Note 19 — Chapter II · THE FOUNDER OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY. (continued 2)

I had noted some of these as worthy, by way of sample, to be printed. But the reduced limits of my book (as compared with its plan) have compelled the omission of much illustrative matter which had been carefully prepared for insertion, and which, as I hope, would have been found to merit the attention of the reader. I will find room, however, to mention one little fact connected with the famous Evangeliary marked ‘Nero D. vi.’ The reader probably remembers Sir Robert Cotton’s fruitless perambulation of the aisle of Westminster Abbey, with that splendid MS. in his hands, on the day of the Coronation of Charles the First. It seems likely that the anecdote was told to Charles the Second when, at length, a like ceremony was to take place for him. Be that as it may, he sent—before he had been many days in England—a confidential servant to borrow the book from Sir Thomas. And the fact of the loan stands recorded on a fly-leaf, by the King’s intermediary, in honour ‘of the most noble Sir Thomas Cotton, the starre of learning and honestie.’ The MS., I may add, is one of those which came to Sir Robert from Dethick (Garter). It bears Dethick’s autograph with the date ‘1603’ and Cotton’s, ‘1608.’ Besides the Four Gospels it contains Processus factus ad Coronationem Regis Ricardi Secundi, and Modus tenendi Parliamentum. For some momentary fancy or other Sir Robert took out of another superb MS. of his—the Psalter of King Henry the Sixth—a small but beautiful miniature, and made of it a vignette for this Ethelstan volume. So it continued to remain for two hundred and forty years, when Sir Frederick Madden restored the miniature to its more legitimate place (Domitian A. xvii, fol. 96*.) Had this Nero volume chanced to have been scrutinized at the moment when it was Sir Robert’s fate to be stigmatized as ‘an embezzler of records,’ it is very possible that it might have been called to bear witness for the charge. For it is undeniable that the ‘Ro. Cotton Bruceus’ is written over an erasure. (The signature occurs on the beautiful dedicatory page—‘Beatissimo Papæ Damaso Hieronymus.’) But, fortunately, the descent of the book can be traced clearly.