New manuscript fragments by John Locke

[Extract] In his will of 1704, John Locke (1632–1704) bequeathed his manuscripts to his relative Peter King (1669–1734), first Baron King. King’s descendants, the earls of Lovelace, preserved these manuscripts until 1947, when the collection was acquired by the Bodleian Library en bloc.1 This collection was catalogued by Philip Long in his Summary Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of the Papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library (1959).2 Scholars interested in consulting Locke’s manuscripts can refer to Long’s Summary Catalogue for a guide to the Lovelace Collection; however, a systematic catalogue of the smaller deposits of Locke’s manuscripts in several other repositories remains a desideratum. These repositories acquired Locke’s manuscripts from a variety of different sources, particularly the nineteenth-century autograph market and a small number of sales presided over by the descendants of Locke’s close friend Edward Clarke (1650–1710), the MP for Taunton (1690–1710).3