Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/524

but immediately after sermon, before I had well got out of the Chapel, many of the Seniors of the Inn gathered about me and asked me many questions altogether frivolous, ill natured and ensnaring. Amongst the rest Mr. Handcock distinguished himself in a more particular manner by asking me, with some austerity, whether your Lordship was not my dictator. I was so pestered with the stale, empty jests and pretended witticisms of the Benchers that I withdrew to avoid their clamorous reproaches. The Wednesday following (being the Council night) Sir Joseph Jekyll, Mr. Spencer Cowper and Mr. Carter, then Treasurer and Chairman, began most violently and bitterly to inveigh against me and to lay my setting that Psalm before the Bench as an offence of the highest nature, aggravating their charge with so much heat and vehemence that the Hon. John Hungerford, Esq., and some other worthy gentlemen then present could scarce have room to put in one word on my behalf, so loudly did these inquisitors, like censurers, thunder out their anathemas against me, and being much superior in number to the good few who took my part and would defend me, they passed a vote for my immediate discharge. The next morning one of the servants of the Inn came to acquaint me that they had no further service for me, but that they had dismissed me from my clerkship for being a person disaffected to the government."

Carey's conduct, by the way, looking at the state of parties and the late perils from the Pretender, was certainly indiscreet in the highest degree; it might have involved the Benchers in a suspicion of Jacobitism. Now we come to what concerns the library: "I was at the same time," says Carey, "keeper of the library in the Middle Temple, under John Troughton, Esq., where I employed myself in regulating and reducing to decency and order a place which through long neglect was become a perfect chaos of paper and a wilderness of books, which were mixed and misplaced to such a degree that it was next to an impossibility to find out any particular book without tumbling over the whole. This undertaking cost me about twelve months' hard labour and pains, besides money out of my own pocket to transcribers. However, I went forward with the greatest alacrity because Mr. Ludlow, then Treasurer, encouraged me by repeated promises (which now I may call specious and empty) of reward when completed, as now it is. I having made a new catalogue in five alphabets with columns (all of my own invention) of all the tracts contained in the library, which catalogue is one hundred sheets in folio, and the books are now so regularly ranged, and the catalogue so plain, easy, and exact, that anybody may go directly from it to any required book or pamphlet without any difficulty or hesitation; so that not only the catalogue but even the library itself are evident demonstrations of my labour and instances of their ingratitude to me who egged me on to this work without rewarding me for it."

This catalogue of Carey's is evidently what was afterwards published as the Worsley catalogue. A hundred years later the number of books had increased from a little over four thousand to fifteen or sixteen thousand. Today they number about forty thousand. The present catalogue is a very full and complete one, and is contained in six manuscript folio volumes,—one a subject matter index, the other five giving the names of authors. The society owes it to the painstaking energy of Mr. John Hutchinson, the courteous and cultivated librarian. Mr. Hutchinson has himself literary associations. He is, interesting to relate, a nephew of Wordsworth's wife, Mary Hutchinson, to whom the poet, in his lines "She was a Phantom of Delight" (written three years after marriage), dedicated