The Rev. Benjamin Heath, D.D., one of the sons to whom Mr. Benjamin Heath gave a part of his books, was born on the 29th of September 1739. He was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, of which College he became a Fellow. After leaving the University he was appointed an assistant master at Eton, and in 1771 succeeded Dr. Sumner as headmaster of Harrow, a post he held for fourteen years.[85] He died on the 31st of May 1817, at the rectory of Walkerne in the county of Hertford, a living given to him by his College, which he held with the rectory of Farnham in Buckinghamshire. He was buried at Exeter. Dr. Heath, who was 'a scholar and a bibliomaniac,' added greatly to the library given to him by his father, for which he built a large room at Walkerne, where, says Dibdin, 'he saw, entertained, and caressed his friends, with Alduses in the forenoon, and with a cheerful glass towards evening, hospitable, temperate, kind-hearted, with a well furnished mind and purse, and with a larder and cellar which might have supplied materials for a new edition of Pynson's Royal Boke of Cookery and Kervinge, 1500, 4to.'[86] Some years before his death Heath offered his books to King's College, Cambridge, for half the sum they had cost him; but the College authorities declined the purchase, and he then sold the principal portion of them to some private individuals, who, Dibdin believes, were Messrs. Cuthell and Martin, for three thousand pounds beneath the sum they ultimately produced,[87] and they instructed Mr. Jeffery of 11 Pall Mall to sell the books by auction. The sale took place on Thursday, the 5th of April 1810, and twelve following days and Wednesday, May 2nd, and eighteen following days. It consisted of four thousand seven hundred and eighty-six lots, which realised eight thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine pounds. The sale catalogue states that the library consisted of 'rare, useful and valuable publications in every department of literature, from the first invention of printing to the present time, all of which are in the most perfect condition.' Another catalogue, with the prices and purchasers' names, of which it is said only two hundred and fifty copies were printed, was published later in the year by Constable of Edinburgh. Both the catalogues are to be found in the Library of King George III. in the British Museum. Dibdin describes this sale in enthusiastic terms in his Bibliomania:—'Never,' he writes, 'did the bibliomaniac's eye alight upon "sweeter copies"—as the phrase is; and never did the bibliomaniacal barometer rise higher than at this sale! The most marked phrensy characterized it. A copy of the Editio Princeps of Homer (by no means a first-rate one) brought £92:[88] and all the Aldine Classics produced such an electricity of sensation that buyers stuck at nothing to embrace them!'[89]

[85] Dibdin, Bibliographical Decameron, vol. iii. p. 368.