is, I submit, far too prevalent a tendency in collectors to
follow suit, to attach themselves to leaders of temporary fashions. I
plead for a greater independence of opinion, where the taste is in any
reasonable measure cultivated and developed, or, again, where an
individual knows what pleases himself. By all means, if it happens
that he does not admire Shakespeare and Bacon, Sydney and Jonson,
Dryden and Pope, Byron and Shelley, Scott's novels or Lamb's _Elia_,
let him leave them alone, and make his own free choice, even if it be
to go in for _John Buncle_, the _Adventures of a Guinea_, or
Luttrell's _Letters to Julia_. There is always the room for hope that
he may quit those pastures after a time and seek more fruitful ones.
What is important and desirable, however, is that each person should
be his own caterer. Schools are only useful where some writer of real
genius has been neglected or overlooked, or been boycotted by the
press, and attention to his works is only a fair service to him, or a
becoming, if tardy, tribute to his memory.

Apropos of the increasing difficulty of obtaining certain old books
noted above, the extensive scale on which reproductions of original
editions of Early English literature have of recent years been made is
certainly a boon to literary inquirers, since the presence of such
reissues in our circulating libraries, if we do not choose to buy
them, tends at every step in many branches of work to help us, and to
render our undertakings more complete. It frequently occurs that
volumes and tracts, which are of very slight literary or intrinsic
value, contain valuable allusions and illustrations, which we might
miss in the absence of available copies. It is worth while to take in
one's hand even some puerile trifle by the author of _Adonais_, if one
is not obliged to buy it or asked to become the possessor. One feels a
curiosity to glance for a moment at a volume which, we are constantly
assured in the catalogue, the writer did his utmost to obliterate; and
we sometimes wish that he had fully succeeded.

Any of us, taking in his hands the series of _English Book-Collectors_
in course of issue by Mr. Quaritch (Nos. 1-12), will perceive without
difficulty, if he go no farther, the two distinct camps, so to speak,
into which the collecting fraternity may be, and is, broadly divided
and classifiable. You have, on the one hand, the men who followed
their personal taste, and amused their leisure i