THE ALFRED JEWEL
[_Page 114_]

Robert Bruce Cotton was another great book-collector. His library was
sold to the nation about seventy years after his death. Many books and
MSS. belonging to it were destroyed or injured by a fire that broke out
where it had been placed; among those injured was the only copy of the
old poem of Béowulf, which I have not talked about because it is
apparently outside our _Catholic_ Heritage in literature. The reduced
library is now at the British Museum. It includes the beautiful
Lindisfarne Gospels, or Durham Book, which once belonged to Durham
Cathedral.

There is another collection which was bought for the British Museum,
made by Harley, Earl of Oxford.

William Laud, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in Charles the First's
time, and, like him, died on the scaffold, was also greatly interested
in collecting books. He gave generously to Oxford University, and his
books are in the Bodleian Library, with many other valuable literary
treasures.

Francis Junius collected Anglo-Saxon literature, and other books. He
left them to the Bodleian Library. Among them is the unique "Caedmon"
Manuscript, given him by Archbishop Usher, who founded the library of
Trinity College, Dublin. People are now alive to the value of these
great possessions, and we must be glad that scholars have worked at
them, and published many of them, and so made their contents accessible
to everyone. But we must never forget our debt to the earliest writers,
and chiefly to the monks who wrote and who copied, much and long and