I soon learned to divide into two camps, as it were, the authorities available to a student of our earlier literature. There were books like those of Dibdin, Brydges, Park, Beloe, Hartshorne and Lowndes, and the auction catalogues, on the one hand, and on the other there were Herbert’s Ames, Ritson’s Bibliographia Poetica, and Collier’s Bibliographical Catalogue, to be reinforced presently by Corser’s Collectanea Anglo-poetica. These two classes were widely different and immensely unequal. I began by drawing a line of distinction, and by depending for my statements on the second group and type rather than the first. But as I discerned by degrees the difference in too many instances between the books themselves and the account of them in works of reference, and as I studied more and more, at my leisure from other employments, the Heber and a few more capital catalogues, revealing to me the imperfections in the treatment of the whole subject, I commenced, just in the same way as I had done in the case of Venice, revolving in my thought the practicability of improving our bibliographical system, and placing it on a broader and sounder basis.

The London Library copy of the Heber Catalogue bears unmistakeable traces of my industrious manipulation in years gone by. I conceived a strong regard for that extraordinary, that unique collection and its accomplished owner. Of his private history I have heard certain anecdotes, which indicate that his life was not a very happy one, nor the end of it very comfortable; but as a scholar, as a bibliographer, and as a benefactor to the cause which he so zealously espoused and on which he lavished a noble fortune, he was a man to whose equal I am unable to refer.

I turn again and again to his sale catalogue, and amid much that is dry and monotonous enough I am never weary of perusing the notes, chiefly from his own pen, where he places on permanent record the circumstances, often romantic and fascinating, under which he gained possession of this or that volume. Remarks or memoranda by Mr Payne Collier and others are interspersed; but the interest seems to centre in those of the possessor, which make his personality agreeably conspicuous, and have always struck me as elevating him above the ordinary standard as a collector, if not as entitling him to the highest rank among those of this or any other country. For when we compare his stupendous accumulations of literary memorials of all ages and regions, in print and in manuscript, with those of Harley, Grenville, Miller, Beckford, Spencer, Huth and others, and then set side by side his conversance with the subject-matter in so many cases, and the purely amateurish feeling and grasp of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors in a vast preponderance of instances, how can we fail to perceive, and forbear to acknowledge, his claim to the first place? I have mentioned elsewhere that Heber was partly instrumental in saving the library of George III. from being sold by the Prince Regent to the Czar.

The Bibliotheca Heberiana, in thirteen parts, is a work which it is impossible to open at any page without encountering some point of interest or instruction; but undoubtedly the second, fourth and eighth portions contain the notices and information likely to be most attractive to English and English-speaking persons, and it entered not immaterially into my earlier life to study and utilise what I found here. No class of anecdote can be more enduringly valuable in the eyes of the bibliophile than those with which the work under consideration is so unstintingly enriched, and I may not be blamed for exemplifying and justifying by some typical specimens my estimate of Heber’s scholarship and energy. If there is a less agreeable side to the question, it is the feeling of regret, in examining the catalogue, that he should not have restricted himself to some range, instead of embracing the entire world of letters, instead of aiming at centralising universality. In Heber book-collecting was not a taste, but a voracious passion. His incomparable library, to a private individual deficient, as he was, in method and arrangement, was of indifferent value; as a public one, if he had chosen to dedicate it to that object, it would have proved a splendid monument to his name for all time, especially if the very numerous duplicates had been exchanged for remaining desiderata.

My jottings in corroboration of my view are, however, almost exclusively derived from those sections of the catalogue devoted to an account of the early English literature, in which the collection was so marvellously rich. Since this is merely a sort of introductory feature in my little undertaking, and I was desirous of affording some samples of one of my bibliographical primers, I do not deal with technical detail, but limit myself to literary adversaria, and to Heber’s own personal remarks about his possessions, as distinguished from those of the compilers of the catalogue.Under ‘Bevis of Hampton,’ Heber notes, ‘For an account of the Romance of Bevis see Ritson’s Dissertation, prefixed to his Metrical Romances,’ and he copies out what is found there. To his copy of the edition of Boethius in English, printed at the exempt Monastery of Tavistock in 1525, he appends a long memorandum, stating that he had bought it at Forster’s sale in 1806 for £7, 17s. 6d., imperfect and ill-bound, and had afterward completed it from a second, which had belonged to Ratcliff and Gough. He refers us to Robert of Gloucester, the Harleian Catalogue, and other authorities, states that Lord Bute gave £17, in 1798, for Mason’s copy, and estimates his own at about £50. It fetched £63. It might now be worth £250.

On Churchyard’s Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainment in Suffolk and Norfolk, there is this commentary: ‘This must have been printed in 1577-8, because Frobisher returned from his last journey while this book was printing. I have another copy of this tract, corresponding minutely throughout with the present, except in the dedication.... The Address to the Reader differs also, but merely in the Typography.’ Of Dekker’s Bellman of London, 1608, he says, ‘I have compared this edition with that of 1612, which corresponds exactly, except that six pages of introductory matter are prefixed, and four pages of canting terms are subjoined, entitled “Operis Peroratio.”’ To the ‘O Per Se O’ of the same writer he has attached a still more elaborate account of the readings of various impressions. He appears to have compared all the editions in his hands with remarkable attention and interest.

When we come to Gascoigne’s Posies, 1575, there is a historiette which seems well deserving of reproduction: ‘This interesting copy of G. Gascoigne’s Poems, diligently read and copiously be-noted by his contemporary, Gabriel Harvey, came from the ancient and curious Library of the Parkers of Browsholme, hereditary bow-bearers of Bolland forest under the Dukes of Buccleuch. In the first instance, my friend, Thomas Lyster Parker, merely proposed to arrange, beautify and enlarge the family collection, for which purpose he called in Ford the bookseller to his assistance, who gave the greater part of the volumes new Manchester liveries instead of their old, time-worn coats, in which they had weathered centuries under the domicile of their protectors. Subsequent events induced Mr P. to dispose of the whole; a few of the Caxtons were distributed in London to Lord Spencer and others at considerable prices; but the bulk was sold to Ford, from whom I purchased the present and several more. The Manchester shears have, I fear, somewhat abridged the margins. I prize the volume as no ordinary rarity—it affords a curious average sample of the manner in which G. H. recorded his studies in the margins of his books, his neat handwriting, his various learning, his quaintness, his pedantry, and above all his self-satisfied perseverance.’

Gascoigne’s Works, 1587, Heber made a receptacle for collations with other texts, and I may be pardoned for breaking through my own rule by appending a remark by a former owner, George Steevens, ‘This volume of Gascoigne’s Works was bought for £1, 1s. at Mr Mallet’s, alias Mallock’s, alias M‘Gregor’s sale, March 14, 1766. He was the only Scotchman who died in my memory unlamented by an individual of his own nation.On the flyleaf of Googe’s Eglogs, 1563, is a composite note by Steevens, Heber and the cataloguer. Heber, alluding to Steevens’s remarks, says, ‘Mr Steevens had never looked into Thomas Rawlinson’s cat., part vii., sold at London House, March 1726, where a copy occurs (perhaps indeed the present one) among the PoetÆ in 8vo. See also Ballard’s cat. of Mr T. Britton, Small-coal man, 1714-15, No. 353.’ The Temple of Glass, by Lydgate, evoked the following: ‘I believe there are three editions of this tract—I. The present in Caxton’s types; II. An edition by Wynkyn de Worde; III. An edition by Berthelet, of which there was a copy in Pearson’s collection, bought by Malone, and left by him to Bindley, at whose sale it was bought by James Boswell.’ Just below occurs the entry of Berthelet’s impression, with a memorandum by Boswell, ‘The price, £4, 18s. 0d., which this volume had been previously sold for, is marked above. On the 21st of Jan., 1819, I purchased it for £40, 10s.!!!’ But as it had been left as a legacy by Mr Malone to Mr Bindley, at whose sale I bought it, I scarcely know how to estimate the pretium affectionis of a book which was at once a memorial of two such dear and respected friends. At Heber’s sale the copy fetched £14.

A singular assemblage of Penny Merriments, published between 1621 and 1675 (Heber Cat. iv., 1743) bears this interesting note of provenance, ‘This curious collection belonged originally to Narcissus Luttrell, and passed with the rest of his valuable Library to Mr Edward Wynne of Chelsea, on whose decease it was sold by auction at Leigh & Sotheby’s, March, 1786 (see cat., lot 23). Mr Baynes was the purchaser for £3, 8s. 0d., and bequeathed the poetical and romantic portion of his Library to Mr Ritson, at whose sale I bought it.’

We enter on a different atmosphere and line of culture, when we scan Heber’s note on a small metrical tract by ‘Playne Piers’ on the clergy, printed secretly in the time of Henry VIII., and mis-described by some authorities as in prose: ‘If Maunsell had examined it with due attention, he must have perceived that a large portion of the text (though not the whole) is written in verse, and runs into loosely-accentuated rhyming stanzas and couplets. To say the truth, I am more than half-disposed to ascribe the authorship to the famous W. Roy, of whose poem, Rede me and be not wroth, the present composition reminds me both in sentiment and measure. It is worthy of remark that G. Steevens’s copy of the first edition of that poem (now in my possession) is bound exactly uniform, and being of precisely the same dimensions, they probably were united in one cover till he separated them. It is plain that he attached equal and considerable importance to both, having bestowed on each his best russia binding, with his initials on the sides, and inscribed his autograph on the back of title and at the foot of the last leaf—infallible signs of his especial favour.’

In the case of a Caxton of extraordinary beauty, the Hoole Lyf of Jason, Heber gives an account of the copies known to him, and concludes that his own, in the original binding of oak covered with calf, and with many rough leaves, is the finest. It had been Watson Taylor’s. Another very beautiful one occurred at the Selsey sale in 1871, and fetched £670, Mr Walford desiring to see how far Mr Quaritch would go and seeing accordingly. He was fortunate enough, however, to have it taken off his hands by Mr Ellis, who sold it to an American, I believe, for £800.

Heber, as we all know, was a general scholar, and was at home in foreign no less than in English books. He observes of a very early Roman de la Rose: ‘This Edition is executed in the Characters of Ulric Gering, the earliest Parisian Printer, and is very scarce. There is said to be a copy in the Public Library at Lyons. See Delandine’s catalogue. Gering exercised his art from 1470 to 1520, in which year he died. The present is neither one of the earliest nor latest efforts of his press—perhaps about 1480. It has signatures, but neither catchwords nor numerals. It has also many grotesque woodcuts. The execution and presswork very clear and beautiful.’

Of the romantic accident which threw Robinson’s Golden Mirrour, 1589, into Heber’s hands, I give an account in the Handbook, where I also shew that the author belonged to Alton in Cheshire. Briefly, Rodd the bookseller found the volume of Elizabethan tracts, this included, at a marine store dealer’s on Saffron Hill about 1830, and being put into the scales it was found to be worth fourpence threefarthings. Rodd sold it to Heber for £50. It was a glorious haul, yet not so good as that of Warton the historian, who picked off a broker’s board at Salisbury for sixpence the 1596 edition of Venus and Adonis, bound up with several other pieces of equal or even greater rarity. Those were halcyon days, were they not? But how much the cost governs the appreciation! What comes to us cheap, because no one else wants it, we hold cheap, and that is the history of many of the early bargains.

The Phoenix Nest, 1593, contains the ensuing flyleaf matter: ‘I gave Mr Isaac Reed five Guineas for this very scarce book in the summer of 1802.—R. H....’ Heber enters into very careful detail as to the authors of the several poems, and where some of them appear in other books. The copy was uncut, and sold at his sale for £31, 10s. I accidentally discovered another very fine one at Sion College, bound up at the end of a common volume, and pointed it out to the librarian, the Reverend Mr Milman, who did not seem to be very strongly impressed by the communication. Had it been a sermon worth twopence, he might have felt otherwise.

Of Pierceforest, of which he possessed the edition by Giles Gourmont, 1531-2, in folio, Heber speaks as follows: ‘This is a Romance of great Character, value and merit. Mr Warton, upon whatever authority, asserts it to have been originally written in verse about 1220, and not till many years afterwards translated into prose, an assertion which cannot be confirmed; no MS. of any Metrical Romance under that title appearing to be anywhere extant, and indeed it is probable that he confounded Pierceforest with Perceval. It is, however, believed to be one of the oldest prose Romances extant, and is mentioned by Caxton in his Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry.’

A volume by Spenser receives this perhaps somewhat out-of-date notice; but it demonstrates the habit of Heber in regard to all classes of works of importance in his possession: ‘This is the first edition of Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calendar, and of extraordinary rarity, not to be found in the most distinguished libraries. Mr Todd was obliged to take a journey to Cambridge to obtain a sight of a copy. The subsequent editions in 4to are rare and valuable, but far less so than the present....’

We have to go back a long way, and cross the sea, before we reach the patria of the next sample, the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, printed by Jenson in 1469, in rich old blue morocco, from the library of Camus de Limari, at whose sale in 1783 it fetched 3000 livres. Heber has inscribed a MS. note on the flyleaf to this effect. The book sold at his sale for £31, 10s.

We return home at the next specimen, which is Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Five Actions in the same volume with Lodge’s Reply to Gosson, and a third tract relating to the theatre. Mr Heber notes: ‘The present vol. contains only 3 out of a remarkably curious collection of 8 pieces, bound together soon after the publication of the latest, somewhere about 1580. This may be ascertained by the antiquity of the handwriting, which exactly records them all, on the reverse of the title-page of Playes Confuted. So late as 1781 they all remained together in Mr Beauclerc’s collection (see cat., 4137), with the exception of Gascoigne’s Delicate Diet for Drunkards. They seem afterwards to have passed into Mr Nassau’s library, who divided them into 5 different vols., which are now all in my possession.

‘As to Gascoigne’s Delicate Diet, it is, I apprehend, the same copy contained in G. Steevens’s collection of Gascoigne’s Works, now in my possession—in fact, no other is known.’ It was on that account, presumably, that the copy sold at Heber’s sale for £27, 16s. 6d.

The history of Marlowe’s Dido, 1594, must not be repeated here, as it is already printed in the Handbook. Nobody has ever seen the elegy by Nash on Marlowe, mentioned by Warton. The copy of Dido given by Isaac Reed to George Steevens, and bought at Steevens’s sale in 1800 by Sir Egerton Brydges, was transferred by the latter to Heber, at whose sale it produced £39. The Duke of Devonshire’s, which had previously been Kemble’s, cost Henderson the actor fourpence.

A good deal of mystery surrounds the Lee Priory collection, which seems to have at one time contained many dramatic rarities of the first order, most, if not all, of which eventually found their way to Heber. Henry Oxenden of Barham, near Canterbury, is known to have owned in 1647 an extraordinary assemblage of old English plays, bound together in six volumes, and comprising the Taming of a Shrew (not Shakespear’s), 1594, Ralph Roister Doister, Hamlet (1603), and other precious remains. What became of them, there is no record; but it has sometimes occurred to me that they might have gone to Lee Priory. At Lord Mostyn’s, at Gloddaeth in Carnarvonshire, there is a second series of volumes; but of the contents I have no personal knowledge. To return to the Heber Dido for a moment, it may be permissible to transcribe Steevens’s note: ‘This copy was given me by Mr Reed. Such liberality in a collector of Old Plays is at least as rare as the rarest of our dramatic pieces.—G. S.’

Now and again, of course, Heber is misinformed, or his information has been superseded, as where he alludes to Shakespear’s Henry the Fourth, 1608, as a first-rate rarity. His copy sold for £12, 12s. In the note about it he takes occasion to mention that Steevens bought many of the books of the Rev. J. Bowle, whom Gifford called ‘the stupidest of two-legged creatures,’ but who had a very curious library, of White.

But Heber’s insight into the contents and merits of his books is admirable. In his copy of Tatham’s Ostella, 1650, he draws our attention to the author’s Ode to Lovelace on his journey into Holland, and adds, ‘It must have been written before his marriage. The Prologue on the removal of the Cockpit has not been hitherto noticed, and on the next page is a mention of a Play called “The Whisperer; or, what you please,” of which this is the only record.’

These extracts might be indefinitely extended; but in a volume not intended for merely bibliographical purposes the foregoing citations may suffice to establish Heber’s intelligent and painstaking treatment of his books and to explain the stress which I laid on his Catalogue in my younger days as one of the leading resources in an attempt to remodel, on an improved and enlarged plan, our national stores.

So long as the original gatherer lived, his books were at the service of all who approached him with a legitimate aim, and more particularly at that of the scholar and the editor. We repeatedly hear from Mr Dyce how greatly he was indebted to Heber for the means of completing his texts of the early dramatists and poets, of whose works the original copies were often nowhere else to be found. Heber was the warm friend and helper of the men of letters of his time, and deserves to be classed among them. Many of his rarest volumes unfortunately passed into hands where they still remain, and where they are not so readily available. I am thinking of the Britwell and other closed private libraries, of which the proprietors are indifferent to literature or jealous of intrusion. The zealous bibliographer blesses them both, and prays for the music of the hammer.

A careful survey of the Heber Catalogue leads to the conclusion, from the immense number of rarities there offered for sale for the first time, that the owner succeeded in obtaining a notable proportion of his early books direct from the trade or from private sources by that most powerful of inducements—the known willingness to pay promptly and well for everything brought to him. The note to Thorpe the bookseller, enclosing an order on his bankers for £200 for the Ballads, of which the Daniel volume was merely a selection, is still extant; the money seems to have reached Thorpe’s hands before the purchase left them, in consequence of Heber being from home; even he speaks there of being ashamed of himself for his extravagance, and he asks the vendor whether it was the inheritance of the Stationers’ Company. He was not aware that the lot came from Helmingham Hall through Fitch of Ipswich, and that it had been milked by Daniel.

My association with the London Library and gradual contact with the British Museum, with collectors, and with the book trade, tended to stimulate a natural affection for old books, while it gradually and, at first, unconsciously gave to the movement a bibliographical and commercial direction. I conceived in my mind, apart from any collateral matters, a grand literary scheme. I saw before me all that former men, Heber included, had achieved toward a British Bibliography; and I determined to combine and collate the whole, and make it the nucleus of a New Work. The result was the appearance in 1867 of the Handbook of Early English Literature.

I made not only the British Museum, and the Oxford and Cambridge libraries, but Sion College, South Kensington, and Lambeth, pay me toll. I did not at first attend personally at Lambeth; but the present Bishop of Oxford, who was then librarian, copied such titles as I indicated to him, and his Lordship, I have to say, was very accurate, and wrote a very clear hand. I always found Dr Stubbs extremely kind and obliging in this way. Maitland was before my time.

I did not consider at the time that I had much ground for being ashamed of this performance; it was undeniably a long advance on my precursors; that I had a great deal to learn and unlearn was an experience to be gained by degrees, and at more or less casual opportunities; and it will become necessary to enter into some particulars of the circumstances which led and enabled me to undo piecemeal my maiden essay, and to build up from the ruins such a colossal structure as, on its near completion, no other civilised country can boast of possessing.

Thirty years have passed away. The Handbook has become only one of a series.

In the Hazlitt Memoirs I judged it to be high time to expose the ingenious strategy of the Rev. Canon Ainger and Mr Alexander Ireland in respect to my Lamb and Hazlitt labours. I have been, as a rule, fairly reticent and forbearing in these cases, and have refrained from appealing to the press. But I procured the insertion in two journals of protests against the assumption of Mr Frederic Harrison that a bibliography of English history was a novel project, and the apparent claim of Sir Walter Besant, as I infer from a paragraph in the Globe, to the rectification of the Whittington legend. I ought to be pleased that so illustrious a personage as Sir Walter thinks so humble an one as myself worth such flattering recognition. Peradventure, if I should reproduce my work, I shall be charged with having borrowed my statements from a great author and scholar.