who
collected books of characters and books printed at Oxford or just
before the Great Fire of 1666; Bandinel, who was smitten by the charms
of the Civil War literature; Corser, whose bibliographical sweethearts
were Nicholas Breton and Richard Brathwaite; and Rimbault, who had
two, Old Music and Old Plays. Mr. G. L. Gomme is similarly situated:
anthropology and folklore are his foibles. It goes without saying that
the Shakespearian and dramatic student, from Sir Thomas Hanmer
downward, has usually made a stand on the literary remains and works
tending to illustrate their own labours; but of course the relevance
may be direct or indirect, and in the latter case the specialist is
found to cast his net surprisingly wide.

Specialism, whether on the principle of personal taste or of
particular studies, has manifest advantages in an age where the
multitude and choice of books are so bewildering, where of every work
of any sort of value or interest a man may have, not a single
edition--all that in a majority of instances was once available--but a
hundred or a thousand in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of
prices. With the discontinuance of the older paucity of literature,
the facilities for lodging within a modest bookcase a coterie of
literary favourites have sorrowfully decreased, and a collector finds
it imperative to draw the line more and more rigidly, if he does not
care to fall into one of two perils--excessive outlay or excessive
bulk. For we have not, as regards the former, to go very far before we
incur a serious expense, if it happens that the run is on the rarer
English section or on what constitutes a picked library of the French
type.

Of the miscellaneous group there are graduated and varying types. The
omnivorous accumulator, especially where he does not insist on
condition or binding, is the dealer's idol. In the forefront of this
class stand _facile principes_ Richard Heber and Sir Thomas Phillipps,
for the reason that they bought everything--whole libraries and
catalogues at a swoop. Yet both these distinguished men have to be
placed on a distinct footing from the normal promiscuous buyer, such
as Thomas Jolley, Joseph Tasker, Edward Hailstone, Edward Solly, and a
legion of others, to whom anything in the guise of a book was a sure
bait, and who spurned Evelyn's motto: "_Meliora retinete_." Ascending
a step or two higher, we come to the men who repudiate specialism as
narrowing and troublesome, and