The Confessions of a Collector
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Title: The Confessions of a Collector
Author: William Carew Hazlitt
Release date: November 17, 2012 [eBook #41393]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 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
PAGE
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, 1
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, 19
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, 41
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_, 57
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 Lily--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_ 73
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, 93
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, 108
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, 128
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, 150
CHAPTER X
As an Amateur--Old China--Dr Diamond of Twickenham--
Unfavourable Results of His Tutorship--My Adventure at
Lowestoft--Alderman Rose--I turn over a New Leaf--Morgan--
His Sale to Me of Various Objects--The Seventeenth Century
Dishes--The Sèvres Tray of 1773--The Pair of Japanese
Dishes--Blue and White--Hawthorn--The Odd Vase--My Finds at
Hammersmith--Mr Sanders of Chiswick and his Chelsea China--
Gale--The Ruby-backed Eggshell--A Recollection of Ralph
Bernal--Buen Retiro and Capo di Monte--Reynolds of Hart
Street--The Wedgewood Teapot--The _Rose du Barri_ Vases--My
Bowls--An Eccentric Character and His Treasures--
Reminiscences of Midhurst and Up Park--The Zurich Jug and
My Zurich Visitor--The Diamond Sale, 188
CHAPTER XI
The Stamp Book--A Passing Taste--Dr Diamond again--An
Establishment in the Strand--My Partiality for Lounging--
One of My Haunts and Its Other Visitors--Our Entertainer
Himself--His Principals Abroad--The _Cinque Cento_ Medal--
Canon Greenwell--Mr Montagu--Story of a Dutch Priest--My
Experience of Pictures--The Stray Portrait recovered after
Many Years--The Two Wilson Landscapes--Sir Joshua's
Portrait of Richard Burke--Hazlitt's Likeness of Lamb--The
Picture Market and Some of Its Incidence--Story of a
Painting--Plate--The Rat-tailed Spoon--Dr Diamond smitten--
The Hogarth Salver--The Edmund Bury Godfrey and
Blacksmiths' Cups--Irish Plate--Danger of Repairing or
Cleaning Old Silver--The City Companies' Plate, 215
CHAPTER XII
Coins--Origin of My Feeling for Them--Humble Commencement--
Groping in the Dark--My Scanty Means and Equally Scanty
Knowledge, but Immense Enthusiasm and Inflexibility of
Purpose--The Maiden Acquisition Sold for Sixteenpence--The
Two Earliest Pieces of the New Departure--To whom I first
went--Continuity of Purchases in All Classes--Visit to
Italy (1883)--My Eyes gradually opened--Count Papadopoli
and Other Numismatic Authorities--My Sketch of the Coins of
Venice published (1884)--Casual Additions to the Collection
and Curious Adventures--Singular Illusions of the
Inexperienced--Anecdotes of a Relative--Two Wild
Money-Changers Tamed--Captain Hudson--The Auction-Thief--A
Small Joke to be pardoned, 235
CHAPTER XIII
My Principal Furnishers--Influence of Early Training on My
Taste--Rejection of Inferior Examples an Invaluable
Safeguard--I outgrow My First Instructors--Necessity for
Emancipation from a Single Source of Supply--Mr Schulman of
Amersfoort--His Influential Share in Amplifying My
Numismatic Stores--My Visit to Him--The Rare _Daalder_ of
Louis Napoleon, King of Holland--My Adventures at Utrecht
and Brussels--Flattering Confidence--In the Open Market--
Schulman's Catalogues--MM. Rollin & Feuardent--Their
English Representative--Courtesy and Kindness to the
Writer--Occasional Purchases--The Late Mr Montagu--
Discussion about an Athenian Gold _Stater_--An Atmospheric
Experiment--My Manifold Obligations to Mr Whelan--Mr
Cockburn of Richmond allows Me to select from His English
Collection--I forestall Mr Montagu--Messrs Spink & Son--
Their Prominent Rank and Cordial Espousal of My Interests
and Wants--Development of My Cabinet under Their Auspices--
My Agreeable Relations with Them--Their Business-like
Policy, Liberality and Independence--The Prince of Naples--
We give and take a Little--The Monthly _Numismatic
Circular_--The Clerical Client, 257
CHAPTER XIV
The Coin Sales--My Stealthy Accumulations from Some of
Them--Comparative Advantages of Large and Small Sales--The
Disappointment over One at Genoa--The Boyne Sale--Its
Meagre Proportion of Fine Pieces--My Comfort, and what came
to Me--Narrow Escape of the Collection from Sacrifice to a
Foreign Combination--Trade Sales Abroad--A New Departure--
Considerations on Poorly-Preserved Coins--I resign Them to
the Learned--I have to Classify by Countries and Their
Divisions--My Personal Appurtenances--Suggestions which may
be Useful to Others--The Great Bactrian Discovery--Extent
of Representative Collections of Ancient Money--Antony and
Cleopatra--Adherence to My own Fixed and Deliberate Plan--
The Argument to be used by Any One following in My
Footsteps--Advice of an Old Collector to a New One, 284
CHAPTER XV
Literary Direction given to My Numismatic Studies and
Choice--The Wallenstein Thaler--The Good Caliph Haroun El
Reschid--Some of the Twelve Peers of France who struck
Money--Lorenzo de' Medici, called _The Magnificent_--Robert
the Devil--Alfred the Great--Harold--The Empress Matilda--
Marino Faliero--Massaniello--The Technist thinks poorly of
Me--My Plea for the Human, Educating Interest in Coins--The
Penny Box now and then makes a Real Collector--How I threw
Myself _in Medias Res_--First Impressions of the Greek
Series--My Difficulty in Apprehending Facts--Early
Illusions gradually dissipated--What Constitutes a Typical
Greek and Roman Cabinet--And what renders Great Collections
Great--Redundance in Certain Cases defended--Official
Authorities except to My Treatment of the Subject--Tom
Tidler's Ground--The Technical _versus_ the Vital and
Substantial Interest in Coins--My Width of Sympathy
Beneficial to Myself and likely to prove so to My
Followers--Outline and Distribution of My Collection--
Autotype Replicas and Forgeries--Romantic Evolution of
Bactrian Coinage and History--Caution to My
Fellow-Collectors against Excessive Prices for Greek
Coins--Wait and Watch--Mr Hyman Montagu and His Roman Gold,
and the Moral--The Best Coins not the Dearest--Our National
Series--Its Susceptibility to Eclectic Treatment--A
Whimsical Speculation--An Untechnical Method of Looking at
a Coin--A Burst Bubble--The Continental Currencies--Their
Clear Superiority of Interest and Instructive Power--The
Writer's Attitude toward Them, 304
CHAPTER XVI
The Question of Condition considered More at Large--How One
most Forcibly Realises Its Importance and Value--Limited
Survival of Ancient Coins in Fine State--Practical Tests at
Home and Abroad--Lower Standard in Public Institutions and
the Cause--Only Three Collectors on My Lines besides
Myself--The Romance of the Shepherd Sale--Its Confirmation
of My Views--Small Proportion of Genuine Amateurs in the
Coin-Market--Fastidious Buyers not very Serviceable to the
Trade--An Anecdote by the Way--The Eye for State more
Educated in England than Abroad--American Feeling and
Culture--What will Rare Old Coins bring, when the Knowledge
of Them is more developed?--The Ladies stop the Way--
Continental Indifference to Condition--Difficulties
attendant on Ordering from Foreign Catalogues--Contrast
between Them and Our Own--_D'une Beauté Excessive_--
Condition a Relative Term--Its Dependence on
circumstances--Words of Counsel--Final Conclusions--Do I
regret having become a Collector?--My Mistakes, 331
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 _Phoenix 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 homoeopathic 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
_Musoeus_, 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 _Paloealbion_, 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, a
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