In 1881, at the time of the death of President Garfield,
Benjamin Scott, Chamberlain of London, proposed again in
the newspapers that the restitution should be made. But
nothing came of it.
When I went abroad I determined to visit the locality on
the borders of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, from which Bradford
and Brewster and Robinson, the three leaders of the Pilgrims,
came, and where their first church was formed, and the places
in Amsterdam and Leyden where the emigrants spent thirteen
years. But I longed especially to see the manuscript of Bradford
at Fulham, which then seemed to me, as it now seems to me,
the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recover
one of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from the
pen of the Evangelist.
The desire to get it back grew and grew during the voyage
across the Atlantic. I did not know how such a proposition
would be received in England. A few days after I landed
I made a call on John Morley. I asked him whether he thought
the thing could be done. He inquired carefully into the story,
took down from his shelf the excellent though brief life of
Bradford in Leslie Stephen's "Biographical Dictionary," and
told me he thought the book ought to come back to us, and
that he should be glad to do anything in his power to help.
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