The Confessions of a Collector

CHAPTER III

The appearance of the Handbook introduced me to the late Mr Henry Huth, and gave me the free range for years of his fine library, with the incidental advantage of assisting in its enlargement, and in the preparation of the catalogue. I had written to Mr Huth in the winter of 1866, soliciting the title and collation of a unique book in his hands, and he wrote back, furnishing the information not quite correctly, but stating that he was always, when in town, at home on Sunday afternoons. This slight incident produced a ten years’ intimacy, and was instrumental in inaugurating a new era in my bibliographical career.

It was when I had reached the letter K in the alphabet that I added Mr Huth to my acquaintance, and thenceforward my book, as it appeared in parts, reflected in its pages the beneficial fruit of weekly visits to that gentleman’s house, and his friendly co-operation in an enterprise which more or less interested him personally.

Our constant intercourse and my widening knowledge of certain classes of books, for which we had a common liking, naturally led to Mr Huth, in the most delicate manner, suggesting after a while, that he should be obliged if I would let him hear of any with which I might meet; and during many years I was in the habit of sending to him single volumes or parcels which fell in my way, and which he had the option of rejecting if he did not care for them, or they happened to be duplicates. I very soon, too, persuaded him to allow me to carry out small literary undertakings for him, for the sake of distributing the very limited number of copies printed among his friends and my own. I became sensible of the inconvenience and awkwardness attendant on the completion of his library, as it involved commercial relations distasteful to us both, and I ventured, as soon as I could, to propose to him a yearly allowance for my help and advice. This idea he was unwilling to entertain, however, because he thought that it would involve something like my domestication on the premises, and the library, as usual, was almost personal to himself. I therefore most reluctantly continued to add to his collection on my own terms, and, with the books which I edited for him and for the publishers, and the general exercise of my bibliographical experience elsewhere, I was in a position to develop by steady degrees my large, yet still rather loosely-defined, project for a general catalogue of early English literature.

My Handbook was brought to an end in 1867, about a twelvemonth subsequent to the fortuitous meeting with Mr Huth. But every day, when the more powerful motive for book-hunting existed, seemed to do its part in opening my eyes to the illimitable magnitude of the field on which I had entered, and in compelling me to pass my pen through some article which I had been tempted to borrow from a secondary authority. In other words, the Handbook was no sooner bound, than I began to convert a considerable proportion of it into waste-paper.

My relations with Mr Huth were, on the whole, as agreeable as they were advantageous. Many and many a rarity in his catalogue passed through my hands, and even when he acquired books elsewhere, he grew into the habit of asking me to go and look through them before they were sent home. My improving familiarity with his tastes and wants placed me in a favoured position, when I stumbled on items in the book-shops and the sale-rooms. Sometimes I had to incur rather formidable risks, and to buy for the library very expensive works, subject to them being approved, and merely on the certainty that they were not duplicates, and were clear desiderata. Such was the case with the extraordinary copy of George Turbervile’s Poems, 1570, in the original sheep binding, as clean and spotless as when it left the first vendor three centuries prior, and nearly the only one known. John Pearson, of York street, Covent Garden, had obtained it of a retired dealer at Shrewsbury for £30, and he asked me £105, with the proviso that it was not returnable as imperfect. I collated it on the spot, and F. S. Ellis very kindly and liberally lent me the money to pay for it. Luckily Mr Huth took to it, and gave me fifty guineas for my trouble. It is one of the chief Elizabethan gems in a library abounding in them.

I remember being in Boone’s shop, in Bond Street, one day, and seeing there a marvellous and matchless copy of Brathwaite’s Barnaby’s Journal, almost uncut, and beautifully bound in red morocco. Boone demanded £18, 18s. for it. I put it in my pocket. The following Sunday I saw Mr Huth, and inquired what sort of a copy of Barnaby he had. He replied that his was as good an one as could be desired, and he opened the case where it lay, and handed it to me. I took mine out, and handed it to him. He smiled. Of course, there was no comparison. His went as a duplicate to Lilly. He did not judge Boone’s dear at twenty-five guineas; it would bring twice that sum now.

I was so much accustomed to frequent the booksellers, and I was so well known and trusted that I overlooked the circumstance, in my earlier visits to Bond Street, that I had not dealt quite so regularly or largely there as elsewhere, and one day when Boone shewed me a fine Book of Hours, of which the price was £150, I coolly placed it under my arm, and walked out of the place, with an intimation that I should like to have it. I suppose that the firm was reassured when I called, a day or so after, and gave them my cheque for the amount. We became very good friends, and I took several things off Boone’s hands for Mr Huth. The Hours I have just mentioned was bound in old velvet; and the owner rather unwisely, as I thought, let Bedford give it a new morocco livery.

One offer on the part of this house to me I was unable to entertain—the Butler MSS. formerly in the hands of the poet’s editor, Thyer, and containing matter not printed by him. Boone spoke of £250; but I declined. What became of them, I never heard; they were not sold with his stock.

His retirement destroyed a link between the old school and the new. He had many curious stories to relate about those whom his uncle and himself had known—about Libri and Dibdin. He (the younger B.) was fairly shrewd and experienced, but thoroughly straightforward. I recollect picking off his shelf one morning an old tract of no particular value, but, as it happened, not in the British Museum, to which I transferred it, bearing on the title the unrecognised autograph, W. Bathon; it was the copy which belonged to Archbishop Laud, when he occupied the See of Bath and Wells.

There was a somewhat parallel incident at the sale of Lord Selsey’s books at Sotheby’s in 1871. I took down from a shelf at random an old Italian book, and perceived at the foot of the title the signature of Montaigne the essayist. I instantaneously closed it, and put it back, for I saw Mr Toovey approach. I waited to see it sold; it fell to me at 2s. F. S. Ellis came into the room a moment after, and heard of the find. He explained to me that he had a Montaigne client, and wished me to let him have my bargain, which I surrendered for a consideration.

I consider Mr Huth answerable for my conversion from a pure amateur into a commercial speculator in books. He was the prime mover in producing the change in my views and arrangements—one which certainly responded to my convenience in working out my great project as a bibliographer, by supplying me in the interval, where the direct practical result was nil, with ways and means, rather than to my natural feeling, which would have kept me outside the market as a buyer and seller. My unconquerable and boundless ambition to become the creator of an entirely new bibliographical system, so far as the early literature of Great Britain and Ireland was concerned, reconciled me, to some extent, to the unwelcome, though profitable, labour of utilising for my own purposes the stores which I accumulated and distributed from year to year, commencing with that which immediately succeeded my introduction to Mr Huth.

I had already fulfilled that gentleman’s own express desire, that I should co-operate in the extension of his library in the direction which I was beginning to study in earnest; but my first notable achievement was a purchase which found another destination. Jeffreys of Bristol sent me up, in the winter of 1868, a beautiful copy of Caxton’s Golden Legend, wanting sixteen leaves, which were supplied from one by Wynkyn de Worde. It was an edition of which the Althorp copy was the only perfect one known. The owner asked £85. I hardly understood why he sent it to me, as I had never had any transaction with him. It was on a Friday. I called at B. M. Pickering’s the next morning, and casually stated that I had had such a book offered to me, and that I intended, on the Sunday, to name the matter to Mr Huth, who did not then possess the volume. Pickering begged to see it first; he came down to my house the same evening, and took it away under his arm at £150. If it had not been for John Pearson persuading Jeffrey to raise his price, I should have had it £40 cheaper. Mr Huth subsequently procured another imperfect copy, and at my request Lord Spencer very kindly forwarded his own to London to enable a facsimilist to complete both.

Mr Huth had some very strong preferences—favourite authors and topics. Anything by Wither or Quarles, with curious woodcuts, on an educational theme, or in exceptionally fine state, was sure game. He did not care for theology, unless it was by such a man as Fuller or Jeremy Taylor; and of folios he was shy, in the absence of a valid reason; there were so many which it was imperative to tolerate, commencing with the four Shakespears. To Americana he became at last a convert, but I knew him when he put the question—a pertinent question, too—what he had to do with that sort of book? Henry Stevens, however, and then others, made the interest clearer to him, and he gave way till, in the end, he was master of a fairly good collection, including such capital features as Hariot’s Virginia, 1588, and such unique morçeaux as Rich’s News from Virginia, 1610. I was fortunate enough to enter on the scene, when in numerous respects his shelves were very deficient, and when some of the leading poets of the seventeenth century were conspicuous by their absence. He had not, at the time I refer to, even Beaumont and Fletcher, or Jonson, or Carew, or Lovelace, by way of example. As I run through his catalogue, I notice hundreds and hundreds of volumes which he had been quietly and patiently waiting to receive from someone, as he never went in quest of anything in his life, beyond calling at Lilly’s, Ellis’s, or Quaritch’s, on his way home; and nearly all his dramatic acquisitions, except the quarto Shakespears and other rarities from the Daniel and Charlemont sales in 1864-5, were late additions, obtained for him by myself, as scarcely a second individual would have dreamed of him not having them, or being willing to take them. All his Shirleys, Massingers, Fords, and the rest, came to him at prices which, compared with current figures, make them appear almost nominal. Massinger’s Virgin Martyr, 1622, cost him most; for B. M. Pickering charged me £7, 7s. for the copy, and I have not met with another since that time.

His Beaumont and Fletcher, 1647, which has been lately trotted up to a startling figure by the Americans, cost me 30s. and is one of the finest I ever saw; one leaf was torn, and a second copy was bought for £1 to make the defect good. In the same way his Ben Jonson, 1616-31, the most complete one in existence, with a duplicate title and a cancel leaf, was obtained from Stibbs for 36s. It had been Colonel Cunningham’s, and was spotless in the original calf binding.

Mr Huth was not a Heber; but he liked to look into his books, and of many he had a fair knowledge. He was a linguist and a scholar, and was led by the circumstances of his origin (his father being a German and his mother a Spaniard) to contract a partiality for the literature of those two countries. The ancient Spanish romance, the early German book with woodcuts, were well represented. One of the former, in its pristine stamped livery, was among his earliest purchases, when he frequented Payne & Foss’s establishment with his brother Louis, just toward the close of the career of that distinguished firm, which supplied Heber and his contemporaries—Grenville, Hibbert, the Freelings, and others—and the price was £8. It might at present be £80, if Mr Quaritch were in the right cue.

Although Mr Huth cannot be said to have been a mere amasser of old books, without an interest in their characteristics and literary value, it is curious that he never, so far as I am aware, inserted a MS. note of any kind in a volume, or his autograph, or a bookplate or ex libris. He seemed to shrink from asserting his personality in these respects, and was so far the reverse of Heber, whose memoranda accompanied thousands of the items in his immense library, and manifested his earnestness and indefatigability in obtaining and perpetuating information—nothing else. Of conceit or pedantry no one ever had less.

Toward the last, while the catalogue was in course of preparation by Mr F. S. Ellis and myself, an unpleasant contretemps produced a coolness between Mr Huth and the writer, and I saw nothing farther of him, although we occasionally corresponded down to the period of his death in 1878, the melancholy circumstances of which I have narrated in my Four Generations of a Literary Family. He made additions to his library rather languidly in later years; but he bought here and there to fill up gaps or otherwise, and some of the entries belonging to the earlier letters of the alphabet form an appendix to the above-mentioned work. There used to be a little drawer at Quaritch’s, where any book thought to be acceptable to Mr Huth was deposited day by day against his arrival about five in the afternoon. Once it was an unique tract of King Edward the Fourth and the Tanner of Tamworth, for which he was asked £16, 16s., and he held it up between two fingers, and exhibited it to an acquaintance with him as rather a dear pennyworth. But he took it, and at the same time he rejected an equally unique and far more curious metrical account of the martyrdom of two churchmen in the time of Henry VIII., which the British Museum was glad enough to secure. As he has said to me frankly enough, it was a toss up, whether he bought or did not buy; of course it was a mere fancy, and it is only a piece of history at present that one or two of the booksellers, acquainted with his peculiarity, passed on volumes now and then from one to the other, and what had not pleased in King Street, caught the fish in Garrick Street at an advanced quotation.

Mr Huth was not only vacillating in his pursuit of books, and so missed many which he ought to have secured, but his health began to fail some time prior to his decease, and he was either abroad or in a frame of mind unequal to the discussion of literary questions and the transaction of unnecessary business. His library, as it appears from the printed catalogue, is a very different monument from that which he might have left, had he been more consistent or been more willing to repose confidence in others. The precious volumes, which went elsewhere through his periodical apathy or indisposition, are barely numerable, and it was the more to be regretted, since the outlay was immaterial and the grand nucleus was there.

I suspect that the cause of wavering was one which is common to so many collectors in all departments, and leads in a majority of instances to the abrupt dispersion of the property. I allude to the almost ostentatious indifference of relatives and friends to the treasures, unless, perhaps, they are pictures or china, which a man gathers round him. In this instance £120,000 had been expended in books, MSS., drawings and prints, and the worthy folks who came to the house, what did they know about them? what did they care? A man might well hesitate and wonder whether there was any good in persevering with a hobby personal to himself.

I do not know whether Mr Huth suspected me of extravagance in the purchase of curiosities, but I remember that he one day, at Prince’s Gate, when we were together, rather gravely, yet with his usual gentleness, observed that it was very important to husband one’s resources—to use his own phrase. He entered more with me than with any other stranger into trivial and ordinary matters; and apropos of expenditure I recall his allusion to the habit of some of his clerks in the city laying out a larger sum on their luncheons than he did. Possibly they went home, not to dinner, but to tea. I have mentioned in Four Generations of a Literary Family farther particulars of Mr Huth, which I of course do not here reproduce. I recollect being at Prince’s Gate one Sunday, when Professor —— called, and began to eulogise the palatial residence, the splendid book-room, the noble cases, and so forth; and I at once saw that he was making our host rather uncomfortable by his gaucherie. On some pretext I induced the Professor to accompany me, when I took my leave, and I am sure that Mr Huth was grateful. I do not know that I grudged Huth anything, for he was worthy of his fortune. Perhaps I was a little envious of his knowledge of the notes of birds, which he told me that he possessed, and of which I have the most imperfect and inaccurate idea. I judge that he was reticent even to his family about his affairs, for, after his sudden death, his widow, to whom he left everything, found to her surprise, I was told, that there was more even than she had expected. So that he had acted up to his own maxim. A man may be frugal with £100,000 a year as he may be with the thousandth part of it—more so indeed, as there is a so much wider margin.

CHAPTER IV

My bibliographical pursuits and exigencies, setting aside my concurrent literary ventures, themselves sufficiently numerous and onerous to have employed a person of average application, had the inevitable effect of making me more or less intimately known to most of the persons who in my time have studied or possessed books. My commerce was with the holders as well as with the buyers and sellers of them. On the one hand I had to face the problem of Life, and on the other that of Title-taking. Of my purely literary work, which is not unknown to a few, I may say that the proportion of pot-boilers is not unreasonably large; it might have been larger, had I not chosen as an alternative to turn to account my conversance with old books as a moyen de parvenir, but during all the term of my relationship with Mr Huth I was incessantly engaged in storing up notes on the volumes, which came and which went, against an opportunity for publication. That aim and my contributions to literature, such as the Venetian History, the Warton, the Dodsley, the Blount’s Tenures, united to constitute my compensation for the rather distasteful ordeal of espousing the commercial side. The bibliographical toil was enormous, for the few hundreds of articles, which Mr Huth and others acquired, were a mere handful in comparison with the mass which I gradually digested into my system, and reduced to form and method.

I judge it to be the most intelligible plan, with a view to tracing my somewhat peculiar and anomalous career in connection with books, china, coins and other objects of general interest, to proceed, after furnishing the previous sketch of Mr Huth and my participation in his experiences as a collector, with some account of certain other individuals who influenced me and proved more or less valuable as instruments for carrying out my central and cardinal policy.

George Daniel of Canonbury and John Payne Collier were practically before my time; but I corresponded with the latter on literary subjects, and Daniel I occasionally met in the street or in the sale-room. With Collier’s relative, Frederic Ouvry the solicitor, I had some transactions; but I found him an undecided and capricious sort of person, who had evidently imbibed from Collier a tincture of feeling for the older literature without having any solid convictions of his own. The best part of his library consisted of books which he had purchased from his connexion by marriage, and which the latter had obtained more or less accidentally in the course of his prolonged career. Ouvry, however, did not get all. For in a note to myself, Collier expressly says that his unique copy of Constable’s Diana, 1592, was exchanged by him with Heber for ‘books he more wanted.’ It was he who lent me the fragment of Adam Bel, Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudisle, more ancient and correct than Copland’s text in the British Museum, for my Early Popular Poetry, 1864, before I met with the second and yet more curious and valuable one of 1536 in the hands of the late Mr Henry Bradshaw, which I collated for my Early Popular Poetry of Scotland and the Northern Border, 1896.

The name most directly and intimately associated with that of Mr Heber, in a bibliographical sense, is that of Mr William Henry Miller of Craigentinny, near Edinburgh, a gentleman who amassed a fortune by occupations outside his profession as a solicitor, and whom we find bidding at least as early as 1819 for books of price against all comers. Mr Miller made it his speciality to take only the finest and tallest copies, and he thence gained the sobriquet of Inch-rule or Measure Miller, because he invariably carried with him the means of comparing the height of any book with which he met against his own; and if the new one had a superior altitude, out went the shorter specimen to make room for the more Millerian example. At the Heber sale, this gentleman saw his opportunity, and used it well. The bibliophobia had set in; prices were depressed, so far as the early English poetry was concerned, and Thorpe the bookseller, under his instructions, swept the field—the Drama, the Classics, and the Miscellanea he left to others. Nearly the whole of the rarities in that particular division, set forth in the second, fourth, sixth and eighth parts of the catalogue, fell to Mr Miller; and of many no duplicates have since occurred. The purchaser must have laid out thousands, and have added to his collection positive cartloads.

He died in 1849. Of his successor, Mr Samuel Christy, the hatter of Piccadilly, who assumed the name of Christie-Miller, I saw comparatively little; but I used to hear odd things about him from David Laing and from Riviere the bookbinder. In my ardour for organising my own Bibliography on an enlarged and exhaustive footing, I jesuitically availed myself of the periodical consignments of books to Riviere for binding; and, with the leave of the latter, took notes of everything in his hands. Mr Christie-Miller himself vouchsafed me a certain amount of information, and from David Laing I derived many other particulars about the Britwell library, so that with these channels of help and light, and others in the shape of occurrences of duplicate copies of recent years, I flatter myself that there is very little in that rather jealously-guarded repository which I have not put on record in print or in MS.

I have been guilty of extending the Miller library only in two or three instances. The late proprietor coveted more than one volume which he saw in my possession; but I always gave Mr Huth the preference, and as a rule that gentleman never let a good thing go begging. I must relate an amusing episode, which happened in connection with Mr Christie-Miller about 1872. I had called at John Pearson’s in York Street, and found him from home; but I waited for him on the doorstep, and presently he arrived with two folio volumes under his arm. I asked him what he had got there. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘two lots which were sold separately to-day at Sotheby’s as “Old Newspapers, etc.”’ And he handed them to me, as I stood by him outside his shop. I glanced at the contents, and inquired how much he expected for his purchase. He said, ‘If you will take the volumes now as they are, twelve guineas.’ I did. Riviere broke them up, bound the seventy black-letter ballads in a volume, which I sold to Mr Miller for £42, and returned me the residue, a collection of penny Garlands, which went to the British Museum, and some rubbish, which dropped into my waste-paper basket.

Christie-Miller owned the house in St James’s Place which had once been classic ground as the residence of Samuel Rogers. I went there two or three times, and met his (Miller’s) wife and son. The latter was a mild youth, who had been educated at high-class schools and a university, and who had (like his father) an imperfect acquaintance not only with literature but with grammar. He was phenomenally ignorant and dull, like his parent. All three at present lie seventy feet beneath the ground, near Holyrood, where a monument has been erected to their memory. If the ferocious Socialist hereafter disinters the remains of haughty and purse-proud book-collectors of former times, he will probably not dig down low enough to find the bones of the Millers.

A personage far more in sympathy with Mr Heber was the Reverend Thomas Corser, of Stand, near Manchester, whose acquaintance it was my honour to enjoy from about 1862 to the time of his death. I have taken occasion elsewhere to explain how it was that Mr Corser and myself were bound together in a measure by a community of interest apart from books. While he was as zealous and genuine an enthusiast as Heber, and regarded his acquisitions as something better than shelf-furniture, he was in one important respect totally different from his great predecessor who, as a man of large fortune, had only to decide on purchases and to refer the vendors to his bankers. Mr Corser, on the contrary, was a man of very limited resources, and found it a difficult task now and then to keep pace with the desiderata submitted to his notice by the booksellers and auctioneers. I know as a fact that at the Bright sale in 1845, which must have marked a comparatively early stage in his bibliographical career, he was obliged to pay five per cent to the agent (Thorpe or Rodd), who bought for him; and his bill was not far from £1000. Altogether his fine and interesting library cost him, as he told me, £9000; and it realised about £20,000, chiefly owing to the competition of the British Museum, Mr Huth, and Mr Miller. The national collection made a splendid haul—far better than it would have done, had Mr Huth been better advised. As it was, I secured at my own risk a large number of lots at very high prices, which his agent Lilly had overlooked, or did not duly appreciate. I bought personally, as well as through F. S. Ellis, to the value altogether of £2000 or £3000, and Ellis subsequently congratulated me on my dexterity in giving my commissions to him, and thus removing one of my most formidable competitors. He instanced one lot, which thus went to him at 2s., and for which he would have given £3, 3s.

The Rectory at Stand was a small, detached house near the church, and had no suitable accommodation for such an assemblage of treasures as Mr Corser gradually accumulated within its walls. Nearly all the bedrooms, as well as reception-rooms, had book-cases or cupboards crammed with volumes. I paid repeated visits here, and enjoyed the free range of everything which I desired to examine, provided that my excellent friend could put his hand on it. He had to light a candle on one occasion to hunt for a Caxton in a bedroom cupboard; and latterly, when he was disabled by paralysis, poor fellow! and unable to help me, I had to search as best I could for this or that book or tract, of which very possibly no second copy was to be seen anywhere in the whole world except in that secluded parsonage.

I cherish, with a gratification never to be lessened or forgotten, the memory of this delightful intercourse with one whose people had known my people in the days gone by, and who, besides being a collector of old books, had made himself a master, like Heber, of the contents; and who, as a younger man, enjoyed the genteel recreation of angling, and in his maturer life relished good wine and good talk. When I think of the Rector of Stand, and look at most of the circle which at present constitutes the book-collecting world, and governs the market, I perceive the difference and the fall! And just at this moment the Almighty-Dollar type rules the roost, and makes its caterers and agents look big and reckless at sales, and the disciples of the old-fashioned school, to which Mr Corser belonged, button up their pockets and retire.

One of the last men who collected books for their own sake, and not from mere ostentation and purse-pride, was the late Mr Samuel Sanders, who, as he informed me, had been a buyer from his youth, and who bequeathed his extensive collections to one of the Colleges. I knew him very slightly. But, not long before his death, I was in the room at Sotheby’s and expressed to a stranger my regret at having missed the day before an unique Wynkyn de Worde, of which I lacked the true particulars. It was Mr Sanders, and he apprised me that he was the purchaser through Mr Quaritch, and would bring up the volume for my inspection next day, which he accordingly did.

My gallery of bibliographical acquaintances is not deficient in variety. During a more or less brief period, I saw a good deal from time to time of Mr F. W. Cosens, Mr R. S. Turner and Mr Edwin Lawrence. Of the two latter I have little more to say than I have noted down in another publication. I used to meet Mr Turner at Mr Huth’s. His line of collecting was, on the whole, a little outside my speciality or specialities, and Mr Lawrence was mainly associated in my mind as a member of a literary club to which I sometimes went as my father’s guest. He was a subscriber to some of my literary enterprises, and I thence learned that he was F.S.A., as those letters accompanied his signature not only in his communications, but in his cheques. He was, like Turner, an ill-hung man; but I have understood that he was very kind and generous, and I know that he was a first-rate judge (like Turner again) of what was the right article, both in books and in other cognate matters.

Mr Cosens was altogether different. He was self-educated and self-helped. His practical conversance with literary affairs was almost nil; but he was willing to take a good deal on credit, and had a natural leaning toward letters and art. He introduced himself to me, as Lawrence indeed had done, and invited me to assist him in a scheme which he had rather vaguely formed for collecting together the MSS. remains of our early poets and verse-writers. I was instrumental in procuring for him a tolerably voluminous body of this sort of material, as Mr Huth was indifferent to it, and among much that was of inferior account, from the incessant absorption of valuable MSS. by public libraries, Mr Cosens succeeded in obtaining a fair number of interesting and even important items, particularly an ancient codex on vellum of the Prick of Conscience, and a volume of Elizabethan lyrics, which I bought at an auction, unbound, and for which Mr Christie-Miller gave me some Roman parchment to enable Riviere to clothe it in a becoming style. This book contained Amoris Lachrymæ and other poems by Nicholas Breton, printed in his Bower of Delights, 1591. Boone valued it at £60, but I gave £16 under the hammer, and I thought £45, under the circumstances, not extravagant. Its subsequent history is curious enough. When the Cosens MSS. were sold by Sotheby, the cataloguing was so well done that what I had got for £16 I had knocked down to me for as many shillings, and the lot is now, I believe, in Great Russell Street. Again, thanks to the auctioneer’s clever manipulation, the old vellum MS. bought at the Corser sale by Ellis for £70, sold by him to me for £105, and by me to Cosens for £157, 10s., fell to me at £24. It has found its probably final resting-place in the Bodleian.

Frederick Locker, or, as he subsequently became, Locker-Lampson, was a gentleman to whose bibliographical side I have devoted a fair share of space in the Four Generations of a Literary Family. During a few years, and prior to the preparation and issue of his privately-printed catalogue, I saw a good deal of him, and he became the channel for some of my acquisitions which Mr Huth did not require, or when the latter was in a less eager humour for buying.

Locker was very partial to certain books. He aimed at getting all four editions of Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody, and he succeeded. Over the first one of 1602 he made a tactical blunder by letting one bookseller understand that he wanted the volume when it accidentally occurred, and giving his commission to another. It was a very poor copy indeed, and cost him £60, plus ten per cent. That of 1611 came to him dear enough, too. I had changed Mr Huth’s copy, which was not satisfactory, for a beautiful one in the original vellum wrapper, and had the duplicate at £6. I sold it to Ellis for £12, and he charged Locker £21. The latter upbraided me, who had no knowledge of his views, with making him pay £9 more than was necessary! He always struck me as a most unfortunate purchaser; and there was about him a flaccidity, which made him appear inconsistent and insincere. He gave an exorbitant price for a most wretched imperfect copy of Barnfield’s Poems, 1598, and he actually paid highly for two copies of England’s Helicon, 1600, both wanting the last leaf, and both otherwise indifferent. Surely these old books, to be interesting and desirable, should be fine and complete. The mere text, where there is no extrinsic feature, such as a signature or a bookplate, you can have in a five shilling or a fivepenny re-issue. Yet Locker found some one to sing the praises of the Rowfant books in strains—well, significant of a quid pro quo for recent experience of friendly hospitality.

This gentleman, however, was in his best days as a collector a genuine enthusiast, and might have been occasionally seen at an early hour walking up and down on the pavement, awaiting the arrival of some bookseller, in whose brand-new catalogue had appeared a nugget to his taste. This phase of the book-fancier’s career, by the way, has its curious side. Such a thing has been known as for the publisher of a list of old books to lard and season it with a few excruciating rarities which had yet to be acquired, and to bring to his door fasting all the competitors for such matters within a radius or telegrams from the more remote—with a common result.

Locker’s Confidences, which he made almost a parade, in referring to their future appearance, in characterising as a publication of absolute necessity posthumous, was, if one may compare small things with great, as perfect a disappointment as the Talleyrand Memoirs, so anxiously looked for, and at last printed, only to create a murmur of surprise at the almost total absence of interest and point. The contents of the Locker volume might have been imparted to the public with the most complete immunity from consequences in the writer’s life-time—they are phenomenally mild and neutral. From my personal impression of the distinguished individuals with whom the author of London Lyrics was connected or associated, I should not have dreamed of him so thoroughly missing the mark, and leaving us a legacy so flat and commonplace.

CHAPTER V

Mr Pyne entered far more conspicuously and materially into my bibliographical and personal history than any person save Mr Huth. I formed his acquaintance while the Handbook was on the stocks, and he assisted me to the extent of his power by placing at my disposal his collection of English books, printed not later than the year 1600. He had begun by adopting a wider range; but circumstances led him to restrict himself to the limit laid down by Maitland in his Lambeth Catalogue. I worked very hard at Mr Pyne’s office in St James’s Square, and at his private house, at the stores he had brought together on this rather hard-and-fast principle; to me, as a bibliographer, the extrinsic merits of the copies were immaterial, and I owed to my estimable and thenceforward life-long acquaintance the means of rendering my introductory experiment of 1867 less empirical and secondary than it would otherwise have been. I cannot turn over the leaves of the volume without identifying many and many an entry with Mr Pyne and his unwearied kindness and sympathy, and in all cases where the book was eminently rare I have cited him as the owner of the copy which I used.

Our relationship grew into intimacy, and as his official functions appeared to be light and unexacting, his spacious room at the Tithe Office was my habitual halting-place on my way home from town. He shewed me any fresh purchase, spoke of what he had seen or heard, and discussed with me points connected with my current literary affairs. I thoroughly appreciated our intercourse, which was less constrained and formal than that with Mr Huth, and I regarded Mr Pyne as my benefactor in his way to an equal extent. The financial strength of the former placed him in a position which was not altogether natural, although I am far from thinking that he failed to fill the rank, to which his wealth entitled him, with dignity and judgment. It was, indeed, due to Mr Huth’s half involuntary self-assertion, as a man of great fortune, that we at last fell out, as it was not my cue to yield even to him beyond a certain point, and I had had reason to complain of the mode in which he conducted the editorship of his catalogue, a proceeding whereby he was the sole loser. With Mr Pyne I was at my ease. We never had a word of difference or the shadow of a rupture all the years I knew him.

I have noticed Mr Pyne’s law made for himself in regard to his choice of books; but he had kept some of those which lay outside the strict chronological barrier, and they were long under the charge of a bookseller in King William Street, Strand. It was in the full flood of Mr Huth’s collecting fancy, and it occurred to me one day to ascertain from Mr Pyne, if possible, how it stood with the property. He said that he was meditating the sale of the boxful to someone. What did it contain? He could not recollect exactly, but there were Civil War tracts, some pieces of earlier date, and so on. How much did he propose to get for them? This he also could not resolve. I had no conception whatever of the nature and extent of the parcel, but I offered him at a venture £15, 15s., and he accepted the sum.

It was a downright little find. Sixty rare pamphlets went to Mr Huth at as many guineas; the British Museum purchased several; and a literary coal merchant, who had just then been providentially inspired with an ardour for the monuments of the Civil War period, gave me £20 for the refuse. But Mr Pyne was once or twice tempted by my offers for books in his own series, and I had from him, among others, The Prayer and Complaint of the Ploughman unto Christ, 1531, and Gervase Markham’s Discourse of Horsemanship, 1593. I gave him £21 for the first, just double what it had cost him. They were both for Mr Huth.

Pyne informed me one morning at his office, when I called as usual, that at a shop in Marylebone Lane he had seen Cocker’s Decimal Arithmetic, 1685 (first edition), marked eighteenpence. I went, and bought it. It was a very fine copy. The portrait belongs to the Vulgar Arithmetic.

The anti-climax was reached when Mr Pyne’s library came to the hammer some years since. It was a two days’ sale at Sotheby’s; the books were poorly described, the trade was not eager for them, and the British Museum had no funds. My own hands were rather tied by a temporary circumstance; but the opportunity was not one to be thrown away. I gave a long string of commissions to a bookseller whom I thought that I could trust, and he got me at nominal prices all the rarest lots, comprising a few of the gems in the English historical series, and some absolutely unique. I cannot divine how it so chanced; but about £16 placed me in possession of all I wanted. One item my agent missed, and I had to hunt down the acquirer, who gave it up to me at a trifling advance. The Museum soon afterward came into the usual grant, and gave me £116 for what they wanted—nearly everything. I met Professor Arber at the institution in Great Russell Street just after the transfer, and he deplored the loss which the national library had sustained by not bidding for such desiderata. He did not hear from me at that time that they were all in the building. Perhaps he discovered the fact subsequently.

There was one article in the Pyne auction, of which the simple-minded cataloguer had as correct an estimate as Messrs Reeves & Turner, who sold it to my friend. I had seen it in the booksellers’ list at £10, described as a quarto volume, two and a-half inches thick, in vellum; but I was not just then in a buying humour; and it passed into other hands. But it was the identical collection of Occasional Forms of Prayer of the time of Elizabeth, in spotless state, with the autograph of Humphrey Dyson on nearly every title-page, which had been missing ever since Dyson’s time, and which Reeves had picked up somewhere in Essex. I sent a commission of twenty-five guineas for it, and obtained it for £4, 6s. The present was one of my most striking experiences. Where the leading buyers were on those eventful days I cannot even dream.

Mr Pyne used to say that there were three prices for old books—the market, the fancy, and the drop one—and I imagine that his taste, if not his resources, led him to espouse the last in great measure, so that he never became master of many volumes of first-rate consequence. He told me that the rise in the figures for rare early literature at the Bright sale in 1845 drove some of the existing collectors out of the market. What would they think, if they were now among us, and witnessed £2900 given for two imperfect copies of Caxton’s Chaucer?

Pyne had had varied experiences. As a young man, he resided at Gibraltar, and he told me that he had there an intrigue with a Spanish beauty, the unexpected advent or return of whose husband necessitated her lover’s desperate leap out of the window. One of his daughters married our Resident in Cashmere, and she was, when I met her in London, regretting the rule by which all presents from the native princes had to be given up to Government, as once, on her return home, the Rajah sent a messenger to meet her with an oblation of a gold teapot.

My old acquaintance had gone into the intricate affairs of the Mostyn family of Mostyn and Gloddaeth, and declared that he found them hopeless. Lord Mostyn owned the moor on which the town of Llandudno was subsequently built; and I have mentioned that he owned a splendid library and collection of antiquities. But when I was last at Gloddaeth, even the flower-garden was farmed. His lordship borrowed £400 of my father-in-law, and repaid him in garden tools.

It always impressed me as a curious trait in Pyne that he possessed so slight a knowledge of the world. He gravely informed me one day, when we were together, that he had gone to a saleroom in quest of an additional book-case, and that a dealer approached him with an offer of his services. He explained his object, and pointed to the article he had come to view. The dealer begged to know his pleasure touching the price, and he named six guineas; and he said to me with affecting simplicity: ‘A most extraordinary coincidence! the thing fetched just the money.’ Of course it did.

There have been very few book-buyers of the last and present generation of whom I have not known something, but our correspondence was, as a rule, purely bibliographical or incidental. Of the booksellers with whom I have mixed I have already specified the Boones. The other principal houses were those of Joseph Lilly, Bernard Quaritch, F. S. Ellis, B. M. Pickering, John Pearson and his successors, Messrs J. Pearson & Co., and Willis & Sotheran. My transactions with the Wallers, the Rimells, the Walfords, Reeves & Turner, Edward Stibbs, John Salkeld, and some of the provincial dealers, have also been a source of combined pleasure and profit. I may affirm one thing with confidence, that if I have been asked a price for an article, I have always paid it, and that I should not be accused of procuring books or MSS. below their value, because I happened, perhaps, to have gained a wrinkle more about them than the vendor.

When I first encountered Lilly it was as a simple amateur. I was at that time—about 1863 or 1864—purchasing rare old books, for which my late father unexpectedly discovered that he had to pay; I made my début in this charlatan-like course at a shop in Lombard Street, kept by a Mr Elkins; but I never offended again. Lilly then had a place of business in Bedford Street, and when I contracted my humble liability with him, and accidentally brushed elbows with Mr Huth once or twice, neither of them foresaw how strongly I should influence the library of the latter, or how I should find it practicable to select from Lilly’s shelves many scores of rare volumes with a view to their translation to his own particular client through me. For, apart from Mr Huth, I do not think that in his later years Lilly had a large circle of customers, and I know that more than once he has begged Mr Pyne on a Saturday afternoon to buy something of him, as he had not sold a single volume during the week. This might have been a joke; but there are not many jokes without a substratum of truth.

Lilly was a bluff, plain-spoken, imperfectly-bred man; but I always found him civil and obliging, and he lent me any book which I required for editorial or other purposes without hesitation. He compiled his catalogues with no ordinary care, and would often take a pleasure in pointing out some little discovery which he had made about an edition or copy of an old writer. He presented me in 1869 with a bound collection of these, and they contain a variety of useful notices. He was no scholar or linguist, yet it was said of him that, if he had a Hebrew or Sanscrit book, he seemed to know whether it possessed value or not. He left behind him a large stock, which was publicly sold, and of which I was a purchaser here and there. It struck me as a curious trait in a man who had much natural shrewdness that he allowed many volumes of the rarest character to remain on his shelves, when they might have been with very slight trouble converted into money. Under the hammer they commanded prices which paid homage to the departed owner’s supposed capability of placing everything to the best advantage; the trade hung off a good deal; and Lilly was not popular, besides. The British Museum wanted nearly all that I bought. There was one very early volume of prayers, printed on vellum, for which Lilly had asked £12, 12s.; it came to me at £4, 12s., and I might, if John Pearson had not suspected it to be something valuable, have had it for half that amount. But the odd feature about the matter was that, although I submitted it to Mr Blades, and to everyone else likely to be able to tell me, no one could say where it was printed. The Museum gladly gave me the sum which its former proprietor had justly deemed it worth without finding anybody to agree with him.

The Daniel sale in 1864 and the Corser one, the latter spread over two or three seasons (1868-70), represented the most profitable and conspicuous incidents in Lilly’s career, as they supplied the material, each in its way, which most largely helped to raise the library of his principal, Mr Huth, to the rank which it occupied, and still occupies in the hands of a son. The Daniel books had been collected under specially favourable circumstances. They were selected at leisure during a period of over thirty years from auction-room and book-shop, whenever an item, which struck their proprietor’s practical instinct as a safe and desirable investment, occurred; and some of the most important—the quarto Shakespears, the unique chapbooks, and the Elizabethan poetry, were secured just when a marked depression had set in—Dibdin’s Bibliophobia, which was to the Bibliomania what the anti-cyclone is to the whirlwind; while not a few highly remarkable lots—