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.