THE CONFESSIONS OF A COLLECTOR

This is a copy of the First Edition of this book. It is published in the United States by Messrs Dodd, Mead & Company, New York; but, in deference to the wishes of Collectors, the original London imprint is retained.

ERRATUM.

Page [192], for Anderton read Anderson.

THE
CONFESSIONS
OF A
COLLECTOR

BY
WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT
AUTHOR OF
‘FOUR GENERATIONS OF A LITERARY FAMILY,’ ETC.

LONDON
WARD & DOWNEY
LIMITED
12 YORK BUILDINGS, ADELPHI, W.C.
1897

CONTENTS

Confessions of a Collector

CHAPTER I

My Antecedents—How and Whence the Passion came to Me—My Father’s People—And My Mother’s—My Uncle—His Genuine Feeling for what was Old and Curious—A Disciple of Charles Lamb—Books My First Love—My Courtship of Them under My Father’s Roof—My Clandestine Acquisitions—A Small Bibliographical Romance—My Uncle as a Collector—Some of His Treasures—His Choice, and how He differed from My Father—An Adventure of the Latter at a Bookstall—Bargains—The Author moralises upon Them—A New View—I begin to be a Bibliographer—Venice strikes My Fancy as a Subject for Treatment—My Want of Acquaintance with It—Mr Quaritch and Mr Ruskin do not encourage Me—I resolve to proceed—I teach Myself what was Requisite to enable Me to do so—Some of My Experiences—Molini the Elder—The London Library Forty Years Ago—What became of My Collections for the Work—Preparing for Another and Greater Scheme.

When one makes in later life some sort of figure as a collector, it may become natural to consider to what favouring circumstances the entrance on the pursuit or pursuits was due. In the present case those circumstances were slight and trivial enough. Although I belonged to a literary family, none of my ancestors had been smitten by the bibliomania or other cognate passion, simply because at first our resources were of the most limited character, and my grandfather was a man of letters and nothing more. He was without that strange, inexplicable cacoethes, which leads so many to gather together objects of art and curiosities on no definite principle or plea throughout their lives, to be scattered again when they depart, and taken up into their bookcases or cabinets by a new generation. This process, broadly speaking, has been in operation thousands of years. It is an inborn and indestructible human trait.

The earliest vestige of a feeling for books among us is unconnected with Collecting as a passion. My great-grandfather, the Presbyterian or Congregational minister, had his shelf or two of volumes, mostly of a professional cast. We hear of the Fratres Poloni, five stupendous folios, brimful of erudition—books which seem, to our more frivolous and superficial and hurrying age, better suited to occupy a niche in a museum as a monumental testimony to departed scholarship—books, alas! which those blind instruments of the revolutionary spirit of change, the paper mill and the fire, draw day by day nearer to canonisation in a few inviolable resting-places, as in sanctuaries dedicated to the holy dead. They will enter on a new and more odorous life: we shall look awfully upon them as upon literary petrifactions, which to bygone ages were living and speaking things.

The Rev. W. Hazlitt was, nevertheless, a man of unusually generous sympathies for his time and his cloth; he could relish secular as well as sacred literature, and his distinguished son thought better of him as a letter-writer than as a preacher. But neither engaged in the pursuit of books otherwise than as practical objects of study or entertainment. There was nothing ‘hobby-horsical,’ to borrow Coleridge’s expression, about the matter. Hazlitt himself secured, as he tells us, stall copies of favourite books or pamphlets, devoured the contents, and then probably cast them aside. This I take to have been Shakespear’s plan. I cannot believe the great poet to have been a bibliophile like Jonson. He merely recognised in other men’s work material or suggestion for his own.

I conclude that with my father and the Scotish blood of his maternal progenitors, the Stoddarts and Moncrieffs, a certain share of taste for antiquities, or, at any rate, for memorials of the past in a literary shape, was inherited by the Hazlitts. My immediate paternal ancestor, the late Mr Registrar Hazlitt, undoubtedly possessed a strong instinctive disposition to form around him a collection of books. He was emphatically acquisitive almost to the last; and had he been a richer man, he would probably have left behind him a fairly good and extensive library. My father was deficient in knowledge and insight—I might add, in judgment. He bought the wrong copies, or he allowed the right ones to be massacred by a pagan binder; but he was a book-lover. The nucleus of his collection had been a set of Hazlitt’s works, a few volumes given to him by Miss Lamb and others, and, of course, his own publications.

His alliance by marriage to the Reynells introduced another stage in our bibliographical evolution. My mother’s brother, Mr Charles Weatherby Reynell, of whom I have so much to say elsewhere, was not only a book-buyer on a modest scale, but a gentleman with a vague, undefined liking for anything which struck him as quaint and curious—a coin, a piece of china, a picture, a bit of old painted glass, a Chippendale chair—it hardly signified what it was; but books had the first place, I think, in his heart, and he knew a good deal about such as he had purchased, and thought a good deal about them too, albeit they were, as copies, hardly calculated for the meridian of the fastidious connoisseur. In short, my relative was a disciple of the Lamb school; he selected for merit rather than condition, and his petite bibliothéque was part of his very being.

My father and Mr Reynell may be regarded as my bibliographical and archæological sponsors, and they have to answer for a good deal. Instead of becoming a distinguished civil servant, a prosperous trader, or a successful professional man, they contributed, I maintain, to mould me into what I was and am—a bibliographer, a collector, an antiquary.

Books, as they were my father’s only, and my uncle’s chief, paramours, were my first love. My father often laid out money on them, when I am now sure that he could ill afford it, and when the hour of pressure arrived, it was the books to which we had to bid farewell. How many I have seen come and go, while I was a boy under my father’s roof—successive copies of the same favourite work, or little lots of different volumes. Stibbs’s, opposite Somerset House, and next door to the Morning Chronicle office, is almost the earliest shop of the kind which I remember; a second was William Brown’s, originally on the same premises. These two establishments witnessed the flux and reflux of many a brown paper parcel sent home in a moment of impulse, and launched on its backward voyage at a lower quotation in some financial dilemma—a contingency too frequent in the days before relief arrived in the shape of an official post.

I am haunted in all my maturer life by a feeling of remorse, that on two or three occasions I was betrayed into making foolish investments on my own authority, when neither my father nor myself could properly defray the expense. But the lues which was, in due course, to assume such enlarged dominion over me, and to branch into so many channels, was already an active agency; and my visits to the shop in the Strand, kept by Mr Brown, bore mischievous fruit in one instance at all events, when I secured for 24s. a set of Singer’s Select Early English Poets, in boards, uncut. My father was terribly concerned, not knowing where this sort of fancy was likely to end; but he recognised, perhaps, his own teaching, and eventually the Singer was bound by Leighton in half-blue morocco. It was a beautiful little set, I thought, and brand-new in its fresh livery. The day came when we had to say good-bye to it—not to it alone; and I should have wished never to behold it again. I did, however; I met with it at an auction; it was faded, thumbed, disreputable. I had not the courage to touch it; it was no longer mine. I mused as I left the place upon its career and its destiny, and it made me really sad.

I have spoken of Mr Reynell as one of my teachers or masters. He was a person who had a genuine love for our older literature, and enjoyed even better opportunities than my father of indulging it. But his purchases were sparing and desultory, and he never attained any distinction as a collector. He had not studied the subject, and he never became wealthy enough to secure the services of competent advisers. In fact, his want of knowledge rendered him distrustful of counsel. The result was that he accumulated, during a very prolonged life, a singular assemblage of nondescript property, of which the really valuable proportion was infinitesimal. It was perfectly fortuitous, that he had picked up an exceedingly rare Psalter, in rather ragged state, for 25s., which at his sale, a year or two back, Mr Quaritch deemed worth £24, and a folio Roman de la Rose, which fetched a good price, and cost him the same moderate sum. As a rule, he invariably, from want of training and fine instinct, bought the wrong article, or, if the right one, in the wrong condition. He had not the eye of George Daniel, R. S. Turner, or Henry Huth, for form and fitness. Yet he was my instructor in a degree and a sense, and many delightful talks we have had about old books, which one or the other of us had seen or admired. He always listened with interest to my stories of adventures up and down the book-world, of which some are reserved for a future chapter; but he felt his inability, I concluded, to enter into the field with stronger competitors, and he usually returned to the contemplation of his own humble appurtenances with a sense of contentment, if not of superiority.

He was totally different from my father in his ideas about books. He did not, in general, care for the modern side, unless it was a first edition of his life-long friend Leigh Hunt, of Hazlitt, or of some other author to whom he was personally attached. On the contrary, my father never cultivated the older editions or original copies. The best standard text was his line. I had from him a little anecdote which shews him in the light of a book-hunter; but then it was for an immediate and isolated literary purpose. While he was engaged about 1840 in editing the works of Defoe, he tried to procure a copy of the Account of the Apparition of Mrs Veal, and went, among other likely resorts, to Baker of Old Street, St Luke’s. That individual derided the notion of finding such a rarity; and my father, turning away, cast an eye on Baker’s twopenny box outside. There what should he disinter but the identical pamphlet, and he takes twopence out of his pocket, which he hands to the boy, and puts the prize into it, which he carries home in triumph. It was the only bargain of which I ever heard him speak. He was not that way built. I sometimes wish that my experiences had not been infinitely more numerous.

The seeking and winning of bargains constitute an attractive pursuit and an equally attractive topic. You have the power of regaling your less fortunate or unpractical acquaintances with the strange chances, which enabled you to become the master for a trifle of such and such treasures and you gain confidence in your continued good fortune,—

‘When a fool finds a horse-shoe,
He thinks aye the like to do.’

It has sometimes appeared to me, however, that the general public looks with modified respect on this class of venture, more especially as it does not share the profits; and what is absolutely certain is, that the whole system of treating literature from a commercial point of view is narrowing and lowering, and tends to harden, if not to extinguish, that fine sensibility which is proper to the bibliophile. Since I was led by a union of circumstances to look upon rare books as a source of advantage, I have grown sensible of a change for the worse in my nature; yet, I think, only so far as the bare ownership is concerned. The volumes which I loved as a younger man are still dear to me; I keep them in my mind’s eye; they stand in no peril at my hands of being degraded into goods or stuff; I do not hold them, because the outlay or capital which they represent is far more than I can afford to lock up; and in the nature of things I have to content myself with being the recipient of the difference, if not of feeling, that I appreciate the book and know its history better than the man to whom it passes from me.

I should be truly ashamed if I had to confess that with the actual proprietary interest in the literary or bibliographical rarities which I have had through my hands during the last forty years my substantial affection for the subject-matter and the authors began and ended. Thousands of precious volumes, which might be mine, if I had been otherwise situated, are merely as a question of form and pecuniary arrangement in the British Museum, in the Bodleian, or in some private library; they are one and all before me at any moment, when I choose to summon them. I remember how they are bound, and the story which each tells; but they are in the keeping of others. Should I be happier, were they in mine?

My father was one of the oldest members of the London Library in St James’s Square, and I long availed myself of his ticket to frequent and use that highly valuable institution. I consider that this circumstance tended importantly to stimulate and confirm my natural bookish propensity. For whatever besides I have been and am, my central interest, as well as claim to public consideration, is associable with the cause of our earlier vernacular literature. I shall be able to demonstrate with tolerable clearness by-and-by that I have through my quiet, and in a manner uneventful, career busied myself with several other topics, not to mention those which lie outside such an undertaking as the present; but my friends seem to have agreed that it is as a bibliographer that I most distinctly and emphatically pose. I shall argue that point no further.

What is more relevant is that at the London Library I met with Smedley’s Sketches from Venetian History, which I perused with enjoyment as a novice, and that this acquaintance led to others and to an exchange of ideas with people about the subject and its position in English literature. With no resources of my own, and with very slight aid from my father, I set to work and collected material. My imperfect knowledge of languages was a stumbling block. When I waited on Mr Quaritch in Castle Street and laid bare my ignorance of Italian by asking for Cicognara’s work on Fabrics instead of Buildings, that distinguished personage tellingly reproved me by suggesting that the first thing for me to do was to learn Italian.

My perseverance, however, was indomitable. I had set my heart on writing about Venice. It was enough. I did not, as Mr Quaritch observed, know much about Italian. I had never seen the place. When I wrote to Mr Ruskin respectfully soliciting helpful suggestions, he left my letter unanswered. What could be done? Why, I borrowed the few works which were to be found at our library, bought some which were not, and for others I sent to Italy through Molini. I taught myself French and Italian, and the Venetian dialect. I studied all the views of the city which I could find, and I brought out my first rough draft in 1857, when I was three-and-twenty.

An amusing illustration of my early faculty of inspiring confidence in the minds of those with whom I dealt was afforded by the perfect trust of Molini in my solvency and his unwillingness to allow my father any credit, while the latter actually discharged both my obligations and his own. The elder Molini was himself of Venetian origin, and of a family which gave more than one Doge to the Republic; he always impressed my fancy as the ideal of a decayed Italian grandee. Not only his appearance, but his deportment, was that of a gentleman. He served me excellently well; but true it is that, in spite of his ducal ancestry and exalted traditions, there was the Lombard beneath and not far from the surface. The representative of Doges, this sovereign prince by inheritance and blood, was the only man who ever charged me interest on an overdue account.

As to my book, it is familiar enough that it was reprinted in 1860 by Messrs Smith, Elder & Co., and is viewed as the standard English work on the subject, so far as it goes. But I contemplate a third and greatly improved edition, which will carry the narrative to the end. My collections for the task are now in the library, to which I partly gave, and partly sold, them a generation since. They included a copy of the much overestimated Squittinio della Liberta Veneta, published at Mirandola in 1612.

There are very few now living who recollect, as I do, the library as it originally appeared, when Mr Cochrane was curator, and the institution occupied only the upper part of the house in the Square. I was not a personal subscriber till 1869; but I had the complete range of the shelves jure patris, and my loan of an unlimited number of books for an unlimited term was never called in question. I have kept volumes at our house for three years uninterruptedly. In those days there were fewer members, and the demand for the class of publications which I required was extremely limited.

One of the staff at the library, a subordinate dignitary, used to dabble a little in books on his own account, and occasionally offered me his purchases. I think that his more distinguished colleagues gradually learned to do the same. But the first-indicated individual, I remember very well, once had on sale a set of fourteen volumes of some neglected publication, for which he submitted a proposal of eighteenpence. He resided at Hammersmith, while I was at Kensington, and I am sure that I do not exaggerate when I say that he carried this merchandise half a dozen times between his abode and St James’s Square before I agreed to take the lot off his hands. I thought of Corporal Nym and the lute-case.

I was even now beginning to be multifarious and polygonal. I have sketched out in my Four Generations of a Literary Family my apprenticeship to bibliography. The starting-point was about 1857, when Mr Bohn produced his revision of the Manual of Lowndes, 1834, of which Mr F. S. Ellis used to speak as a very creditable performance for a drunken bookseller. My haunt in St James’s Square again befriended me. I met with the Heber Catalogue, Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities, and such like. I was unconsciously shifting my ground; yet it was to be long enough before the new departure took form. I allowed myself ample time to ruminate over the matter, to reconnoitre, and to make notes. A copy of the augmented and revised Lowndes became my memorandum book.

The original meagre sketch of the Venetian work had introduced me to Mr Russell Smith the publisher, who undertook it on my father agreeing to contribute to the cost. I acquired the habit of frequenting Smith’s shop in Soho Square; I bought a few trifles from him, and in 1858 he took my commission for a book at the Bliss sale—Lord Westmoreland’s Otia Sacra, 1648—for which my father, to his consternation, learned that I had to give nearly £9. The copy was in the original calf binding, and was one of the very few which were entirely perfect. It was my earliest purchase at an auction. 1858-9-60 passed away—the second edition of the Venetian History appeared—and I, after sundry experiments, finally resolved to cast my lot in with antiquarian literature as an editor and a bibliographer.

It is not my present mission to enter into detail respecting my innumerable experiences of a normal character in connection with publishers and booksellers. These are matters of no permanent value or interest to anyone. I have had, in common with the majority of folks similarly situated, my sorrows, my disappointments, my wrongs and my triumphs. Luctor et Emergo. I have known what it has been to be unfairly abused and perhaps unfairly commended. I have kept myself proudly and wilfully apart, and under circumstances, of which no other person has ever comprehended or measured the difficulties, I have held my ground, although once or twice the keel of my dingy has grazed the rocks.

CHAPTER II

I survey the Ground before I start—I contemplate a New British Bibliography—Richard Heber—His Extraordinary Acquirements—His Vast Library—His Manuscript Notes in the Books—A High Estimate of Heber as a Scholar and a Reader—He eclipses all Other Collectors at Home and Abroad—A Sample or so of His Flyleaf Memoranda—A Few very Interesting Books noticed—A Historiette—Anecdotes of Some Bargains and Discoveries by Him and His Contemporaries—The Phoenix Nest at Sion College—Marlowe’s Dido—Mystery connected with the Library at Lee Priory—The Oldest Collections of English Plays—A Little Note about Lovelace—Heber’s Generosity as a Lender—His Kindness to Dyce—Fate of His Rarest Books—How He obtained some of Them—The Daniel Ballads and Their True History—Result of a Study of Heber’s Catalogue and other Sources of Knowledge—The Handbook appears—Mr Frederick Harrison and Sir Walter Besant pay Me Compliments.

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 Phœnix 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.

CHAPTER III

The Handbook of 1867 and Its Fruits—Mr Henry Huth—His Beneficial Influence on My Bibliographical Labours—He invites Me to co-operate in the Formation of His Library—I edit Books for Him—He declines to entertain the Notion of a Librarian—My Advantages and Risks—A Few Heavy Plunges—A Barnaby’s Journal—A Book of Hours of the Virgin—The Butler MSS.—Archbishop Laud—Montaigne—Mr Huth answerable for My Conversion into a Speculator—The Immense Value of the Departure to My Progress as a Bibliographer—A Caxton from the Country—Why I had to pay so Much for It—Mr Huth’s Preferences—His Americana—Deficiencies of His Library gradually supplied—His Dramatic Series—Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson—Mr Huth a Linguist and a Scholar—His First Important Purchase—Contrasted with Heber—The Drawer at Mr Quaritch’s kept for Mr Huth—His Uncertainty or Caprice explained by Himself—His Failing Health becomes an Obstacle—The Fancy a Personal One.

The appearance of the Handbook introduced me to the late Mr Henry Huth, and gave me the free range for years of his fine library, with the incidental advantage of assisting in its enlargement, and in the preparation of the catalogue. I had written to Mr Huth in the winter of 1866, soliciting the title and collation of a unique book in his hands, and he wrote back, furnishing the information not quite correctly, but stating that he was always, when in town, at home on Sunday afternoons. This slight incident produced a ten years’ intimacy, and was instrumental in inaugurating a new era in my bibliographical career.

It was when I had reached the letter K in the alphabet that I added Mr Huth to my acquaintance, and thenceforward my book, as it appeared in parts, reflected in its pages the beneficial fruit of weekly visits to that gentleman’s house, and his friendly co-operation in an enterprise which more or less interested him personally.

Our constant intercourse and my widening knowledge of certain classes of books, for which we had a common liking, naturally led to Mr Huth, in the most delicate manner, suggesting after a while, that he should be obliged if I would let him hear of any with which I might meet; and during many years I was in the habit of sending to him single volumes or parcels which fell in my way, and which he had the option of rejecting if he did not care for them, or they happened to be duplicates. I very soon, too, persuaded him to allow me to carry out small literary undertakings for him, for the sake of distributing the very limited number of copies printed among his friends and my own. I became sensible of the inconvenience and awkwardness attendant on the completion of his library, as it involved commercial relations distasteful to us both, and I ventured, as soon as I could, to propose to him a yearly allowance for my help and advice. This idea he was unwilling to entertain, however, because he thought that it would involve something like my domestication on the premises, and the library, as usual, was almost personal to himself. I therefore most reluctantly continued to add to his collection on my own terms, and, with the books which I edited for him and for the publishers, and the general exercise of my bibliographical experience elsewhere, I was in a position to develop by steady degrees my large, yet still rather loosely-defined, project for a general catalogue of early English literature.

My Handbook was brought to an end in 1867, about a twelvemonth subsequent to the fortuitous meeting with Mr Huth. But every day, when the more powerful motive for book-hunting existed, seemed to do its part in opening my eyes to the illimitable magnitude of the field on which I had entered, and in compelling me to pass my pen through some article which I had been tempted to borrow from a secondary authority. In other words, the Handbook was no sooner bound, than I began to convert a considerable proportion of it into waste-paper.

My relations with Mr Huth were, on the whole, as agreeable as they were advantageous. Many and many a rarity in his catalogue passed through my hands, and even when he acquired books elsewhere, he grew into the habit of asking me to go and look through them before they were sent home. My improving familiarity with his tastes and wants placed me in a favoured position, when I stumbled on items in the book-shops and the sale-rooms. Sometimes I had to incur rather formidable risks, and to buy for the library very expensive works, subject to them being approved, and merely on the certainty that they were not duplicates, and were clear desiderata. Such was the case with the extraordinary copy of George Turbervile’s Poems, 1570, in the original sheep binding, as clean and spotless as when it left the first vendor three centuries prior, and nearly the only one known. John Pearson, of York street, Covent Garden, had obtained it of a retired dealer at Shrewsbury for £30, and he asked me £105, with the proviso that it was not returnable as imperfect. I collated it on the spot, and F. S. Ellis very kindly and liberally lent me the money to pay for it. Luckily Mr Huth took to it, and gave me fifty guineas for my trouble. It is one of the chief Elizabethan gems in a library abounding in them.

I remember being in Boone’s shop, in Bond Street, one day, and seeing there a marvellous and matchless copy of Brathwaite’s Barnaby’s Journal, almost uncut, and beautifully bound in red morocco. Boone demanded £18, 18s. for it. I put it in my pocket. The following Sunday I saw Mr Huth, and inquired what sort of a copy of Barnaby he had. He replied that his was as good an one as could be desired, and he opened the case where it lay, and handed it to me. I took mine out, and handed it to him. He smiled. Of course, there was no comparison. His went as a duplicate to Lilly. He did not judge Boone’s dear at twenty-five guineas; it would bring twice that sum now.

I was so much accustomed to frequent the booksellers, and I was so well known and trusted that I overlooked the circumstance, in my earlier visits to Bond Street, that I had not dealt quite so regularly or largely there as elsewhere, and one day when Boone shewed me a fine Book of Hours, of which the price was £150, I coolly placed it under my arm, and walked out of the place, with an intimation that I should like to have it. I suppose that the firm was reassured when I called, a day or so after, and gave them my cheque for the amount. We became very good friends, and I took several things off Boone’s hands for Mr Huth. The Hours I have just mentioned was bound in old velvet; and the owner rather unwisely, as I thought, let Bedford give it a new morocco livery.

One offer on the part of this house to me I was unable to entertain—the Butler MSS. formerly in the hands of the poet’s editor, Thyer, and containing matter not printed by him. Boone spoke of £250; but I declined. What became of them, I never heard; they were not sold with his stock.

His retirement destroyed a link between the old school and the new. He had many curious stories to relate about those whom his uncle and himself had known—about Libri and Dibdin. He (the younger B.) was fairly shrewd and experienced, but thoroughly straightforward. I recollect picking off his shelf one morning an old tract of no particular value, but, as it happened, not in the British Museum, to which I transferred it, bearing on the title the unrecognised autograph, W. Bathon; it was the copy which belonged to Archbishop Laud, when he occupied the See of Bath and Wells.

There was a somewhat parallel incident at the sale of Lord Selsey’s books at Sotheby’s in 1871. I took down from a shelf at random an old Italian book, and perceived at the foot of the title the signature of Montaigne the essayist. I instantaneously closed it, and put it back, for I saw Mr Toovey approach. I waited to see it sold; it fell to me at 2s. F. S. Ellis came into the room a moment after, and heard of the find. He explained to me that he had a Montaigne client, and wished me to let him have my bargain, which I surrendered for a consideration.

I consider Mr Huth answerable for my conversion from a pure amateur into a commercial speculator in books. He was the prime mover in producing the change in my views and arrangements—one which certainly responded to my convenience in working out my great project as a bibliographer, by supplying me in the interval, where the direct practical result was nil, with ways and means, rather than to my natural feeling, which would have kept me outside the market as a buyer and seller. My unconquerable and boundless ambition to become the creator of an entirely new bibliographical system, so far as the early literature of Great Britain and Ireland was concerned, reconciled me, to some extent, to the unwelcome, though profitable, labour of utilising for my own purposes the stores which I accumulated and distributed from year to year, commencing with that which immediately succeeded my introduction to Mr Huth.

I had already fulfilled that gentleman’s own express desire, that I should co-operate in the extension of his library in the direction which I was beginning to study in earnest; but my first notable achievement was a purchase which found another destination. Jeffreys of Bristol sent me up, in the winter of 1868, a beautiful copy of Caxton’s Golden Legend, wanting sixteen leaves, which were supplied from one by Wynkyn de Worde. It was an edition of which the Althorp copy was the only perfect one known. The owner asked £85. I hardly understood why he sent it to me, as I had never had any transaction with him. It was on a Friday. I called at B. M. Pickering’s the next morning, and casually stated that I had had such a book offered to me, and that I intended, on the Sunday, to name the matter to Mr Huth, who did not then possess the volume. Pickering begged to see it first; he came down to my house the same evening, and took it away under his arm at £150. If it had not been for John Pearson persuading Jeffrey to raise his price, I should have had it £40 cheaper. Mr Huth subsequently procured another imperfect copy, and at my request Lord Spencer very kindly forwarded his own to London to enable a facsimilist to complete both.

Mr Huth had some very strong preferences—favourite authors and topics. Anything by Wither or Quarles, with curious woodcuts, on an educational theme, or in exceptionally fine state, was sure game. He did not care for theology, unless it was by such a man as Fuller or Jeremy Taylor; and of folios he was shy, in the absence of a valid reason; there were so many which it was imperative to tolerate, commencing with the four Shakespears. To Americana he became at last a convert, but I knew him when he put the question—a pertinent question, too—what he had to do with that sort of book? Henry Stevens, however, and then others, made the interest clearer to him, and he gave way till, in the end, he was master of a fairly good collection, including such capital features as Hariot’s Virginia, 1588, and such unique morçeaux as Rich’s News from Virginia, 1610. I was fortunate enough to enter on the scene, when in numerous respects his shelves were very deficient, and when some of the leading poets of the seventeenth century were conspicuous by their absence. He had not, at the time I refer to, even Beaumont and Fletcher, or Jonson, or Carew, or Lovelace, by way of example. As I run through his catalogue, I notice hundreds and hundreds of volumes which he had been quietly and patiently waiting to receive from someone, as he never went in quest of anything in his life, beyond calling at Lilly’s, Ellis’s, or Quaritch’s, on his way home; and nearly all his dramatic acquisitions, except the quarto Shakespears and other rarities from the Daniel and Charlemont sales in 1864-5, were late additions, obtained for him by myself, as scarcely a second individual would have dreamed of him not having them, or being willing to take them. All his Shirleys, Massingers, Fords, and the rest, came to him at prices which, compared with current figures, make them appear almost nominal. Massinger’s Virgin Martyr, 1622, cost him most; for B. M. Pickering charged me £7, 7s. for the copy, and I have not met with another since that time.

His Beaumont and Fletcher, 1647, which has been lately trotted up to a startling figure by the Americans, cost me 30s. and is one of the finest I ever saw; one leaf was torn, and a second copy was bought for £1 to make the defect good. In the same way his Ben Jonson, 1616-31, the most complete one in existence, with a duplicate title and a cancel leaf, was obtained from Stibbs for 36s. It had been Colonel Cunningham’s, and was spotless in the original calf binding.

Mr Huth was not a Heber; but he liked to look into his books, and of many he had a fair knowledge. He was a linguist and a scholar, and was led by the circumstances of his origin (his father being a German and his mother a Spaniard) to contract a partiality for the literature of those two countries. The ancient Spanish romance, the early German book with woodcuts, were well represented. One of the former, in its pristine stamped livery, was among his earliest purchases, when he frequented Payne & Foss’s establishment with his brother Louis, just toward the close of the career of that distinguished firm, which supplied Heber and his contemporaries—Grenville, Hibbert, the Freelings, and others—and the price was £8. It might at present be £80, if Mr Quaritch were in the right cue.

Although Mr Huth cannot be said to have been a mere amasser of old books, without an interest in their characteristics and literary value, it is curious that he never, so far as I am aware, inserted a MS. note of any kind in a volume, or his autograph, or a bookplate or ex libris. He seemed to shrink from asserting his personality in these respects, and was so far the reverse of Heber, whose memoranda accompanied thousands of the items in his immense library, and manifested his earnestness and indefatigability in obtaining and perpetuating information—nothing else. Of conceit or pedantry no one ever had less.

Toward the last, while the catalogue was in course of preparation by Mr F. S. Ellis and myself, an unpleasant contretemps produced a coolness between Mr Huth and the writer, and I saw nothing farther of him, although we occasionally corresponded down to the period of his death in 1878, the melancholy circumstances of which I have narrated in my Four Generations of a Literary Family. He made additions to his library rather languidly in later years; but he bought here and there to fill up gaps or otherwise, and some of the entries belonging to the earlier letters of the alphabet form an appendix to the above-mentioned work. There used to be a little drawer at Quaritch’s, where any book thought to be acceptable to Mr Huth was deposited day by day against his arrival about five in the afternoon. Once it was an unique tract of King Edward the Fourth and the Tanner of Tamworth, for which he was asked £16, 16s., and he held it up between two fingers, and exhibited it to an acquaintance with him as rather a dear pennyworth. But he took it, and at the same time he rejected an equally unique and far more curious metrical account of the martyrdom of two churchmen in the time of Henry VIII., which the British Museum was glad enough to secure. As he has said to me frankly enough, it was a toss up, whether he bought or did not buy; of course it was a mere fancy, and it is only a piece of history at present that one or two of the booksellers, acquainted with his peculiarity, passed on volumes now and then from one to the other, and what had not pleased in King Street, caught the fish in Garrick Street at an advanced quotation.

Mr Huth was not only vacillating in his pursuit of books, and so missed many which he ought to have secured, but his health began to fail some time prior to his decease, and he was either abroad or in a frame of mind unequal to the discussion of literary questions and the transaction of unnecessary business. His library, as it appears from the printed catalogue, is a very different monument from that which he might have left, had he been more consistent or been more willing to repose confidence in others. The precious volumes, which went elsewhere through his periodical apathy or indisposition, are barely numerable, and it was the more to be regretted, since the outlay was immaterial and the grand nucleus was there.

I suspect that the cause of wavering was one which is common to so many collectors in all departments, and leads in a majority of instances to the abrupt dispersion of the property. I allude to the almost ostentatious indifference of relatives and friends to the treasures, unless, perhaps, they are pictures or china, which a man gathers round him. In this instance £120,000 had been expended in books, MSS., drawings and prints, and the worthy folks who came to the house, what did they know about them? what did they care? A man might well hesitate and wonder whether there was any good in persevering with a hobby personal to himself.

I do not know whether Mr Huth suspected me of extravagance in the purchase of curiosities, but I remember that he one day, at Prince’s Gate, when we were together, rather gravely, yet with his usual gentleness, observed that it was very important to husband one’s resources—to use his own phrase. He entered more with me than with any other stranger into trivial and ordinary matters; and apropos of expenditure I recall his allusion to the habit of some of his clerks in the city laying out a larger sum on their luncheons than he did. Possibly they went home, not to dinner, but to tea. I have mentioned in Four Generations of a Literary Family farther particulars of Mr Huth, which I of course do not here reproduce. I recollect being at Prince’s Gate one Sunday, when Professor —— called, and began to eulogise the palatial residence, the splendid book-room, the noble cases, and so forth; and I at once saw that he was making our host rather uncomfortable by his gaucherie. On some pretext I induced the Professor to accompany me, when I took my leave, and I am sure that Mr Huth was grateful. I do not know that I grudged Huth anything, for he was worthy of his fortune. Perhaps I was a little envious of his knowledge of the notes of birds, which he told me that he possessed, and of which I have the most imperfect and inaccurate idea. I judge that he was reticent even to his family about his affairs, for, after his sudden death, his widow, to whom he left everything, found to her surprise, I was told, that there was more even than she had expected. So that he had acted up to his own maxim. A man may be frugal with £100,000 a year as he may be with the thousandth part of it—more so indeed, as there is a so much wider margin.

CHAPTER IV

Literary Results of My Acquaintance with Mr Huth—The New Bibliography in Progress, and the 1867 Book gradually superseded—Some Other Literary Acquaintances—George Daniel—John Payne Collier and Frederic Ouvry, His Son-in-Law—The Millers of Craigentinny—‘Inch-rule’ Miller—He purchases at the Heber Sale by Cartloads—My Efforts to procure Particulars of all the Rare Books at Britwell—I let Mr Christie-Miller have One or Two Items—An Anecdote—Mr Miller’s London House formerly Samuel Rogers’s—His Son—Where They are all buried—The Rev. Thomas Corser—His Fine Library—What It cost and what It fetched—His Difficulties in Forming It—Whither Much of It went—My Exploits at the Sale—Description of the House where the Books were kept—Mr Corser’s Peculiar Interest in My Eyes—His Personal Character—The Sad Change in the Book Market since Corser’s Day—Mr Samuel Sanders—A Curious Incident—Mr Cosens, Mr Turner and Mr Lawrence—Their Characteristics—Some Account of Mr Cosens as He gave It to Me—His Line of Collecting—My Assistance requested—A Few of His Principal Acquisitions and Their Subsequent Fortunes—Frederic Locker—His Idiosyncrasies—His Want of Judgment—His Confidences.

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.

CHAPTER V

Mr Henry Pyne—His Ideas as a Collector, and My Intercourse with Him—His Office One of My Regular Lounges—His Willingness to Part with Certain Books—I buy a Pig in a Poke, and It turns out well—Mr Pyne’s Sale—A Frost—I buy All the Best Lots for a Trifle—The Volume of Occasional Forms of Prayer and Its History—Pyne’s Personal Career and Relations—His Investigation of the Affairs of a Noble Family—The Booksellers—Joseph Lilly—His Sale—His Services to Mr Huth—The Daniel Books in 1864—Daniel’s Flyleaf Fibs—The Event an Extraordinary Coup—The Napier First Folio Shakespear knocked down and out at £151—Why some Books are Dear without being Very Rare—F. S. Ellis and the Corser Sale—My Successful Tactics—He lends me Sir F. Freeling’s Interleaved Bibliotheca Anglo-poetica.

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,

besides others, no doubt, were obtained sub rosâ by a mysterious strategy, at which Daniel would darkly hint in conversation with you, but of which you were left to surmise for yourself the whole truth. The general opinion is, that he procured them through Fitch of Ipswich, whose wife had been a housekeeper or confidential servant of the Tollemaches, from Helmingham Hall, Bentley, the Suffolk seat of that ancient family. But when I consider the numberless precious volumes, which have dropped, so to speak, into my hands, coming, as I of course did, at a far less auspicious juncture, I arrive at the conclusion, not that Daniel bought freely everything really valuable and cheap, but that he must have had abundant opportunities, as a person of leisure and means, of becoming the master of thousands of other literary curiosities, which would have brought him or his estate a handsome profit by waiting for the return of the tide.

This gentleman improved the occasion, however, so far as his acquisitions went, by making flyleaves the receptacles of a larger crop of misleading statements than I ever remember to have seen from the hand of a single individual; let us charitably suppose that he knew no better; and the compiler of his catalogue must be debited with a similar amount of ignorance or credulity, since there probably never was one circulated with so many unfounded or hyperbolical assertions, from the time that Messrs Sotheby & Co. first started in business. If the means are justified by the end, however, the retired accountant had calculated well; the bait, which he had laid, was greedily swallowed; and the prices were stupendous. It was a battle à l’outrance between the British Museum, Mr Huth, Sir William Tite, and one or two more. But the national library and Mr Huth divided the spolia opima, and doubtless the lion’s share fell to the latter. The Museum authorities can always wait.

Mr Huth did not want the first folio Shakespear, 1623, as he had acquired at the Gardner sale in 1854 a very good one in an eighteenth-century russia binding, not very tall, but very sound and fine. The Daniel one, which went to Lady Coutts at over £700, came from William Pickering, and cost about £200, as I was informed by a member of the Daniel family. It thoroughly jumped with the owner’s idiosyncrasy to pronounce his copy, whenever he spoke of it, as the finest in existence, which it neither was nor is. One of the best which I have seen was that sold at Sotheby’s for Miss Napier of Edinburgh through the recommendation of Mr Pyne aforesaid, who admonished the lady to put a reserve of £100 on it. This was wholesome advice, for it was put in at that figure, and the only advance was £1 from a member of a solid ring opposite to myself, who had looked in from curiosity to see how the bidding went. At £101 it would have fallen a prey to the junto; it was in the old binding; it only wanted the verses; the condition was large, crisp, and clean, the title-page (which had been shifted to the middle for some reason, and was said in the catalogue to be deficient) immaculate; and I was prompted to say £151. Angry and disconcerted looks met me from the enemy’s line, and I weighed the utility of pursuing the matter. At £151 it became the property of six or eight gentlemen, and I understood that the ultimate price left £400 behind it.

But the volume even in perfect state is not very rare. It is merely that, in common with the first editions of Walton’s Angler, the Faëry Queene, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, Burns, and a few more, everybody desires it. The auctioneers have a stereotyped note to the effect that the first Shakespear is yearly becoming more difficult to procure, which may be so, but simply because, although fresh copies periodically occur, the competition more than proportionately increases. There is a steadfast run on capital books, not only in English, but in all languages—ay, let them be even in Irish, Welsh, Manx, or Indian hieroglyphics.

I personally attended the Corser sales, although Mr Ellis held my commissions for all that I particularly coveted. I was therefore a spectator rather than an actor in that busy and memorable scene; I now and then intervened, if I felt that there was a lot worth securing on second thoughts, not comprised in my instructions to my representative. The glut of rarities was so bewildering, that I got nearly everything which I had marked. It was before the day, when Mr Quaritch asserted himself so emphatically and so irrepressibly, and John Pearson was not yet very pronounced in his opposition. I had therefore to count only on Lilly and Ellis, apart from the orders of the British Museum through Boone. By employing Ellis I substantially narrowed the hostile competition to two, and Lilly was not very formidable beyond those lots which Mr Huth had singled out, nor Boone, save for such as he was instructed to buy for the nation at a price—not generally a very high one. The Britwell library just nibbled here and there at a desideratum, and had to pay very smartly for it, when it traversed me.

Lilly, Ellis and myself (when I was there) usually sat side by side; neither of them knew what my views were till some time afterward. But I occasionally stood behind. There was an amusing little episode in relation to a large-paper copy in the old calf binding of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars, 1595, with the autograph of Lucy, Lady Lyttelton. Two copies occurred in successive lots, the large paper first; the others did not notice the difference in size, till I had bought the rare variety, and then Lilly, holding the usual sort of copy in his hand, and turning round to the porter, asked him to bring the other. But he was of course too late in his discovery. Mr Corser had given £20 for the book, which was knocked down to me under such circumstances at £4, 6s., and at the higher rate, one endorsed by the excellent judgment of the late proprietor, it passed in due course to Mr Huth.

One of my direct acquisitions at this sale was the exceedingly rare volume of Poems by James Yates, 1582; there were two copies in successive lots; and I suggested that they should be sold together. The price was £31; but most unfortunately they both proved imperfect, so that my hope of obtaining a rich prize for my friend’s library was frustrated. By the way, the copy given by Mr Reynardson to the public library at Hillingdon about 1720 has long gone astray.

Lilly did not actively interfere in the book-market subsequently to the dispersion of the Corser treasures. I confess that, if I had had a free hand, I should have bought far more than he did; and if it had not been for my personal offices, the Huth collection would have missed many undeniably desirable and almost unique features in the Catalogue, as it stands. Mr Huth himself was not very conversant with these matters, and his leading counsellor had much to learn. I retain to this hour a foolish regret, that I permitted Mr Christie-Miller to carry off anything, but I am sufficiently patriotic to be glad, that the British Museum was so successful. I have in my mind’s eye the long rows of old quarto tracts as they lay together, while Mr Rye, the then keeper, was looking through them preparatorily to their consignment to a cataloguer; and I felt some remorse at having been directly instrumental without his knowledge in making many of them costlier. Poor Mr Huth was not prosperous as an utterer of bons-mots. The only one I ever heard him deliver—and it was weak to excess—was that he had bought at the Corser auction a good dish of Greenes.

I apprehend that it was not so very long prior to this signal event in my bibliographical history, that I had regular dealings with F. S. Ellis, then in King Street, Covent Garden. I invariably found him most well-informed, most obliging, and most liberal. While I was finishing my Handbook, he volunteered (as I have said) the loan of Sir Francis Freeling’s interleaved Bibliotheca Anglo-poetica, on the blank pages of which Freeling had often recorded the sources, whence he procured his rare books at a very different tariff from that prevailing in Longman & Co.’s catalogue. It may not be generally known that this eminent collector, whose curious library was sold in 1836, enjoyed through his official position at the General Post Office peculiar facilities for establishing a system of communication with the authorities in the country towns, and he certainly owed to this accident quite a number of bargains (as we should now esteem them) from Dick of Bury St Edmunds. I must not repeat myself, and I have already transcribed from the volume above-mentioned several of Freeling’s memoranda in my own publication of 1867.

CHAPTER VI

My Transactions with Mr Ellis—Rarities which came from Him, and How He got Them—Riviere the Bookbinder—How He cleaned a Valuable Volume for Me—His Irritability—A Strange Tale about an Unique Tract—The Old Gentleman and the Immoral Publication—Dryden’s Copy of Spenser—The Unlucky Contretemps at Ellis’s—A Second Somewhere Else—Mr B. M. Pickering—Our Pleasant and Profitable Relations—Thomas Fuller’s MSS. Epigrams—Charles Cotton’s Copy of Taylor the Water-Poet’s Works—A Second One, which Pickering had, and sold to Me—He has a First Edition of Paradise Lost from Me for Two Guineas and a Half—Taylor’s Thumb Bible.

Ellis after a while penetrated my pharisaical duplicity in acquiring from him and others, to keep my pot boiling at home, while I amassed material for my barren bibliographical enterprise, every item calculated to fit my purpose; he now and then resisted my overtures; but as a rule he gave way on my undertaking to pay his price. I owed to him a large number of eminently rare volumes, of which he did not always appreciate the full significance. I could specify scores of unique or all but unique entries in the Huth Catalogue, which filtered through me from this source, and ministered to my leading aim—not the earning of money so much as the advancement of bibliographical knowledge.

Some of these prizes came to hand in a strange and romantic manner enough. Two young Oxonians brought into the shop in King Street the copy of Withals’ Dictionary, 1553, which was not only unique and in the finest condition, but which settled the question as to the book having been printed, as the older bibliographers declared, by Caxton. A correspondent at Aberdeen offered Sir David Lyndsay’s Squire Meldrum, 1594, and Verstegan’s Odes, 1601, both books of the highest rarity, and the Lyndsay unexceptionable, but the other horribly oil-stained. I exchanged the Withals for twenty guineas, and the remaining two for thirty more. The first was in the original binding, and it was not for me to disturb it; but the Scotish book and the Odes I committed to Riviere. He made a grimace, when he examined the latter, and asked me if I was aware how much it would cost to clean it. I assured him that that was a point which I entirely left to him, and he restored it to me after a season in morocco with scarcely a vestige of the blemish. He informed me that he had boiled the leaves in oil—a species of homœopathic prescription; and I cheerfully paid him seven guineas for his skill and care.

He was a capital old fellow, originally a bookseller at Bath, and was constantly employed by Christie-Miller and Ouvry. He was ambidexter; for he executed a vast amount of modern binding for the trade, and was famous for his tree-marbled calf, which I have frequently watched in its various stages in his workshop.

He was a trifle irritable at times. I had given him an Elizabethan tract to bind, and on inquiring after a reasonable interval it was not merely not done, but could not be found. I called two or three times, and Riviere at last exclaimed: ‘Damn the thing; what do you want for it?’—pulling out his cheque-book. I replied that I wanted nothing but my property, bound as ordered; and he was so far impressed by my composure, that he said no more, and eventually brought the stray to light.

At the Donnington sale in Leicestershire, when the old library removed from Moira House, Armagh, was brought to the hammer, there was in a bundle a particular pamphlet entitled The Eighth Day, 1661, an ephemeral poem on the Restoration by Richard Beling, of which Sir James Ware had descended to the grave without beholding a copy. In fact, no one else had. This precious morçeau found its way to a stall-keeper in London, who confidently appraised it at one shilling. He had occasional proposals for it, but they never topped the moiety; and he at last carried it to Edward Stibbs in Museum Street, and told him that, if he could not get his price, he would burn it. Stibbs behaved in a truly princely manner by handing him half-a-crown. In a day or two Ellis called, saw the prize, and gave £2, 2s. for it. I happened to catch sight of it on his counter, and he forced me to rise to £12, 12s.—it was intended as a prohibitive demand; but I was not to be intimidated or gainsaid. Mr Huth did not offer a remark, when I sent it to him in the usual way (with other recent finds) at £21. What is its true value?

An odd adventure once befell Ellis without directly affecting me. He mentioned to me that an old gentleman had called one day, and had bought a copy of Cleveland’s Poems at six shillings. He paid for it; and shortly after he returned, and beckoning Ellis aside, as there was a third party present, he demanded of him with a very grave air whether he was acquainted with the nature of the publication, which he had sold to him. As Ellis hardly collected his drift, and seemed to await a farther disclosure, he added, ‘That is a most indecent book, sir.’ Ellis expressed his sorrow, and engaged to take it back, and reimburse him. ‘Nothing of the kind, sir,’ rejoined his visitor; ‘I shall carefully consider the proper course to pursue;’ and he quitted the premises. When he reappeared, it was to announce that after the most anxious deliberation he had burned the immoral volume!

Samuel Addington of St. Martin’s Lane, of whom there is some account in Four Generations of a Literary Family, formed his collections, as a rule, wholly from direct purchases under the hammer. He had no confidence in his own knowledge of values, and liked to watch the course of competition. It was his way, and not altogether a bad one, of gauging the market, and supplying his own deficiencies at other people’s expense. But Addington occasionally bought prints of his friend Mrs Noseda, on whose judgment he implicitly relied, and now and then he took a book or so of Ellis. I was in the shop in King Street one day when he was there, and Ellis succeeded in fixing him with £150’s worth of MSS. Of course, it was all whim; and the money was a secondary matter. He pulled out his cheque-book on the spot, and paid for the purchase.

We had many a chat together, and he was obliging enough in one or two instances to lend me something in his possession for myself or a friend. I never heard the origin of his career as a collector. He was somewhat before my time. But I ascribed his peculiarly fitful method of buying to uncertainty as to the commercial aspect and expediency of a transaction; for of real feeling for art or literature I do not believe that he had a tittle.

When I was talking to Ellis in King Street one day, an individual strongly pitted with small-pox presented himself, and asked for a catalogue. He said in a tone, which suggested the presence of a pebble in his mouth, that he was ‘Mr Murray Re-Printer.’ This person was the predecessor of Professor Arber in his scheme for bringing our earlier literature within the reach of the general reader, who as a rule does not care a jot for it.

Of course it would be idle to pretend that I monopolised the innumerable curiosities, which Ellis was continually having through his hands. I did not even see the copy of Spenser’s Works, 1679, Dryden’s MSS. notes, which he sold for £35 to Trinity College, Cambridge, having got it at an auction for £1, where it was entered in the catalogue without a word; nor did I venture to stand between Mr Huth and him in the case of the miraculously fine copy in the original binding of the romance of Palmendos, 1589, which Mason of Barnard’s Inn brought in by chance. Mr Huth unfortunately re-clothed both that and the Withals in modern russia.

Mason unwisely relinquished his employment as a brewer’s actuary for the book-trade, and that, again, for a yet worse one—drink. Many valuable volumes passed through his hands, and he afforded me the opportunity of taking notes of some of them.

I was once—once, only I think—so unhappy and so gauche as to incur the serious displeasure of my estimable acquaintance, and it was thus. Dr Furnivall happened to enter the place of business with a volume in his hand, which he was going to offer to the British Museum on behalf of the owner, Mr Peacock of Bottesford Manor, and without reflection I tried, standing on Tom Tiddler’s ground, to dissuade him from his project in the hearing of Ellis, and to let me have the refusal for Mr Huth. It was a beautiful little book, The School of Virtue, the second part, 1619, and unique. To the Museum it went surely enough; and I was upbraided by Ellis, perhaps not undeservedly, with having thwarted him in his own intended effort to intercept the article in transitu with the same view as myself; and I apologised. He was terribly ruffled at my indiscretion; and I was sorry that I had perpetrated it.

Dr Furnivall is my nearly forty years’ old friend. He is associated in my recollection only with two transactions, both alike unfortunate: the one just narrated, and a second, which was more ludicrous than anything else. I had seen on his table at his own house a remarkably good copy of Brathwaite’s Complete Gentlewoman, 1631, and I thought of Mr Huth. I knew Furnivall to be no collector, and I suggested to him that, if he did not urgently require the Brathwaite, for which he had given 6s., I would gladly pay him a guinea for it, and find him a working copy into the bargain. He pleasantly declined, and I was astonished the next morning to receive from him a fierce epistle enjoining me to restore to him instantly the book, which I had taken. I contented myself with writing him a line, to intimate that I had not the volume, and that I thought when he found it, he would be sorry that he had expressed his views in such a manner. I heard no more from him, till, a few days subsequently in my absence, he called on me, and asked to see my wife, and to her he declared his extreme regret at what had occurred, and announced the discovery of the lost treasure underneath a pile of papers, where he had probably put it himself. The affair was not exactly a joke; but it was just the kind of impulsive thoughtlessness, which distinguishes my eminent contemporary, and to which I dare say that he would readily plead guilty. I made no secret of the business; and it produced no substantial difference in our relations. I understood, rightly or wrongly, that he had gone so far as to advertise the supposed larceny; but I treated the matter with stoical indifference, and I believe that we have shaken hands over it years upon years.

I used to see at Ellis’s the late William Morris. He was then in the prime of life, and I recollect his long curly black hair. I do not think that he had yet imbibed those socialistic ideas, which afterward distinguished him, and which one is surprised to find in a person of considerable worldly resources—in other words, with something to lose. I bought a copy of his Earthly Paradise, when it first came out; but beyond the smooth versification, and correct phraseology I failed to discern much in it. I have often seen Morris stalking along with his rod and bag in the vicinity of Barnes.

Of his typographical and artistic styles I own that I had a very indifferent opinion, for they seemed to me to be incongruous and unsympathetic. They did not appeal to my appreciation of true work. I regarded them as bastard and empirical; they might do very well for wall-papers. I must not be too sure; but I should imagine that any one, who is familiar with the early printed books illustrated by engravings of whatever kind, would be apt to take the same view. The graphic portion of Morris’s publications is intelligible, however, and sane; one can see what is meant, if one does not agree with the treatment. It is not so utterly outrageous as Mr Beardsley’s performances.

There were two other personages, with little in common between them, whom I met in King Street—George Cruikshank and Mr A. C. Swinburne. I have come across the latter elsewhere; but Cruikshank whom my grandfather had known so well, a short, square-set figure, who once entered the shop, while I was there, it was not my fortune to behold on more than that single occasion.

I had started as a bookman nearly soon enough to meet William Pickering himself; but with his son, B. M. Pickering, when he opened a small shop in Piccadilly, my intercourse was prompt and continuous. He was a man of rather phlegmatic and unimpressionable temperament, but thoroughly honourable and trustworthy. My earliest dealings with him were on my own personal account, while I cherished the idea, that I might take my place among the collectors of the day, and I obtained from him a few very rare volumes, including a copy of England’s Helicon, quarto, 1600, which he had found in a bundle at Sotheby’s in 1857, shortly after the realisation of £31 at the same rooms for one at the Wolfreston sale. He gave £1 for this but it was not very fine, and like the Wolfreston and every other known copy, except Malone’s in the Bodleian, wanted, as I subsequently discovered, the last leaf. Pickering had it washed and bound in brown morocco by Bedford, and charged me £18, 18s. for it. Perhaps the most remarkable purchase which I ever made in this direction was a copy of Richard Crashaw’s Poems, in which an early owner had inserted a MS. text of upward of fifty otherwise unknown epigrams by Thomas Fuller. Pickering marked the volume 15s., and said nothing about the unique feature. Dr Grosart printed the collection from this source.

My relations with the younger Pickering were almost equally divided in point of time into two epochs: from 1857 to 1865, when I bought for myself, and thenceforward till the date of his death, when I added him to the number of those who assisted me in carrying out, through Mr Huth and a few others, my interminable task of cataloguing the entire corpus, with very slight reservations, of our early national literature. Pickering never objected to let me become the medium for filling up gaps in the Huth library from his periodical acquisitions; I paid him his price; and I paid it promptly, as I did all round.

Our maiden transaction was a very humble one. It was a copy of a little tract called A Caution to keep Money, 1642, and it was a sort of experiment. I had to give 5s. for it, and at the same not very extravagant figure it went to my acquaintance. He eyed it rather wistfully; the low price was somewhat against it; but he accepted it, and fortunately or otherwise he did not take its counsel practically to heart. But I discovered the futility of allowing cheapness to appear as a recommendation in the case of one, who knew comparatively little of the selling value, and to whom cheapness was not the slightest object. The pamphlet in question was the pioneer of many scores of articles of the highest rarity and interest, which found their way through the same channel to the ultimate possessor. Among them was a curious copy in the original calf binding with many uncut leaves of Taylor the Water Poet’s works, 1630, formerly belonging to Charles Cotton the angler; it had come from the Hastings library at Donnington, and I paid Pickering £30 for it. A second one, which I had of him, was the only example containing anything in the nature of a presentation from the author, whose autograph is of the rarest occurrence; but unfortunately in this case the memorandum was written by the recipient. The folio Taylor is one of those books, which has unaccountably fallen in price of late years; and certainly it is by no means uncommon.

I was almost invariably on the acquiring side. Once I sold Pickering, as I have already related, a Caxton, and at another time a first edition of Paradise Lost, 1669, in the original sheep cover. I had seen the latter at a shop in Great Russell Street, of which the rather impetuous master, when I put some query to him, seemed undecided, whether he would let me have the book after all for £2, 2s., or throw it at my head. He did the former, and an American agent begged me as a favour to let him pay me double the money, which, as I thought him to be in jest, I declined. I subsequently parted with it to Pickering for £2, 12s. 6d., which was about the prevailing tariff thirty years since. I may take the present opportunity of mentioning that it was at the same emporium in Bloomsbury, that a later occupant apologised to me, in tendering me a beautiful uncut copy in sheep of Taylor the Water Poet’s Thumb Bible, for being so unreasonable as to want 14s. for the Jeremy Taylor, as he took it to be. I forgave him, and Mr Huth was very pleased to have the volume.

Pickering had, like his father, a singular weakness for accumulating stock, and laying up imperfect copies of rare books in the distant hope of completing them. Yet he held his ground, and gradually enlarged his premises, till they were among the most spacious at the West End. Poor fellow! he lost all his belongings in an epidemic, and never recovered from the shock.

CHAPTER VII

Mr John Pearson—Origin of Our Connection—His Appreciable Value to Me—He assists, through Me, in Completing the Huth Library—Lovelace’s Lucasta—The Turbervile—The Imperfect Chaucer—The Copy of Ruskin’s Poems at Reading—The Walton’s Angler—Locker and Pearson—James Toovey—Curious Incident in Connection with Sir Thomas Phillipps—Willis & Sotheran—Two Unique Cookery Books—Only Just in Time—The Caxton’s Game and Play of the Chess—A Valuable Haul from the West of England—A Reverend Gentleman’s MSS. Diaries of Travel—The Wallers—Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear, 1807—The Folio MS. of Edmond Waller’s Poems—An Unique Book of Verse—A Rare American Item—The Rimells—I take from Them and sell to Them—Some Notable Americana—The Walfords—An Unique Tract by Taylor the Water Poet—John Russell Smith and His Son—My Numerous Transactions with the Latter—Another Unknown Taylor—John Camden Hotten—I sift His Stores in Piccadilly—The Bunyan Volume from Cornwall—John Salkeld—My Expedition to His Shop on a Sunday Night, and Its Fruit—A Rather Ticklish Adventure or Two—Messrs Jarvis & Son—My Finds There—King James I.’s Copy of Charron, dedicated to Prince Henry—The Unknown Fishmongers’ Pageant for 1590—The Long-Lost English Version of Henryson’s Æsop, 1577.

I first met with John Pearson, if I remember rightly, when he had a room at Noble’s in the Strand. He had sent me his catalogue, and I went to buy a small London tract, for which he demanded £3, 3s., because it had all the three blank leaves; it was in fact a speech delivered to King James I. on his entry into the City in 1603 by Richard Martin of the Middle Temple. Mr Huth sent it to Bedford, who removed the leaves, which constituted the feature; but I did not see the mischief, till it fell to my lot to catalogue the piece years afterward. My good friend was very tiresome and difficult in these small matters, which in bibliography are apt to become great ones. I obtained for him a bipartite volume by Ben Jonson, comprising the description of James I.’s reception in London and his previous entertainment at Althorp, in 1603-4, at two different points, and explained to him the desirability of having them bound together, as the latter portion was named on the first title. They went to Bedford, I suppose, without a word, and were clothed in separate jackets.

Pearson became another of my coadjutors. His intelligence, energy, and good fortune did me excellent service. He dealt of course with many other persons, both here and in America; but a handsome proportion of his prizes passed through me to Mr Huth. The latter at that period—in the seventies—still lacked some of the most ordinary desiderata of a collection, which was beginning under my auspices to assume a more general character than it possessed, when I entered on the scene in 1866. Even Lovelace’s Lucasta, of which I purchased of Pearson George Daniel’s copy for £3, 3s., Carew’s Poems, 1640, of which I met with a beautiful specimen on thick paper in the original binding for 21s., and many others, were absent. It was Pearson’s object to come to the front, and I perhaps did my part in making him known to my patron, who eventually added his shop to his places of call, and inspected the articles, which the proprietor and I had agreed to lay before him as suitable and deficient.

The Turbervile above noticed was my most signal gain from this quarter. I shall never forget Pearson’s exultation, when I acceded to his proposal; he seemed, as he cried, ‘I have made £75 by it,’ as if he would have leapt over the counter.

His commercial transactions became sufficiently wide and lucrative, and all my purchases of him did not go to Mr Huth. A curious little piece of luck befel me in the case of a Chaucer wanting the end, which he had kept for years, and at length sold to me in despair. The next week Reeves & Turner obtained a second of the same impression by Thomas Petyt, wanting the commencement. Reeves let me take out the leaves I required for a trifle. I never experienced from Pearson any deficiency of straightforwardness, except that once Mrs Noseda and he had, I think, a joint hand in passing off a facsimile frontispiece of Taylor the Water-Poet’s Works, and I was the victim. I said nothing, but, like the Frenchman’s jackdaw, thought the more. He was an exceptionally shrewd and vigilant character, and nearly broke Lovejoy of Reading’s heart by getting from his assistant an uncut copy of Ruskin’s poems for a shilling during Lovejoy’s absence. But Pearson paid the price, which the fellow asked. I was in the shop, when he had just received through a third party a lovely copy of Walton’s Angler, 1653, in the pristine binding for £14 plus £3, 10s. to the bringer. The last copy in the market in precisely the same condition brought successively £310 and £415. Someone tells me that in both cases the buyer and the seller was one and the same party. Poor Walton! like Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespear, and our other Great Ones, he has been converted into bric-à-brac. To your millionaire amateur it does not signify whether it is a book or a tea-pot or a violin, if the price is high enough—better still, if it is higher than was ever given before. That is his intelligent seeing-point. In the present instance the holder of the Walton, if the above-named view be correct, did not meet with a customer so enthusiastic as himself. He was a trifle too much in excelsis.

Pearson was almost the introducer of those stupendous prices for really first-rate books or rarities in book-form, which have now gone on ascending, till it is hard to tell where they will stop. Frederic Locker told me that he had asked him fifty guineas for a prose tract by Southwell a few years anterior in date to any recorded. Why not five hundred? With Pearson’s successors I have had many years’ pleasant acquaintance. Verbum sap. The volumes, which have changed hands on that ground, would form a library and a fine one.

With the late James Toovey I never had a single transaction. But Mr Huth often spoke of him and of the Temple of Leather and Literature, as his place of business in Piccadilly was jocularly called from Toovey’s predilection for old morocco bindings. I do not pretend to know what was the exact nature of this business; but it must have been a very profitable one. Ordinary bookselling made only a small part of it. I always took Toovey to be a Jew, till I found that he was a Catholic; and it was a laughable circumstance that, when the library of Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middle-Hill had to be valued, he was the very person selected to perform the task, although Phillipps had laid down in his will that the house should never be entered, nor the books examined, by Mr Halliwell or a Papist.

Willis & Sotheran’s in the Strand was known to me by tradition. My father had bought books of Willis in early times, when the latter was in Prince’s Street and in the Piazza, before he joined Mr Sotheran. The shop in the Strand united with Pickering’s and one or two more to supply me with a handful or so of curiosities, while I remained what is termed an amateur. Later, it was one of the marts, to which I regularly resorted with advantage in quest of the wants of Mr Huth or the British Museum. An old-established business, it mechanically attracted year by year an endless succession of private parcels and single lots, which generally rendered the monthly catalogues remunerative reading. It is more than a quarter of a century ago, since I received one of these lists at Kensington, and spied out two unique items in the shape of Cookery Books of the Elizabethan period at 10s. 6d. each. I was on the top of the next omnibus going Londonward, and entered the premises with a nervous uncertainty not legible on my countenance. I applied for the lots; they brought them to me; they were in splendid state; I clapped them in my pocket, and I left the place with a lightened heart. I met some of my friends, who were coming in, as I walked out, and I guessed their mission. How sorry I was for them! Mr Pyne was one. There came into my thoughts a saying of Mr Huth’s elucidatory of the success of his firm: ‘We do not profess,’ quoth he, ‘to be cleverer than other folks; but we get up earlier in the morning.’

Mr Huth owed his copy of Caxton’s Game of Chess to Willis & Sotheran. An individual brought it into the shop, and offered it for sale. It was in vellum, but wanted A i. and A viii., the former a blank leaf. What the firm gave, I never heard; but when Lilly approached them on behalf of Mr Huth, the demand was £1000. It is always wise to start with a margin. The ultimate figure was £300. It was the second edition, of which Trinity College, Cambridge, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Tollemache, have perfect copies.

It was the buyer (Francis), whom Willis & Sotheran employed about 1860, to whom we were all indebted for discovering at or near Plymouth the unique tragedy of Orestes, 1567, which went to the Museum, and for a duplicate of which Payne Collier safely offered at the time fifty guineas, and the equally rare copy of Drayton’s Harmony of the Church, 1610, which was acquired by Mr Corser, and at his sale by Mr Christie-Miller. I have not heard that the West of England has of recent years yielded many such finds as it formerly did. It was long a profitable hunting ground.

Speaking of Drayton, of whose early editions it has fallen to my lot to secure several at different times, I am reminded that in Willis & Sotheran’s 1862 catalogue appeared that eminent writer’s Tragical Legend of Robert Duke of Normandy, 1596, of which only three copies are known; the volume turned out on examination to want a leaf; but luckily in another list issued by the firm there was a second example misdescribed as Drayton’s Poems, which, though elsewhere imperfect, supplied the immediate deficiency; and the duplicate, which had served me so well, was wasted. I had been about the same time disappointed by missing at a shop in Old Bond Street (not Boone’s) the English Ape, 1588, in the original binding at £2, 12s. 6d.; and curiously enough the house in the Strand purchased it, bound it in red morocco, and put it in a subsequent monthly circular at £5, 5s. I had to stretch my purse-strings, and go to the higher figure.

I have elsewhere given Willis himself credit for introducing me to a small literary commission, which if it did not yield much money, did not entail much labour. The only other experience of the same class afforded me the labour without any result. It was a parson of independent fortune, who called me in for my opinion on certain Diaries of Travel, which he had written, and which he thought (most correctly) in need of editorship. The negotiation came to nothing, and so did my fee. It was not my province to inform the reverend gentleman that his MSS. were waste-paper, nor would the mention of his name be of any utility. He was unconsciously one of those sempiternal caterers for the paper-mill, whose unprinted effusions generally figure in the auctions among the bundles in the wane of the season, and they resemble in their inevitable doom the processions through the streets of the drover’s charges on their way to our shambles. Let us pray that from the pulp of this holy man’s derelicta, swept out by his executors, something worthier and more durable may evolve.

There is quite a group of minor or secondary dealers, whose absolute rank to me was indifferent, and from whom it has been my fortune in the course of my career as a bibliographical huntsman to bring away spoils of the chase neither few nor unimportant.

An odd case of rather shallow misrepresentation occurred, when I went to an emporium in Conduit Street in search of a copy of Stapylton’s Musœus, 1647. It was marked 5s. 6d. in the catalogue, but, said the owner, ‘that is a misprint for 15s.’ I put down the larger sum, merely inquiring how the odd sixpence crept in!

The Wallers of Fleet Street, originally next to Saint Dunstan’s Church, subsequently higher up, had known my grandfather. The younger was my more particular acquaintance, and helped me to many choice items. I recollect that I refused a spotless copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear, in old sheep, 1807, for 7s. 6d., which Waller assured me that Mr George Daniel had seen, and estimated at a guinea; and I regret this more than I congratulate myself on the acquisition of an unique folio MS. of Edmond Waller’s Poems, which his namesake had got from a furniture sale for one shilling, and let me have for fifty, of an unknown impression of A Description of Love, 1629, tenderly and mercifully swaddled between two imperfect books in a volume, and itself (the sole thing of value) as clean as a new penny, and several other ungratefully forgotten blessings. It was to the Waller volume that the last editor of the poet was indebted for the unprinted and otherwise undescribed dedication to Queen Henrietta Maria, of which I furnished the earliest notice an age since to Notes and Queries. By the way, I must not overlook the matchless copy in boards uncut of the Papers relating to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, published at Boston, 1769, for which I tendered Waller 5s., and for which an American house gave £8.

I had not much to do with the Rimells and the Walfords. The former put in my way two or three rarities, and I furnished them with a couple of valuable Americana for the Carter-Brown library at New York. The books which I associate with this firm are Philipot’s Elegies on the Death of William Glover, Esquire of Shalston in Buckinghamshire, 1641, which cost me 4s., and Gardyne’s Theatre of the Scottish Kings, 1709, both alike scarce to excess. Of neither are more than two copies known, and the Grenville one of the second is mutilated. Mr Christie-Miller would have been glad to possess the Philipot; but it went to the national library; the Gardyne passed into the Huth collection.

The Walfords were instrumental in enabling me to track out a pamphlet by Taylor the Water Poet relative to a murder at Ewell in 1620, of which I had been on the scent for years, and of which a copy at last occurred in a huge pile of miscellanies at Sotheby’s tied up together at the close of a season. I found that Walford was the buyer; and when I waited on him, it turned out that it was a commission. For whom? Well, a customer in Scotland. But he did not want the account of a transaction at Ewell! Well; he would write, if I would name my price. I offered 10s. The tract came up; I took all the particulars; and the Museum relieved me of it at £4, 4s. No duplicate has ever been seen, I believe.

John Russell Smith was one of my earliest publishers. I became acquainted with him in 1857 in that capacity, and continued to do literary work on his behalf down to 1869. I subsequently purchased a large number of old books of him and of his son, Alfred Russell Smith, through whose hands passed some very rare articles less highly appreciated by him than by myself. Which was the truer estimation, I do not know; but Smith now and then ingenuously stated to me that a lot in the catalogue, which I selected, had been ordered over and over again. Such was the case with the Book of Measuring of Land, by Sir Richard de Benese, Canon of Merton Abbey, printed at Southwark about 1536 by James Nicholson, priced 15s. in the original stamped binding, and Henry Vaughan the Silurist’s Thalia Rediviva, marked 25s. Smith said one morning that a party had sent him three tracts, which he shewed me, and wanted 25s. for the lot; and he should expect 5s. for his trouble, if they would suit me. ‘Very well,’ said I. But the party advanced to 30s. and Smith by consequence to 35s. Still I was agreeable; and at that figure they became mine. Two of them were by Taylor the Water Poet, one unique—the original narrative of his journey to Bohemia, 1620; and it was, as so many of these exceedingly rare items often are, in a perfect state of preservation.

I once went through Hotten’s stores in Piccadilly, and found nothing but the copy which Mr Huth had, of Wither’s Psalms, printed in the Netherlands, 1632, in unusually fine condition, and marked 15s. Hotten had from Cornwall, in a volume, Cowley’s Poems set to music by W. King, 1668, and Bunyan’s Profitable Meditations, the latter unique, and now in the British Museum. I somehow missed that; but I bought the Cowley; it is the identical one described in the Huth catalogue. Hotten had a curious propensity for marking his old books at figures, which might denote the exiguity of his profit—or the reverse. He would not ask 18s. or a guinea, but 19s. 6d.

There was a constitutional and aggravating proneness on his part as a publisher to the pursuit of a tortuous path in preference to a straight one; and I am afraid that he took a certain pride in trying to outwit or overreach his client. Most unwillingly I had in the case of a small book, which he took, to involve him in two bills of costs from his sheer perversity in regard to his engagements; and the curious, but unfortunate sequel was that his successors, in taking over the interest, repudiated their balance of liability, and exposed themselves to a farther superfluous outlay. What was a poor author to do?

When he was in Orange Street, Red Lion Square, I saw a good deal of John Salkeld, a north-countryman, whom I always found perfectly satisfactory and reliable. He never had occasion to carry out the practice on me, as I was a most exemplary paymaster, especially in those cases, when I thought that the money was at once an object and an encouragement; but Salkeld often spoke to me of less punctual clients at a distance, whom he should like to hug. My most notable adventure in connection with him was the result of a catalogue, which he sent to me, so that I got it the last thing on a Saturday night. There was a Wither’s Emblems, Daniel’s Works and Panegyrick in a volume on large paper, and one or two other matters. They were not very cheap; but they were worth having, thought I. I knew that Salkeld resided over his shop, and on the Sunday evening I walked up to town from Kensington, proceeded to Orange Street, found my man at home, and carried off my plunder in triumph. What charming books they were! For no better a copy of the Wither Mr Huth had paid Toovey £40. Both wanted the pointers to the dial.

Like so many other of my doings in the book-market, the solitary experience which I had of a person named Noble was with an immediate eye to Mr Huth. He (Noble) had come into possession of a handful of scarce old English tracts, including a volume containing several by Lady Eleanor Audley, a very rare item in the series of George Chapman’s poetical works—his Epicede on Prince Henry, 1612, absolutely complete with the folded engraving, and Joshua Sylvester’s Elegy on the same personage, so difficult to procure in such condition as Mr Huth always desired. These treasures I converted for Noble into cash, and was immediately afterward favoured with a casual suggestion elsewhere, which led me to take them to Riviere to be measured for new coats, except the Lady Audley volume, which I deposited at Great Russell Street. I had paid Noble £2 for it, thinking it must be worth £3; but before I reached Bloomsbury, I thought that it might not be too dear at £7, 7s.

The only other misadventure of the kind—if it may be so termed, as no unpleasant consequences ensued—was in connection with a book, which some one stole from Stibbs in Museum Street, and sold to Salkeld, who sold it to me. I was apprised by the original owner that he had traced it to my hands; but I pointed out that I had purchased it in good faith in open market, and for the rest I referred him to the Trustees of the national library, where it had found a resting-place.

Messrs Jarvis & Son succeeded during my acquaintance with them in stumbling upon a variety of bargains and prizes, which I usually appropriated. One was a splendid copy of Greene’s Pandosto, 1592, the only known one of that of 1588 in the Museum being imperfect. A second acquisition was the copy, which had belonged to James I. of the long-lost first edition of Lennard’s translation of Charron De la Sagesse, dedicated to Prince Henry; and a third was a singular metrical tract by John Mardelay, Clerk of the Mint to Henry VIII. called A Rueful Complaint of the Public Weal to England, printed under Edward VI., and completely unknown.

There was a remarkable coincidence between this Mardelay piece and an equally unique little volume by Thomas Nelson, 1590, which I purchased elsewhere about the same time, that both were folded in a precisely similar manner, as if the old owner grudged the space, which they occupied in a drawer or a box. They were perfectly clean and very much as they had left the printer’s hands. The Nelson was the hitherto undiscovered pageant of the Fishmongers under the mayoralty of John Allot, Lord Mayor of London, and Mayor of the Staple, and was six-and-twenty years anterior to any of which the company was aware. It was not published, but privately issued to members. I held this to be a great find, and I reproduced the text in the Antiquary, before I parted with the original to the Museum. The printer could not make out the meaning of staple, and in the first proof put steeple.

There was one more striking episode in my temporary contact with Jarvis & Son. I saw in a catalogue of miscellaneous books sold at Sotheby’s in 1890 a lot, which fixed my attention as a bibliographer. It was the English or Anglicised version of Henryson’s Æsop, printed at London in 1577, and of which David Laing, in his edition of the old Scotish poet, 1865, speaks as having been seen by him in the library of Sion College, when he visited that institution about 1830. He mentions that he wished to verify something at a later date, and that the volume had disappeared. I found on inspection that this was the identical book, no other being known anywhere, and I bought it under the hammer for £6, and let Jarvis & Son have it for £12, 12s. They sold it to Lord Rosebery. It had probably been a wanderer above half a century, since it quitted the College in the pocket of some divine of elastic conscience or short memory.

CHAPTER VIII

Messrs Reeves & Turner—My Literary Work for the Firm—My Advantageous Acquisitions Here—Cheap Rates at which Rare Books were Formerly Obtainable—The Large Turn-over of the Business—Wake of Cockermouth—An Unique Wynkyn de Worde—A Supposed Undescribed Shakespear in a House-Sale at Bognor—Tom Arthur—The Wynkyn de Worde, which I secured for Another Shilling—Arthur and Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill—The Bristol Book Shops—Lodge’s Rosalynd, 1592—Mr Elliot Stock—My Literary Work for Him—One Volume Unexpectedly Productive—Mr Henry Stopes—My Recovery for Him of a Sarum Breviary, which belonged to an Ancestor in Queen Mary’s Days—His Wife’s Family and Sir Walter Scott—A Canterbury Correspondent and His Benefits—Two More Uniques—A Singular Recovery from New York—Casual Strokes of Good Luck in the Provinces—The Wynkyn de Worde at Wrexham—A Trouvaille in the Haymarket—Books with Autographs and Inscriptions—A Few Words about Booksellers and Publishers.

My much-respected publisher and acquaintance, Mr Reeves, of the firm of Reeves & Turner, was in business in St Clement’s Churchyard, when I first met with him about 1873. He succeeded Mr Russell Smith as my publisher, and acted as my agent for some books, while others he entrusted to my editorship. The most important in the latter category were the Dodsley and the Montaigne, to the latter of which I contributed only the Introduction, my father revising the text for me, and seeing the proofs, as I was at this juncture extremely busy with all sorts of ventures, and was, above everything else, intent on a new bibliographical departure. Thousands of volumes had been in my hands during the last few years, had answered my questions, and had gone on their way, leaving me wiser and not poorer. The toll, which they paid me, had placed me in a position to pursue a vast Quixotic undertaking; and I had no other means of executing it.

Messrs Reeves & Turner’s premises were a favourite haunt of bargain-hunters in days gone by. Mr Reeves frequently attended outside and country sales, and bought many private lots; and every morning certain members of the trade made the place their first destination. I am not going to allege that I never participated in the advantages myself; but my gains were occasional and accidental; although I was long an habitual caller at the shop, the necessity for consulting Mr Reeves about some current literary affair making such visits imperative.

I have noticed the somewhat strange absence of perception and training which led Reeves to sacrifice an incalculable amount of valuable property, constantly passing through his hands in former years, and often going to others, who knew better how to turn it to account, where I describe the unique collection of Occasional Forms of Prayer of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the statement of the sagacious cataloguer that the volume containing them was so many inches thick. But it was ever so. There was no discrimination. At one time I bought an important first edition of Heywood, 1605, for half-a-guinea, and a theological tract worth a couple of shillings was marked at the same price. They had only just come in, and not to draw undue attention to the Heywood, I tendered a guinea for the two. On another occasion, a lovely little copy of Donatus De Octo Partibus Orationis, an unknown ancient impression, four leaves, octavo, fell to me here at 4s. But I should make too long a story, if I were to set down all the trouvailles, which I owed to my excellent friend’s omission to employ a capable assistant, or to look into these details himself, I might grow monotonous, unless the circumstances happened to be salient or peculiar.

Reeves, when he was in business in St Clement’s Churchyard, must have for some years done an enormous volume of trade, for he shewed me one day in the early eighties his bank-book, where it appeared that in a year he had paid in £21,000, exclusively of small amounts, which were used as cash. Yet sadly too little came of all this exhausting labour. He parted at too trivial a profit; he was too eager to turn over; and his assistants have told me that he often sold out of the open window for sixpence, items which had cost a couple of shillings. The auction-room in Chancery Lane did not, it is to be feared, contribute to his welfare. No man, however, was more honourable or trustworthy. He once remitted £50 to a person, of whom he had purchased a lot of books, on finding them more profitable than he had expected. Someone spoke of him to me as ‘a nobleman who dealt in books’—an improvement on Johnson’s definition of Tom Davies.

Wake of Cockermouth, a member of the Society of Friends, who deals in every conceivable and inconceivable object of curiosity, but is a highly deserving and industrious man, sent me on one occasion at £4, 10s. a tract of six leaves from the press of Wynkyn de Worde—the Stans puer ad Mensam of Sulpitius. It was an edition of 1515, earlier than any on record, and the British Museum paid me £12, 12s. for it. The curious part was that some months later Reeves had a very bad copy of the Grammar of the same author from the same press—a thick volume in quarto, marked £6, 6s., and I took a note of it, and left it. Wake, shrewdly calculating that as I had given £4, 10s. for the little tract of six leaves, I could not hesitate to take this one of at least sixty at £10, 10s., bought the lot on speculation, and reported it to me. I returned him my thanks. His deduction was arithmetically, but not bibliographically, accurate.

I had put into my hands at Reeves’s one day the catalogue of a house-sale at Bognor, There was a single lot in it: ‘Shakespeare’s Poems, 8º, 1609.’ No such book was known; yet it was perfectly possible that it might have been printed. Reeves thought that it might be worth my while to go down, and inspect it. I did, and had a day at the seaside. The volume was a Lintot! The auctioneer apologised; but he did not offer to defray my travelling expenses.

There are many among us, who remember Arthur in Holywell Street. He was a singular character, and had been a porter, I think, at one of the auction-rooms. My purchases of him were very numerous; and they were always right and reasonable, or I should not have been his client. He left £400 to Mr Ridler his assistant, who, called in Reeves to appraise the stock, and obtained it within that amount. While Arthur was in business, there was a grammatical tract in English printed by De Worde in his catalogue at £3, 3s. I went in to ask for it, and Ridler said that I could not have it. ‘Is it out of the house?’ I enquired. ‘No,’ said he; ‘but it is put aside for a gentleman, who always gives me something for myself.’ ‘What does he give you?’ said I. ‘A shilling,’ quoth he. ‘I will give you two.’ The lot left the shop in my pocket.

I acquired several curious articles from Ridler himself. He was, as a rule, reluctant to sell anything except through the catalogue. But he made an exception in my favour by pulling out of a drawer on one occasion a very fine copy of the very book which Wake of Cockermouth had previously offered me; and I agreed to give £8, 18s. 6d. for it. It is now in the Museum. In a second case he sold me, with a stern proviso that it was not returnable on any account whatever, a defective copy of John Constable’s Poems, printed by Pynson, 1520, which nearly completed the Museum one—only two copies, both imperfect, being known! The Constable was bound up with a foreign tract of no value in such a manner as to mystify our good friend.

He no longer honours me with his catalogue. I ceased to find much in my way, and perhaps I was not worth the postage. Ridler it was, who once signalised a volume as ‘difficult of procuration.’

It was Arthur who had the only copy ever been with the colophon of Slatyer’s Palœalbion, 1621; he got it for a few shillings of Lazarus in the same street, and sold it to Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill for £15, as Ridler informed me many years ago.

The last mad freak of Phillipps was the transmission of an order to Arthur to send him one of his catalogues en bloc. Some of the lots had been sold; but the remainder was duly shipped to the Broadway, Worcestershire; and a pretty parcel of rubbish it must have been! This is book-scavengering. You only require a besom and a purse, and a block of warehouses.

With the exception of Jeffreys and George of Bristol and Wake above named, I have not known much of the provincial dealers. Jeffreys sent me the Golden Legend by Caxton, as I have said, and a few other rare things, and with George my transactions were limited to just one. Mr Pyne had returned from these parts, and had seen at Jeffreys’ or Lasbury’s (as he thought) Lodge’s Rosalynd, 1592, at £3, 10s., bound up with an imperfect copy of Lyly’s Euphues. He declined it, but on his arrival home he reconsidered the matter, and wrote to the wrong man. I dropped in, just as he was deliberating whether it was worth while to write to the right one; but he concluded by giving up the volume to me. I had to pay £5 for it, George stating that a party had assured him it was quite worth the higher sum. I did not dare to dispute the point; I bound the Lodge, for which Mr Huth gave me £42, and let Mr Pyne have the Lyly. The only other copy known of the Rosalynd is in the Bodleian, and the single antecedent impression (1590) exists in an unique and imperfect one. The book, as it is familiar to most people, has the foundation-story of As You Like It.

The mention of that drama reminds me that Rosalind and Rosaline were rather favourite names with our early poets. Spenser introduces Rose Daniel, the writer’s sister, into his Faëry Queen under that designation, as he had done another lady in his Shepherd’s Calendar. Shakespear himself has Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost and Romeo and Juliet, and Thomas Newton wrote a poem no longer known beyond its registration in 1604, entitled: A pleasant new History; or, a fragrant Posie, made of three Flowers: Rosa, Rosalynd, and Rosemary.

I edited a few small books for Mr Elliot Stock, and had the opportunity of taking notes of one or two very rare volumes in that gentleman’s private library. I met in the shop one day my friend M——, who told me that he had come to buy the new English translation of the Imitatio Christi. I expressed surprise. He explained that it was to give away. I still expressed surprise. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘you see it is the fine style.’ I had thought that that lay in the original Latin; but I scarcely presumed to hint such a thing. I passed for one who had long laboured under a very grave misapprehension, and who was at length undeceived.

I did not grow very rich out of Mr Stock’s commissions; they were, as I have mentioned, little undertakings; perhaps they did not sell very well—I fancy that the general editor of the series gave me to understand that his own contributions were the only ones which did. But one of them—the Old Cookery Books, introduced me to a city gentleman, whose library I assisted in completing. He was a very good fellow, who had been spoiled by companies and company-mongers. He had conceived, before I met him, the design of collecting everything in all languages relative to fermented liquors and the processes of their manufacture. He was not fastidious as to condition, though he preferred a good copy to a bad one; and I left his shelves fuller than I found them. He unconsciously made up the deficiency in Mr Stock’s cheque; and my researches on his behalf were bibliographically useful to me, as they brought under my notice a variety of pamphlets and other ephemerides illustrative of a by no means uninteresting topic. Besides, he threw in my way editorial work worth £700 or more.

A rather curious incident evolved from our temporary acquaintance. Quaritch had in his catalogue just then a Sarum service-book, which purported to have belonged in Queen Mary’s days to one L. Stokes; I looked at it; and I saw that the name was Stopes, and I concluded that the old proprietor was the same Leonard Stopes who printed an Ave Maria to the Queen in or about 1555. The book also bore the signature of his brother, James Stopes. Leonard was of St John’s College, Oxford. The point was, that my casual correspondent was Henry Stopes, and was a descendant of Leonard or James. He was hugely delighted by the discovery; and he purchased the Breviary.

It was his wife, a very pleasant and accomplished Scotish lady, daughter of Mr Carmichael, clerk to Sir Walter Scott as Sheriff-Depute, who wrote the almost superfluous confutation of the claims set up on behalf of Bacon to the authorship of Shakespear’s plays.

Had it not been for my intuitive surmise, that the inscription in the volume was mis-rendered, a piece of family history, valuable at least in somebody’s eyes, might have been overlooked.

Bohn of Canterbury helped me to a good thing or two. That is a neighbourhood formerly most rich in early English books; and a good deal of obscurity hangs over certain incidents connected with the books once belonging to Henry Oxenden of Barham and to Lee Warly, and to the hand, which Sir Egerton Brydges seems to have had in obtaining some of the rarest for the library at Lee Priory. A sale of the residual portion of the Lee Warly collection took place in situ many years ago, and a few remarkable items found their way to Mr Huth, particularly Oxenden of Barham’s MS. Commonplace Book, 1647, in which the original proprietor had written a list of his old plays bound up together in six volumes. I copied out this inventory for the Huth catalogue; but it was one of the numerous omissions made by Mr Ellis to save space. Bohn met with a fair number of curious tracts, some of which he sold to me. Two of them were The Metynge of Doctor Barons and Doctor Powell at Paradise Gate, printed early in the reign of Edward VI. and in verse, and the History of King Edward the Fourth and the Tanner of Tamworth, a black-letter ballad in pamphlet form with woodcuts, both unique. Mr Huth declined the former, God knows why, but took the latter.

Through the late Mr Sabin I once sent a couple of commissions to New York for as many unique items, which had been sold at Sotheby’s in 1856, a little before my time, among the Wolfreston books. They were the Cruel Uncle, 1670, the story of Richard III. and his nephews, and A Map of Merry Conceits, by Lawrence Price, 1656. I secured the latter only for £5, 5s., and it went to the national library. This was my sole transatlantic experience in the way of purchases.

I have now and then of course laid my hand on a stray volume or so in some unexpected corner, as when I was in Conway in 1869, I ran through a local stationer’s humble stock, and discovered Paul Festeau’s French Grammar, 1685, a phenomenally rare book, of which I never saw more than two copies, and those of different editions. It cost me sixpence and the labour. The author was a native of Blois, where, says he, ‘the true tone of the French tongue is to be found by the unanimous consent of all Frenchmen.’ At another time, a bookseller at Wrexham had attended the house-sale of the Rev. Mr Luxmoore’s effects in the vicinity, and among the lots was Richard Whitford’s Work for Householders, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1533—the unique copy which had been Sir Francis Freeling’s. The buyer had marked this £3, 3s., without finding a customer; I basely offered him £2, and he accepted the amount. It is the copy described in the Huth catalogue. It reached Mr Huth through Ellis, who estimated it to me at £12.

The Luxmoore books were represented to me as having been thrown out on a lawn, and sold at random; and the same story was related of a second haul, which I once made of a Mr Fennell in Whitefriars, including an unique copy of Chamberlain’s Nocturnal Lucubrations, 1652.

I have never been a stall-hunter. I do not rise sufficiently early; and, sooth to say, it has grown by report a barren quest. At Brooks’s in Hammersmith, which I mention more particularly below, I would turn over dreary lots of volumes which he had carted away from some house-sale for a song; but I never laid out anything there or elsewhere. I always found the cheapest books were to be obtained at the auctions, or at Mr Quaritch’s, or at Mr Ellis’s. To be sure, Brooks once had uncut cloth copies of the first editions of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Maud, and Princess at ninepence each, or two shillings the three; but I passed them.

A sensible proportion of my discoveries was thus turned to good account; but such was not invariably the case. I have, on the contrary, now and then ordered a book or books from a country catalogue, simply because it or they were undescribed by me, and when I had done with them, I was often obliged to be satisfied with reimbursing myself. Again, it sometimes occurred that I transcribed the full particulars in a shop, and went no farther. One of my latest adventures in this latter way was at Messrs Pickering & Chatto’s in the Haymarket, where I have always met with the greatest kindness and consideration. On information received, as the policeman says, I proceeded to the premises, and there, surely enough, I found a dilapidated and imperfect copy, yet still a copy, of the First Part of the First Edition of Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom, 1596. The Second Part, 1597, was in the Heber sale from Isaac Reed’s collection, where it fetched 17s. But no trace of the First was discoverable, till this one turned up, dog’s eared, torn, and deficient of three leaves at the end. It was in the original vellum wrapper, and must have been reduced to its actual degradation by excess of affection or of neglect. It has been my fortune to rescue from oblivion many and many an item in our early literature, of which only just so much survived as was absolutely needed to make out the story; and I have known cases, in which it has been requisite to employ two or even three copies, all defective, to accomplish this.

So far I have presented a sketch of my life-long touch with the collectors of books and the dealers in them, and have shown that to a certain extent I am entitled to rank in both categories, my own share in the commercial side being due to the exigencies, to which I have adverted, rather than to choice. I think it not improbable that during the period from 1868 to 1878 the regular trade might have been prepared to raise a handsome subscription to send me and my family to a distant colony. Yet I exercised an influence beneficial rather than the reverse on their businesses, since I paid them their prices, and relieved them of large numbers of volumes, which they might have kept on their shelves. There was a jealousy, however, and a natural one.

Of books with autographs and inscriptions I have published in more than one periodical rather copious particulars and varied examples, ranging in date from the monastic era to our own days. I have generally found no difficulty in judging as to the character of entries in books by private owners; and considering the large number of surviving volumes which contain matter of this kind, fabrications are certainly uncommon, as well as fairly self-convicting.

Yet it cannot be a source of surprise, that the less experienced book-hunter falls into occasional traps. It is so pleasant and so tempting to be master of some copy which has once been consecrated by the fingers of a king or a queen, or a king’s lady, or a queen’s favourite, or a renowned soldier, poet, or whatever it may be, that we do not always pause to weigh the decent probabilities, do we?

The worst thing of all to do is to trust to ordinary catalogues and dealers of the commoner type. The latter have constantly by them specimens of the libraries of Queen Elizabeth, Mary of Scotland, James I., with imposing lateral, if not dorsal, blazons, and autograph attestations of proprietorship or gift. An eminent member of the trade once offered me a copy of May’s Lucan, in which the translator, quoth he, had written, ‘Ben Jonson, from Thomas May.’ I recollect an early Chaucer with Thomas Randolph on the title; of course the vendor avouched it to be the signature of the poet. Joseph Lilly had a black-letter tome with the name George Gascoigne attached to it, and advertised it as a souvenir of that distinguished Elizabethan writer; but unluckily the writer died, before the book was printed. There was similarly more than a single W. Shakespear just about the same period of time; but we have not come across any sample of his cunning in caligraphy. Perhaps he wrote better than the dramatist. That excessively interesting Florio’s Montaigne, 1603, in the British Museum carries the impress of former appurtenance to our great bard, and its history is much in its favour; but some question it (do not some question everything?), not that the inscription belongs to a namesake, but that it does so to a disciple of Mr Ireland junior.

As an illustration of the manner, in which one may be misled without remedy by an auctioneer’s catalogue, a copy of Cranmer’s Bible, 1549, was offered for sale a few years since, and, says the cataloguer, ‘on the second leaf occurs “Tho. Cranmer” in contemporary handwriting.’ In fact, some one at the time under the line of dedication to the Archbishop of Canterbury had inserted his name, to shew who he was. But there was no unwillingness on the part of the auctioneer’s assistant—or the auctioneer himself—to catch a flat. Alas! that the world should be so full of guile!

Henry Holl and myself were once parties to a mild practical joke on a fashionable bookseller and stationer named Westerton near Hyde Park Corner, who engaged to procure for his clients at the shortest notice any books required. We drew up between us a list of some of the rarest volumes in the English language, and one or the other took it to Westerton’s, desiring the latter to let him have them punctually the following day. We did not go near the shop for some time after that, I remember. Of course we never heard anything of our desiderata. The fellow woke up probably to the hoax.

There is not the slightest wish on my part to disparage the qualifications of the bookseller as a type; but it has always struck me as unreasonable, looking at the large number of persons, whose subsistence is wholly derived from this pursuit—and often a very good one, too—to represent the calling as an indifferent and an uncommercial line of industry. For there must be thousands earning livelihoods by it, although very few realise the El Dorado of £500 a year, which I have heard Mr Quaritch cite as a kind of minimum, which it is in the power of any poor creature to make out of books. Moreover, it is to be recollected that many and many, who have chosen the employment, would scarcely be capable of discharging the duties of any other; it is recommendable for variety and liberty; and it brings those engaged in it into contact with celebrated people and interesting incidence.

Imprimis, as of every other calling, there are too many booksellers. Within my memory their ranks have sensibly increased. They are not dealers in the sense in which Mr Quaritch is one; their training has been slight and superficial; and their stocks are of the thinnest and poorest quality. Still, in town and country alike, they maintain a sort of ground, and when you pass and repass their places of business, you wonder how they live, and conclude that the occupation must be profitable even on the smallest scale. For the bargain-hunter—from his point of view—there is nothing to be got out of these outlying or minor emporia nowadays; the whole actual traffic in valuable commodities centres in two or three London auction-rooms and half-a-dozen West-End houses. For all the rest it is a scramble and a pittance. I have almost ceased to look at ordinary shop catalogues; and the stall was a thing of the past before my day. If I wanted a cheap book, I should go to Mr Quaritch or to a sale-room. Your suburban and provincial merchant in all kinds of second-hand property is desiccated.

Much the same appears to be at present predicable of the publisher. He tells you that it is a poor vocation, a slender margin for himself, yet the number of houses devoted to the business was never greater, and of some the experience and capital must be equally limited, as the printer and paper-maker can tell you.

A curious, almost comic, side in the question of literary earnings, is the habitual propensity for embracing one of two extremes. A. is coining money; his publishers are all that a man could desire or expect; he has taken so much in such and such a time from them on account of his last book. You listen to his tale with jesuitical reticence; you have just parted from a member of the firm, who has told you exactly how many copies have been sold, and you can do the rest for yourself. B., on the contrary, never makes any appreciable sum by his efforts; all publishers are rogues; and the public is an ass. How much in both these views has to be allowed for temperament and imagination? Perhaps B. does nearly as well as A.

CHAPTER IX

At the Auction-Rooms—Their Changeable Temperature—My Finds in Wellington Street—Certain Conclusions as to the Rarity of Old English Books—Curiosities of Cataloguing and Stray Lots—A Little Ipswich Recovery—A Narrow Escape for some Very Rare Volumes in 1865—A Few Remarkable Instances of Good Fortune for Me—Not for Others—Three Very Severe ‘Frosts’—A Great Boom—Sir John Fenn’s Wonderful Books at last brought to Light—An Odd Circumstance about One of Them—The Writer moralises—A Couple of Imperfect Caxtons bring £2900—The Gentlemen behind the Scene and Those at the Table—Books converted into Vertu—My Intervention on One or Two Occasions—The Auctioneers’ World—The ‘Settlement’ Principle—My Confidence in Sotheby’s as Commission-Agents—My Three Sir Richard Whittingtons.—A Reductio ad Absurdum—The House in Leicester Square and Its Benefactions in My Favour—Change from the Old Days—Unique A.B.C.’s and Other Early School-Books—The Somers Tracts—Mr Quaritch and His Bibliographical Services to Me—His Independence of Character—The British Museum—My Resort to It for My Venetian Studies Forty Years Ago—The Sources of Supply in the Printed Book Department—My Later Attitude toward It as a Bibliographer—The Vellum Monstrelet and Its True History—Bookbinders—Leighton, Riviere, Bedford, Pratt—Horrible Sight which I witnessed at a Binder’s—My Publishers—Dodsley’s Old Plays—My Book on the Livery Companies of London—Presentation-Copies.

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 bonâ 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.