William Carew Hazlitt

Transmission of ancient remains—The unique fragment and unique book—Importance of the former—The St. Alban's Grammar-School find—A more recent one or two—Mr. Neal's volume—A tantalising entry in a country catalogue—The Hundred Merry Tales—Large volumes only known from small fragments—Blind Harry's Wallace—Aberdeen and other Breviaries—The Oxenden Collection of Old English Plays—The idyll of Adam Bell, 1536—John Bagford: his unsuspected services to us—Ought we to destroy the old theology?—Other causes of the disappearance of books—Unique books which still preserve their reputation—Rare books which are not rare—Books which are rare and not valuable—Ratcliff, the waste-paper dealer, who had a collection of Caxtons—The bystander's manifold experiences—Narrowness of the circle of first-class buyers—The old collector and the new one—Speculative investors.

Looking at the imperfect and unconsecutive condition in which much of our most precious early literature has been received by us, we are apt to reflect to how narrow and close an accident we owe two classes of existing remains: the unique book and the unique fragment. Of course to term a volume or production unique is a perilous business; the bookseller and the auctioneer may do so ex officio; an inexperienced amateur may resort to the term as a pleasant and harmless self-deception; but no responsible writer or critic dares to pronounce anything whatever unique without an emphatic caveat. We have personally known cases where a publication by one of the early printers was first introduced to notice, and created a sort of sensation, as a mutilated fragment rescued from the binding of another work; this revelation brought to light, after an interval, a second of a different issue; anon at some auction occurred a perfect copy; and now the poor damaged worm-eaten leaves, once so reverently and so tenderly regarded, awake no further interest; the mystery and romance have vanished; and when we examine the book as a whole, we do not find its merits so striking as when we strained our eyes to decipher the old binder's pasteboard.

The Fragment is really an unusually and more than at first credibly important feature in the elder literature. It may be taken, after all deductions for occasional discoveries of the entire work, to be the sole existing voucher for a terribly large section of the more popular books of our forefathers, just as the Stationers' Register is for another. But it is far more than one degree trustworthier and more palpable; for it is, like the torso of an ancient statue, a veritable part of the printed integer and a certificate of its publication and former existence. Many years ago there was a great stir in consequence of the detachment from the binding of another book—Caxton's Boethius—in the St. Alban's Grammar-School of a parcel of fragments belonging to books by Caxton; these are now in the British Museum. In the Huth Catalogue are noticed several relics of a similar kind; and indeed scarcely any great library, public or private, is without them. They may be accepted as provisional evidences. A rather curious circumstance seems to be associated with one of the Huth fragments—three leaves of Thomas Howell's New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets. The relic once belonged to Thomas Martin of Palgrave, and includes two leaves of signature D, which are deficient in the Capell copy of this work at Cambridge. The latter is described as a quarto; but it would be interesting to discover that from the fragment the text could be completed. The inconvenience attending the examination of rare books in provincial libraries is very great and serious.

A copy of Statham's Abridgement of the Statutes, printed at Rouen about 1491, and bound in England, had as flyleaves two sheets of Caxton's Chronicles of England, possibly some of the waste found in Caxton's warehouse after his death.

There is a weird fascination about a newly found fragment of some lost literary composition. Only a few months since, in a copy of Cicero's Rhetorica, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1546, in the possession of Mr. Neal, quite a number of pieces of wastrel were disclosed on the removal of the covers, and among them portions of English metrical effusions of the period (for the volume must have been bound here). We view this treasure trove wistfully and indulgently; there it is; no mortal eye had fallen on it in the course of three and a half centuries; and how can we be expected to judge its value or quality by the ordinary standard—on an ordinary critical principle? It has come to us like an unlooked-for testamentary windfall. We are not to look at it in the mouth too curiously or fastidiously, or we deserve to have lost it; and it is the very same thing with scores of remains of the kind, brought to light in various directions and ways from season to season, and (to the utmost extent of my power and opportunity) chronicled by me on my accustomed principle.

When I was younger by some thirty years, I received the catalogue of a provincial bookseller, and was sanguine enough to suppose that I should become the happy master at the marked price (7s. 6d.) of No. 2084, which ran as follows:—

"Pynson and others—Specimens of Early Printing, comprising Twenty Leaves of the Ballad of Robin Hood, &c. &c., taken from the cover of an old Missal."

No time was lost in giving the order; but the lot was sold, and the proprietors did not even know who had bought it. I comforted myself as the fox did. Yet such is the frailty of one's nature, that one cannot refrain, after long, long years, from sentimentalising over it. There is something so taking in the notion of a tattered, semi-illegible, unappropriated fractional relic, not a trunk even; it fascinates us like a coin of which the legend is almost beyond identification; there is mystery behind it; we may be on the track of a discovery which will help to make us famous. We have all heard of the Hundred Merry Tales, rescued by Mr. Conybeare in the early years of the century from another book, of which the fragments assisted to form the covers, and how the treasure was prized till a complete copy occurred in a Continental library and dispelled the charm. It was pointed out many years ago by the present writer (Old English Jest-Books, 1864, i., Additional Notes) that Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584, quotes the story from this miscellany of the miller's eels, and enabled us, before the GÖttingen copy was brought under notice, to complete the text, which is almost undecipherable in the Conybeare (now Huth) one.

The fragmentary state by no means restricts itself to literary items of insignificant bulk. For, as we see, a potential factor in the creation of rare books has been a vast temporary popularity, succeeded by a prolonged period of neglect. The result is before us in the almost total evanescence of thousands of books extending to hundreds of pages. Look at Blind Harry's Wallace, a large volume, first printed in folio about 1520; a few leaves are all that remain of the editio princeps; and others have totally vanished. Many of us are familiar with the tolerably ample dimensions of the service-books of various uses in the English Church; and yet those of Aberdeen, Hereford, and York survive only in fragments or torsi; and the modern reprint of the first was formed from a combination of several imperfect originals. A similar fate has all but overtaken such excessively popular works as Coverdale's Bible, 1535, and Fox's Martyrs, 1563, an absolutely perfect copy of either of which I have never beheld.

Henry Oxinden, of Barham in Kent, was the earliest recorded collector of old English plays, and bound up his 122 dramatic possessions in six volumes before 1647. He has left a list of them in his manuscript common-place book. Tears almost steal into our eyes as we read the titles: the Hamlet of 1603, the Taming of the Shrew, 1594, Ralph Roister Doister. Of the first we know well enough the history to date: two copies, both imperfect. The second exists in the unique Inglis, Heber, and Devonshire example; it is mentioned in Longman's Catalogue for 1817, from which it was purchased by Rodd, and sold to Mr. Inglis; it is reputed to have once belonged to Pope. The remaining item survives in the titleless copy at present in the library of Eton College, to which Mr. Briggs presented it in 1818, not on account of the association of Udall the author with that seminary of learning, but, curiously enough, by mere accident.

Among Bagford's collections there is a single leaf of an otherwise unknown impression of Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delights, a 1565 book only hitherto extant in a 1584 reprint. This precious little morÇeau altogether differs, so far as it goes, from the corresponding portion of the volume now preserved in the National Library.

Let me insist a little on the instructive progress of knowledge in one or two cases. A fragment of a small tract in verse by Lydgate, from the prolific press of Wynkyn de Worde, was proclaimed as an extraordinary and unique accession to our literary stores some eighty years since; it was called The Treatise of a Gallant, and had been taken from the covers of a volume of statutes in the library at Nash Court. Some time after, a complete copy of another impression turned up, and ultimately a third, quite distinct from either of the previous two, was discovered in a volume of marvellously rare pieces sold by a Bristol bookseller to the late Mr. Maskell for £300, and by him to the British Museum. Take another case connected with the same press. A piece entitled The Remorse of Conscience, by William Lichfield, parson of All Hallows, Thames Street, who died in 1447, leaving a larger number of MSS. behind him than Lamb once humorously made Coleridge do, long enjoyed the reputation of being a solitary survivor; but at present the world holds four, two recovered from bindings, and a third titleless, and all, in fact, more or less dilapidated by unappreciative or over-appreciative handlers. Last, not least, the delightful idyll of Adam Bell, of which we were so glad on a time to follow the Garrick exemplar, is now proved to have been in type in the reign of Henry VIII.; and a piece of a pre-Reformation issue luckily preserves enough to show how, even in a production probably sold at a penny, it was thought worth while to alter a passage where the Pope was originally alluded to. There are instances where we are deprived of the gratification of beholding so much as a morsel of a book sufficient to establish its former existence in hundreds, if not thousands, of copies. Of the Four Sons of Aymon, from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, 1504, not a vestige has so far accrued; yet it once existed, as it is expressly cited in a later issue. So it is, again, with Skelton's Nigramansir, printed by De Worde in 1504, which was actually seen by Weston the historian in the hands of Collins the poet, and with Peter Fabyl's Ghost (the Merry Devil of Edmonton) from the same press.

We are accustomed to associate with the black-letter fragment the name of John Bagford, who, in the closing years of the seventeenth and beginning of the next century, distinguished himself by the zeal with which he collected typographical specimens and memorials. In Bagford's day, the relative value of old books was scarcely at all understood; there was no adequate discrimination between the productions of Caxton and his immediate successors and those of living or recent printers; and, again, which was more excusable, volumes by early divines or by writers of established repute were more generally sought than those by schools of poetry and fiction, which at present command chief attention and respect. If we turn over the pages of an auctioneer's catalogue belonging to that era, we perceive, side by side, items estimated at about the same figure, of which many have become worth perhaps even less, while a few have left their former companions immeasurably behind, and one or two rank among the livres introuvables. Those were the days when the classics were preserved with the most jealous care, and acquired at extravagant prices, and when our vernacular literature, from the introduction of typography down to the Restoration, was an object of attention to an extremely limited constituency, and could be obtained for a song.

The Bagford collection of title-pages and fragments formerly constituted part of the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum, but has been chiefly transferred to the printed book department of recent years. It resembles a Typographical Cemetery, a charnel-house of books crowded together without respect to their subject-matter or their literary rank: the leaf of a Caxton, another of a valueless legal treatise, the title-page of Romeus and Julietta, on which Shakespeare founded, as the phrase goes, his own play, and a broadsheet preserved entire, there being no more of it. But Bagford, who helped Dr. Moore, Bishop of Ely, and perchance Lord Oxford, to some of their rarities, does not stand alone. He had many followers; but the scale of operations diminished as the orthodox collector multiplied and prices rose. Sir John Fenn, editor of the Paston Letters, whom we have named above, was a disciple, however, and Martin of Palgrave was another. Many years since, for a proposed new Biographia Britannica by Murray of Albemarle Street, the present writer collected all the known particulars of Bagford himself, who spent his last days in the Charterhouse. His episcopal client or patron died in 1714.

Before we condemn these biblioclasts, let us recollect one thing. It is not so much that they have rendered books imperfect by the abstraction of leaves or title-pages, as that they have actually preserved the sole testimony for the existence of hundreds of books, tracts, and broadsheets of which we should have otherwise known nothing, amid the wholesale destruction of early literature, which was not arrested till the close of the last century, and still proceeds in a modified form and degree. Not many years since the Troy-Book printed by Caxton was discovered hanging up in a water-closet at Harrogate; a portion had disappeared, but the remainder was secured, and was sold to a dealer in Manchester for thirty guineas. It must be, and is, Bagford's apology that he sacrificed to his typographical scheme material which was almost universally neglected, and for which there might seem, two hundred years ago, scarcely any prospect of a future call. Yet, oddly enough, this very person was one of the pioneers, by his labours and example, in bringing back a taste for the older English school; he appeared at a juncture when sufficient time had elapsed for the destruction by various agencies of a vast proportion of the products of the press; but until the fashion, which he and others set, had begun to spread, it remained unknown how much was reduced from its original volume, and how much had perished. We have the less pretence for censuring the biblioclasts of the past, who could only use the eyes and experience of their own epoch, when instances are reported from time to time of the same ruthless practices even by those who might have been expected to know better; and there is more than one way of viewing the present notorious tendency to exterminate the old theology on the plea that it is worthless, since a generation may arise which will upbraid us for having converted to pulp this part of our inheritance, till it comes at last to survive in a stray leaf here or a mangled fragment there. An altogether different quarter from which a result conducive to the shrinkage or disappearance of copies of early works has arisen is the print-collecting movement, involving the devastation of the innumerable volumes which contain portraits, frontispieces, and other engravings, and the more than incidental risk of the consignment of the unvalued residue to the waste-basket; and it may be mentioned that within our personal knowledge hundreds upon hundreds of scarce old books have been destroyed by editors, lexicographers, and other literary workers, to save the trouble of transcribing extracts. It might be impossible to exhaust the variety of ways in which an extraordinarily large body of publications of former days has been reduced or raised to the position of rarities of graduated rank.

After all these ages, all the indefatigable researches which have been undertaken for profit or for pleasure, all the libraries which have been formed and dispersed, true it is that the Unique volume, which of course enjoys its designation only till a second copy is producible, still survives in such abundance, that one, if it were otherwise feasible, might form a library composed of nothing else. Does it not become curious to consider to what lottery, as it were, we owe them—owe their arrest just at the dividing line between living and lost literature? Whatever may be the cause, we have hitherto failed to trace duplicates of the metrical Ship of Fools, 1509, Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-Book, 1569, Watson's Teares of Fancie, 1593, Venus and Adonis, 1593, 1599, and 1617, and of Lucrece, 1598. Copies of these later productions must have found their way to Shakespeare's country at the time. Malone met with the Venus and Adonis of 1593 at Manchester in 1805, and another collector with that of 1594 in the same shire; and the Florio's Montaigne of 1603, the only volume with the poet's autograph yet seen, was long preserved at Smethwick, near Birmingham. It was at Manchester, too, that the copy of the Tragedy of Richard III., 1594, came to light as recently as 1881. Several of the works of Nicholas Breton and Samuel Rowlands survive in isolated copies. Upwards of a century has elapsed since a medical man picked up in Ayrshire in 1788 an assemblage of quarto tracts belonging to the ancient vernacular literature of Scotland and to the parent press of Edinburgh; and not a whisper has been raised to suggest the existence of a second copy of any of them, which is to be regretted so far, as some are imperfect. During years on years, the authorities at the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, kept this inestimable relic in a cupboard under the stairs. In the find at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, thirty or forty years since, there were items upon items utterly unknown. It was the same at the Wolfreston sale in 1856. It goes without saying that among the Heber stores the uniques were barely numerable; and many yet preserve their reputation as such. Mr. Caldecott, Mr. Jolley, and Mr. Corser were lucky in falling in with scores of tracts of the first order of rarity. No one has beheld the double of the Jests of the Widow Edith, purchased by Lord Fitzwilliam for £3 10s. at West's sale in 1773, and formerly Lord Oxford's; and the citation of the last name prompts the remark that many a book in the Harleian Library still awaits recovery, assuming the description in the catalogue to be correct. On the contrary, there are serious warnings to enthusiasts not to rely too implicitly on the reputation of a volume for uniqueness or high rarity in view of such phenomena as the occurrence within a short period of each other at the same mart in 1896 of two copies of the first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, printed by Caxton. Here was a case where the publicity afforded to these matters brought out a second example, which the owner found to be worth a small estate.

The writer's publication, Fugitive Tracts, 1493-1700, 2 vols., 1875, very aptly and powerfully illustrates the present bearings of our subject. Of the sixty pieces there reproduced, two-thirds appear to be unique, and only four are traceable in the Heber Catalogue. Yet many of the items are of historical or biographical importance, and were, in fact, selected from a much larger number with that view; which seems to be tantamount to a recognition of the truth, that, enormous as is the total surviving body of early English and Scotish Literature, it represents in some sections or classes only a salvage of what was once in type, or, to speak more by the card, of what we have so far been able to recover.

There are rare books which, paradoxical as it may seem, are not rare. Take, for example, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; the first folio Shakespeare, 1623; Milton's Lycidas, Poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, in the editiones principes; the works of the minor poets, Suckling, Carew, Shirley, Davenant; Walton's Angler, 1653; Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 1678; the Kilmarnock Burns, 1786; and many first editions of Wordsworth, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson. Every season swells the roll of existing copies. On the contrary, Spenser's FaËry Queen, Books i.-iii., 1590, and Milton's Comus, 1634, are authentically scarce, the former especially so in fine state; and the same may be predicated of Lovelace's Lucasta (the two parts complete). But the real meaning of the rarity of the other books above specified—and the list might be readily enlarged—is that, although the copies are numerous enough, the taste for capital productions has increased within a few years out of proportion to the recovery of new or unknown examples. We are finding frequent occasion to cite works of foreign origin, which are more or less habitually taken up into our own collections by miscellaneous or general buyers; and there is among these one which forms a signal illustration of the fallacy of uniqueness. It is the Gutenberg or Mazarin Bible. Scarcely a library of the first rank occurs here or elsewhere without offering a copy; and we are persuaded that at least forty must exist, either on paper or on vellum, throughout the world. The book occupies the same bibliographical position as the first folio Shakespeare, the first edition of Walton's Angler, and the first Burns; it tends to grow commoner, yet, so far, not cheaper.

There are other books which, as it may be more readily understood, are rare without being valuable, and of which such of the commercial world as has it not in its power to expend large amounts on individual purchases, naturally seeks to make the most. It was almost amusing, some time since, to note the entries in some of the booksellers' lists under "Black Letter," "Gothic Letter," "Rare Law," "Curious Early English," and so forth; and the names of Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and other ancient printers were freely introduced to help off a rather lame foreigner, who was alleged to have been professionally associated with one or the other of them. If the bookseller knows the book-buyer, it is highly requisite that the latter should study what he is going to buy.

Illustrations are not wanting of the loss of untold treasure through a medium more fatal than any other—through exhaustive popular demand. Entire and large impressions of books, pamphlets, and broadsides have succumbed, not to the sacrilegious hand of the spoiler, but to the too affectionate, and not too cleanly, fingering of the multitude of men and women who read and then cast the sources of entertainment away. If we remember that certain of the Bibles ordered to be kept in churches for general use chiefly survive in crumbling fragments, or at best woefully dilapidated copies, we cease to be surprised at the easy prey which more fugitive compositions have formed to a succession of careless and indifferent owners. The illiterate inscriptions on many books, which have thus become valuable, point to the hands through which they have passed, and tell a story of prolonged neglect, too often culminating in appropriation to domestic requirements.

It is, anyhow, perfectly undeniable that of the miscellaneous early literature of all countries, the proportion which exists is in very numerous instances no more than a simple voucher for the work having passed the press. A single copy has formerly occurred or occurs fortuitously, and no duplicate can be cited. This is the position of thousands of volumes, and of many it is the chief merit.

Infinitely numerous are the strange tales, sometimes drawing up the moisture into the mouth, sometimes sufficient to make one's hair rigid, of books of price hung up for use at country railway stations, or employed by a tobacconist to wrap up his pennyworths of snuff, or converted by a lady of quality into curl-papers. What has become of the Caxtons sent over to the Netherlands in the last century by a confiding English gentleman their owner, for the inspection of a nameless Mynheer his friend, who, when he was invited to restore them, lamented their disappearance in a fire?

There was beyond a question an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons, Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper in the Borough. We may surmise how his Caxtons came to him, and at what rates!

These episodes appertain to the romantic and speculative aspect of book-collecting; but they really have another side. Here, at a time when the first-fruits of the English press were unregarded, we find a man of Ratcliff's status acquiring thirty Caxtons. He lived just to see a rise in their value, yet a very slight and fluctuating one; for at last he went into the open market and purchased a few lots at West's auction in 1773, and the Caxtons thus obtained re-sold after Ratcliff's death in one or two cases at a lower rate. He had inflated the market; the competitors were not more than two or three. But the time was soon to come when such persons could no longer afford to hold this kind of property—when it became fashionable for dukes and earls and men of large property to make our early typography an object of research; and so it continued down to the present time, till the agricultural depression arrived to create another organic change, and to direct these, as well as other costly luxuries, into new channels. Not the chandler, or the Government official, or the private gentleman of modest means, but the great manufacturer or the merchant-prince entered on the scene, and wrested from the landowner his long-cherished possessions. The West and Ratcliff sales (1773-76) were the two golden opportunities, however, of which the advisers of George III. wisely availed themselves to purchase volumes at what we have been taught to consider nominal prices; and there they are in the British Museum to-day, a recollection of one of the better traits in the character of that prince. When we say that the market for Caxtons in 1776 was beginning to expand, we mean that the day for getting such things for a few pence or a shilling or two had gone by. Here, for example, are some of the quotations from the Ratcliff auction:—

These figures make even some of those in the West auction, 1773, appear by comparison rather extravagant. For his Majesty's agent at the latter gave as much as £14 for the romance of Paris and Vienne, from the Caxton press, 1485. True, it seems to be unique, and might to-day require its purchaser, if it were for sale, to have £500 in his pocket or at his bank to secure it. Yet strange events still continue to happen from time to time. Not Caxtons nor Shakespeares, but excellent books which command prices in the open market, are yet occasionally given away.

A case occurred in Lincolnshire about a year ago, when a library of some 2500 volumes was sold by an intelligent provincial auctioneer al fresco in the dogdays, and put up in bundles, nearly all of which were knocked down at the first bid—threepence. Say, 150 lots at 3d. per lot = £1 17s. 6d. for the whole. There must have been an entente cordiale among those in attendance, the gentleman in the rostrum inclusive.

These instances of misdirection, which have been in times past more numerous than now, although two of the most recent and most signal have occurred in the same county (Lincolnshire), inevitably tend to the destruction of copies, and so far illustrate our remarks on the causes of the gradual disappearance of books during former periods.

There are, however, circumstances under which prices are depressed by collusion, as where a first folio Shakespeare was knocked done for £20 in an auction-room not five hundred miles from Fleet Street; or by an accident, as when the original Somers Tracts, in thirty folio volumes, comprising unique Americana, fetched bon fide under the hammer only £61. A single item was re-sold for sixty guineas, and would now bring thrice that amount. What a game of chance this book traffic is!

Imperfect Books, as distinguished from Fragments, constitute a rather complex and troublesome portion and aspect of collecting. They are susceptible of classification into books—(1) Of which no perfect copy is known; (2) Of which none is known outside one or two great libraries; (3) Of which even imperfect examples, as of a specimen of early typography or of engraving, are valuable and interesting; (4) Of which copies are more or less easily procurable. It is only the last division at which an amateur of any pretensions and resources draws the line. With the other contingencies our keenest and richest book-hunters and our most important public collections have been and are obliged to be satisfied. When it is a question of a unique, or almost unique, Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, or Pynson, or quite as much of a volume from the London, St. Albans, Tavistock, York, or Edinburgh presses, what is to be done? The object, no doubt, laisse À desirer; but where is another? This sentiment and spirit operated twice, as we have elsewhere noted, within three months in 1896 in the case of two incomplete copies of the first edition by Caxton of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But for the defective copy of a common book some find an apology and a home: they cannot afford a better, or they require it for a special purpose. The upshot is, that for every old volume there is a customer, who is pleased with his acquisition according to his light; and we have met with such as seemed disposed to view the missing of damaged leaves as negative evidence of antiquity and genuineness.

The bystander who has had the benefit of as long an innings as the present writer, witnesses perpetual changes and vicissitudes of sentiment; and from one point of view, at all events, the minute details, into which the too generally despised bibliographer enters, are valuable, because they present to us, in lists of editions of authors and books published from age to age, the astonishing evidence of mutable popularity or acceptability. There is a feature, which is almost amusing, in the ideas and estimates expressed of many works by our earlier antiquaries, when we look to-day at their position and rank. If we turn over the pages of Hearne's Diary, for instance, we constantly meet with accounts of literary curiosities and rarities, which we regard with different eyes by virtue of our enlarged information, while thousands of really valuable items—valuable on some score or other—go there unnoted, although copies of them must have passed through the sales, even more frequently than at present. The close of the nineteenth century has brought these matters to a truer level. We are better able to gauge the survival of books and editions. Even in the sometimes tedious enumeration of editions of early books bibliography confers a sort of benefit, for it demonstrates the longevity in public estimation and demand of a host of books now neglected, yet objects of interest and utility to many successive ages.

We have seen so many cranks and fancies successively take possession of the public. Early typography; early poetry and romances; books of hours; books of emblems; Roman Catholic literature; liturgies; Bewick; Bartolozzi; the first edition (which was sometimes equally the last); books on vellum, on India-paper, or on yellow or some other bizarre colour or material, debarring perusal of the publication; copies with remarkable blunders or with some of the text inadvertently omitted—all these and a legion of others have had their day; and to some of them it happens that they drop out of view for a season, and then reappear for a second or third brief term of life and favour; and therefore, it being so, who can have the heart to blame the parties that in the exercise of their vocation make hay while the sun shines? There is one personage, and one alone, who makes it whether or no, summer and winter, to wit, the auctioneer; his commission is assured; on what or from whom he gets it he cares not. He cheerfully leaves the adjustment of accounts to gentlemen outside.

The circumstances under which a new departure takes place, often without much previous warning, in the book-market, and disturbs the calculations of holders of certain classes of stock, are infinitely varied. The bibliographical barometer is surprisingly sensitive, and the slightest change of fashion in the older literature, and even in those sections of the more recent which embrace acknowledged rarities, is instantaneously felt. In some branches of collecting, and where the prices of commodities are such as to exclude all but a knot of wealthy amateurs, the entrance of a new-comer on the ground makes a vital difference, especially if the market is in need of support from existing wants having been supplied; and if one goes about a little, one hears men whispering in corners and questioning who the stranger is, and for what he is likely to prove good. Should he be a strong man, that is, in purse, you will soon perceive, if you keep your eye on the auction-room, another strong man buying at all costs against all comers just the articles which commend themselves to the first dramatis persona. He buys nearly everything; they are for him alone, unless there are two in the field concurrently, and then one may be conveniently played off against the other. A small field it is!

And this interesting commercial strategy is always going on, while the objects of pursuit continually vary. The dealer looks after, not his own desiderata—for he has none—but those of his immediate clients. In a large business a man is likely to have many; but the class which repays study, which turns sovereigns into bank-notes for him, is not a numerous one. Half-a-dozen first-rate customers keep a shop open even in the most fashionable and expensive thoroughfare. The late Joseph Lilly leant during his last years mainly on one. A collector of the stamp of Mr. Hartley was almost sufficient to support such an establishment as Newman's in Holborn or Toovey's in Piccadilly. You might pass the latter, or both, day after day and week after week, and not see a soul enter or leave the premises; all was done by correspondence and flukes and a few real good buyers in the background. Mr. Quaritch in London or M. Fontaine in Paris will clear more in an afternoon by the change of hands of two or three heavy items than a small dealer, even if he is unusually lucky, will do in a twelvemonth out of thousands of petty and troublesome transactions. It is not particularly unusual for a big firm to sell at one sitting four or five thousand pounds worth of property. There are others which have not sold as much during the entire term of their career, and never will.

The works which enjoy their turn of public favour are generally recognisable in the catalogues by the type in which they are set forth; and any one who has stood by and witnessed all the changes of the last thirty or forty years observes periodical phenomena in the transfer of typographical honours from one school of authors, or one group of subjects, to another. The most recent auctioneers' catalogues reflect the sentiment of the day in lavishing capitals on trifles from the pens of more or less ephemeral modern writers, and registering with corresponding brevity much of the old English literature, which a few years since was in the ascendant. A rare volume of Elizabethan verse or prose halts after an insignificant brochure by Lamb, Dickens, or Thackeray, which the respective authors would have judged scarcely worth preserving, to which their indifference, in point of fact, constitutes the cause of scarcity and consequent appreciation.

So it was once upon a time, to be sure, with the Caxton, the quarto Shakespeare, the ballad, the penny black-letter garland, and many another article which we now hold so precious. The man who could secure Caxtons and Shakespeares for pence, was he happier? Why, no; for he simply followed the market and nobody was envious. He lifted his acquisition off the counter or stall for the best of all reasons—because he fancied it—nay, because he intended to read it when he reached home.

A plea from the absolute collector's point of view—I fear, a weak and false one—is occasionally advanced for books which were formerly in fashion and favour; for example, Sylvester's Du Bartas, the Platonic romances, Townley's French Hudibras, and a hundred—a thousand—ten thousand more. It is thought to be worth while to have a few of these deposed idols to show to your friends when they visit you, that they may join in a homily on changes of taste. Perhaps it would suffice to compare notes through the medium of some Censura Literaria, or Beloe, or Collier. With most people space is a consideration, with a few, money; and an incidental and passing reflection need not be so costly in either way. For that reason such works as I have indicated, and a few others similar to them, are apt to prove serviceable and economical.

The periodical reinforcement of the ranks of the book-collecting world, in the higher latitudes at least, is obviously imperative, as individuals do not usually commence investments of such a kind till they are well on in life and have put by a fortune, or at all events retired from business. Some purely accidental matter directs attention to a line of bibliography which appears attractive and important; the money is there, and the expert will undertake the rest. It is not the interest of those engaged in the business to be critical; they are merely executive agents. But the demand for the costlier rarities and curiosities is so narrow, that the fresh aspirant is soon the central object of attention to the few who can provide him with what he imagines he wants. As a rule, where a man has no personal knowledge, and finds that he is gradually becoming a milch-cow for the trade, the hobby is not of long duration; it is only where the buyer can control and check the vendor that satisfactory relations are likely to continue, perhaps for years, perhaps for a lifetime. There is ever a tendency, on the part of the bookish commissariat, to strike the iron too hard.

It does happen here and there that collectors are enabled to make their own prices for their acquisitions either by extraordinary reputation for judgment and by virtue of a well-known name, or by the fact of being carried by our common lot beyond earshot of their good fortune, or, once more, by the force of peculiar circumstances. As an almost inexorable rule, the stocks of dealers are coldly regarded, and even those of William Pickering and Joseph Lilly were allowed to drop, so that, in the latter instance more particularly, some real bargains were obtained. Yet, on the contrary, the books thrown on the market after the retirement of F. S. Ellis and the death of James Toovey went capitally, partly because they were supported by Mr. Quaritch (rather glad perhaps to get rid of his two confrÈres). Then, more recently, the collection formed by Mr. Warton brought quite unexpected figures, and we feel justified in adding, figures sometimes scarcely warranted by the property. These instances, and this other aspect of the subject, strengthen our contention that the whole affair from beginning to end is a sort of lottery, a type of gambling. If those who enter into the fray do so with their eyes open, and do not object, who should?

But assuredly the most egregious case in modern times of the absolute despotism of name and ownership over all other considerations was that of the portion of William Morris's library submitted to public sale in December 1898. The books themselves were, as a rule, below mediocrity in state, and could not have well possessed for the new acquirers even that special interest and value which Morris recognised in them as aids to his artistic and literary labours. Yet the prices realised were beyond anything on record, and were simply absurd. There seemed to be a violent struggle on the part of three or four competitors to secure these treasures at any cost, and they did so. Let the very same copies recur, and in the hands of a person of inferior celebrity, and the shrinkage will probably be serious. The direct association was dissolved when the lots were adjudged to the highest bidders, and here the highest bidders were high indeed.

To the speculative investor in literary property what can we have to say? He works with his eyes opened to their widest possibility of expansion, and carries his fortune or success in his hands. No doubt there are occasional flukes for him; but, generally speaking, the greatest have been for collections formed and dispersed without any view to profit, where the state of the market has accidentally favoured the owner, or there was some nimbus round the name.

Before you set about forming a library, you should consider in what sort of atmosphere, of your own or your friends' creation, it is likely to be sold hereafter. You ought almost to be able to calculate how celebrated you will die.