rectified under the superintendence of Sir Christopher Wren. When Bishop Barlow's books were brought to the Library, in 1692 or 1693, the galleries on either side of the middle room were erected; and, as the beams of the roof of the School were then observed to give from the wall, they were anchored on both sides, under the direction of Dr. Aldrich. But the tight bracing had now caused the south wall, that which adjoins Exeter College garden, to bulge outwards, so that the book-stalls were found to have started from the wall by three and a-half inches at the top and two and a-half at the bottom; the wall itself was seven and a-half inches out of the perpendicular, and the four great arches of the vault of the School were all cracked. Hereupon Dr. Gregory, the Savilian Professor, was despatched to London to consult Sir C. Wren again, and, by his advice, additional buttresses of great depth and strength were erected on the south side, the weight of the bookstalls was removed from the roof of the School by their being trussed up to the walls with iron cramps; and the cracks in the vault were filled with lead or oyster-shells, and in some places
with the insertion of new stones, and were then 'wedged up with well-seasoned oaken wedges.' This work went on through the summers of 1701 and 1702; and in 1703 some similar repairs were executed in some of the other Schools. The letters and papers of Wren on the subject, with the draughts, and reports of the workmen employed, are preserved in Bodley MS. 907. They are printed in [Walker's] Oxoniana, iii. 16-27.
In this year died Henry Jones, M.A., Vicar of Sunningwell, Berks[155]. He bequeathed to the Library sixty volumes in MS., very miscellaneous in character, and chiefly of the 16th and 17th centuries. Some of them had belonged to Bishop Fell. The bequest probably came to Oxford some few years after Mr. Jones' death, as the books are entered (in a full and accurate list) by Hearne, in the Benefaction Book, among the gifts of about the years 1706-12. It was from a modern transcript among these that Hearne edited the Historia Regum Angliæ of John Ross or Rouse; and seventy-one documents from No. 23, which is an Hereford Chartulary, were printed by Rawlinson at the end of his History of Hereford, 8o, Lond. 1717. One volume has for many years been missing from the collection, viz., a funeral oration, by John Sonibanck, on the death of Queen Elizabeth of York, in 1503. A list of the MSS. is printed from the Benefaction Register, in Uffenbach's Commercium Epistolicum, pp. 200-208.
Between 1700 and 1738 Sir Hans Sloane is recorded to have given considerably more than 1400 volumes, together with his picture in 1731; but the majority of them do not appear to have been considered of much value, and only 415 are specified by name in the Benefaction Register. Dr. Hyde, in a letter to Hudson, which accompanied a list of the books for which the latter had asked with a view to registration, says he scarce thinks the entry to be 'for the credit of the business,
nos inter nos[156].' But Hudson appears to have thought that the omission proceeded rather from carelessness, for, in a letter to Wanley, he says that he thinks Hyde assigned 'non causa pro causa[157].'
[155] Steele's MSS. Collections for Berks; Gough MS. 27.
[156] Walker's Letters by Eminent Persons, i. 173.
[157] Ellis's Letters of Eminent Literary Men, Camd. Soc. pp. 302-3.