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.