I have been trying to find out a bit more about Edward Harley, about whom I wrote the entry in the Macmillan Dictionary of Art (the big Dick), but so long ago that I have forgotten most of it. He was born in 1689 and educated at Westminster and Christ Church, when Henry Aldrich was Dean. After graduating, he became a Tory MP for Radnor, but was never remotely as interested in politics as his prominent, highly political father. Instead, he devoted himself to bibliophily and antiquarianism, massively extending his father’s already extensive collection of books and manuscripts. According to A.S. Turberville, who wrote a history of Welbeck in the 1930s, ‘He loved the society of men of letters and of learning; he dabbled in archaeology; he patronised the arts; he made the collecting of manuscripts, of books, and of coins, medals and miniatures the consuming passion of his life’. Every summer he went on tours round England, ostensibly to visit his wife’s estates, but in reality to look at archaeological remains, writing sardonic comments on any examples of new building he encountered, particularly if they were designed by Colen Campbell, who he called ‘that ignorant rascal’ or had work by William Kent, which he described as full of ‘very clumsy over-charged chimney pieces to the great waste of fine marble’. Meanwhile, he bought manuscripts ‘with incessant assiduity and at an immense expense’. He started out with about 3,000 printed books and manuscripts and ended up with over 7,000 manuscripts – Greek, Hebrew and Oriental – and a library of about 50,000 books by the time of his death from drink in June 1741. He employed Gibbs to design extensions to Wimpole and bought pictures by Carracci and Claude Lorraine. Horace Walpole was contemptuous of that part of his collection which was sold by auction after his death, describing it as ‘much rubbish’, including such items as ‘Feather bonnets presented by the Americans to Queen Elizabeth’, apart from ‘a few fine bronzes, and a very fine collection of English coins’. But there are quite a few things he owned still at Welbeck, not just miniatures by Christian Zincke and Bernard Lens, but also a painted cabinet which had been owned by the Earl of Arundel and a dagger said to have belonged to Henry VIII.