The next move added meanness to inertness.  I do not blame Mr. E. B. Nicholson, Bodley’s Librarian, because he probably had orders to write the following choice specimen: 

30/3/1887.

“Dear sir Richard Burton,

“I have received two vols. of four (read six) ’Supplemental Nights’ with a subscription form.  If a Bodleian Ms. is to be copied for any volume, I must stipulate that that volume be supplied to us gratis.  Either my leave or that of the Curators is required for the purpose of copying for publication, and I have no doubt that they would make the same stipulation.  I feel sure you would in any case not propose to charge us for such a volume, but until I hear from you I am in a difficulty as to how to reply to the subscription form I have received.

Yours faithfully,
(Signed) E. B. Nicholson,
Librarian.”

The able and energetic papers, two printed and one published by Mr. H. W. Chandler, of Pembroke College, Oxford, clearly prove the following facts:—­

1.  That on June 20, 1610, a Bodleian Statute peremptorily forbade any books or manuscripts being taken out of the Library.

2.  That, despite the peremptory and categorical forbiddance by Bodley, Selden, and others, of lending Bodleian books and MSS., loans of both have for upwards of two centuries formed a precedent.

3.  That Bodley’s Statute (June 20th, An. 1610) was formally and officially abrogated by Convocation on May 22nd, 1856; Convocation retaining the right to lend.

4.  That a “privileged list” of (113) borrowers presently arose and is spoken of as a normal practice:—­sicut mos fuit, says the Statute (Tit. xx. iii. § 11) of 1873; and, lastly,

5.  That loans of MSS. and printed books have for years been authorised to approved public libraries.

After these premises I proceed to notice other points bearing upon the subject which, curious to say, are utterly neglected or rather ignored by Mr. Chandler and “The Times.”  Sir Thomas Bodley never would have condemned students to study in the Bodleian had he known the peines fortes et dures to which in these days they are thereby doomed.  “So picturesque and so peculiar is its construction,” says a writer, “that it ensures the maximum of inefficiency and discomfort.”  The whole building is a model of what a library ought not to be.  It is at once over solid and ricketty:  room for the storage of books is wanted, and its wooden staircases, like touchwood or tinder, give one the shudders to think of fire.  True, matches and naked lights are forbidden in the building; but all know how these prohibitions are regarded by the public, and it is dreadful to think of what might result from a lucifer dropped at dark upon the time-rotten planks.  The reading public in the XIXth century must content itself with boxes or stalls, like those of an old-fashioned tavern or coffee-house of the humbler sort wherein