e--Speculative investors.

LOOKING at the imperfect and unconsecutive condition in which much of
our most precious early literature has been received by us, we are apt
to reflect to how narrow and close an accident we owe two classes of
existing remains: the unique book and the unique fragment. Of course
to term a volume or production unique is a perilous business; the
bookseller and the auctioneer may do so _ex officio_; an inexperienced
amateur may resort to the term as a pleasant and harmless
self-deception; but no responsible writer or critic dares to pronounce
anything whatever unique without an emphatic _caveat_. We have
personally known cases where a publication by one of the early
printers was first introduced to notice, and created a sort of
sensation, as a mutilated fragment rescued from the binding of another
work; this revelation brought to light, after an interval, a second of
a different issue; anon at some auction occurred a perfect copy; and
now the poor damaged worm-eaten leaves, once so reverently and so
tenderly regarded, awake no further interest; the mystery and romance
have vanished; and when we examine the book as a whole, we do not find
its merits so striking as when we strained our eyes to decipher the
old binder's pasteboard.

The FRAGMENT is really an unusually and more than at first credibly
important feature in the elder literature. It may be taken, after all
deductions for occasional discoveries of the entire work, to be the
sole existing voucher for a terribly large section of the more popular
books of our forefathers, just as the Stationers' Register is for
another. But it is far more than one degree trustworthier and more
palpable; for it is, like the _torso_ of an ancient statue, a
veritable part of the printed _integer_ and a certificate of its
publication and former existence. Many years ago there was a great
stir in consequence of the detachment from the binding of another
book--Caxton's _Boethius_--in the St. Alban's Grammar-School of a
parcel of fragments belonging to books by Caxton; these are now in the
British Museum. In the Huth Catalogue are noticed several relics of a
similar kind; and indeed scarcely any great library, public or
private, is without them. They may be accepted as provisional
evidences. A rather curious circumstance seems to be associated with
one of the Huth fragments--three leaves of Thomas Howell's _New
Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets_. The relic once belon