l _bona fide_ Books. They may be the best
editions by the best binders, or they may be antiquarian periodicals
or sets of Learned Transactions, reducing much of the elder lore
cherished and credited by our ancestors to waste-paper; we feel that
it is a sort of superstition which influences us in regarding them;
but we fail to shake off the prejudice, or whatever it may be, and we
hold up, on the contrary, to the gaze of some sceptical acquaintance
a humble little volume in plain mellow sheep--say, a first Walton, or
Bunyan, or Carew, nay, by possibility a Caxton or Wynkyn de
Worde--which a roomful of perfectly gentlemanly books should not buy
from us. It may strike the reader as a heresy in taste and judgment to
pronounce the four Shakespeare folios of secondary interest from the
highest point of view, as being posthumous and edited productions. But
so it is; yet Caxton's first impression of Chaucer's _Canterbury
Tales_, if we were to happen upon it by accident, is a possession
which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and
such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's _Faery Queen_, 1590, with
the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside
the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter.
So, again, Aubrey, in his _Miscellanies_, _Remains of Gentilism and
Judaism_, _History of Surrey_, and _Natural History of Wiltshire_,
presents us with works very imperfect and empirical in their
character--even foolish and irritating here and there; but between
those undertakings and such as Manning and Bray's or Brayley and
Britton's _Surrey_ there is the difference that the latter are
literary compilations, and the former personal relics inalienably
identified with an individual and an epoch.

It is the same with certain others, ancient as well as modern writers.
Take Herodotus, Athenaeus, and Aulus Gellius on the one hand, and
Bishop Kennett's _Parochial Antiquities_, White's _Selborne_, Knox's
_Ornithological Rambles in Sussex_, or Lucas's _Studies in
Nidderdale_ on the other. All these equally tell you, not what some
one else saw or thought, but what they saw or thought themselves, and
in a manner which will never cease to charm.

There are works, again, which, without professing to entertain for the
authors any strong personal regard, we read and re-peruse, as we admire a
fine piece of sculpture or porcelain, an antique bronze or cameo, as
masterpieces of art or m