The Confessions of a Collector

tship 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 Adventu

site to enable Me to do so-Some of My Experiences-Molini the Elder-The London Library Forty

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 o

l 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 fi

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

azlitt, 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

or 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 th

for a good deal. Instead of becoming a distinguished civil servant, a prosperous trader, or a successful profession

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 sa

p 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

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. T

ote 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, tur

power of regaling your less fortunate or unpractical acquaintances with the strange chances, which enabled you to

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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

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

y. 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 manne

ubject 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 Quaritc

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 t

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 w

t 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

are. 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 ques

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 Kensingto

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 unconsci

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

d, 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 k