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

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

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

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

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

Christie-Miller owned the house in St James’s Place which had once been classic ground as the residence of Samuel Rogers. I went there two or three times, and met his (Miller’s) wife and son. The latter was a mild youth, who had been educated at high-class schools and a university, and who had (like his father) an imperfect acquaintance not only with literature but with grammar. He was phenomenally ignorant and dull, like his parent. All three at present lie seventy feet beneath the ground, near Holyrood, where a monument has been erected to their memory. If the ferocious Socialist hereafter disinters the remains of haughty and purse-proud book-collectors of former times, he will probably not dig down low enough to find the bones of the Millers.A personage far more in sympathy with Mr Heber was the Reverend Thomas Corser, of Stand, near Manchester, whose acquaintance it was my honour to enjoy from about 1862 to the time of his death. I have taken occasion elsewhere to explain how it was that Mr Corser and myself were bound together in a measure by a community of interest apart from books. While he was as zealous and genuine an enthusiast as Heber, and regarded his acquisitions as something better than shelf-furniture, he was in one important respect totally different from his great predecessor who, as a man of large fortune, had only to decide on purchases and to refer the vendors to his bankers. Mr Corser, on the contrary, was a man of very limited resources, and found it a difficult task now and then to keep pace with the desiderata submitted to his notice by the booksellers and auctioneers. I know as a fact that at the Bright sale in 1845, which must have marked a comparatively early stage in his bibliographical career, he was obliged to pay five per cent to the agent (Thorpe or Rodd), who bought for him; and his bill was not far from £1000. Altogether his fine and interesting library cost him, as he told me, £9000; and it realised about £20,000, chiefly owing to the competition of the British Museum, Mr Huth, and Mr Miller. The national collection made a splendid haul—far better than it would have done, had Mr Huth been better advised. As it was, I secured at my own risk a large number of lots at very high prices, which his agent Lilly had overlooked, or did not duly appreciate. I bought personally, as well as through F. S. Ellis, to the value altogether of £2000 or £3000, and Ellis subsequently congratulated me on my dexterity in giving my commissions to him, and thus removing one of my most formidable competitors. He instanced one lot, which thus went to him at 2s., and for which he would have given £3, 3s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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