When Peter the Great was wearied with London and Londoners, and even receiving visits of ‘the thin gentleman’ in ‘a modest looking coach’ to his lodgings in Norfolk Street, Strand, and returning them through the back door of Kensington House had ceased to amuse, he was induced to make an expedition from Deptford to Lambeth where, we are told, ‘nothing in England astonished him so much as the Archiepiscopal library … he declared that he had never imagined that there were so many printed volumes in the world.’ One would like to know if they displayed to him among the MSS. that Elizabethan atlas (463) with its wonderful map of the New World and its mariner's compass in the wooden cover—an atlas made, as it shows, in days when Africa was better known than Scotland and Canada included what we now know as the United States; or Sir Henry Maynwaring's treatise on nautical terms (91, cf. 268), parent of many similar works. They form at any rate part of the original collection which the Archbishops hold in trust ‘to ye service of God and his Church, of the Kings and Commonwealth of this Realme, and particularly of the Archbishops of Canterbury,’ in the terms of Archbishop Abbott's will, ‘as they will answere unto me, and my predecessor [Richard Bancroft] in that fearefull day of God.’ Those treasures thus preserved have been added to, under sanctions less tremendous, not only by the munificence of Archbishops such as Sheldon and Tenison, Secker and Manners-Sutton, but also by the gifts of readers: or if Lambeth Library is the only one in London, public or private, of which it can be said that access has been given to students for over three hundred years, it may be allowed to the enthusiasm of one of the youngest as well as the latest of its Keepers to venture the opinion that it has gained thereby not less than it has given. It was a reader, John Selden, who saved it in the days of the Commonwealth: it was yet other readers, William Dugdale, and in the following century Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham, who recovered for it valuable MSS. which, owing to the change of the times, could no longer be regained, as had been done in earlier days, by the weapons of the major excommunication and that godly discipline as to which some of my brother librarians probably agree with the Prayer Book that its restoration is much to be wished. And while there are many other readers down to the present time to whom the Library is indebted not only for books but even for MSS., there have been few I believe, who share with King James I the ignominy of having abused their privilege.