At a lower level than the individuals above mentioned, yet still on a basis which made it possible for me to render them subservient to my all-engrossing design, were Mr Henry Pyne, Assistant Commissioner of Tithes, and two or three minor characters, with whom my contact was transient.

Mr Pyne entered far more conspicuously and materially into my bibliographical and personal history than any person save Mr Huth. I formed his acquaintance while the Handbook was on the stocks, and he assisted me to the extent of his power by placing at my disposal his collection of English books, printed not later than the year 1600. He had begun by adopting a wider range; but circumstances led him to restrict himself to the limit laid down by Maitland in his Lambeth Catalogue. I worked very hard at Mr Pyne’s office in St James’s Square, and at his private house, at the stores he had brought together on this rather hard-and-fast principle; to me, as a bibliographer, the extrinsic merits of the copies were immaterial, and I owed to my estimable and thenceforward life-long acquaintance the means of rendering my introductory experiment of 1867 less empirical and secondary than it would otherwise have been. I cannot turn over the leaves of the volume without identifying many and many an entry with Mr Pyne and his unwearied kindness and sympathy, and in all cases where the book was eminently rare I have cited him as the owner of the copy which I used.

Our relationship grew into intimacy, and as his official functions appeared to be light and unexacting, his spacious room at the Tithe Office was my habitual halting-place on my way home from town. He shewed me any fresh purchase, spoke of what he had seen or heard, and discussed with me points connected with my current literary affairs. I thoroughly appreciated our intercourse, which was less constrained and formal than that with Mr Huth, and I regarded Mr Pyne as my benefactor in his way to an equal extent. The financial strength of the former placed him in a position which was not altogether natural, although I am far from thinking that he failed to fill the rank, to which his wealth entitled him, with dignity and judgment. It was, indeed, due to Mr Huth’s half involuntary self-assertion, as a man of great fortune, that we at last fell out, as it was not my cue to yield even to him beyond a certain point, and I had had reason to complain of the mode in which he conducted the editorship of his catalogue, a proceeding whereby he was the sole loser. With Mr Pyne I was at my ease. We never had a word of difference or the shadow of a rupture all the years I knew him.

I have noticed Mr Pyne’s law made for himself in regard to his choice of books; but he had kept some of those which lay outside the strict chronological barrier, and they were long under the charge of a bookseller in King William Street, Strand. It was in the full flood of Mr Huth’s collecting fancy, and it occurred to me one day to ascertain from Mr Pyne, if possible, how it stood with the property. He said that he was meditating the sale of the boxful to someone. What did it contain? He could not recollect exactly, but there were Civil War tracts, some pieces of earlier date, and so on. How much did he propose to get for them? This he also could not resolve. I had no conception whatever of the nature and extent of the parcel, but I offered him at a venture £15, 15s., and he accepted the sum.

It was a downright little find. Sixty rare pamphlets went to Mr Huth at as many guineas; the British Museum purchased several; and a literary coal merchant, who had just then been providentially inspired with an ardour for the monuments of the Civil War period, gave me £20 for the refuse. But Mr Pyne was once or twice tempted by my offers for books in his own series, and I had from him, among others, The Prayer and Complaint of the Ploughman unto Christ, 1531, and Gervase Markham’s Discourse of Horsemanship, 1593. I gave him £21 for the first, just double what it had cost him. They were both for Mr Huth.

Pyne informed me one morning at his office, when I called as usual, that at a shop in Marylebone Lane he had seen Cocker’s Decimal Arithmetic, 1685 (first edition), marked eighteenpence. I went, and bought it. It was a very fine copy. The portrait belongs to the Vulgar Arithmetic.

The anti-climax was reached when Mr Pyne’s library came to the hammer some years since. It was a two days’ sale at Sotheby’s; the books were poorly described, the trade was not eager for them, and the British Museum had no funds. My own hands were rather tied by a temporary circumstance; but the opportunity was not one to be thrown away. I gave a long string of commissions to a bookseller whom I thought that I could trust, and he got me at nominal prices all the rarest lots, comprising a few of the gems in the English historical series, and some absolutely unique. I cannot divine how it so chanced; but about £16 placed me in possession of all I wanted. One item my agent missed, and I had to hunt down the acquirer, who gave it up to me at a trifling advance. The Museum soon afterward came into the usual grant, and gave me £116 for what they wanted—nearly everything. I met Professor Arber at the institution in Great Russell Street just after the transfer, and he deplored the loss which the national library had sustained by not bidding for such desiderata. He did not hear from me at that time that they were all in the building. Perhaps he discovered the fact subsequently.

There was one article in the Pyne auction, of which the simple-minded cataloguer had as correct an estimate as Messrs Reeves & Turner, who sold it to my friend. I had seen it in the booksellers’ list at £10, described as a quarto volume, two and a-half inches thick, in vellum; but I was not just then in a buying humour; and it passed into other hands. But it was the identical collection of Occasional Forms of Prayer of the time of Elizabeth, in spotless state, with the autograph of Humphrey Dyson on nearly every title-page, which had been missing ever since Dyson’s time, and which Reeves had picked up somewhere in Essex. I sent a commission of twenty-five guineas for it, and obtained it for £4, 6s. The present was one of my most striking experiences. Where the leading buyers were on those eventful days I cannot even dream.

Mr Pyne used to say that there were three prices for old books—the market, the fancy, and the drop one—and I imagine that his taste, if not his resources, led him to espouse the last in great measure, so that he never became master of many volumes of first-rate consequence. He told me that the rise in the figures for rare early literature at the Bright sale in 1845 drove some of the existing collectors out of the market. What would they think, if they were now among us, and witnessed £2900 given for two imperfect copies of Caxton’s Chaucer?

Pyne had had varied experiences. As a young man, he resided at Gibraltar, and he told me that he had there an intrigue with a Spanish beauty, the unexpected advent or return of whose husband necessitated her lover’s desperate leap out of the window. One of his daughters married our Resident in Cashmere, and she was, when I met her in London, regretting the rule by which all presents from the native princes had to be given up to Government, as once, on her return home, the Rajah sent a messenger to meet her with an oblation of a gold teapot.

My old acquaintance had gone into the intricate affairs of the Mostyn family of Mostyn and Gloddaeth, and declared that he found them hopeless. Lord Mostyn owned the moor on which the town of Llandudno was subsequently built; and I have mentioned that he owned a splendid library and collection of antiquities. But when I was last at Gloddaeth, even the flower-garden was farmed. His lordship borrowed £400 of my father-in-law, and repaid him in garden tools.

It always impressed me as a curious trait in Pyne that he possessed so slight a knowledge of the world. He gravely informed me one day, when we were together, that he had gone to a saleroom in quest of an additional book-case, and that a dealer approached him with an offer of his services. He explained his object, and pointed to the article he had come to view. The dealer begged to know his pleasure touching the price, and he named six guineas; and he said to me with affecting simplicity: ‘A most extraordinary coincidence! the thing fetched just the money.’ Of course it did.

There have been very few book-buyers of the last and present generation of whom I have not known something, but our correspondence was, as a rule, purely bibliographical or incidental. Of the booksellers with whom I have mixed I have already specified the Boones. The other principal houses were those of Joseph Lilly, Bernard Quaritch, F. S. Ellis, B. M. Pickering, John Pearson and his successors, Messrs J. Pearson & Co., and Willis & Sotheran. My transactions with the Wallers, the Rimells, the Walfords, Reeves & Turner, Edward Stibbs, John Salkeld, and some of the provincial dealers, have also been a source of combined pleasure and profit. I may affirm one thing with confidence, that if I have been asked a price for an article, I have always paid it, and that I should not be accused of procuring books or MSS. below their value, because I happened, perhaps, to have gained a wrinkle more about them than the vendor.

When I first encountered Lilly it was as a simple amateur. I was at that time—about 1863 or 1864—purchasing rare old books, for which my late father unexpectedly discovered that he had to pay; I made my dÉbut in this charlatan-like course at a shop in Lombard Street, kept by a Mr Elkins; but I never offended again. Lilly then had a place of business in Bedford Street, and when I contracted my humble liability with him, and accidentally brushed elbows with Mr Huth once or twice, neither of them foresaw how strongly I should influence the library of the latter, or how I should find it practicable to select from Lilly’s shelves many scores of rare volumes with a view to their translation to his own particular client through me. For, apart from Mr Huth, I do not think that in his later years Lilly had a large circle of customers, and I know that more than once he has begged Mr Pyne on a Saturday afternoon to buy something of him, as he had not sold a single volume during the week. This might have been a joke; but there are not many jokes without a substratum of truth.

Lilly was a bluff, plain-spoken, imperfectly-bred man; but I always found him civil and obliging, and he lent me any book which I required for editorial or other purposes without hesitation. He compiled his catalogues with no ordinary care, and would often take a pleasure in pointing out some little discovery which he had made about an edition or copy of an old writer. He presented me in 1869 with a bound collection of these, and they contain a variety of useful notices. He was no scholar or linguist, yet it was said of him that, if he had a Hebrew or Sanscrit book, he seemed to know whether it possessed value or not. He left behind him a large stock, which was publicly sold, and of which I was a purchaser here and there. It struck me as a curious trait in a man who had much natural shrewdness that he allowed many volumes of the rarest character to remain on his shelves, when they might have been with very slight trouble converted into money. Under the hammer they commanded prices which paid homage to the departed owner’s supposed capability of placing everything to the best advantage; the trade hung off a good deal; and Lilly was not popular, besides. The British Museum wanted nearly all that I bought. There was one very early volume of prayers, printed on vellum, for which Lilly had asked £12, 12s.; it came to me at £4, 12s., and I might, if John Pearson had not suspected it to be something valuable, have had it for half that amount. But the odd feature about the matter was that, although I submitted it to Mr Blades, and to everyone else likely to be able to tell me, no one could say where it was printed. The Museum gladly gave me the sum which its former proprietor had justly deemed it worth without finding anybody to agree with him.

The Daniel sale in 1864 and the Corser one, the latter spread over two or three seasons (1868-70), represented the most profitable and conspicuous incidents in Lilly’s career, as they supplied the material, each in its way, which most largely helped to raise the library of his principal, Mr Huth, to the rank which it occupied, and still occupies in the hands of a son. The Daniel books had been collected under specially favourable circumstances. They were selected at leisure during a period of over thirty years from auction-room and book-shop, whenever an item, which struck their proprietor’s practical instinct as a safe and desirable investment, occurred; and some of the most important—the quarto Shakespears, the unique chapbooks, and the Elizabethan poetry, were secured just when a marked depression had set in—Dibdin’s Bibliophobia, which was to the Bibliomania what the anti-cyclone is to the whirlwind; while not a few highly remarkable lots—

The Ballads

The quarto edition of the Book of St. Albans

The Lucrece, 1594,

The Chester’s Love’s Martyr, 1601,