d), we have a succession of English collectors
to whom it would be difficult to produce foreign counterparts. Round
these _dii majores_ have clustered innumerable demigods of the
book-market, and certainly in no other country has collecting been as
widely diffused, and pursued with so much zest, as in England during
the present century. It is to be regretted that so few English
collectors have cared to leave their marks of ownership on the books
they have taken so much pleasure in bringing together. Michael Wodhull
was a model in this respect, for his book-stamp is one of the most
pleasing of English origin, and his autograph notes recording the prices
he paid for his treasures, and his assiduous collation of them, make
them doubly precious in the eyes of subsequent owners. Mr. Grenville
also had his book-stamp, though there is little joy to be won from it,
for it is unpleasing in itself, and is too often found spoiling a fine
old binding. Mr. Cracherode's stamp was as graceful as Wodhull's; but,
as a rule, our English collectors, though, as Mr. Fletcher is
discovering, many more of them than is generally known have possessed a
stamp, have not often troubled to use it, and their collections have
never obtained the reputation which they deserve, mainly for lack of
marks of ownership to keep them green in the memory of later possessors.
That this should be so in a country where book-plates have been so
common may at first seem surprising. But book-plates everywhere have
been used rather by the small collectors than the great ones, and the
regrettable peculiarity of our English bookmen is, not that they
despised this rather fugitive sign of possession, but that for the most
part they despised book-stamps as well.

Of book-plates themselves I have no claim to speak; but for good taste
and grace of design the best English Jacobean and Chippendale specimens
seem to me the most pleasing of their kind, and certainly in our own day
the work of Mr. Sherborn has no rival, except in that of Mr. French,
who, in technique, would, I imagine, not refuse to call himself his
disciple.

I have purposely left to the last the subject of Bindings, as this,
being more immediately cognate to Mr. Davenport's book, may fairly be
treated at rather greater length. If the French dictum 'la reliure est
un art tout francais' is not without its historical justification, it is
at least possible to show that England has done much admirable work, and
t