of knowledge. Having from the earliest date had a taste for this fascinating pursuit-and when a boy I formed a very respectable collection of Elzevirs, and looked on auction days as festivals— I have ventured to add my contribution to the rest. This little volume will be found to contain many curious and interesting things not readily accessible, and deals in some fashion with almost everything that is connected with "book." Due allowance must be made for the enthusiasm of the collector, who from the days of the excellent Dr. Frognall Dibdin has been good-naturedly allowed ever to see gold and silver and jewels in his mouldy treasures. For some curious information concerning bookbinding I am indebted to the papers of the late Mr. Sanders of Oxford. Other obligations I have acknowledged in the notes. ATHENÆUM CLUB, MY darling books!" exclaims an enthusiastic collector, Silvestre de Sacy; "a day will come when you will be laid out on the saleroom table, and others will buy and possess you persons, perhaps, less worthy of you than your old Yet how dear to me are they all! for have I not chosen them one by one, gathered them in with the sweat of my brow? I do love you all! It seems as if, by long and sweet companionship, you had become part of myself. But in this world nothing is secure." master. Some such pang or foreboding as this has often wrung the collector's heart as he surveys his treasures ranged within their glass-bound tenements; for he knows that, whatever securities he may contrive, their dispersion is almost inevitable. The more precious the collection, the more certain the temptation; and A there is even a grim legend of one library carried to the saleroom, "by order of the relatives," on the very day after the interment of the owner. Yet here there is a righteous Nemesis; for too often, indeed, the "hobby" has been ridden at the sacrifice of family comforts, and even family embarrassment,— hence the pressing temptation to recover what is thought to have been unrighteously abstracted. Yet a cloud of pleasant romantic associations may envelop the amiable collector, often a man of simple manners and tastes, whose holiday is a prowl among the "old bookshops," and whose triumph is his return home with some mouldy but precious little duodecimo. He will exhibit to you with trembling glee his Elzevir Rabelais, secured out of a book-box at the door, "all at a shilling," or his rare Jenson in folio, purchased from a country dealer" for the vast price of £10, but which "he knows is worth five times the money,”- -as indeed it is. But alas! behind all this is the grim tragic idea of, as it were, "writing in water," of gathering for dispersion, of heaping up only for scattering, of that final, fatal day when all shall be sold and others buy again! He is but a bibliophilist Danaïd, vainly filling his pitcher-the waters running out at bottom! 66 The book-collecting passion was alluded to long ago in Lucian, who asks: "Why do you buy so many books? You are blind, and you buy a grand mirror; you are deaf, and you purchase fine musical instruments; you have no hair, and you get yourself a comb." This is perhaps the most bitter stroke yet given to the bibliomaniac. More pleasantly sarcastic, too, are the lines of old Brandt in his "Ship of Fools," where our maniac is ever a conspicuous passenger : |