and improving, that hardly anything curious escaped him. He had made the best collection that possibly he could of Erasmus’s works.”36
In another place Hearne describes Dyson as—
“A person of a very strange, prying, and inquisitive genius in the matter of books, as may appear from many libraries; there being books chiefly in old English, almost in every library, that have belonged to him, with his name upon them.”37
The following interesting entry from Smith’s catalogue corroborates Hearne’s statement as to Smith’s acquisition of Dyson’s books—
“115. Six several catalogues of all such books, touching the state ecclesiastical as temporal of the realm of England, which were published upon several occasions, in the reigns of K. Henry the VIIth and VIIIth, Philip and Mary, Q. Elizabeth, K. James and Charles I., collected by Mr. H. Dyson: out of whose library was gathered by Mr. Smith a great part of the rarities of this catalogue.”