Within these broad lines, which do not include libraries privately acquired by institutions, such as the Dyce, Forster, and Sandars, or by the trade, which is an almost daily incidence, are comprehended a preponderant share of all the important books which have come to the front since the earliest period, of which there is an authentic register.

For we have to recollect that many of the persons whose possessions were dispersed only in our time were buyers a century or more ago, and had from Osborne, at what still appear to our weak minds provokingly low prices, his Harleian bargains. By the way, he kept them a tolerably long time. Did some one help him to find the money, or did he pay it by instalments? Seriously speaking, it was rather a white elephant. One of the most notorious private transactions in the way of sales of books en bloc was that by the Royal Society in 1873 of the printed portion of the Pirkheimer Library, presented to it by Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the first president, and originally purchased by his ancestor, the celebrated Earl of Arundel, in 1636.

The dispersion of the Harleian Library doubtless gave an impetus to the revival in the eighteenth century of a taste for book-collecting; but of course a large proportion of the purchases from Osborne himself was on the part of buyers who parted with their acquisitions, and of whom we have no further record. But the Osterley Park and Ham House collections, the latter still intact, owed many indeed of their greatest treasures to this source. In 1768 Dr. Johnson, who had had a leading hand in the compilation of the Harleian Catalogue, and had so gained a considerable experience of the bearings of the matter, as they were then understood, addressed a long and interesting letter to the King's Librarian on the subject of the public collections of Europe and other bibliographical particulars.

Of the libraries above mentioned, the Sunderland, Syston Park (Sir John Thorold), and Hamilton-Beckford collections owed their chief importance to early typography, editiones principes of the classics, and bindings. Among the Blenheim books were a few miscellaneous rarities in the English class. Of Beckford's volumes many contained his MSS. notes.

The Surrenden (Dering family), Stourhead (Sir Richard Colt-Hoare), and Hartley libraries were historical and topographical. In the Inglis, Dunn-Gardner, and Osterley Park (Earl of Jersey) catalogues we encounter, among a good deal that is more or less commonplace, the rarest ancient typography, poetry, and romances.

We next approach the larger and more important Private Collections of books, which are more or less of a permanent and hereditary character, and which we have to content ourselves with admiring at a distance or otherwise according to circumstances. We cannot enumerate the holders of a few volumes or so up and down the country. The names of which we think are Devonshire, Bute, Bath, Dysart, Bridgewater (Earl of Ellesmere), Britwell, Huth, Aldenham (H. H. Gibbs), and Acton (or Carnegie). The Duke of Fife is believed to possess some curious books inherited from Skene of Skene. The Duke of Northumberland owns a few, and a few are in the possession of Lord Robartes at Llanhydrock, near Bodmin, Lord Aldenham, and Mr. Wynn of Peniarth. All these centres affect the book-collector in one of two ways: in showing him what exists, and in showing him now and then what he is never likely to obtain. For in these repositories there are actually certain things which have never been offered for sale, and of which the most indefatigable research has failed to bring to light other examples. Such is not the case, however, with Lord Acton's library at Aldenham Park, near Bridgnorth. That is a collection made by a scholar for scholars; it is wonderfully extensive and complete in its way, and it were much to be desired that it should be preserved intact. It commercial value is, relatively to its extent, inconsiderable.

The collections at Chatsworth and Devonshire House (including the books of Henry Cavendish and many of those of Thomas Hobbes) principally consist of early printed literature, English and foreign, and old plays; of the latter the Kemble dramatic library formed the nucleus, Payne Collier filling up at the Heber and other sales many important lacunæ. The late Duke ill-advisedly engaged a foreign gentleman to compile his catalogue, and the result is most unfortunate. Besides the Henry Cavendish and Hobbes elements, a few very valuable items came from the old library at Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire.

The Althorp heirlooms, now removed to Manchester, have been familiarised by the catalogues of them printed by Dibdin; but there are hundreds of precious volumes which he has overlooked, and of which some account is given in the present writer's Collections from the books themselves. An idea of the Dysart and Britwell libraries is to be gathered from Blades's Caxton, Dibdin's Ames, and Hazlitt's Collections. Of the possessions in this way of the Marquises of Bath and Bute we gain only casual glimpses from the same sources. Payne Collier and Hazlitt have made the Bridgewater House library fairly well known. The Huth one is elsewhere referred to, and of Lord Acton's a sale catalogue of a portion was prepared some years since, as well as a bibliographical account; but the former was suppressed, and the latter remains incomplete and in MS.

Of Lord Aldenham's collection (Early English Literature, Bibles, Classics, MSS., &c.) there is a privately printed catalogue, 1888, and there is also one of the late Mr. Locker-Lampson's literary treasures.

CHAPTER IV

The normal amateur starts, in general, without any well-defined scheme before him. He has seen in the hands of a friend, perhaps, a curious book; and the notion takes possession of him, rather stealthily, yet rather languidly too, that it might be a "nice" thing to have oneself—that or such another. The spirit of collecting, like a delicate germ, is at first easily extinguished; but an incident as trivial and fortuitous as the one just suggested has ere now constituted the nucleus and starting-point of a large library. It may, indeed, be a favourable symptom and augury when a man begins circumspectly and deliberately; he is more apt, other circumstances favouring, to prosecute his scheme to the end, and to prove a valuable friend to the trade.

We have mentioned that the Specialist may be of more than one sort. He may, in short, be of ten thousand sorts; and the Student, after all, may be bracketed with him; for both equally devote their exclusive attention to a prescribed class of works or branch of inquiry for a more or less definite term.

The subjects which principally engage the notice of specialists are:—

There is probably not much of consequence to be suggested outside this calendar from which an intending collector may make his choice. Each of the topics indicated is, for the most part, susceptible of being subdivided and subdivided again.

Ancient Typography is not only a large, but a difficult and costly field. It is, notwithstanding, a not unusual circumstance for a beginner, and not a rich one, to start by making himself master of a few examples of our first printers; and this arises from the fact that among the remains in such a line of collecting are pieces of no high interest or character, and copies whose condition does not attract the riper connoisseur. At the same time it arises from the feeling of the period which witnessed the dawn of the art, that a heavy percentage of the output of the printers of all countries amounts to little more than typographical curiosities, which may be substantially possessed in the form of an example of moderate cost. The novice generally selects books and tracts of foreign origin, and of a theological or technical complexion. Perhaps he goes further—even so far as to discard his earlier purchases; perhaps he does not. It is a matter of taste and money. If he does not seek the finest and rarest specimens, especially in the English series, it is not too much to say that £500 spread over a career would suffice to procure one a fair representation in which Fust and Schoeffer, Gutenberg, Mentelin, and Caxton might appear in the form of a leaf—possibly a damaged one. Yet there would be a chronological view in actual originals of the art of printing from the commencement in all countries. We go for our facts on this subject to Panzer, Hain, Brunet, the British Museum Catalogue, &c.

British History and Topography are alike departments which can scarcely be regarded as specialities without questionable fitness. For when we survey the catalogues of those who have professedly restricted their aim to these two ranges, and reflect that all such collections are, by the light of bibliographical authorities, more or less tentative and imperfect, we are brought to the conclusion that there would be, in a thoroughly exhaustive treatment of the matter, less left outside than could be found within. Of the divisions which present themselves above so much is capable of being drawn into the two other series. Numerically an assemblage of ancient and modern books in these classes would be by possibility immense. But the attendant outlay, unless certain signal rarities were included, or it was deemed necessary to comprise all the poetical relics with a historical or a topographical side, ought not to be relatively so high as that on the preceding category, particularly if the acquirer were satisfied here and there with trustworthy reproductions of three-and-four-figure items. From £1000 to £1500 will go a long way in supplying a collection with that qualifying proviso; without it, four times the amount would barely cover you. The Hartley and Phillipps catalogues should be consulted, as well as Upcott and other older authorities.

Liturgies form one of the tastes and objects of pursuit of persons who have left behind them the fancies of their novitiate, and possess the means of purchasing a description of literature which is abnormally costly, and might prove more so, were the buyers more numerous. The editions of the Prayer-Book fall under this section, and are almost innumerable, being tantamount to Annuals, and of many years we possess more than one issue.

The printed Books of Hours might, from their extent, as regards subordinate variations arising from the different uses and occasional changes in portions of the ritual, constitute in themselves a life's study and absorb a fortune. There is great disparity in their typographical and artistic execution, no less than in their commercial value. A tolerably full description of the series occurs in Brunet, Lowndes, Maskell, the British Museum Catalogue, and in those of the principal collectors on these lines. Of those adapted to English or Scotish uses there is an account in Hazlitt's Collections; but we may look in the early future for an exhaustive monograph from the pen of Mr. Jacobus Weale.

The British Museum is singularly rich in editions in all languages of the Imitatio Christi, having enjoyed the recent opportunity of supplying wants from an enormous collection sold by public auction en bloc. The Offor Catalogue is considered an authority on the Pilgrim's Progress and other works of Bunyan; but the National Library contains a large proportion of these books, and the Huth Catalogue and Hazlitt's Collections must not be overlooked.

The authorities just cited, the Corser Catalogue, and the publications of the Holbein Society, will prove useful guides to any one desirous of studying the Emblem Series, which was some time since in marked request, but has sustained the customary relapse, and is what booksellers term rather slow just now. Our own literature is not particularly wealthy in these productions; there is nothing of consequence beyond Whitney, Peacham, The Mirror of Majesty, 1618, Wither, Quarles, and Harvey (School of the Heart). But if the collector goes outside the national frontier, he meets with works of this class in even bewildering abundance in regard to number, variety of type and treatment, and degree of artistic and literary merit. Moreover, among the works of this species just enumerated as of national origin, four of the six were more or less heavily indebted to the Continent; the Whitney was printed at Leyden, and Wither, Quarles, and Harvey did little more than write English letterpress to sets of foreign plates.

Books of Characters, of which perhaps Earle's Microcosmography, 1628, is the most familiar, have attracted attention from more than one of our book-fanciers; they constitute a somewhat extensive series, and we gain a fair aperçu of it in the catalogue of the library of Dr. Bliss, of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, 1858. It was Bliss who reprinted Earle in 1811, and inserted a bibliography of publications on similar lines.

The above-mentioned gentleman also lent himself to two other paths of collecting: one suggested by local associations, and consisting of works printed at Oxford, the second dealing with those which appeared just prior to the Great Fire of London in 1666.

One of Bliss's Oxford friends, Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's librarian, made it his speciality to bring together as many of the fugitive publications as possible relative to the Civil War Period and the Commonwealth, and Mr. John Forster did the same. The Bandinel Catalogue, 1861, is an excellent guide on this ground, although it is almost unnecessary to state that it is very incomplete. The best and most exhaustive assemblage of the literature of the Troubles and Interregnum (1640-59) is the descriptive list of the King's pamphlets in the British Museum formed by Thomason the stationer.

The interest and profit attendant on the study of the monastic and patristic writers, who may be said to be less strictly national and more cosmopolitan than those of later schools, are, as a rule, casual and slender for the merely literary consulter or peruser, supposing the rather extreme case, where such a person is sufficiently courageous and robust to engage in anything approaching a serious examination of these families of books. The authors were true enthusiasts, labouring to their lives' last thread in some obscure cell or dim closet, where pride of authorship, as we may feel and enjoy it, there was none, when beyond the walls of a convent or those of a native town their names were unknown, their personality unrecognised. Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem! How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men (Universal, Irrefragable, or Seraphic Doctors), and after a certain date by women too (Angelical Sisters), who had no knowledge of the world, of society, of human nature, or of real philosophy. Yet they were, and long remained, the class of literature most cultivated, most studied, and most multiplied; and to this hour, notwithstanding the destruction of millions of them, they abound in our national, cathedral, and college libraries, and in private collections dedicated to that particular side of inquiry and learning. In the booksellers' catalogues we sometimes meet with examples, which are recommended to the curious buyer by their illustrations of conventual life, and their exposure of those vices which a state of celibacy is calculated to promote in both sexes. The chained book is not an uncommon feature in the ancient ecclesiastical repositories, and even in certain churches; and apart from the Scriptures, it almost invariably enters into the department of early divinity or polemics.

Whatever may be thought of this branch of the theological library, there is an undoubted market for it, or some portions of it, as stocks are kept both here and abroad, although on a more restricted scale, perhaps, than formerly. It is extremely probable that, if any one who was learned enough and dexterous enough should make a decoction of all the uncountable folios which exist up and down the globe, the result might be a single volume of not very ample dimensions, affording its share of insight and edification.

The call on the part of a narrow coterie of churchmen for the Catholic literature of the sixteenth and succeeding centuries, more especially the books produced at Continental presses, necessarily resulted in the rapid inflation of the value, while it brought to light from numberless recesses a vast assemblage of works previously undescribed and unknown. Many of these works were produced at obscure localities in France and the Netherlands; but Paris, Douay, Brussels, Antwerp, Mecklin, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Breda, are responsible for a majority. Besides the purely religious publications, quite a large number of secular books, and those of permanent and striking interest, owed their origin to the same region, particularly to Amsterdam, the Hague, Middelburg, Dort. The source of all this foreign production was mainly either the employment of Englishmen and Scots abroad on military service, or their residence there in exile or for other purposes. Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and even Poland, lent their presses to the British author; the scarce tracts by James Crichton (the Admirable) proceeded from Milan or Venice. We know what important centres for English controversial divinity and political pamphleteering were Geneva, Basle, and Zürich, and the last-named place is particularly associated with the name of Christopher Fröschover, printer of the Bible of 1550. A distinct feature in this vast body of Continental typography connected with us is the curious and often unique light which it incidentally throws on the lives of our countrymen and countrywomen, segregated by their employments or opinions from their compatriots at home, and obliged to resort to printers ignorant of the language which they committed to type. A tolerably exhaustive estimate may be found of this branch of the subject by a reference to the General Index of Hazlitt's Collections (1867-91).

To the Duke of Sussex's Catalogue, and those of Lea Wilson, George Offor, Francis Fry, William Maskell, W. J. Loftie, W. J. Blew, Farmer-Atkinson, Lord Ashburnham, and the Rev. W. Makellar of Edinburgh, we must go for the means of bibliographically estimating the editions of the Scriptures and the Prayer-Book; and the Huth and Caxton Exhibition Catalogues should be consulted. The ordinary English and American collector seldom goes beyond English, French, German, and Latin Bibles. Of all these, not even excepting the Fust and Gutenberg or Mazarin, the original impression of the Scriptures in French, published at Paris and Antwerp in six volumes between 1523 and 1528, is by far the rarest; and the next place or rank is perhaps due to the German one, printed at Zürich in the same number of volumes, 1527-29, of which an imperfect copy is in the Huth Library. The Mazarin Bible has grown rather commoner of late years. It is certainly much more so than Coverdale's English one of 1535 in a perfect state, or Tyndale's New Testament of 1526. It is a point about it not generally known, that the extant copies on vellum and on paper differ.

For History, Genealogy, Topography, and well-nigh all other branches of human science, the student finds himself referred to the Middle-Hill Library, now in course of gradual dispersion; but this is far richer in the manuscript than in the printed book department. He may also profitably consult the catalogues of Mr. Hartley and Mr. Tyrrell (City Remembrancer), of whom the second collected largely on London.

Mr. Bolton Corney, Mr. Grenville, and Mr. Jadis made voyages and travels, books relating to America, and the first-named literary adversaria, distinct features in their enormous aggregate of volumes.

Information on early English poetry and the drama may be sought in the catalogues of Sykes, Perry, Caldecott, Heber, Chalmers, Jolley, Wolfreston, Way, Daniel, Corser, Collier, Frere, Bliss, Bright, Mitford, Ouvry, Bandinel, Halliwell-Phillipps, and of course Huth.

Mr. Brook Pulham concentrated his attention on the writings of George Wither, Mr. Bragge on works illustrative of Smokers and Tobacco, and Major Irwin on the occult and supernatural.

Mr. Henry Pyne during a long series of years made an extensive collection, restricted to English books dated prior to the year 1600, and as a rule, it must be added, to the commoner class of publications.

CHAPTER V

Voyages and Travels have always engaged a large share of attention and study, and comprise the central and very interesting feature of almost the entire body of early Americana, dealing with the discovery and colonisation of that continent. This part of the subject before us has received, owing to recent political occurrences, a further development in the direction of Africa. To the purely American collector, who of course takes in Canada, his own literary heirlooms are unexceptionally material; and if he works on a comprehensive principle, he admits every item relevant to the series, however costly and however individually trivial. An Englishman, as a rule, is content with typical or representative examples. The late Mr. Huth long remained unpersuaded that books of this character were desiderata.

There can be no doubt, however—and Mr. Huth concurred so far from the outset—that there are certain Anglo-American works which are, so to speak, indispensable to a library of any pretensions. For instance, it must not be without such capital productions as those written or published in elucidation of the history of the New World by Drake, Cavendish, Hakluyt, and Purchas; or such, again, as contribute to throw light on the settlement of New England and the progress of the Pilgrim Fathers. This group of literature has grown within the last twenty years almost unattainable by the less opulent bibliophile; its commercial value has risen to four times that to which the previous generation was accustomed. The most signal feature in the whole series is, however, out of the pale of commerce. The precious manuscript found at Fulham Palace in 1896, giving a detailed account of the settlement of New Plymouth, has by a graceful international act been restored, as it were, to its fittest home, although many of us in Old England would have, no doubt, preferred to see it deposited in Great Russell Street.

There is another source of association with the mother country which commends to the notice of many, not exclusively American in their tastes or objects, the literary memorials of Maryland and Pennsylvania, so intimately associated with the English families of Calvert and Penn. There is no rarer volume among the first Anglo-American monuments than Hariot's Virginia, 1588, which is worth from £100 to £120.

Among the favourite books of travel are Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, of which there are ancient editions in English, French, Italian, and German, and which is being constantly reproduced with the quaint illustrations. The narratives of Pinto, "prince of liars," and Bruce are gaining increased credit and confidence. Leo's Description of Africa, in the English version of 1600, has a map already showing the source of the Nile in an inland lake. The labours of the Hakluyt and Geographical Societies have conferred respectively great benefits on the cause of discovery and verification.

In the famous Letter of Columbus, 1493, in its various forms, the Mundus Novus and Paesi Retrovate (1507) of Vespucci, and a few other leading publications, there is a recognised interest regardless of the countries of origin.

We owe to the entrance into the lists of sundry members of the medical profession a temporary emergence from oblivion and respite from the waste-basket of what the booksellers describe in their catalogues as "Rare Early Medical." There is no doubt that among these obsolete publications may be detected many curious points and many evidences of former acquaintance with supposed latter-day inventions or ideas. A prominent feature in the series is Harvey's Latin treatise on the circulation of the blood, of which he was the (rather late British) discoverer. But, on the whole, the group of early works dealing with medicine and surgery is of questionable interest outside the purely practical range as a comparative study, and those which treat of anatomy and other cognate topics are in the last degree gruesome. They are the antipodes to the belles lettres.

Occult Literature is susceptible of a division into several classes or sections: Religious Cults, Necromancy, Magic, Second Sight, Divination, Astrology, Palmistry, of which all have their special literatures and bibliographies. Major Irwin recently sold an extensive series of works on these and kindred topics. Cornelius Agrippa, Ashmole, Bulwer, Lilly, Partridge, Gadbury are among the foremost names of older writers in the present categories. But for the faiths and worships of antiquity which may be ranked in the first order of importance and solid interest, we chiefly depend on modern books, such as Payne, Knight, Inman, Davies, Forlong; and there is quite a small library on that branch which touches on theosophy and similar speculations—all having a common source in the grand principle of Agnosticism. Further information will be found collected on this and the topics which we notice below in Hazlitt's Popular Antiquities, 1870.

For those who are interested in Portents, Phenomena, Lusus Naturæ, Murders, Earthquakes, Fires, there is the catalogue of Mr. Nassau, 1824. The British Museum has in recent times grown more complete in the same direction. The founders and earlier curators of the institution appear to have regarded such nugæ as beneath the dignity of a national library; but in fact the information which they, and possibly they alone, convey, is frequently of historical, biographical, or topographical relevance.

There has been a rather marked tendency to a rise in the value of a section of technical publications which deals with the earliest notices in English literature of such subjects as Electricity, the Microscope, the Steam-Engine, the Paddle-Wheel, and the Telephone, and the books identified with these subjects are now commanding very high prices. An uncut copy of Thomas Savery's Navigation Improved, 1698, where the principle of the paddle-wheel is discussed, fetched at Sotheby's in June 1896, £16, 15s.

This is a somewhat fresh departure, but it is not an unsound or unreasonable one, and the series is limited. An almost invariable incidence of these artificial figures is to draw out other copies, and then the barometer falls.

The name of Mr. Eyton is identified with copies of books printed on vellum or on some special paper, not unfrequently for his own use or pleasure; and this gentleman's catalogue is serviceable to such as desire to follow his precedent, of which the modern Edition de Luxe is an outgrowth. Eyton would have proved an invaluable friend to Japanese vellum, had he belonged to a later decade of the century.

The Chap-Book, which dates from the reign of Elizabeth, and was sold for a silver penny of her Highness, becomes less rare under the Stuarts, and common to excess at a later period down to our own days. A large proportion of this species of literature consists of abridgments of larger works or of new versions on a scale suited to the penny History and Garland. Pepys was rather smitten with those which appeared in and about his own time, and at Magdalen, Cambridge, with the rest of his library, a considerable number of them is bound up in volumes, lettered Penny Merriments and Penny Godlinesses respectively. The Huth Collection possesses many which were formerly in the Heber and Daniel libraries. All these productions share the common attributes of very coarse paper, very rough cuts, and very poor type. They are interesting as eminently folk-books—books printed for the multitude, and now, especially when the article happens to be of unusual importance and rarity, worth several times their weight in gold. Two catalogues of Chap-Books and Popular Histories were edited by Mr. Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1848-49.

In the present writer's bibliographical works, to which there is a General Index, will be found an account of all that have come into the market between 1866 and 1892. Thousands upon thousands have unquestionably perished.

The most fascinating member of the Chap-Book series is undoubtedly the Garland—not so much a volume by a given author, such as the Court of Venus (1558) and Deloney's Garland of Good Will, 1596, as a miscellany by sundry hands. The next earliest of these collections known to us at present are the Muses' Garland, 1603, and Love's Garland, 1624. Those in Pepys's library at Cambridge are of much later date, yet of some no duplicates can be quoted, so vast has been the destruction of these ephemerides. Of the Pepysian Garlands a certain proportion are reprints of older editions or repositories of songs and ballads belonging to an anterior date, and here and there we meet with lyrics extracted from contemporary dramatic performances.

Besides Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell the Diarist displayed a taste for fugitive and popular publications, and the copies acquired by him eventually found their way, for the most part, into Heber's hands, whence they have drifted in large measure either into the British Museum or the Miller and Huth collections. Numerous unique examples of the popular literature of his own day, again, are preserved among Robert Burton's books in the Bodleian.

Allied to the chap-book are the broadsides of various classes, including the Ballad, popular and political, the Advertisement and the Proclamation. So far as we know, the second division exhibits the most ancient specimen in our own literature, and is a notification on a single leaf by Caxton respecting Picas of Salisbury use. This precious relic, of which only two copies are recorded, appeared about 1480. It must have been soon after the introduction of printing into London and Westminster that resort was had to the press for making public at all events matters of leading importance; but we do not seem to possess any actual evidence of the issue of such documents save in isolated instances till toward the end of the century, and they are chiefly in the shape of indulgences and other ecclesiastical manifestos, circulated in all probability in the most limited numbers and peculiarly liable to disappearance.

The Ballad proper cannot be said to be anterior to the closing years of Henry VIII., subsequently to the fall of Cromwell, Earl of Essex, when the composition relative to that incident printed in the collections appeared, and was followed by the series preserved in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and reprinted in the writer's Fugitive Tracts, 1875. From the time of Elizabeth onward the broadside in its varied aspects grew abundant, and served as a substitute for newspaper notices, so long as the press remained an insufficient medium. The British Museum and Society of Antiquaries possess large collections of this kind. Lord Crawford has printed a catalogue of his Proclamations, and in the writer's Collections, 1867-92, occur thousands of these ephemerides arranged under what appeared to be their appropriate heads.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sheet format lent itself largely and conveniently to teachers, quack doctors, astrologers, announcing their addresses, qualifications, and terms, no less than to the official, municipal, or parochial authorities, and to private persons who desired to give publicity to some current matter by the exhibition of the placard on a wall or a church door. There was yet another purpose which the broadside was made to serve: prospectuses of schemes and reports of companies' or societies' proceedings. The purely temporary interest of such publications accounts for their survival in unique examples and even fragments.

There is a general notion that the Harleian Miscellany and the Somers Tracts represent between them a very large proportion of the extant pamphlets and broadsheets published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, as a matter of fact, they do nothing of the sort. Even in or about 1695 William Laycock of the Inner Temple drew attention to the unsuspected importance of these fugitive publications in his printed proposal for buying them up by a public subscription; but even in the National Library, with all its immense accumulations, and in Hazlitt's Collections, many thousands of items are probably deficient; while the two sets of books above mentioned contain a very slender percentage of the whole—in fact, mere representative selections.

There have been men who coupled with a general plan a speciality or two. For instance, Dyce, who laid a collateral stress on Shakespeariana; Ireland, who made himself strong in Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt; Crossley, who had a peculiar affection for Defoe; Bliss, who collected books of characters and books printed at Oxford or just before the Great Fire of 1666; Bandinel, who was smitten by the charms of the Civil War literature; Corser, whose bibliographical sweethearts were Nicholas Breton and Richard Brathwaite; and Rimbault, who had two, Old Music and Old Plays. Mr. G. L. Gomme is similarly situated: anthropology and folklore are his foibles. It goes without saying that the Shakespearian and dramatic student, from Sir Thomas Hanmer downward, has usually made a stand on the literary remains and works tending to illustrate their own labours; but of course the relevance may be direct or indirect, and in the latter case the specialist is found to cast his net surprisingly wide.

Specialism, whether on the principle of personal taste or of particular studies, has manifest advantages in an age where the multitude and choice of books are so bewildering, where of every work of any sort of value or interest a man may have, not a single edition—all that in a majority of instances was once available—but a hundred or a thousand in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of prices. With the discontinuance of the older paucity of literature, the facilities for lodging within a modest bookcase a coterie of literary favourites have sorrowfully decreased, and a collector finds it imperative to draw the line more and more rigidly, if he does not care to fall into one of two perils—excessive outlay or excessive bulk. For we have not, as regards the former, to go very far before we incur a serious expense, if it happens that the run is on the rarer English section or on what constitutes a picked library of the French type.

Of the miscellaneous group there are graduated and varying types. The omnivorous accumulator, especially where he does not insist on condition or binding, is the dealer's idol. In the forefront of this class stand facile principes Richard Heber and Sir Thomas Phillipps, for the reason that they bought everything—whole libraries and catalogues at a swoop. Yet both these distinguished men have to be placed on a distinct footing from the normal promiscuous buyer, such as Thomas Jolley, Joseph Tasker, Edward Hailstone, Edward Solly, and a legion of others, to whom anything in the guise of a book was a sure bait, and who spurned Evelyn's motto: "Meliora retinete." Ascending a step or two higher, we come to the men who repudiate specialism as narrowing and troublesome, and who impose on themselves no restraint save perchance in the direction of theology, science, and arcana. They stop peremptorily at the belles lettres. Singer, Mitford, Bliss, Bandinel, Forster, Cosens, Ireland, Crossley, Sir John Simeon, were more or less of this school. At a still greater altitude we meet with a yet stronger tendency to draw the line at character or condition, and there occur to us the names, under the former head, of Capell, Malone, Douce, Bright, Chalmers, Collier, Ouvry, Bolton Corney, David Laing, E. F. Rimbault, Halliwell-Phillipps, Frederick Locker, W. H. Miller, Henry Cunliffe, R. S. Turner, and Henry Huth. From the same point of view, nearly in the clouds are discovered a small knot of fastidious dilettanti, who purchase a volume in the same spirit as they might do a picture or a piece of majolica; and of this minority Sir Andrew Fountaine, Sir David Dundas, and Samuel Addington may perhaps be accepted as types.

The most interesting, and it may with permission be added, intelligent type of book-collector, however, seems to be that where, after a certain measure of preparatory thought and training, one confines acquisitions for permanent ownership to volumes for which the acquirer has a genuine personal relish. In general, the principle of forming a library on this wholesome basis would be found not only more useful, but more economical, since the rarest and costliest articles are by no means, on the whole, the most interesting or the most instructive. In any case, the inconsiderate emulation by one collector of others, who may have different objects and perhaps ampler resources, is a course to be avoided. Even here there is more than a single source or ground of inducement to purchase. Setting aside the mere book of reference, which has to be multiplied to suit various exigencies, there may be said to be three classes of literary property which rationally appeal to our sympathy: (i) the volume which commends itself by its intrinsic value and charm; (ii) that which has grown dear from lengthened companionship and possibly hereditary link; (iii) and that which, unimportant so far as its internal claims and merits are concerned, bears on its face the evidence of having once belonged to a favourite of our own or a world's hero.

One persuasive argument in favour of adopting the miscellaneous or typical course in the choice of a library is the rapid growth of the difficulty of meeting with the rarer items in all important specialities. It is the general plan on the part of every follower of particular lines to commence, very often casually, by bringing home from time to time a few volumes on a certain topic, or in a given class of literature, or by one or two of a school of writers; and such a proceeding succeeds tolerably well, till the owner makes discovery of volumes positively essential to his object, and unattainable save by a heavy outlay—perchance not even to be had at any price. It is nearly always the lacunæ for which we yearn; one or two of our richer friends have them, and we have not. What we possess anybody can get in a morning's walk; we find that we have travelled a long distance, and have come to an impasse. It is very seldom indeed that a man is satisfied with the cheaper and commoner articles in a series, if he is aware of the existence of those which just constitute the corner-stones of such a collection as his.

On the contrary, by the process of sampling or picking out here and there, now and again, a book or a set of books which chance or circumstances may throw in our path, we may gradually acquire a caseful of most desirable specimens, against which it is out of the question to raise any charge of incompleteness, where incompleteness is the governing aim. Book-buying under these conditions is a humour. We are at liberty to take or leave. Because we conceive a fancy for a work by this or that author, we feel under no obligation to accommodate every scrap which he has printed, or which his friends or followers have penned. The object of our personal selection suffices us; and there perhaps we begin and we end. It is our humour.

The auctioneers' and booksellers' catalogues of the present day supply an instructive demonstration of the gradual withdrawal from the market of many thousands of articles, in Early English literature more particularly, which at one time seemed to be of fairly frequent recurrence. They have been taken up into public collections all over the world; and the very few copies, not to speak of unique examples, which time had spared, are beyond the reach of the private purchaser of to-day. We have only to study with attention the Heber and other leading records of former libraries existing in this and other countries to become convinced that the facilities for acquiring an approximately complete library of the rarer books grow narrower year by year.

There is, I submit, far too prevalent a tendency in collectors to follow suit, to attach themselves to leaders of temporary fashions. I plead for a greater independence of opinion, where the taste is in any reasonable measure cultivated and developed, or, again, where an individual knows what pleases himself. By all means, if it happens that he does not admire Shakespeare and Bacon, Sydney and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Byron and Shelley, Scott's novels or Lamb's Elia, let him leave them alone, and make his own free choice, even if it be to go in for John Buncle, the Adventures of a Guinea, or Luttrell's Letters to Julia. There is always the room for hope that he may quit those pastures after a time and seek more fruitful ones. What is important and desirable, however, is that each person should be his own caterer. Schools are only useful where some writer of real genius has been neglected or overlooked, or been boycotted by the press, and attention to his works is only a fair service to him, or a becoming, if tardy, tribute to his memory.

Apropos of the increasing difficulty of obtaining certain old books noted above, the extensive scale on which reproductions of original editions of Early English literature have of recent years been made is certainly a boon to literary inquirers, since the presence of such reissues in our circulating libraries, if we do not choose to buy them, tends at every step in many branches of work to help us, and to render our undertakings more complete. It frequently occurs that volumes and tracts, which are of very slight literary or intrinsic value, contain valuable allusions and illustrations, which we might miss in the absence of available copies. It is worth while to take in one's hand even some puerile trifle by the author of Adonais, if one is not obliged to buy it or asked to become the possessor. One feels a curiosity to glance for a moment at a volume which, we are constantly assured in the catalogue, the writer did his utmost to obliterate; and we sometimes wish that he had fully succeeded.

Any of us, taking in his hands the series of English Book-Collectors in course of issue by Mr. Quaritch (Nos. 1-12), will perceive without difficulty, if he go no farther, the two distinct camps, so to speak, into which the collecting fraternity may be, and is, broadly divided and classifiable. You have, on the one hand, the men who followed their personal taste, and amused their leisure in late years after a busy life by purchasing such works or such descriptions of literature as appealed to them and fell within their resources; again, the scholar or investigator who assembled round him what illustrated his studies, not merely with an aim at emulating others; or, once more, the gentleman of fortune, who evolved from his school-day acquisitions a feeling or a passion for higher things, and made it the business of his maturer time—even made it his career—to carry out on a scale and on lines dictated and governed by circumstances the predilection formed in boyhood. On the contrary, there are for our consideration and instruction the libraries which owed their existence to less interesting motives, to the vague and untrained pursuit of rare and expensive books and MSS., on the judgment of others in rivalry of others, and the enterers into the field of competition with a practical eye and a financial side-look. Of all these great divisions there are varieties naturally arising from personal character; but of the collector pure and simple of the older school, that type, we avow, most warmly and potently attracts us which limited itself to the small and unpretentious book-closet, with just those things which the master loved for their own sakes or for the sakes of the donors—where the commercial element was wanting, and where the library was not viewed in the same light as railway or mining stock. It is a famous principle to invest money prudently and well; but happy is he who is wise enough to keep his library within narrow limits, and rich enough to leave it, such as it may be, out of the category of realisable assets.

Mr. Quaritch's project possesses in our eyes the incidental merit of providing us with personal accounts in a succinct form of many of the past proprietors of English and American libraries, and enables us to see at once how varied and fortuitous were the conditions under which the task was begun and accomplished, with what different measures of success and financial means; and in what a preponderance of instances it was an individual rather than an hereditary trait. Broadly speaking, we recognise two varieties of collector from all time: the one who confers his name on a library, and the other whose library confers a name on him.

Even the family of genuine book-lovers—neither virtuosos nor speculators—presents more than a single type to our notice. We have the student who takes a subject for treatment, and forms a small gathering of the literary material necessary for his purpose, shooting it back perchance into the market, his immediate task accomplished. There is the man like Coleridge, who regarded the volumes which fell in his way as casual and welcome visitors, of whom he asked questions, or who answered his, and whose margins gave themselves up to his untiring habit of registering whatever occurred to him, before the passing—possibly borrowed—volume went on its way again. There is Lamb, who was less addicted to annotating his acquisitions, but who gave them a permanent home, if they had come to him jure emptionis, and were of the elect—not presentation—copies, cold and crude, thrust into his hand by some well-meaning acquaintance. There is Edward Fitzgerald, dissimilar from all these, yet so far cognate that he bought only the books which struck him as worth reading, if not turning to some practical account. Nor should we in strict fairness refuse admittance within this highest circle even to such as Selden, Burton, Pepys, and others who might be easily enumerated, who may have been little more than curiosity-hunters, but who had a genuine relish for pieces of old popular literature, the greatest rarities in the language inclusive, when there was barely any competition for them. The man of the old school, who ransacked the shops and the stalls, and even attended the auction, may have been a faddist and a superficial student; but his was an honest sort of zeal and affection; there was no vanity or jealousy; and we meet with cases where one collector would surrender to another an acquisition which the latter happened to have missed, and to want very badly indeed. So Isaac Reed gave up to George Steevens Marlowe's Dido, and so George III. enjoined his agent not to bid for him against a student or a scholar.

I have not yet quite done with this aspect of the matter. I have to speak of the personages who have thought fit to impose on themselves a chronological or a financial limit, who drew the line at a given year, or would not go beyond a certain figure. Mr. Henry Pyne laid down 1600 as the latest date which he would admit, and rarely exceeded a sovereign or two for a single article (Dr. Doran gave me to understand that fourpence was his maximum). It may appear strange to suggest that the higher the sum paid for a book (assuming it to be worth the money), the slighter the risk grows of the purchase proving pecuniarily unprofitable. Yet at the same time outlay on a library is a relative term, and one individual may account himself as frugal in expending £30,000 in the course of a lifetime, as another may do in expending £300. The late Earl of Ashburnham bought in chief measure during the forties and fifties, when the reaction from the bibliomania still more or less sensibly prevailed, and considering his Lordship's position and resources, he was not much more lavish than the above-mentioned Mr. Pyne, or indeed any other amateur of average calibre, while he was to the full extent as genuine a follower of the pursuit for its mere sake as anybody whom we could name—as the Duke of Roxburghe, Mr. Heber, Mr. Corser, or Mr. Crossley.

In my Rolls of Collectors I specify a type under the designation of Book-Recipients, and I instance such cases as Dickens and Thackeray; but in fact there are many who would never go in pursuit of anything of the kind beyond a work of reference, and whose utmost exploit is the payment of a friendly subscription. The only title to admittance into my category of such doubtful enthusiasts is the sentimental enhancement of value arising from the transformation of the margins of a common-place volume into a repository for manuscript remarks or graphic embellishments, which may send it back into the market some day a three-figure item in a catalogue.

In attempting to indicate in a sort of tentative manner the publications to which a private collection might be advantageously and comfortably limited, one does not contemplate the shelf or so of mere works of reference, which have to be obtained even by such as are not amateurs in this direction, and, moreover, there is an obvious difficulty in prescribing for persons of infinitely varied ideas and prepossessions. Now, as to volumes for reference, the class and extent of course depend on individual requirements, and the books outside this radius are apt to be subject in their selection to local circumstances, since a man associated with a district or county naturally contracts a sympathy with its special history or its archæological transactions, as well as any miscellaneous monographs relating to particular places or celebrated persons. With such specialities and preferences we cannot presume to interfere; but, as a rule, the aggregate body comprised in them need not be large or very expensive, and in catholic or general literature it becomes almost surprising when we have taken the pains to winnow from literary remains of real and permanent interest the preponderant mass, of which the facilities for occasional examination at a public library ought to suffice, how comparatively slender the residuum is.

CHAPTER VI