The Manuscript Library of Sir Robert Cotton.

Colin G. C. Tite gave the Panizzi Lectures in 1993: 'My purpose in these lectures is to look at one aspect - but certainly the most lasting one - of that career: Sir Robert Cotton's acquisition of his remarkable collection of manuscripts.' We have his portrait by Cornelius Johnson in the National Portrait Gallery, and another by Paul van Somer engraved by Vertue showing Cotton's hand lying on MS Otho B.vi, a manuscript almost wholly destroyed in the great fire of 1731; both portraits are here reproduced. We learn that William Camden was Cotton's schoolmaster at Westminster, and that Camden sowed the seed of the love of books that grew in Cotton into a fruitful acquisitiveness. He became when young a member of that eminent first Society of Antiquaries, and we learn what were his first acquisitions. He prospered with the Smart accession to the throne of England: 'Not only did he receive a knighthood in that outpouring …