Book-stamp of Sir Symonds d'Ewes, Bart.
Sir Symonds D'Ewes, one of the most eminent of the antiquaries and collectors of the first half of the seventeenth century, was born in 1602. He was the son of Paul D'Ewes of Milden, Suffolk, and Cecilia, daughter and heiress of Richard Simonds of Coxden, Chardstock, Dorsetshire. In 1618 he was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, but left in 1620, and entered at the Middle Temple, being called to the Bar in 1623. He soon, however, gave up his legal practice, and devoted himself to the study of history and antiquities. D'Ewes was made a knight in 1626, and created a baronet in 1641. He was twice married, and died in 1650. The baronetcy became extinct in 1731.
D'Ewes possessed a very fine collection of manuscripts, which were sold by his grandson to Sir Robert Harley, afterwards Earl of Oxford, notwithstanding the injunction of D'Ewes, in his will, that his library should not be sold or dispersed. Oldys states that Harley recommended Queen Anne to purchase the manuscripts for a public library, as the richest collection in England next to Sir Robert Cotton's, but that the Queen said, 'It was no virtue for her, a woman, to prefer as she did arts to arms; but while the blood and honour of the nation was at stake in her wars, she could not, till she had secured her living subjects an honourable peace, bestow their money on dead letters.' 'Whereupon,' adds Oldys, 'the Earl stretched his own purse, and gave six thousand pounds for the library.' The manuscripts, together with a list of them, which is believed to have been made by D'Ewes himself, now form part of the Harleian Collection in the British Museum. The manuscript of an Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, compiled by D'Ewes in conjunction with Francis Junius, and several of his diaries are also preserved there. His great work was the Journals of all the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was not published until 1682.
SIR KENELM DIGBY, 1603-1665
One of Sir Kenelm Digby's Book-stamps.
The celebrated scholar and collector, Sir Kenelm Digby, was born at Gayhurst, near Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, in 1603. He was the son of Sir Everard Digby, who was executed in 1606 for the part he took in the Gunpowder Plot. Sir Kenelm, who was the author of several remarkable works, is described by Lord Clarendon as a man of 'very extraordinary person and presence, with a wonderful graceful behaviour and a flowing courtesy and civility.' He was knighted in 1623. Digby possessed a very fine library, which he formed during his residence in Paris, and he had many of the volumes bound there by Le Gascon and other eminent binders. An earlier library which he collected is said to have been burnt by the Roundheads during the Civil War.[46] When he died in 1665, his library, which was still in France, was claimed as the property of the French king, by virtue of the droit d'aubaine, and it is said to have been purchased for ten thousand crowns by the Earl of Bristol, who died in 1676, and whose books, conjointly with those of another collector, were sold in London in April 1680. A priced catalogue of the sale is preserved in the British Museum; and it is stated in it that the books principally belonged 'to the library of the Right Honourable George, late Earl of Bristol, a great part of which were the Curiosities collected by the learned Sir Kenelme Digby.' It is evident, however, that a considerable number of the volumes which belonged to Digby remained in France, as several are to be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale and other libraries. In a communication to the Library Association of the United Kingdom, M. Léopold Delisle, Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, gives a list of manuscripts and printed books in that library, which were formerly the property of the collector. One volume, with a very beautiful binding by Le Gascon, is preserved in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Sir Kenelm presented to the Bodleian Library a valuable collection of manuscripts and printed books which Thomas Allen, his former tutor, had bequeathed to him in 1630. He also gave a considerable number of volumes to the library of Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass., and the following notice of the gift occurs in the works of Richard Baxter:—
'I proposed,' he writes, 'to have given almost all my library to Cambridge in New England; but Mr. Thomas Knowles, who knew their library, told me that Sir Kenelm Digby had already given them the Fathers, Councils and Schoolmen, and that it was Histories and Commentators which they wanted. Whereupon I sent them some of my Commentators and some Histories, among which were Freherus, Renherus, and Pistorius's collections.'
Unfortunately, this first Harvard library was destroyed by fire in 1764. At that time it contained about six thousand volumes.