A.D. 1759
Above forty Syriac, Greek and Arabic MSS. are recorded in the Registers to have been presented by Henry Dawkins, Esq., of Standlynch, Wilts, who had collected them while travelling in the East with Robert Wood, whose works on Baalbec and Palmyra he presented at the same time. There are now sixty MSS. in Syriac alone which pass under the name of Dawkins, some of which are of great age and value. They are described in Dr. R. Payne Smith’s Catalogue of the Syriac MSS. Mr. Dawkins died in London, June 19, 1814, aged eighty-six.
Swedenborg’s Arcana Cœlestia, published anonymously, in 8 vols. were sent ‘by the author, unknown.’ The same donor, still unknown, sent in 1766 Selecti Dionys. Halicarn. tractatus.
In this year and in 1761 published music began to be received from Stationers’ Hall, and to be entered in the Register. It remained piled up in cupboards until about twenty-three years ago, when it was all disinterred and carefully arranged by Rev. H. E. Havergal, M.A., then Chaplain of New Coll. and Ch. Ch., and an assistant in the Library (now Vicar of Cople, Beds.), and bound in some 300 or 400 volumes. Since that time two further series of musical volumes have been arranged and bound.
A meagre list of the pictures, &c., in the Picture Gallery and Library was printed by the Janitor (or Under-janitor), N. Bull, and ‘sold by him at the Picture Gallery.’ It fills twelve duodecimo pages. A new edition, ‘with additions and amendments,’ including the pictures in the Ashmolean Museum, was issued by him in 1762, in sixteen octavo pages. This was, as it seems, the first list that had been issued since Hearne printed his original Catalogue in his Letter containing an Account of some Antiquities between Windsor and Oxford. A list, equally meagre with Bull’s, was published by W. Cowderoy, Janitor, in 1806. He was succeeded in office (before 1825) by —— Lenthall; on whom followed the present Janitor, J. Norris, appointed in 1835. By him a new Catalogue, enlarged with biographical notices, was issued, filling sixty pages; which was reissued, with a few alterations, in 1847, when such of the pictures as were not portraits had been removed to the new Randolph Gallery. As all the portraits were a few years ago distinctly labelled, but few copies of the Catalogue have, consequently, been since sold, and no new edition has appeared.