folios in the neat new tenement which Milton inhabited in Petty France; and it gives one a stronger idea than we have yet had of Milton’s passion for books, and of his indomitable perseverance and ingenuity in the use of them in his blind state, that he should have taken such pains, at our present date, to supply himself with copies of some of the rare Byzantine Historians.  Connecting this purchase, through Bigot, with the recent inquiry, through Heimbach, about the price of Blaeu’s great Atlas, may we not also discern some increased attention to the furnishing of the house occasioned by the second marriage?

[Footnote 1:  It seems to me possible, though I would not be too sure, that the book about which Bigot wrote to Milton was one entitled Modus tenendi Parliamentum apud Anglos, by Henry Elsynge, Clerk of the House of Lords, and father of the Henry Elsynge who was Clerk of the Commons In the Long Parliament (Wood, Ath.  III. 363-4).  The book, which had been sent forth under Parliamentary authority in 1641, was a standard one; and manuscript copies of it, or drafts for it, more complete than itself, may well have been extant in such places as the Cotton Library or Bradshaw’s.  Actually Elsynge’s autograph of the book, dated 1626, was extant in London at the date of Milton’s letter, though not in the Tower.  An edition of the book, “enriched with a large addition from the author’s original MS.,” was published in 1768; and the MS. itself is now in the British Museum (Bonn’s Lowndes, Article “Elsynge").]

The Herald in charge of the Records in the Tower, mentioned in Milton’s letter as one of his acquaintances, was, I believe, WILLIAM RYLEY, Norroy King-at-arms.  He had been Clerk of the Records, under the Master of the Rolls, for some years, and was to continue in the post till after the Restoration.  A more interesting person was the “MR. STOUPE” who took charge of the cash to Bigot for the Byzantine volumes, and was to see to their conveyance to London.—­He was no common character.  A Grison by birth, he had settled in London as minister of the French Church in the Savoy; but he had left that post to be one of Thurloe’s travelling-agents and political intelligencers or spies.  For two years or more he had been employed in secret missions to France and Switzerland, chiefly for negotiation in the interests of the continental Protestants; and his success in this kind of employment, often at considerable personal risk, and his talent for collecting information in London itself by means of correspondence from abroad, had gradually recommended him to the Protector.  Burnet, who knew him well in after life, when he was more a frantic Deist than either a Protestant or “Christian,” had more anecdotes about Cromwell from him than from any other man.  The anecdotes he liked best to tell were those in which his own intriguing ability figured.  Thus it was Stoupe, according to his own account, that knew of Cromwell’s design