The Confessions of a Collector Part 3

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 rosa_ 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 a.s.sertions, 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 _a l'outrance_ between the British Museum, Mr Huth, Sir William t.i.te, 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 t.i.tle-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 _Faery 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 compet.i.tion 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 a.s.serted himself so emphatically and so irrepressibly, and John Pearson was not yet very p.r.o.nounced 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 compet.i.tion 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 circ.u.mstances at 4, 6s., and at the higher rate, one endorsed by the excellent judgment of the late proprietor, it pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.k 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 ama.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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 h.o.m.oeopathic 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: 'd.a.m.n 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 ent.i.tled _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 _morceau_ 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 compet.i.tion. 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 t.i.ttle.

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 pa.s.sed 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 Peac.o.c.k 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 a.s.sociated 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sisted 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 acc.u.mulating 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 s.p.a.cious 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 a.s.sists, 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 _aesop_, 1577.

I first met with John Pearson, if I remember rightly, when he had a room at n.o.ble'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 const.i.tuted 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 bipart.i.te 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 t.i.tle. 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume 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.