A copy on vellum, with illuminated initials, &c., of vol. i. (reaching to the Psalms) of the Vulgate Bible, printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1462, was bought for £2 10s.! The volume was imperfect at the end, ceasing at Job xxxii. 5, and seven leaves followed in contemporary and beautiful MS., which also ended imperfectly at Ps. xxxvi. 9, with one leaf wanting at the end of Job. But when the Canonici Collection of MSS. was received from Venice, in 1818, among some fragments which were found in one of the boxes were fourteen leaves of a MS. Bible, which were at once recognised as being part of those wanted to complete this book, and which left only four still deficient. The volume came to the Library from the collection of Nic. Jos. Foucault
, 'Comes Consistorianus,' many other of whose MSS. and printed books came by Rawlinson's bequest; but through how many hands the missing leaves had passed in the seventy subsequent years ere they were thus marvellously restored to their place, it is impossible to tell[212].
[212] The story of this recovery has been already related by Archd. Cotton in his Typographical Gazetteer, p. 339, where by mistake he refers the original purchase to the year 1752.
A.D. 1751.
A benefaction from Lord Crewe, Bishop of Durham, of £60 to the Librarian and of £10 for the purchase of books, appears for the first time in the Accounts for this year. These sums (which are still annually paid into the General Fund) proceed from a bequest of £200 per ann. from Crewe (who died Sept. 24, 1721) to the University. A proposal to give these same sums to the Library, with other assignments for the remainder, was brought forward in Convocation on June 5, 1723, but the scheme was then rejected[213]. And thus nearly thirty years seem to have elapsed from the time of the bequest before the share for the Library was definitely fixed and paid.
Charles Gray, M.P. for Colchester, presented a MS. Roll, containing a Survey of the estates of the Abbey of Glastonbury at the Dissolution, which is printed by Hearne in his Appendix to Langtoft's Chronicle, vol. ii. pp. 343-388, from a copy made from this original; and an inscription, in the Phœnician language, upon a white marble stone, which was brought, with many others, from Citium, in the island of Cyprus, by Dr. Porter, a physician of Thaxted in Essex. The stone measures twelve inches in length, by three in breadth, and three in depth. It has been frequently engraved: first by Pocock (Travels in the East, vol. ii. pl. xxxiii. 2); next by Swinton (Inscriptiones Citieæ, 1750, and Philos. Trans. 1764); afterwards by Chandler, Barthélemy, &c.; and, lastly, by Gesenius
(for whom former copies were collated with the original, and corrected, by Mr. Reay) in his Scripturæ Linguæque Phœniciæ Monumenta, published in 1837, where the inscription is described at pp. 126-133, part i., and engraved at pl. xi. part iii. It appears to be an epitaph by a husband in memory of his wife. The stone is now kept in one of the Sub-librarians' studies.
Thomas Shaw, the well-known Eastern traveller, bequeathed his collection of natural curiosities, which was sent to the Ashmolean Museum, and the MS. of his own travels, with corrections, and other papers. Copies of Caxton's Game of the Chesse and Recuyell of Troye were given by Mr. James Bowen, of Shrewsbury, painter[214].
[213] Hearne's Diary, xcvii. 12.
[214] A MS. vol. of collections by him relating to the history of Shropshire, dated 1768, is among Gough's books, Salop MS. 20.