The Private Collections offer considerable advantages to the Historical enquirer, to alleviate the toil with which their extent threatens him. He will find in them copious transcripts of original documents made with a fidelity that deserves implicit reliance, though it fail to satisfy curiosity; and with a perspicuity most acceptable in exchange for the cramped and faded characters of antiquity.

For Hare's MSS. I cannot do better than present a ready drawn account.

“Robert Hare was an Esquire of good worship and wealth, and a great lover and preserver of Antiquities, says Fuller, Hist. Univ. p. 15.

He was the Son of Sir Nicholas Hare, quondam Rotulorum Cancellariæ magistri, as he tells us in the preface to his Collections, which work he says he undertook at the request of Dr. Capcott then Vice-Chancellor, and finished A.D. 1587.

We are told in the first form of Public Commemoration of Benefactors made A.D. 1639, Dr. Cosin Vice-Chancellor, that — Principum Chartas Indulta et Privilegia quæcunque vel Rempublicam, Academiam vel Municipium Cantabrigiæ spectabant, ingenti sumptu et industria collegit; quæ cum quatuor omnia libris digessisset, et eleganter manu descripta triplicasset, eorum primarium Exemplar in membranis exaratum inter Archiva Academiæ, alterum apud Procancellarium, tertium vero apud Registrarium asservari voluit.

There are now four Volumes with the Vice-Chancellor; I am told there was a fifth, which was lost by the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. James, in 1684.