The " adininistmtivo" libraries of London are not prominent. The libraries of the Houses of Lorda and Commone,botli in the new Houses of Parliament, but entirely distinct, aro of recent formation ; tho former libraries having been destroyed at the conflagration of 1834. The library of the Fact India House has been already spoken of. It is the most important collection of the kind in London.
Of libraries not in the capital, the Bodleian of Oxford is the most extensive and the most interesting. Long the first collection in England, it still remains the second and is likely long to remain so. Increased interest in its prosperity has been manifested . in the present century, during which it has received the valuable presents of the Gough, the Malone, and the Douce collections, each of them more important than any single donation in the 18th century, and only to be paralleled by the benefactions of the Lauds and Seldens of the 17th. Its venerable buildings, so appropriate to a university library, are now becoming inadequate to the reception of its treasures, and a proposal has been recently decided on which will at once provide the establishment with room and increase its magnificence. The Radcliffe Library building, in almost immediate juxtaposition to the Bodleian Library, and remarkable for the beauty of its interior as well as exterior structure, is to be added as a reading-room to the Bodleian, with which it will be connected by a passage, and the Radcliffe collec tion is to be removed elsewhere. This will be singularly in accordance with the intentions of the founder, Dr. Radcliffe, the great physician, who originally intended to enlarge the Bodleian Library, by building another room connected with it ; a scheme which only failed on account of some conditions insisted on by Exeter College. The Radcliffe and the Bodleian Libraries have been remarkable among libraries in close juxta - position for having come to an agreement which would have been thought likely to suggest itself to almost all libraries in a similar pre dicament. The Radcliffe has confined itself to the purchase of hooks in a particular department—natural history—and the Bodleian has avoided making purchases in that department. Had a similar plan been followed with regard to college libraries, and Hebrew or Arabic manuscripts, for instance, been as systematically collected at one, as Welsh manuscripts have accidentally been at another,—at Jesus I College—the large assemblages of books at Oxford might have stituted one all-embracing library. The Bodleian library consisted, in
1849, of 220,000 volumes as returned to the House of Commons, and may be now estimated to amount to 250,000. There are several minor libraries to the University—the Radcliffe, the Ash molean, the library of the Taylor Institution for modern languages, &c. The college libraries are, however, the distinguishing glory of Oxford. Within a short walk of each other, in a city of not more than 30,000 inhabitants are found a range of some of the most splendid edifices ever erected for the reception of literature, most of them enclosed with lawns and gardens, some venerable for antiquity, some radiant with architectural splendour. Christ Church and All Souls are particularly magnificent, Merton is venerable ; but almost all have striking attrac t tions, and each of many would be a gem elsewhere. The same may be said of Cambridge, where, indeed, the arrangement of the buildings is uperior to that at Oxford, and one range of gardens with noble trees joins on to another, leading along the banks of the Cam, from college to college, from library to library. By perhaps an intentional arrange ment of Sir Christopher Wren, who built the noble library at Trinity College, Cambridge—the place of education of Bacon, Newton, and Byron, of Tennyson, Thackeray, and Macaulay—the windows are so high that the view of this unrivalled scholastic landscape which they command is not allowed to distract the reader from study. The library so lodged, which now contains about 50,000 volumes, embraces the autograph of Milton's Comas, the Shakcspere collection of Capel, and the German library of Archdeacon Hare. The library of St. John's is, like the college, a rival to Trinity ; Bennet's is famous for its Anglo Saxon manuscripts; that of Magdalen for the autograph of Pepys's Diary and the Pepys collection of ballads. Other libraries have other claims to attention, while the University Library, placed in the new and splendid room, erected by Mr. Cockerel, which is only a portion of the intended design, forms a worthier rival than is supposed to the Bodleian. The collection of about 30,000 volumes, brought together by Bishop Moore of Norwich, and presented to the University by George 1., abounds in resources not yet sufficiently explored. The library is spoken of in the University Calendar as containing over 170,000 volumes. The Fitzwilliam library also belonging to tho University, and placed in the Fitzwilliam Museum, of which it forms a part, is rich in works of art.