Judge Sewall went over to Charlestown to hold court, and the Rev. Simon Bradstreet persuaded him to spend the night at his house. Sewall had given his host Chrysostom's works in two folios and learned that Mr. Bradstreet already had all the Eton edition. Whereupon "I offered to give Dr. Mather's Church History for them and put them into the Library." On the following morning, "Mr. Bradstreet read to me Chrysostom going out of Constantinople into Banishment; and I read in return, both in Latin, very entertaining." The account of the departure of that great bishop and "golden mouthed" rhetorician is of intense interest now as it was two hundred years ago, for on leaving his people whom he loved passionately, he preached a marvellously pathetic homily, which these two elderly Puritans were reading seated by the fireplace of a winter's morning.

1

It is to be hoped that Sewall carried out his intention of giving the book to "the Library" - the Town Library I think he meant, for that at Harvard was generally alluded to as the College Library.

My attention was called a short time ago to a volume of sermons by Lewis Atterbury, an elder brother of Bishop Atterbury. On the cover was stamped in gold

It might not unnaturally be inferred that this inscription refers to the old Town Library. But, in the King's Chapel Library are eight volumes by Henry More and five books by other writers - all strongly Anglican — bearing the same stamp. This stamp is simply the English of De Bibliotheca De Boston. - which, as will appear later, is the inscription on other books belonging to the King's Chapel Library. Hence these books could scarcely have belonged to the old Boston Town Library and are now doubtless in their proper place in the King's Chapel Library.

Sewall's letter to Dummer recounting the loss of several volumes, and the advertisement calling in books, show that the Boston Town Library was in fair condition after the fire. Later on steps were taken to improve and increase it. In the town reports we find that on Feb15 Massachusetts Historical Collections, vii. 163.

ruary 25, 1733-34, the Selectmen voted "that Mr. Treasurer Wadsworth be directed to take a Bond of Nathaniel Green Esq' for Ninety Pounds being now in his hands, A Donation from Col° Fitch and others, in order to procure Books for the Town Library."1

Ninety pounds in those days would buy many books. In the Bowditch Collection in the Boston Public Library is a fine copy of Leybourn's Cursus Mathematicus, a thick folio, beautifully printed, full of illustrations. A note by the original owner, John Allason of "ffoulesyke," England, states that he paid for it, March 21, 1691, 1£ 9s 9d. When one considers the make-up of this volume, its excellent paper and printing, the engravings, its stout leather binding, and its limited sale, this was a very low price for the book.

The Town House was again burned in 1747. Nothing remained but the walls. In the Massachusetts Magazine of 1790 (III. 467) is an account of the building, which says that in this fire "a vast number of ancient books and early records together with a collection of valuable papers were destroyed."

After this nothing more appears in letters or records in regard to the Public Library. Mr. Prince had formed his library at the South Church. King's Chapel had its collection given by King William, and in 1765 John Mein, a bookseller, started a large circulating library, so that the loss was not so severely felt. The town was in no condition to start a library on its own account. There was its portion to pay for the rebuilding of the Town House; the country was at war with France, and when that ceased, there was a little interval of peace, followed by a struggle lasting from 1754 to 1763; then came the Stamp Act and taxes, a quarrel with king and parliament and the Revolution. During this time the town was impoverished and needed all its means to live, and to support its poor. When the question of a Public Library was taken up again in the middle of the nineteenth century, it seemed a perfectly new idea; apparently no memory was left of the old Town Library.

If the records in regard to the Library are scanty, still they show that a Town Library was started in 1656, and kept in a room devoted to it. From time to time it received accessions, and in 1711 it was valuable. In 1734 it received great additions, and it probably gave Boston Record Commissioners' Reports, xiii. 249. See Publications of this Society, xi. 196-207.

up the ghost in the fire of 1747, which left nothing but the bare walls.

We shall now apparently digress from the subject, but it is for the purpose of setting forth two acts of courtesy, one ancient, the other of to-day, extended by the old Boston Town Library and by our present Boston Public Library to a sister institution.

An account has been written by the Rev. Henry W. Foote1 of a library given to King's Chapel by King William in 1698, ninety-six volumes, to which many others were added later. It was kept in the houses of the successive ministers of King's Chapel; and though it suffered somewhat in the Revolution, when Boston was in turn occupied by the two opposing armies, its loss was greatest during the time it was deposited with the Theological Library. In 1807 it entered those gates, and two hundred and fifty-one volumes were lined up on the shelves. In 1823 it came out with ranks sadly thinned. Red Coats and Blue Coats had passed it by, but the Black Coats made great havoc, more than decimating it, leaving but two hundred and fourteen volumes. These books were finely bound; on one cover was stamped in golden letters:

SVB
AVSPICIIS

WILHELMI

III

and on the other:

DE
BIBLIOTHECA

DE
BOSTON.

In 1823 by vote of the proprietors of King's Chapel the library was placed in the Boston Athenæum, where it has since remained.

One of the most popular theological writers in the time of James I and Charles I was Dr. Joseph Mede, or Mead, a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, an Anglican of the older type, not greatly given to ceremony and with a leaning toward the simplicity of the Puritan ; yet "he never could digest that black doctrine of absolute Reprobation." Dr. Mede's Works were in the King's Chapel Library, but had 1 1 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, xviii. 422.

1

disappeared. In January, 1907, the volume was turned over to the Athenæum by the Boston Public Library, to which it had been given in 1890.

It is pleasant to record a similar kindness done by the old Boston Town Library. On January 30, 1715-16, at a meeting of the Selectmen, "it was ordered that L. Cursus Mathematicus be delivered Mr Miles it appearing yt ye sd booke belongs to ye Church Liberary.' "2 Mr. Miles was the Episcopal clergyman, and in the old King's Chapel catalogue was "Leybourne's Cursus Mathematicus 1690." It had evidently gone astray, and probably owing to the advertising and the demand for the return of books to the Town Library after the fire, had been handed in at the Town House and was restored to its owners by the Selectmen.

Among the books in the Church Library was the monumental Biblia Polyglotta by Walton, the loss of which from the Town Library Sewall referred to with so much regret in his letter about the fire of 1711. Fourteen years later the Judge again alludes to this book, when writing to the Rev. Thomas Prince, May 30, 1762.3 He says he does not believe in Prince's scheme for a lending library, but will contribute liberally to buy the Polyglot for the use of the minister of the South Church.

The reading of this paper was followed by a discussion in which the PRESIDENT, Mr. LINDSAY SWIFT, and Mr. ALBERT MATTHEWS participated. Mr. SWIFT remarked that some distinction should be made between a "public library" such as Mr. Canavan had described and the popular institutions of to-day. Continuing, he said:

In the earlier instances books were bequeathed to city or town corporations and kept, as appears to have been the case with the Boston Library, in some room as a part of the municipal possessions. The present public libraries, which have existed in their present form

1 [The return of Mede's book to the King's Chapel Library came from a suggestion by Mr. Canavan. EDITOR.]

2 Boston Record Commissioners' Reports, xi. 240.

* Sewall's Letter Book, ii. 208.

See J. J. Ogle's The Free Library (London, 1897), p. 11.

for considerably less than a hundred years, are subject to municipal control and are supported by "rates" or taxation. This distinction is touched upon in the Ninth Report of the Free Public Library Commission of Massachusetts.1 The early subscription libraries, in fact, more nearly resembled the democratically constituted institutions of to-day than did these town-owned assemblages of books. Benjamin Franklin, who proudly speaks in his Autobiography of the Philadelphia Library, which he organized when he was twenty-six years old, as the "mother of all the North American subscription libraries, now so numerous," takes pains to call this significant act his "first project of a public nature." The true seeds of development seem then to have been rather in these quasi-public libraries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than in any collection of books such as that so accurately and fully described by Mr. Canavan.

On behalf of Mr. FRANCIS H. LEE, Mr. MATTHEWS exhibited an original licence issued by Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire in October, 1774, authorizing the marriage of Samuel Charles and Susannah Abbott. The licence is a printed form, running "To either of the ordained Ministers of the Gospel in said Province, and to them only." The words "and to them only" have been struck out, and inserted in writing are the words "or To Thomas Merrill Esq: of Conway."

Mr. EDES communicated a copy of the inscription on a tablet in memory of Major Simon Willard (1604-1676), set in 1902 into the wall of Canterbury Cathedral, outside the Crypt, near St. Gabriel's Chapel. The inscription2 follows.

1 Report for 1899, p. 43.

The inscription has been kindly verified by Dean Wace of Canterbury Cathedral, who writes that the tablet is of white marble. It need scarcely be pointed out that the terms "British Colony of New England," "British Forces," and "American Commonwealth" would not have been employed by an American.