should not be unwieldy or unworkable, nearly every volume to which an ordinary student habitually refers should find a place on the shelves; and while a sprinkling of rare and famous editions may be admitted, the vast majority should consist of handy modern reprints --not too precious for daily use. Then as a key to the whole it should contain a selection of well-digested and well-indexed indices, so that its treasures may be made directly and promptly available to its owner. It is lamentable to think how many precious moments are thrown away in verifying quotations on which the writer cannot lay his hand (I spent an hour this morning in a vain essay to recover the passage in which Sir Thomas Browne maintains that the mind works most smoothly between the autumnal and the vernal equinox), and it is still more lamentable to notice how little care is taken by contemporary writers to avoid the slovenly sin of misquotation. A celebrated novelist appears to be of opinion that Oliver assured Celia in the forest that he had been chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies,' and that Hamlet described the king his uncle as a thing of shreds and patches.' Even the indices are not always to be implicitly trusted. One authority, I see, accuses Coleridge of writing Her gentle limbs she did undress, And laid down in her loveliness; and another will have it that Othello compared himself to The Indian' to be sure figures in several versions of the plays, though I shall continue to believe that Shakespeare wrote Judean until he assures me to the contrary.2 The old race of book-hunters, celebrated in congenial prose by Mr. Hill Burton, has nearly died out. Joseph Robertson, John Stewart, David Laing, were men who not only bought books, but read them. They knew the insides as well as the outsides. They were all comparatively poor men, who could not afford to pay fancy The late Principal Scott, of Manchester, concludes a striking and powerful discourse on the range of Christianity with the lines 'From worlds not quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won; The intermingling of heaven's pomp is spread On ground which mortal creatures tread.' Any student of Wordsworth knows, of course, that the last line of the passage (which is taken from the Ninth Evening Voluntary) should run 'On ground which British shepherds tread.' But Principal Scott was a man of such nice and scrupulous accuracy of speech and thought, that I have sometimes wondered whether the words might not have been so printed in some early edition, from which he had learnt them.-Two prices for their tools, but, having each his special subject, which he had assiduously cultivated, they knew the intrinsic importance, the genuinely antiquarian and historical value, of many works which are caviare to the crowd of buyers. So they acquired really valuable collections-collections which in some respects were unique. But the bibliomania which flourishes at present is unconnected with any genuinely antiquarian or historical instinct. The picture mania was succeeded by the cracked china mania, and the cracked china mania has been succeeded by the book mania. The men who bought the pictures and the china knew the trade marks by which a painter or a plate could be identified, but they knew little more. In like manner the men who buy the books have come to know that the copy of an early edition which contains a printer's blunder at a specified page is pure and priceless, but that without the misprint it is comparatively worthless and may go for an old song. That is about the measure of the capacity of the majority of our book fanciers, though some of their number possess, in addition, a more or less intelligent appreciation of the distinction between half morocco, uncut, top edge gilt by Rivière,' and 'calf extra, uncut, top edge gilt by W. Pratt,' a distinction of no mean value in the auction room. The truth is, that book-buying has become a fashion, and the canons which govern the buyers of books are as capricious and incalculable as those which govern the buyers of old pictures or old china. There are handbooks for the buyers of porcelain; a handbook for the fanciers of rare editions and choice 'bits' for the library is not yet compiled. 6 The prevailing bibliomania must, I am afraid, be regarded as the expression, more or less intelligent, of a simply sentimental dilettanteism. It is not antiquarian; it is not historical: it affects the personal and the picturesque. An early illuminated missal, a 'Hora Beatæ Virginis Mariæ' on vellum within beautiful arabesque borders, exhibiting flowers, birds, and grotesques, richly ornamented with thirty-one large and twenty-two small miniatures, and numerous capital letters, all exquisitely illuminated in gold and colours, red morocco, silk linings (1518),' an Aldine Dante or Pindar, a first edition of 'Comus' or Lycidas,' the 'Adonais' printed at Pisa, are the dainties on which it feeds. January 29 of last year is a red-letter day in the calendar of the bibliomaniac. On that day the library of Mr. Dew Smith was sold by auction at Messrs. Sotheby's room in the Strand. There never was brought together at that classic shrine a more illustrious congregation of book-hunters. The piety which they manifested was infectious; the prices which they gave were fabulous. The very catalogue is a work of genius; it sparkles like a page of Macaulay. And, in the absence of any official handbook, it is perhaps the best guide that the critical student of the latest fashions in bibliography can select. In such a pursuit there cannot, of course, be any absolute standard of value, for there is no why or wherefore in healthy action of competition in equalising prices cannot make itself felt. Mere rarity is an essential element in the estimation in which a work printed not less than 200 years ago is held; and thus an absolutely worthless volume will often fetch a fancy price simply because there is not another in existence. But when the single copy is the sole survivor of the edition in which the poems of 'Will Shakespeare' or the 'Comus' or 'Lycidas' of Milton were first given to the world, the uneducated interest in singularity is intensified by a true literary interest, and the price which it may or ought to bring cannot be nicely appraised even by experts. Yet, in spite of the constant fluctuation in prices, the general drift of the current at any particular moment may be determined with approximate exactness.3 The influence of Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Dante Rossetti on the prices which a certain class of books command is very noticeable. The passion for 'Hora' of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is of quite recent growth, being, in fact, one of the offshoots of preRaphaelitism. These manuscript offices could be purchased for a trifle not so many years ago in many German and Italian book shops; now they are not to be met with except in the auction room, and the Hora' at Mr. Dew Smith's sale brought from 40l. to 50l. apiece. In 1850 Mr. Rossetti, Mr. Holman Hunt, and Mr. Woolner began the publication of the Germ,' of which three or four shilling parts were published; it was thereafter discontinued for lack of subscribers. The numbers, bound together, form a thin octavo volume, which now sells for about 51. The drawings (like the wooden figures carved among the dolomites) are delightfully archaic, though the remarkable Italian story by Mr. Rossetti is probably the main attraction. The Blessed Damosel,' moreover, originally appeared in the 'Germ,' and the admirers of that vivid vision are thus enabled to set side by side the original study-somewhat crude and incoherent, it must be confessed-and the finished masterpiece as it appears in the collected poems. (I notice, for instance, in comparing the two, that in the very powerful lines 3 With a Frenchman's passion for logical method, M. Edouard Rouveyre, in his Connaissances nécessaires à un Bibliophile (Paris, 1879), has formulated the general rules by which the value of rare books of European repute may be determined. Rarity, it appears, is absolute and relative—absolute when only a limited number have been printed or preserved, relative when the scarcity is due to other causes. Among books whose rarity is absolute are those which have been rigorously suppressed, those which have been destroyed by accident (the fire at Jean Hevelius's, for instance, destroyed the whole edition of the second part of the Machina Cælestis, with the exception of the few copies presented to friends), those printed on vellum or large paper, and ancient MSS. Among works whose rarity is relative are the grands ouvrages,' which are to be found only in the great libraries (such as the Acta Sanctorum or the Bibliotheca Maxima Pontifica), fugitive pieces (pièces volantes), local histories, the proceedings of literary societies, the lives of savants, catalogues, illustrated works of which the plates have been destroyed, works which treat of the black arts, macaronics, obscene libellous and seditious tracts, editions printed at the Imperial presses or by the celebrated printers, the Aldes, the Elzeviers, From the fixed lull of heaven she saw 'place' has been substituted for 'lull.') The devotees of the auction room can still remember the days when the weird and grotesque designs of William Blake were simply unsaleable-a mere drug in the market. Then came Mr. Rossetti's brilliant chapter in Gilchrist's Life, in which justice (perhaps more than justice) was done to Blake, and to another great and unsaleable genius, David Scott; and now a copy of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion,' which twenty years ago might have been picked up for 30s., cannot be secured for less than 30l. It has been irreverently said by unbelievers that Mr. Ruskin made Turner, which from the auctioneer's point of view may or may not be true. It is certain, at least, that Turner made Rogers. A fine impression of that worthy old gentleman's Poems is worth 5l. at a sale; but it is the poetry of Turner, not of Rogers, for which we are asked to pay. are asked to pay. It is needless to add that Mr. Ruskin's own works are always eagerly competed for, most of them being out of print and the Modern Painters' having already become a rarity. A copy went the other day for five-and-thirty guineas, and seven or eight pounds have been given for the series of shilling handbooks-the caustic Notes on Royal Academy Pictures'-which Mr. Ruskin published for six or seven years. The most unique and characteristic feature of the Dew-Smith sale was the prices obtained for the original editions of Shelley's poems, a matter to which I am going to refer by-and-by. Meantime it may be added that, except Mr. Ruskin's and Mr. Tennyson's works, there are not many quite modern publications which show any considerable increase in value. This is the édition de luxe of the Waverley Novels the beautiful Abbotsford edition,-published at 12l. it sells at present for from 30l. to 35l. Here are the first edition of Miss Barrett Barrett's Poems (1844), with graceful dedication to her father; most of the first editions of Thackeray's novels; the early edition of Swinburne's Queen Mother and Rosamond' (1860), which was allowed to pass unnoticed, a review in this Magazine being, I think, almost the only recognition it obtained, and his 'Poems and Ballads' (1866), afterwards withdrawn from circulation by a panic-stricken publisher (quite unjustifiably,' says a great poet and painter in a note which is attached to the copy beside me); Clough's Bothie of Toper na Fuosich' (1848), which in the collected poems has been rechristened the 'Bothie of Tober na Vuolich;' the facsimiles of the national MSS. of Scotland, which were produced under the super 6 At Mr. B. M. Pickering's sale on April 7, 1879, a copy of Mr. Tennyson's suppressed poem, The Lover's Tale (1833), was sold for 411. Mr. Pickering paid intendence of the Lord Clerk Register-all of which have become rare and comparatively dear. But it may be laid down as a general rule that most of the best editions which have appeared during the last forty years can now be bought for less than the price at which they were published. 6 Dr. James Martineau has observed, in his Hours of Thought,' that, in the absence of anything of nobler scope, limited loves, particular enthusiasms, mere fancies of the mind, be they only innocent, are a great good. 'The active votary of any harmless object is better than the passive critic of all, and the dullest man who lives only to collect shells or coins is worthier than the shrewdest who lives only to laugh at him.' And in the same spirit I would venture to suggest that it is not wise to treat the passion for old, rare, or curious books with disrespect. Any pursuit of the kind has a more or less refining influence upon the mind. It may be tainted and vulgarised, no doubt, by the ignorant caprice of fashion or the mere money-grubbing spirit of speculation; but, on the other hand, it may be so pursued as to be made not only a charming but an instructive occupation. Let us look at it a little in this light. Here, for instance, is the first edition of Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves.' It was published in 1817-that is the date it bears on the title-page. On the back of the title-page there is the name of a London, on the last page of the volume the name of a Bristol, printer. The explanation is simple. The body of the book was printed at Bristol in 1815; but Coleridge kept the sheets beside him for upwards of two years, and only the title-page, the preface, an odd poem or two, and the list of errata were printed (in London) at the time of publication. Now, this list of errata, which is unusually lengthy, is unusually interesting. Its lengthiness is no doubt partly to be attributed to the carelessness of the Bristol printer (as is indeed vaguely insinuated in the preface), but it was partly due to another cause. The printed The facsimiles of the national MSS. of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which have been taken by the photo-zincographic process, and published by Government, are extremely well done and ought to become specially popular among bookhunters. The rarest manuscripts and the scarcest prints are reproduced-even to the rents and stains which time and rough usage have made-with absolute exactitude. The Scotch have been, upon the whole, the most successful; but the English, from the greater wealth of available material, are wonderfully interesting, and the Irish are simply splendid. These unattainable Irish chronicles and gospels, with their illuminated capitals and gorgeous borders, are thus brought within the reach of the modest bibliophile, and-were it only for the lovely tints of rainbow light in which the Church artist (whose sense of colour must have been out of all proportion to his knowledge of form) indulged-cannot be too highly prized. But, curiously enough, the English and the Irish series have found few purchasers. Of the 500 copies of the English which were printed, not more than 170 or 180 have been disposed of to the public; of the Irish, only 185 out of 556. The Scotch edition, on the other hand, is out of print, upwards of 400 of each part having been sold; and the consequence is (the plates having been destroyed) that the price has risen immensely, the three parts, published at a guinea apiece, selling now for 157. (See a very interesting Parliamentary paper on the Record Publications, ordered by the House of Commons |