On visiting the Wren Library in Cambridge Charles Lamb had an unwelcome shock. Inspecting the manuscript for Milton’s Lycidas, he was “staggered” to discover that the drafts were “interlined, corrected as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure!” Before that “evil hour” when he confronted the artist in his workshop, he had regarded Milton's great elegy as “a fullgrown beauty – as sprung up with all its parts absolute”. Lamb rued the day of his disillusionment.
Readers of a similarly romantic turn of mind may also wish to keep clear of the Bodleian in Oxford. That library has made headlines recently for taking possession of some 74 poems by the Victorian Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. It has actually had these poems on long-term deposit for several decades; but still, it really is news – and wonderful news – that their future has now been made permanent.
