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Doc. 809.] 827
THE MISSING MANUSCRIPTS.
"Concerning the £5 1s. you have paid for the binding of
our MSS. it will not be as you say, ’a combat of friendship
between us,’ but the Academy regards as a strict duty of
gratitude to reimburse your expenses, as soon as our property
has been restored ; herself being no less interested than your
Committee, in the preservation of these precious MSS. from
injury and decay.
"As for the rest, you are perfectly in the right in sup
posing, ’ that no suggestion will be entertained by the Royal
Academy, short of the return of the original MSS.;’ and if
the Committee will have the goodness to enrich our Library
with a copy of its new editions of Swedenborg’s theological
works, we shall thankfully receive them as a friendly present,
but without the least pretension to regard this as compen
sation for the permission given by the Academy to make what
use you find most convenient of the contents of the Sweden
borg MSS.
"As you have informed us by a very clear and historical
deduction how the oft-mentioned MSS., after various succes
sions, have at last-
’ most honourably indeed’ - come into your
hands, I will only add a brief account of their first alienation
from the Academy. It is already about sixty years since the
MSS. were lent to Messrs. Wadström and Nordensköld, only
on the condition to restore them to the Secretary of the
Academy. No penalty has ever been imposed or received
from the borrowers or their successors, so there can in no
ways be a question of returning such penalty, neither on our
side nor on your own, as you seem to suppose at least as a
possibility.
"The borrowers having lived a long time in foreign coun
tries, the reclamations from the Academy may probably never
have reached them, at least they have never been answered.
"Nordensköld offered to bind all the MSS. at his own
expense, which the Academy gratefully accepted ; but we have
no proof in hand that all the MSS. he received to bind have
been completely returned. It is probable, in general, that in
those times, about 1780, the value of Swedenborg’s posthumous
works in manuscript may have been less known and estimated
than in our days ; and that therefore in delivering over these
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