I now proceed to speak a few words about the two auctions, with which I have been familiar—Sotheby’s and Puttick & Simpson’s. Both these distributing agencies repay careful study. You must consider the circumstances, and bear in mind Selden’s maxim, Distingue Tempora. The rooms are very variable in their temperature. Now it is high, now low. It is not always necessarily what is being sold, but what is being asked for. For instance, just at the present moment there is a desperate run on sixteenth and seventeenth century English books and on capital productions, because a few Americans have taken the infection; they know nothing of values, so long as the article is right; and therefore the price is no object. It is merely necessary to satisfy yourself that your client wants the book or books, and you may without grave risk pose at the sale-room table and in the papers as a model of intrepidity. But the game does not usually last very long; the wily American soon grows weary or distrustful; and the call for these treasures subsides, and with it the courage of the bidders. The market resumes its normal tranquillity, till a fresh fad is set afloat with similar results. No prudent buyer loses himself in these whirlpools. He watches his opportunities, and they periodically recur amid all the feverish competition arising from temporary causes.

At Sotheby’s my finds have been endless. It is in those rooms that ever since 1861, when I made notes at the Bandinel sale, I have figured as an inevitable feature in the scene, when anything remarkable, either bibliographically or commercially, has been submitted to the hammer; and I have not often had reason to lament oversights on one score or the other. When I have missed a lot, of which I desired the particulars for my collections, it has illustrated my conviction of the immense unsuspected rarity of a preponderance of the national fugitive literature. This accident occurred in the case of a tract called The Declaration of the Duke of Brabant (Philip III. of Spain) proffering a Truce with the Netherlands, 1607, and I have not since met with a second copy. It is over twenty years ago. I have occasionally registered the title of a piece, which I have found in the warehouse in the hands of a cataloguer; and it was fortunate that I did so as regarded A Farewell to Captain (afterward Sir Walter) Gray, on his departure for Holland, 1605, as the article was never again seen. There has been a good deal of this sort of miscarriage. Quite at the outset of my bibliographical career, the most ancient printed English music-book, 1530, was bought for the British Museum at the price of £80; it was only the Bassus part with that to Triplex bound up at the end; and the cataloguer had put it into a bundle. Attention was drawn to the mistake in time, and the lot was re-entered with full honours. On the other hand, I have been repeatedly indebted to Sotheby’s staff for useful and valuable help. Mr John Bohn never failed to point out whatever he supposed to be of service, and in 1891 Mr A. R. Smith shewed me a small volume printed at Ipswich by John Owen about 1550, entitled An Invective against Drunkenness, so far known only from Maunsell’s catalogue, 1598.

In quite the earlier portion of my experience here occurred the disastrous and destructive fire of 1865, which made a holocaust of the Offor library, and proved fatal to much of Lord Charlemont’s. It was a most fortunate circumstance that just at the moment Halliwell-Phillipps had some of the rarest of the Charlemont books on loan from the auctioneers at his private house in Old Brompton, and they were thus saved.

I was away, when Mr Bolton Corney’s books were sold at Sotheby’s, and did not see them. But one was returned by the buyer as imperfect; it was Drayton’s Odes and Eglogs (1605), and was said to want two leaves. I examined it, and found that it was complete, and had two duplicate leaves with variations in the text. I bought it for £1, 11s., and sold it to John Pearson on my way home for £8. 8s. A somewhat analogous incident befel me at the Burton-Constable auction in 1889, where a volume containing the Theatre of Fine Devices, 1614, the only copy known, and several other rare pieces in the finest state, was sold with all faults, because a copy of Wither’s Motto, 1621, at the end, was slightly cropped. I left a commission of £8, 8s. for this, and saw it knocked down for £1, 12s. I put the Wither in the waste-paper basket, and divided the rest between the British Museum and Messrs Pearson & Co. There were two other dispersions of curious old books, which I may exemplify. At the Auchinleck sale the prices were not low, but were extremely moderate, considering the character of many of the early Scotish tracts there offered; but the other instance, where a gentleman had with the assistance of John Pearson and others formed a collection of early English poetry, making the Bibliotheca Anglo-poetica the nucleus, was a deplorable fiasco. Books went for fewer shillings than they were worth pounds. I bought Drayton’s Mortimeriados, 1596, clean and uncut, which Mr Quaritch had acquired for the late owner for £17, for 16s. No one particularly wanted that class of books just at the moment, and the field was open to the opportunist. The proprietor, who was living, must have been gratified. I never witnessed a more thorough frost than this except at the Pyne sale already described and at those of the dramatic libraries of Mr Kershaw and Dr Rimbault, although I believe that the firm is steadfastly persuaded that the most signal collapse, in recent times at least, was the two-days’ auction of Prince Lucien Bonaparte’s philological stores, which realised £70! The Kershaw and Rimbault affairs were rather notable as yielding a large crop between them of old English plays, which were not in the Huth library, and which dropped to myself at nominal prices. The slaughter of Rimbault’s property took place on a Saturday afternoon. I recollect the buzz in the room, when Shirley’s Lady of Pleasure was carried to 14s. I bought nearly everything worth buying.

Then there was the other side of the picture, as when the Frere, or rather Fenn, books came to the hammer at Sotheby’s in 1896. As nothing in the before-mentioned auctions seemed too low, so nothing here seemed to be too extravagant. There was a kind of mysterious halo round the affair. People had heard of such books being in existence, and longed to put the report to a practical test. Herbert, in his revision of Ames, had quoted Sir John Fenn, the John Fenn Esquire of his day, as the owner of certain rarities, of which nothing absolutely reliable was known. But the items really material to myself amounted to no more than twenty, of which several were mere verifications.

Mr Quaritch was in great form. He made himself master of all the principal lots, as any one can do by bidding long enough. A copy of Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities with an extra volume of original specimens, of which the chief portion was of very slight significance, produced £255. A volume of tracts, of which nearly all the title-pages had been mutilated by Fenn for the sake of the printer’s marks, and of which the central interest lay in the first edition of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, 1592, fetched £80. The first might have been worth £40 and the second (with the defects indicated) £15. A really valuable lot, which belonged to Sir John Fenn, and which had gone somehow equally astray, was subsequently offered for sale at another room, and brought £81. It was Nicholas Breton’s Works of a Young Wit (1577), and was one of my bibliographical desiderata. I took a full note of it of course, and should have willingly gone to £42 as a matter of purchase. Mr Quaritch trusted to the prevailing American boom, and was there to win the day against all comers with the feeling that those who opposed him had with him only a common market. Failing one or two wealthy enthusiasts, the volume might lie on his shelves, so long as he lived, at that figure. This is what Mr Quaritch himself has characterised as a species of gambling. What is to be said or thought of the two imperfect copies of Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales bringing in 1895-6 £1020 and £1880 respectively? All that can be argued is, that the worth is positively artificial, and that to the individuals, for whom Mr Quaritch destines them, money is a drug or a form of speaking.

Then there was the second folio Shakespear which fetched the unheard-of price of £540, and the third, to which I presently advert. The disregard of precedents in such cases brings a certain type of early literature within the magical circle of objets de vertu, when economic laws cease to operate, and books seem to lose their true dignity in the hands of the virtuoso. Beyond a certain financial altitude there are no bon fide bookmen.

A sale, which might in its way deserve to be classed with the Frere-Fenn one at Sotheby’s, fell to the lot of the Leicester Square house in 1894. It was bipartite, and rather on the incongruous principle discountenanced in the Horatian Epistle to the Pisos. For the first division consisted of MSS. and printed books formerly belonging to Thomas Astle the antiquary, and chiefly relating to Suffolk, the Tower, and America; while the second was a series of autograph letters, particularly a small parcel addressed by Mottley the historian to Prince Bismarck between 1862 and 1872. The auctioneers looked on the day’s sale as worth £150; it realised four times as much. A single lot of Americana brought £216. The Mottley correspondence was highly interesting, and indeed important, and some of the allusions were almost droll from their homely familiarity. The nine letters were knocked down en bloc for £60.

The first item in this remarkable series, written from Vienna, the Hague, and London, found the Prussian statesman at a watering-place in the South of France, and at that time the two men appear to have been well known to each other; for Mottley subscribes himself ‘Always most sincerely your old friend;’ and the next of 1864 starts with ‘My dear old Bismarck.’ There was evidently much cordiality and sympathy. A good deal of pleasantry arises out of some photographs of the great German’s family and himself, which were a long time in arriving. But a singular interest centres in a letter of 1870, urging the desirability of mediation between the two then belligerent Powers; it is marked Private and Confidential; and I do not imagine that anything came of it.The day’s sale embraced another lot of a somewhat mysterious character, as regarded a portion of the contents. I refer to two letters from Sir Christopher Hatton in his own hand to a lady, couched in most familiar and affectionate terms, and subscribed with the same fictitious signature as Hatton employed in corresponding with the Queen herself.

It is so usual to associate the ownership of a library in middle-class hands with a single generation—scarcely that very often—that events like the Auchinleck, Astle, and Frere sales strike and impress us, and often, indeed generally, produce results gratifying to the beneficiaries; and so it was with the Berners Street and Way affairs. Volumes, which were known to exist somewhere, at last emerged from their places of concealment. Mr Swainson had bought many of his books at the sale of George Steevens in 1800; the Way lot belonged to about the same date. Among the latter were such prizes as the original editions of Arthur of Little Britain and England’s Helicon. The Berners Street business took place on the premises; there was of course a settlement; and John Payne Collier, who looked in, could get nothing. I was offered, some time after, a rare little treatise, which I declined; and I subsequently heard a queer story about a copy of it (? the same) having been removed from Joseph Lilly’s tail-pocket, while he was attending the auction. I put this and that together.

It was certainly much the same thing at the Osterley Park, Beckford, and Fountaine sales. The quotations are suggestive of lunacy, not on the part of the immediate purchasers, who are middlemen, but on that of the ulterior acquirer behind the scenes. What could be more childishly extravagant or absurd than 610 guineas for Henry VIII.’s Prayer Book on vellum, 1544, with MSS. notes by the king and members of his family? What could be indeed? Why, the £435 paid for a third folio Shakespear, 1663-4, with both titles—a book which has been repeatedly sold for £60 or £70, and which the auctioneers misdescribed, as if it had been something unique and unknown. The Beckford books realised perfectly insane prices, and were afterward resold for a sixth or even tenth of the amount to the serious loss of somebody, when the barometer had fallen. The Thuanus copy of Buchanan’s Poems, 1579, which was carried to £54, was offered to me in October, 1886, for £15. Of course there have always been inflations of value for special articles or under particular circumstances here and elsewhere; and I must confess to an instance of malice prepense at one of the Corser sales at Sotheby’s, when I made Ellis pay £100 for Warren’s Nursery of Names, 1581, by sitting next to Addington at the table, and whispering in his ear the praises of the book and its fabulous rarity. He left it at £99. There was no other competitor within a fifty-pound note’s distance. The Museum could not have gone beyond £30 or £35.

I stood behind Quaritch at Sir John Simeon’s sale in Wellington Street, and when it came to two lots, the first being the History of Oliver of Castile, printed at York in 1695, and the second one of David Laing’s publications, I told him that if he would let me have the first, I would not bid on the second. He was so amiable as to assent, and the almost unique little volume fell to me at 7s. Unhappily some one else opposed him for the Laing, which realised its normal value. I looked as grieved as I could, when he good-humouredly turned round to inquire what he had got.I have said that 1861 marked the date, when I graduated at Sotheby’s as a bibliographer. As a private buyer to a sparing and experimental extent I had known that house since 1857, when I was baulked, as I have elsewhere related, in my attempt to obtain an unique copy of the Earl of Surrey’s English version of the Fourth Book of Virgil’s Æneid, which was unique in a second sense—in being the only lot of value among a mass of rubbish.

The auctioneer’s world is classifiable into two sections: Buyers and Sellers. If you do not belong to one of these divisions, the profession scarcely knows where you come in in the economy of nature. You enter into the nondescript species. The man with the hammer views his commission as the elixir of life, as the sole object, for which men and women are born and exist; he has no other motive or seeing-point; and he does not expect others to have it. Your friends, as a rule, estimate you according to the house, in which you live, and the undertaker by the order, which he gets for your funeral; but the auctioneer appraises you by your value to him as a bidder at his table and by the marketable quality of the property, which you leave behind. If it happens that you are only a scholar, occasionally picking up a cheap lot, or a bibliographer, taking notes for the benefit of others without profit and without thanks, he eyes you with a mixture of commiseration and surprise, and has a private feeling, perhaps, that there is a percentage somewhere. And so there is—in Fame, for which he cares nothing except as an advertisement for his business; and it is natural enough, that the staff takes its cue from the principal, and unless you distribute largesse, sets you down as a troublesome nondescript.

I think that I am right in saying that it was the member of the firm of Walford Brothers, who attended the sales, who was referring at the table to the knock-out system, and Mr Hodge, who was in the rostrum, disclaimed any knowledge of such a thing, whereupon says Mr Walford to him, ‘You are the only person who does not know about it, then.’ The other day at the sale of the Boyne coins nine continental dealers were counted—confrÈres indeed. Had it not been for the English competition, the result would have been absolutely disastrous.

Thus much may be confidently affirmed of Sotheby’s. As commission-agents they are implicitly trustworthy. I have had a long and large experience, and where I have not been able, or have not deemed it politic, to attend in person, I have found that I could depend on the discretion of the auctioneer. Let one instance suffice. In 1882 there appeared in a catalogue published by the firm The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington, octavo, 1656, a mediocre copy, but twenty years earlier than any on record. I left a commission of five guineas, and the lot fell to me at as many shillings. Only three copies are known, all of different issues: and every one has been in turn mine. Two are now in the British Museum; the other, from the Daniel sale, is in the Huth library.

There was an imperfect copy of the first edition of the Paradise of Dainty Devices, 1576, in a catalogue issued by the firm in 1889. It was described as probably unique, as wanting A 4, which had been supplied from the next earliest edition in the British Museum, and as bound by F. Bedford; it was further stated, that every possible search had been made for a second copy without success. This was a tissue of romantic inventions on the part, not of the auctioneer, I apprehend, but on that of the ingenious and candid owner, who was rewarded for his pains by seeing his property fetch £100!

Some time before, Mr Burt the facsimilist came up to me at the Museum, and shewed me the copy, asking me whether I could refer him to another, whence the missing leaf might be supplied. I did so; but he eventually took it, not from the next earliest issue, which was not in the library, but from that of 1596. Bedford was dead, when the volume was bound. I leave the judicial reader to sum up!

At one of the Scotish sales at Sotheby’s—David Laing’s, I think—Kerr & Richardson of Glasgow bought against Quaritch at an utterly extravagant price some specimens of old Scotish binding, but thought better of it afterward, and the next morning Richardson went to Piccadilly, and offered to lose the last bid, if Quaritch liked to have the book. ‘No,’ replied the other; ‘I thank you; I was mad yesterday; but now I have come to my senses again.’

I have recorded in a previous page an anecdote connected with the Simeon sale at Sotheby’s. I may take the present opportunity of adding that Sir John Simeon was a resident in the Isle of Wight, and a friend of Tennyson, who met Longfellow under that roof. There is a curious story of Wilberforce, when he was at Winchester, making one of a picnic party at Simeon’s, and, the guests strolling about, as they pleased, the bishop was discovered sitting down in a field alone, with a handkerchief over his head as a sunshade, one foot in a rabbit-hole, and in his hand a bottle of champagne.

To the house in Leicester Square I feel myself under considerable obligations for acts of courtesy and kindness. In former years I bought there rather largely; and it was very possible, even in a full room, to obtain bargains, such as do not go many to the sovereign. I remember that it was here that I got the Fishmongers’ Pageant for 1590, a tract of the utmost rarity, the Merry Devil of Edmonton, 1631, a prose version of the story far scarcer than the play, and mistaken by some of those present for it, till it was knocked down to me, and a volume of early pieces relating to murders, accidents, and other cognate matters in the finest state. There seemed to be no voice lifted up for them beyond a bid, which I could easily cap. One of the most remarkable early grammars in the British Museum occurred here, and fetched only 44s. although it was in the highest preservation and wholly undescribed. Another work of this class, which led to a certain amount of inquiry, was an A B C printed on paper like linen at Riga in Russian Poland for the use of the German children there, who preponderate in number, about 1700—perhaps the oldest example of the kind. It was very appropriately lotted with Thomas Morton’s Treatise of the Nature of God, 1599! The two did not bring more than 12s. The Riga Primer was, I conclude, a find, as the British Museum sent down an individual to my house to procure information about it and similar productions in connection with some task which he had before him.

There was a singular little upheaval, so to speak, at Puttick & Simpson’s a few years ago, when certain tracts, so far known only from report or the Stationers’ Register, occurred. I took memoranda of them all, but somehow omitted to bid for them. What became of the others, I do not know; but an extraordinarily rare Elizabethan pamphlet respecting Edward Glemham, 1591, fell to Mr Quaritch, and from him passed to me at 36s. My intimacy with the market-value of these relics inspired my eminent acquaintance by degrees with a distrust of me, and led to a cessation of his catalogues. I own that I should have looked from such a quarter for greater magnanimity. He sold me a small piece by Ralph Birchensha on Irish affairs, 1602, for £6, 6s., less ten per cent. for cash, and subsequently wrote to demand for what consideration I was willing to surrender it. But both purchases were bespoken: the former for the British Museum, the latter for Mr Huth.

It was on this ground that I had the bad luck to fall into a trap laid by myself. In some sale a copy of Dekker’s Belman of London, 1608, occurred in a volume in old vellum with the same author’s Lanthorn and Candlelight, bearing the same date as the first piece, and so far known only in a re-issue of 1609. I committed the stupid and double blunder of fancying that it was the former and less important article, which was imperfect, and of suggesting to the auctioneers, that the book should be sold with all faults. Even then I had to give £5, 2s. 6d. for it, and it turned out that the missing sheet in the middle was in the Lanthorn and Candlelight. I separated the two pieces, and sold the Belman to Smith; and the other, when I had kept it a twelvemonth or so in the vain hope of completion, I handed over to the Museum. I just saved myself.

Nothing is much more remarkable than the jetsam, which chance brings up to the surface here and in Wellington Street alike. Some of the rarest books and pamphlets in our early literature have fallen under my eyes in Leicester Square. Once it was a parcel, I recollect, including, among others, Drayton’s Shepheard’s Garland, 1593; but the lots were uniformly, in point of condition, hopeless; and I had to leave them to others.

But the most signal acquisition on my part was the series of the Somers Tracts in thirty folio volumes, which had belonged to the famous chancellor, and had passed through several hands, but were still in the original calf binding. This set of books and tracts comprised some of the rarest Americana, especially the Laws of New York, printed there in 1693-4, and probably one of the earliest specimens of local typography. I forget what I left with the auctioneers; but the price, at which the hammer fell, was £61. A single item was worth double that sum; and there were hundreds and hundreds. I spoke to Mr Quaritch after the sale, and begged him to say why he had not bidden for the article. I apprehend that he overlooked it—at all events its peculiar importance. What a lottery!

Now alike in Wellington Street and here all is changed. A new school has arisen, and every article of the slightest consequence is carried to the last shilling—and beyond. The highest bidder never despairs of finding, when he gets home, somebody more enthusiastic or more foolish than himself. I sometimes look round, while a sale is proceeding, and nearly all the faces are strange. They are those of young men, who represent firms, or who speculate on their own account. There are no cheap lots, save to the preternaturally knowing or lucky.

I have reserved to the last the name, which should by right, perhaps, have come first in order—that of Mr Quaritch, because he co-operated with me in the enterprise, which constituted throughout my motive for mingling in the commercial circle, and has enabled me to preserve from the risk of destruction a vast body of original matter. Mr Quaritch cannot have realised any appreciable advantage from publishing my Bibliographical Collections from 1882 to 1892; and he left me a perfectly free hand with the printer, saying that his share of the business was to pay the bill and sell the books. I waxed tired of the practical side, when I lost £140 by a single volume of the series.

But, while he associated himself with me in a variety of ways, some more mutually profitable than this one, our practical transactions were, comparatively speaking, not so important or heavy as might have been expected. Mr Quaritch used at one time to have cheap books as well as dear; and I suppose that I gave the preference to the former. I saw a copy of Fortunatus in English in his window one day, marked 12s., and I went in to buy it. He was just by the door, and when he learned my object, ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I have kept that book so long, that it is 15s. if you want it,’ and the higher figure I had to pay. There was never any remarkable event in my life immediately identifiable with these classic premises. I fear that I was suspected of knowing too much. I was not like the good folks, to whom, when he had bought the first copy of the Mazarin Bible, he exhibited an ordinary early printed specimen on their application for leave to inspect the real article. They were just as happy and just as wise. How many thumbs it saved!

I shall always cherish a sentiment of gratitude toward Mr Quaritch for his valuable aid during a whole decade in putting it in my power to present in instalments the fruit of my labour at the auction-rooms and elsewhere, and in agreeing to defray the entire cost of the General Index to a large portion of it. I look forward to the possibility of carrying on the task piecemeal, till it embraces the entire corpus of our earlier national literature in all its branches, each item derived from the printed original, and illustrated by such notes as may appear desirable and appropriate.

Thousands of new titles await the printer.

It was through this medium that Lord Crawford was pleased to honour me with a proof of his lordship’s catalogue of Proclamations, thinking that it might be of service; but I had to return the copy with a message by the same channel that the descriptions were drawn up on a different principle from mine, and that I never accepted information at second-hand, if I could possibly avoid it.After what I had seen of Lord Crawford’s bibliographical discernment, I was rather distressed to hear that his lordship is regarded as one of the best-informed men on the Board of Trustees in Great Russell Street. But the qualifications of an ex-officio member cannot be always satisfactory.

I conclude that it is, except among the general public, an open secret that Mr Quaritch has been during quite a long series of years eminently indebted for his success to the varied and extraordinary erudition of his adviser, Mr Michael Kerny. Mr Quaritch was accustomed to say to me: ‘I am a shopkeeper; Mr Kerny is a gentleman;’ and there was a degree of truth in this remark. Yet the former is something more than le grand marchand; his enterprise and pluck are marvellous; and they are the outcome, for the most part, not of foolhardihood, but of genius. A man, who buys blindly, soon reaches the end of his tether. That Mr Quaritch for divers reasons has often made unwise purchases, and has missed his mark, may be perfectly the fact; but in the main he has obviously struck the right vein; and he pursues his policy season after season, witnessing the departure of old clients (or, as he would rather put it, customers) and the advent of new ones. He despises popularity, and has ere this given umbrage by his brusquerie to supporters of long standing and high position; and he leaves them to do as they please to seek other pastures or to return to their former allegiance. He is a striking example—the most striking I have ever seen—of a man, who knows how to accommodate unusual independence of character and conduct to commercial life.

The successive authorities in the Printed Book Department of the British Museum have earned my cordial gratitude by their uniform deference to my somewhat peculiar and somewhat exacting requirements. They soon formed the habit, when it was found that I was an earnest and genuine worker, of waiving in my favour, so far as it was consistent with reason and propriety, the hard and fast rule of the establishment, and even under the now rather remote and quasi-historical keepership of Mr Watts.

It was as a simple student that I in the first place sought the British Museum, and in the old reading-room initiated myself in the learning requisite to qualify me, as I imagined, for becoming the English historian of Venice. I was self-complacently happy in the unconsciousness of my own intense ignorance of the magnitude of the task and of the fact that, at a distance of forty years, I should still have merely reached a more advanced stage of my labours. It at any rate speaks for my perseverance and resolution, that my interest in the topic is unabated, and my desire and intention, to see the project of my youth completed on a suitable and satisfactory scale inflexible.

I ventured into type in 1858 and 1860, and since then I have printed farther instalments destined to fall into their places, when the time arrives. But accident directed my steps and thoughts about the same time into a different groove, and I turned my attention to book-collecting and bibliography, at first vaguely and desultorily, and by degrees on a more systematic principle; and cogent circumstances—that necessity for living, which Dr Johnson ignored—finally drove me into the market as a speculator. My conversance with old books was very special and defective; of many classes I knew next to nothing; but I gradually gained a fair insight into the value of those, for which I had contracted a personal liking—the early poetry and romances—and I tried my hand as a hunter for specialities. I naturally turned to the Museum as a channel; for I was not acquainted with many of the booksellers, and I had yet to meet with Mr Huth.

It may not be, indeed is not, generally known, how wide a diversity of persons offer their possessions or acquisitions to the national library. There are great differences of opinion respecting the questions of rarity and value, and the authorities are most unconscionably plagued by a host of individuals of imperfect bibliographical attainments, who shoot parcels of old volumes in Great Russell Street in the expectation of a more or less rich harvest, in which they are apt to be more or less disappointed. Here and there a real treasure is netted. The Bishop of Bath and Wells brought a small octavo volume from Ickworth, comprising the Prophete Jonas and other tracts of singular scarcity and importance. A gentleman from Woolwich introduced a quarto volume in old vellum of poetical compositions of the middle of the sixteenth century, including the Scholehouse of Women, the Defence of Women, the Seven Sorrows that Women have when Their Husbands be dead, etc., with the autograph on a flyleaf of ‘John Hodge, of the Six Clerks’ Office 1682.’ Such prizes atone for a vast amount of annoyance and rubbish.

But Mr Maskell, Mr Halliwell, Mr Henry Stevens, and myself have probably, apart from purchases made direct from the sales and the shops, contributed of late years most largely to supply lacunÆ in the Early English Department, and supersede the three-volume catalogue.

At the Bodleian the late Dr Coxe and the Rev. Mr Madan have always done their best to help me, and at Cambridge the late Mr Henry Bradshaw was a host in himself. These relations, however, were purely bibliographical; while those with the Museum were of a more mingled yarn, and my connection with that institution, both as regarded printed literature and manuscripts, was in fact part of the system, which I have above fully explained.

I did a good deal con amore. A strange story reached me about a copy of Monstrelet’s Chronicles in French, printed on vellum, for which Mr Quaritch was not willing to give as much as the owner desired, in fact throwing discredit on the genuineness of the book. Whereupon it was carried to Great Russell Street, duly inspected, and as to the price—the authorities were prepared to hand over all the cash in hand, about £700. Mr Quaritch was stated to have been very wroth, when he found that he had missed the lot, and declared that his ground for scepticism was the fact that the only copy in the market or likely to occur for sale was in Russia; and he then learned for the first time, that the present one had been obtained at St Petersburg. I called on Mr Garnett, and inquired what were the actual circumstances, so far as the Museum was concerned; and it appeared that the book did come from Russia, and consisted only of vols. 2 and 3; but the library already possessed vol. 1 (wanting one leaf only) in an incomplete set formerly belonging to King Henry VII.; and the purchase was arranged. The keeper referred to the accounts, and found that the transaction took place in 1886, and that the sum given was £375.

My experiences of bookbinders have been tolerably manifold, and not exempt from the sorrows, with which the employers of this class of skilled labour are bound to become familiar. The earliest of my acquaintances was Mr Leighton, who executed a great deal of work for Sir William Stirling-Maxwell—in those days known as William Stirling of Keir. There was a stupendous copy of Maxwell’s Cloister-Life of Charles V., published at a few shillings, which I understood Leighton to say had cost with the illustrations and elaborate Spanish binding about £1000. I saw the book in Brewer Street, but not the value. Leighton’s speciality was Spanish calf, as Riviere’s was the tree-marbled pattern. I had a considerable amount of work done for me here, while I filled the rÔle of a collector on my own account in a humble degree. But when I had occasion, at a later period, to put volumes into new liveries, and their condition demanded nice handling, I employed Riviere, whom I found very satisfactory and punctual. His place of business in Piccadilly adjoining Pickering’s shop was during years one of my not least agreeable resorts, and I profited, with the concurrence of the principal, by the constant presence on the premises of undescribed books or editions consigned for binding. Of Bedford I saw very little. He was a true artist, and a very unassuming, pleasant fellow, whom I occasionally visited at his address in or near York Street, Westminster. My first call was in consequence of Mr Huth having given me leave to take notes of some rare volumes, which were in course of treatment. Bedford was more reliable than Riviere, who could bind well, if he liked; but he sometimes left too much to subordinates. Pratt, who had been a workman at Bedford’s, was a respectable binder, but an indifferent cleaner and mender, two very essential features, where the slightest neglect or oversight may prove disastrous. It is trying to look in casually, and perceive that the tender title-page of a quarto Shakespear has parted with one of the letters of the poet’s name or a figure of the date, and that one of these is floating on the surface of a tub of water; and such thrilling episodes have occurred.

If it is in some cases an advantage to take your acquisitions to a binder, and have them separately clothed, it is in others, and perhaps for the most part, one to buy ready-bound. It saves expense, delay, and annoyance.

Of my publishers I am scarcely entitled to speak in a volume devoted to the collecting side beyond such works as directly arose from my pursuit as a book-lover pure and simple between 1857 and 1867. But, when I look closely at my professedly literary undertakings, I discern more or less in nearly all of them a bibliographical spirit and training. My Venetian labours included the formation of a fair representative collection of books relating to the subject and a study of the MSS. within my reach. My pronounced taste for method and minutiÆ in early English literature extended to Italy, when I was endeavouring to concentrate on the history of the Republic all the direct and collateral light, which I was enabled to gather from various sources; and the same thing may be truly predicated of the commissions, which I executed for several publishers, beginning with Russell Smith and Reeves & Turner. Mine have been chiefly enterprises, where a knowledge of detail and a familiarity with extant or available material were apt to prove of eminent service; and such was especially the case with the Early Popular Poetry and the Dodsley. Disciples of the belles-lettres, who entertain less respect for the extrinsic side or part of their tasks, may be wiser than myself; but it strikes me, that it is difficult to do justice to a subject without surveying the entire ground occupied by it.

Two very mortifying illustrations of the soundness of this view occurred to me at different times. In my collected edition of Randolph, I collated everything with the original editions except the Aristippus and had the satisfaction of discovering, when it was too late, that all but the first issue were incomplete in many places, in one to the extent of omitting a line. In my reconstructed and enlarged Dodsley, in fifteen thick octavo volumes, containing eighty-four dramas, I have a table of errata of thirty-six items, many very trivial and even dubious; and of this total five-and-twenty occur in one play, which I neglected to compare with the old copy deposited in an inconvenient locality, and gave from the Shakespear Society’s text. I attach greater blame to myself, that I should have forgotten, when I reprinted in 1892 my Suckling of 1874, to set right the stupid mistake in the song from ‘The Sad One,’ of dawn for down.

I shall remain highly pleased, that I succeeded, in the volume entitled Tales and Legends, in putting in type my long-cherished ideas about Robin Hood and Faustus; and I adopted a sort of old-fashioned, vernacular style throughout the book, apparently not unsuitable to the nature of the topics treated. Both the stories just mentioned were there for the first time presented in an English form and text agreeably to my view and estimate of the facts relative to two of the most remarkable characters in romance. The accumulation of absurdities round those heroes of the closet and the stage prompted me, years and years since, to endeavour to reduce the legends to a shape more compatible with evidence and probability. Yet I am informed that some of the critics wondered, what the aim of the volume was. It struck others, as well as myself, as fairly clear; indeed the undertaking was strictly on recognised lines. But I had unfortunately omitted to graduate as a specialist and to add myself to the roll of the faithful.

Another venture, which involved the writer in a slight temporary imbroglio, was the monograph on the Livery Companies of London. I was most unhappy in the season and circumstances of launching this work. It was a tolerably hard six months’ task, and I hurried it forward, inasmuch as I knew that a rival scheme was on the stocks. Considering that it is a big book with numerous illustrations supplied by the editor, it is perhaps not much worse than it might have been, had it proceeded from a pen writing superiorum approbatione. The rumour arose that, as soon as the real work on the subject appeared, the attempt of an outsider would sink into merited oblivion; but the real work did not appear, and its proposed author had to content himself, in the presence of his disappointment, with sending me an anonymous communication, based on erroneous intelligence, that the word Gild ought to be spelled with a U, as it is in Guildhall, Gild signifying to face with gold.

A far more serious misadventure, however, was occasioned by an unlucky clerical oversight. In the account of the Cutlers’ Company I stated that there had been, many years before, a defalcation by the Clerk, whereas I should have said ‘by a clerk;’ the wrong article and the capital letter drew down on me the ire of the party, who still occupied the position of Clerk to the Gild, and who pleaded damage to his reputation by the misprint, pointed out to him by the frustrated compiler aforesaid. There could be no sustainable plea of injury, and the large amount lost rendered it obvious that there must have been neglect by superiors; but the publishers thought it better to agree to cancel the leaf, which was done in all copies unsold or recoverable. The Clerk was in fact the responsible officer, and although he might have had no hand in the misappropriation, he must have exercised a very imperfect control over the accounts, to render such a thing possible.

Owing to the unlucky retention in my agreement for the Livery Companies’ book of certain clauses, I involved myself in an unpleasantness, which made me anxious to get rid of the entire business. Accordingly, the moment that I was advised by the firm, that they had (without previous consultation with me as a royalty-holder) converted themselves into a limited company, I solicited a cheque in settlement of all claims, and obtained it. I have very possibly set a precedent, by which others might not do ill to profit.

I know that to my more recent acquaintances and auxiliaries I must have appeared rather niggard of presentation copies of my publications. But I used to be generous enough in distributing such things, till I was thoroughly disheartened and disgusted. Some stopped short of acknowledgment; others might without much disadvantage have done the same. I sent a privately-printed volume worth several pounds as a gift to a reverend professor at Cambridge, and he wrote back on a card: ‘Thanks. Curious.’ My former schoolmaster at Merchant Taylors had only to say that I had left out a Greek accent in a quotation, and a female relative, after two years’ deliberation, apprised me that I was guilty of printing the wrong article in a French maxim. When I forwarded to Mr William Chappell direct as from myself an important volume edited for Mr Huth, he pointed out to the latter, leaving me unrecognised, that I had made a slip in a particular place. An official at the British Museum, who solicited one of my books as a memorial, which would be cherished as an heirloom in his family, forthwith passed it on to a bookseller, who priced it in his catalogue at £12, 12s., and Mr Huth, till I explained the circumstances, imagined that I was the culprit.