By the Rev. Canon J. L. Jackson, F.S.A. 



339 



that it is impossible to describe in detail the many beautiful volumes 

 which it contains. So I pass to the Old library. 



The Old library contains a vast collection of books, of which many 

 of more modern date have been put there merely for convenience 

 sake, but the greater part formed the library of Longleat at the time 

 of the first Lord Weymouth, who died in 1714. These old books 

 were chiefly collected by him, and among them are many curious 

 and rare ones upon almost every subject, but especially Divinity, 

 and still more especially the controversial Divinity of the latter part 

 of the seventeenth century — from 1660. The first Lord Weymouth 

 was, as I need hardly say, the friend and protector of Bishop Ken ; 

 and the country being at the time torn to pieces by theological war- 

 fare, much connected with the great political changes of the time, 

 Lord Weymouth and Bishop Ken, between them, seem to have en- 

 tered into these subjects with deep feeling and earnestness, and to 

 have gathered almost everything that was printed during their day. 

 There is a vast number of tracts, answers, rejoinders, and replications, 

 all no doubt in their turn eagerly looked for and read as they came 

 out, but which now stand, in grim rank and file, bound in plain and 

 homely black calf, exhibiting no outward sign of bookbinding vanity. 

 No drawing-room table volumes are these, noi at all likely to be met 

 with at those establishments so fascinating to a large portion of 

 modern readers, the railway bookstalls. Yet in these old dim volume? 

 the controversialists of our day would find that many of the points 

 they are fighting about had been fought about before, over and over 

 again, though we seem to be as far as ever from a harmonious con- 

 clusion. 



It is, I believe, not an uncommon notion among the public tbat 

 all the books in the Old library were Bishop Ken's, the room being 

 often called Bishop Ken's Library. It was no doubt the daily living 

 place of the good bishop, who probably had all his own books there 

 at the time. But the books now there were, for the greater part, the 

 first Lord Weymouth's. The addition made to them by the bishop's 

 last Will was as follows : 



" I leave and bequeath to the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Weymouth, 

 in case he outlives me, all my books of which his Lordship has not the duplicates, 



