BIBLIOMANIA.

New Zealand Mail, 17 September 1902, Page 19

BIBLIOMANIA.

(By Andrew Lang.)

rich collector, first, is ftpt to want • Tb crtnts By these he seldom means Sltor caf manuscripts, to a well-regu-l„ted mind perhaps the most moving of lat „ They are not pretty, they are not frilled and illuminated: nut who knows Shat secrets of the past may lurk under the* crabbed hands? Personally I want Z originals of Queen Mary's CaskeS ratters the poisonous letters which she said’to have written to the Earl of nnHuvell Bid she write them, or are SS? in part, forgeries? We shall never hn certain. They are known to have been in the hands of the first Earl of Gowno in 1584 Collectors were in the market. Oueen Elizabeth offered largely, so did Queen Mary, but Gowrie would not part. Now it is not impossible that you or I niieht have bought these papers- lately for a sovereign! I tell the strry as it was told to me, only suppressing a name. In 1584, we know, Gowrie held tlieso priceless treasures, having received them through a bastard of the Earl of Morton about the time of that noblemr.n’s execution. In the spring of 1584 Gowrie was awkwardly situated. He was suspected by liis king of intending a • new rebellion, and he was suspected by his fellow conspirators of having taken to the fine arts and lost his taste for high treason, then the ruling passion of the Scottish gentry. In these circumstances he left his new gallery of Italian art at Perth and went to Dundee. Here ho had the sea open before him: if the conspiracy of his friends was a success, lie could join them; if it failed, he could sail to England or abroad.

Now since nothing would have made him so welcome to Elizabeth as the Casket Letters. Gowrie probablv curried the letters with him to D ’ndee. But here he was arrested by Colonel Stewart, after attempting to defend the house in which lie was living, and we never hear more of the Casket or the letters. But five years ago the house in Dundee where Gowrie resided was pulled down, and a gentleman begged the workmen employed to search carefully for any old papers. None were found, but the inqu’rer learned that, five or six years previously, another old house hard by, named “Ladv Wark’s Stairs," had been demolished, and that in a secret recess in the angle of a chimney place a workman had found a bundle of old M.S.S. The workman carried them (the story went on) to a person whom he regarded as an authority in things antiquarian. This authority looked at the papers, said that thev “were onh- old letters in French," and gave them back. No more is known of them. Anv old letters in French, concealed in a secret hiding hole of a sixteenth century house in Scotland, would deserve attention. But if these papers had been conveyed by. Gowrie to a friend at Dundee, and ; f tliev were the contents of Queen Mary’s Casket, what a bargain the collector might havebought from the finder of the treasure! I tell the story as it was told to me, and the moral is to look at old MSS. bpfore throwing them away.—“Cornhill Magazine.”