Note 330 — The Drawing Room.

The reader, it is presumed, will not form his opinion of the bibliomaniacal taste of this great man, from the distorted and shameful delineation of his character, which, as a matter of curiosity only, is inserted at p. 237, ante. He will, on the contrary, look upon Cecil as a lover of books, not for the sake of the numerous panegyrical dedications to himself, which he must have so satisfactorily perused, but for the sake of the good to be derived from useful and ingenious works. With one hand, this great man may be said to have wielded the courageous spirit, and political virtue, of his country—and with the other, to have directed the operations of science and literature. Without reading the interesting and well-written life of Cecil, in Mr. Macdiarmid's Lives of British Statesmen (a work which cannot be too often recommended, or too highly praised), there is evidence sufficient of this statesman's bibliomaniacal passion and taste, in the fine old library which is yet preserved at Burleigh in its legitimate form—and which, to the collector of such precious volumes, must have presented a treat as exquisite as are the fresh blown roses of June to him who regales himself in the flowery fragrance of his garden—the production of his own manual labour! Indeed Strypes tells us that Cecil's "library was a very choice one:" his care being "in the preservation, rather than in the private possession of (literary) antiquities." Among other curiosities in it, there was a grand, and a sort of presentation, copy of Archbishop Parker's Latin work of the Antiquity of the British Church; "bound costly, and laid in colours the arms of the Church of Canterbury, empaled with the Archbishop's own paternal coat." Read Strype's tempting description; Life of Parker; pp. 415, 537. Well might Grafton thus address Cecil at the close of his epistolary dedication of his Chronicles: "and now having ended this work, and seeking to whom I might, for testification of my special good-will, present it, or for patronage and defence dedicate it, and principally, for all judgment and correction to submit it—among many, I have chosen your Mastership, moved thereto by experience of your courteous judgment towards those that travail to any honest purpose, rather helping and comforting their weakness, than condemning their simple, but yet well meaning, endeavours. By which, your accustomed good acceptation of others, I am the rather boldened to beseech your Mastership to receive this my work and me, in such manner as you do those in whom (howsoever there be want of power) there wanteth no point of goodwill and serviceable affection." Edit. 1809, 4to. If a chronicler could talk thus, a poet (who, notwithstanding the title of his poem, does not, I fear, rank among Pope's bards, that "sail aloft among the Swans of Thames,") may be permitted thus to introduce Cecil's name and mansion: