tablish its
former existence in hundreds, if not thousands, of copies. Of the
_Four Sons of Aymon_, from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, 1504, not a
vestige has so far accrued; yet it once existed, as it is expressly
cited in a later issue. So it is, again, with Skelton's _Nigramansir_,
printed by De Worde in 1504, which was actually seen by Weston the
historian in the hands of Collins the poet, and with _Peter Fabyl's
Ghost_ (the Merry Devil of Edmonton) from the same press.

We are accustomed to associate with the black-letter fragment the name
of JOHN BAGFORD, who, in the closing years of the seventeenth and
beginning of the next century, distinguished himself by the zeal with
which he collected typographical specimens and memorials. In Bagford's
day, the relative value of old books was scarcely at all understood;
there was no adequate discrimination between the productions of Caxton
and his immediate successors and those of living or recent printers;
and, again, which was more excusable, volumes by early divines or by
writers of established repute were more generally sought than those by
schools of poetry and fiction, which at present command chief
attention and respect. If we turn over the pages of an auctioneer's
catalogue belonging to that era, we perceive, side by side, items
estimated at about the same figure, of which many have become worth
perhaps even less, while a few have left their former companions
immeasurably behind, and one or two rank among the _livres
introuvables_. Those were the days when the classics were preserved
with the most jealous care, and acquired at extravagant prices, and
when our vernacular literature, from the introduction of typography
down to the Restoration, was an object of attention to an extremely
limited constituency, and could be obtained for a song.

The Bagford collection of title-pages and fragments formerly
constituted part of the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum,
but has been chiefly transferred to the printed book department of
recent years. It resembles a Typographical Cemetery, a charnel-house
of books crowded together without respect to their subject-matter or
their literary rank: the leaf of a Caxton, another of a valueless
legal treatise, the title-page of _Romeus and Julietta_, on which
Shakespeare founded, as the phrase goes, his own play, and a
broadsheet preserved entire, there being no more of it. But Bagford,
who helped Dr. Moore, Bishop of Ely, and