critical of a merely custodial role: "... their emploiment," he writes
of the typical librarian of his day, is "of little or no use further,
then to look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not
bee lost; or embezeled by those that use them: and this is all" (p. 16).

The King's Library was unquestionably magnificent; Charles's father and
brother Henry had been particularly zealous in building it up, acquiring
such collections as that of Isaac Casaubon. And Charles had been the
recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex
Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek,
certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in
fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was
apparently an embarrassment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan
government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of
others, the post of deputy keeper of the King's Library was little but a
sinecure for Dury, leaving him free to pursue his many other interests
but powerless to implement the reforms he advocated in his pamphlet
within the only library over which he ever had direct control. Though he
retained the post until the Restoration, he left the library itself
early in 1654, never to return.

The _DNB_ notes that Dury's life was "an incessant round of journeyings,
colloquies, correspondence, and publications." The account might also
have added that, sadly, it was a life of many failures and frustrations,
since his visionary scheme for the wholeness of life was so out of touch
with the jealousies and rivalries of those he encountered. But if the
larger vision that underlay _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ is now merely
a historical curiosity, the specific reforms that Dury advocated, as
seemingly impractical in his own time as his other schemes, proved to be
of lasting importance. Shorn of the millenarian vision that gave them