The six thousand and more incunabula of the Bodleian Library and the two thousand six hundred in my recently finished catalogue covering all the other libraries of Oxford make a total of some nine thousand books (not editions, for I include duplicates) in the possession of the University as a whole. It is hoped that a complete catalogue will be published, probably in three volumes; but there is a difference between Mr. Sheppard's catalogue of the Bodleian and mine in that his is arranged in ‘Proctor-order,’ i.e., by countries, towns, and presses, while mine is in ‘Goff-order,’ i.e., a straightforward alphabetical order under authors. For technical reasons they cannot be arranged in any other way; but while Mr. Sheppard's catalogue will have complete author indexes, my own will have indexes by printers and publishers as well as by libraries (since some of my libraries are not colleges).

Enrique IV is commonly acknowledged to be Spain's worst king; in the frequently picturesque words of Menéndez Pelayo, ‘son, sin duda, los veinte años de aquel reinado … uno de los más tristes y calamitosos períodos de nuestra historia.’ We can find favorable points about him, and there are many favorable comments in the early sources. We can point out that the contemporary opinion was much influenced by the comparison with his father, Juan II, whose reign was all show and little substance, and with his successor, Isabel la Católica, who with her husband concluded the reconquest of Granada, seen as the glorious culmination of eight centuries of struggle. Certain hard facts, however, remain.

Roger Ascham's dialogue Toxophilus is a book made of books. Ascham himself indicated the importance of classical sources to his ‘schole of shootinge’ by providing an apparatus of marginal references in Toxophilus. In its substance his dialogue of expert knowledge envisioned the old learning, drawing upon its forms in a new imaginative style. It is remarkable that for his use and conception of classical learning Ascham always had a model. He admired the great teachers Cheke and Sturm, and his writing abounds in judgments and appreciations of other classical scholars of his time. But his model for his relation to the literary past was Cicero. I do not mean Cicero the master orator but Cicero the student of the ancient Greeks.

Although many scholars have cited Marin Mersenne's Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim for his critical remarks about the life of Julius Caesar Vanini, none of them has realised the extent to which Mersenne dealt with Vanini's works. They have found in Mersenne only a story about Vanini's intention to teach atheism, his execution, and one or two criticisms of his ideas. Far from making here and there a few comments about Vanini, however, Mersenne devoted a large portion of the volume to a critical analysis of the view of nature and religion which Vanini presents in his two books. The purpose of this article is, first, to explain why no one has hitherto discovered the extent of Mersenne's preoccupation with Vanini and, secondly, to examine briefly his basic attitude to Vanini's life and works.

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy… . I was not a little offended with this malady, shall I say my mistress Melancholy, my Egeria, or my malus genius [evil genius]? and for that cause, … make an antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.

Such teasingly self-referential passages as that quoted above have long led scholars to speculate as to the real physical and mental condition of Robert Burton. Did he suffer, as he claimed, the ravages of melancholy, or was he as a scholar simply assuming the fashionable scholars’ disease as a peg upon which to hang his encyclopedic treatise? Much of this uncertainty arises from gaps in our knowledge of Burton's biography.