At the Restoration, Thomas Rosse was made royal librarian, but his offices were already so numerous that he was unable to bestow much attention on the books.  Nevertheless, he revived the project of printing the Alexandrian Ms., and urged the king to interest himself in bringing it about, saying that, although it would cost 200 pounds, it would “appear glorious in history after your Majesty’s death.”  “Pish,” replied Charles ii., characteristically, “I care not what they say of me in history when I am dead,” and there was an end of the matter till our own day.

The year 1678 is noteworthy in the annals of the Royal library as the period at which it acquired the series of valuable MSS. known as the Theyer collection.  They had been bought from Theyer’s executors by Robert Scott, a famous bookseller, who offered them to the king for 6841.  He subsequently got them for 560 pounds.  Next to the Alexandrian Codex this is the most important addition to the library in comparatively modern times.  It consisted of 336 volumes, including l00 rare treatises, a whole series of Roger Bacon’s works, and the celebrated autograph collection formerly belonging to Cranmer, and long mourned as lost.  Many of these manuscripts could be traced back to the library of Llanthony Abbey, having passed into Theyer’s possession by the marriage of one- of his ancestors with a sister of the last prior of Llanthony.  Nearly the whole of the Theyer collection is described in the Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum of 1697, but without the least hint that it then formed part of the Royal library.  The great Richard Bentley was at that time librarian, and was responsible for the amazing omission, having prohibited any mention of the Royal library in that work, his reason perhaps being the disgraceful condition into which the books had fallen.  Bentley was by far the most distinguished of the royal librarians during any part of its history, and he would, no doubt, have accomplished wonders if he had not been so outrageous a pluralist, so busy a scholar, and so pugnacious a litigant.  Not only was he Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Regius Professor of Divinity, Rector of Haddington, Rector of Wilburn, and Archdeacon of Ely, but he was immersed in numberless lawsuits, and in classical studies which would alone have sufficed to fill the whole life of an ordinary man.  What he, in spite of these multifarous occupations, attempted to do for the Royal library at least testifies to the grandeur of his conceptions and the boldness of his schemes.  His failure to place the library within the reach of students was as much due to the stultifying effects of red-tapeism as to the disorganised condition of the library itself.