Cotton made two separate petitions to have his rights over his own property restored.  In the first he signified to the Privy Council that their detaining his books without rendering any reason for the same had been the cause of the mortal malady from which he suffered.  In the second, in which his son joined, he merely complained that the documents were perishing for lack of airing, and that no one was allowed to consult them.  The Lord Privy Seal was at last sent to him with a tardy message from the king, but too late to avail him anything.  Within half an hour of his death the Earl of Dorset came to condole with his son, now Sir Thomas Cotton, bearing the somewhat ambiguous assurance that, “as his Majesty loved his father, so he would continue his love to him.”  Sir Robert Cotton died on the 6th May 1631, and was buried at Connington.  Long afterwards it was discovered that the author of the fatal pamphlet, that had done so much to kill him, was Sir Robert Dudley, who had written it when in exile at Florence.

Before tracing the subsequent history of the Cottonian library we will pause and consider some of the most important manuscripts which it contained at the death of its famous originator.

It has been said that he turned his attention largely towards collecting materials for every period of English history.  Those materials are particularly rich as regards the Anglo-Saxon period.

Beginning chronologically we find here (in Vitellius, A 15) the story of Beowulf, the oldest monument of AngloSaxon literature, reaching back into the ages of heathendom.  It is a pagan war-song which, in being handed down from minstrel to minstrel, has lost nothing of its wild, exultant beauty, while it has received many Christian inflexions from the bards of a better religion than that in which it was originally conceived, through whose minds it passed before being committed to parchment.  When the Saxons had embraced Christianity they carefully weeded out from their national poetry all allusion to personages of pagan mythology, so that, in an antiquarian sense, their literature suffered.  But the forcible and picturesque imagery of half-barbaric tribes still remained.  The coarseness of the beer-hall is, however, subdued by the gold and silken embroideries with which it is adorned.  In a vivid description of a battle, in the midst of lurid flames, of blood and carnage, the enemy is “put to sleep with the sword.”  When a hero dies in peace, “he goes on his way.”

The poem of Beowulf has been variously edited.  It was first noticed by Wanley, in his catalogue of Saxon MSS. in 1705.  It was printed with a Latin translation by Thorkelin, at Copenhagen, in 1815.  Conybeare, in his Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, points out several errors into which the Dane, Thorkelin, and the Englishman, Turner fell; and Thorpe, in his Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, differs from all preceding editors, who considered the heroes as mythical beings of a divine order, he suggesting that they were kings and chieftains of the North, within the pale of authentic history.* This opinion had been shared by Kemble, but under the influence of Grimmperhaps the greatest authority on these matters—­he ended by regarding the poem as mythic.  Later critics have, however, considered that it deals with historical persons.