A.D. 1738.
The fourth Catalogue of the printed books appeared this year in two volumes, folio, of 611 and 714 pp. respectively. It is still a Catalogue of great use and value, from its remarkable accuracy, and from the abundance and minuteness of its cross-references. The secret history of this Catalogue, however, as of the preceding one, is related by Hearne. By him, as he himself frequently tells us[206], the greater portion of it was virtually prepared soon after his appointment as Sub-librarian, in 1712 (although no mention of his name is made in Fysher's preface), and to him, therefore, its accuracy is most probably in a great measure due[207]. He compared every book in the Library with Hyde's
Catalogue, and corrected many mistakes, adding notes here and there about anonymous and synonymous authors, and, as the Vice-Chancellor (Dr. Maunder, of Balliol) was anxious to have an Appendix issued, he transcribed for this purpose all his corrections and additions into two folio volumes, 'which' (to take up now Hearne's own account in his Diary, vol. lxii. p. 58, under date 1717) 'now lye and are to be seen in the Library.... But at last Dr. Hudson thought it more convenient with respect to himself that both Dr. Hyde's Catalogue and my Appendix should come out together as one intire work, so that he might have the honour of all. Upon which he employed one Moses Williams, his servitour[208] (the Dr. being then Fellow of University College), to transcribe it, the said Williams being in the Dr.'s debt. When Williams had done, he demanded the remaining part of his money, which was about ten or twelve pounds, the rest having been stopped by the Dr. for the debt just now mentioned. The whole was fifty lbs. which he bargained for with the Dr. But when Williams desired the said ten or twelve pounds, of which he had immediate occasion to discharge the fees and charges for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, the Dr. was in a very great passion, and refused to pay it. Upon which Williams moved the matter so far that the Catalogue was laid before the Delegates
of the Press, and the Dr. was called before them to his very great mortification, and they told him that 'twas highly unreasonable to stop the poor lad's money. Upon which the Dr. in a great rage and fury paid him; otherwise Williams had most certainly put him into the Court. This Catalogue was last summer ordered to be printed, and the Dr. was refunded his money; but 'tis not yet put to the press, the Dr. being unwilling it should be printed till such time as he hath done Josephus.' But Hudson died before his Josephus was finished, and the proposed new Catalogue was consequently begun, and only begun, by his successor, Bowles. The latter printed as far as p. 244 of vol. i. and p. 292 of vol. ii. His successor, Fysher, upon his appointment, engaged the assistance of his friend, Emmanuel Langford, M.A., Vice-Principal of Hart Hall, who completed the second volume, while Fysher himself finished the first. At the end of the second volume appeared an announcement of a supplemental Catalogue, as being ready for the press, containing the books existing in College Libraries but wanting in the Bodleian. This, however, never appeared, and nothing is known of the MS. from which it was to have been printed. Fysher's Catalogue appears, from the University Accounts, to have occupied from 1735 in preparation, for which, and for transcribing it for the press, £194 5s. were paid to him.
Alexander Pope gave, together with copies of his Iliad and Odyssey, a curious volume, containing a series of 178 Portraits of East Indian Rajahs and Great Moguls, down to Aurung-Zebe. It is now numbered Bodl. MS. Sansk. 14.
The names of various persons (all, probably, undergraduates) employed in the Library about this time are learned from the Accounts:—1738, Mr. Hall; 1740-1, Mr. Allen; 1740, Mr. Toynbee (Ball. Coll., B.A., 1743); 1743, Mr. Jessett (All Souls', B.A., 1745); 1747, Mr. Thomas Winbolt (All Souls', B.A. 1748).
[206] Pref. to Chron. de Dunstaple, p. xii. Autobiogr. p. 11, &c.
[207] It is fair to say that Fysher remarks in his preface that experience proved how entirely vain and foolish were the reports which had been spread abroad of the little or the nothing which, after the labours of their predecessors, would remain for the then editors to do.
[208] Moses Williams took his degree as B.A. in 1708. One John Williams (probably the one of that name who is entered in the Register of Graduates as having taken the degree of B.A. at Oriel in 1704) appears to have been a colleague of Hearne's in employment in the Library, about 1704. For in a letter written to Hearne, March 20, 1705/6, one year and a-half after he had quitted Oxford, in which he mentions his having been appointed to the Head-mastership of Ruthin School in November, 1705, he refers to 'our dear friends that are in irons at the Bodleian Library, there being several, I suppose, that have been manacled in that pleasing prison since my being there.' (Rawlinson Letters, vol. xii. f. 1.)