apply a scientific term; hence it is fitting that to it belong the
two men to whom perhaps Oxford owes most. Thomas Bodley was a fellow
and lecturer in Greek there, before he left Oxford for diplomacy, and
accumulated that wealth which he used to endow the oldest and the
most fascinating, if not the largest, of British libraries. And among
the men who have gained from "the rare books in the public library" a
way to a "perfect elysium," none better deserves remembrance than the
Mertonian, Antony Wood, whose monument stands in Merton Chapel, but
who has raised /monumentum aere perennius/ to himself, in his
/History of the University of Oxford/ and his /Athenae Oxonienses/.

[Plate VII. Merton College : The Library Interior]




MERTON LIBRARY


"Hail, tree of knowledge! thy leaves fruit; which well
Dost in the midst of Paradise arise,
Oxford, the Muses' paradise,
From which may never sword the blest expel.
Hail, bank of all past ages! where they lie
To enrich, with interest, posterity."
COWLEY.

"The appearance of the library" (at Merton), says the great Cambridge
scholar, J. Willis Clark, in his /Care of Books/, "is so venerable,
so unlike any similar room with which I am acquainted, that it must