A.D. 1862
A large collection of British Essayists and Periodicals was presented by the late Rev. F. W. Hope, D.C.L., the munificent benefactor to the University Museum, the founder of the Professorship of Zoology, and the donor also of a large collection of engraved portraits and other prints361. The collection was one which had been formed by John Thomas Hope, Esq., the donor’s father. It contains some 760 specimens of its class of literature, belonging chiefly to the eighteenth century. Special thanks for the gift were returned by Convocation, on Feb. 20. A catalogue, which had been drawn up for Mr. Hope by Mr. Jacob Henry Burn, containing notices in detail of the various publications, was printed at the University Press, in 1865, in an octavo volume.
A Hebrew MS. of the Pentateuch, probably of the thirteenth century, was bought for £32 10s. Some tracts relating to the period of the Great Rebellion were bought at the sale of Dr. Bandinel’s extensive Caroline collection.
On March 4, the Curators accepted the gift of a bust of Rev. F. W. Robertson, late incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, which had been purchased by subscription. It is now placed in the Picture Gallery.
A large number of purchase-duplicates, which had accumulated during the course of many years, were removed from the Library and sold by auction, in London, by Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson, in May. Among them were some of great rarity. The sale, which lasted five days, produced £766 2s. 6d.; of which £110 5s. were given for a specimen of the St. Alban’s press, the Rhetorica Nova of Gul. de Saona, printed in 1489. A second and smaller sale, containing many English works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took place on April 12, 1865, at which a copy of Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame (1593), produced £101, and Decker’s Guls Horne-Booke, 1609, £81. The proceeds of the whole sale amounted to £750 18s. 6d.
The Rev. Alfred Hackman, M.A., Chaplain and Precentor of Ch. Ch., and P. C. of St. Paul’s, Oxford, and an Assistant in the Library of twenty-five years’ standing, was approved by Convocation, on April 12, as Mr. Coxe’s successor in the Sub-librarianship; after a discussion, which led to the abrogation by Convocation, in February, of a provision in the Statutes forbidding the holding cure of souls in connection with that office or that of Head-librarian without special licence from the Curators.
Notes
361 These engravings are deposited in the gallery of the Radcliffe, under the charge of a separate Keeper, the Rev. J. Treacher, M.A. They do not belong to the Bodleian.