ing converted to pulp this part of our inheritance, till it comes
at last to survive in a stray leaf here or a mangled fragment there.
An altogether different quarter from which a result conducive to the
shrinkage or disappearance of copies of early works has arisen is the
print-collecting movement, involving the devastation of the
innumerable volumes which contain portraits, frontispieces, and other
engravings, and the more than incidental risk of the consignment of
the unvalued residue to the waste-basket; and it may be mentioned that
within our personal knowledge hundreds upon hundreds of scarce old
books have been destroyed by editors, lexicographers, and other
literary workers, to save the trouble of transcribing extracts. It
might be impossible to exhaust the variety of ways in which an
extraordinarily large body of publications of former days has been
reduced or raised to the position of rarities of graduated rank.

After all these ages, all the indefatigable researches which have been
undertaken for profit or for pleasure, all the libraries which have
been formed and dispersed, true it is that the Unique volume, which of
course enjoys its designation only till a second copy is producible,
still survives in such abundance, that one, if it were otherwise
feasible, might form a library composed of nothing else. Does it not
become curious to consider to what lottery, as it were, we owe
them--owe their arrest just at the dividing line between living and
lost literature? Whatever may be the cause, we have hitherto failed to
trace duplicates of the metrical _Ship of Fools_, 1509, _Queen
Elizabeth's Prayer-Book_, 1569, Watson's _Teares of Fancie_, 1593,
_Venus and Adonis_, 1593, 1599, and 1617, and of _Lucrece_, 1598.
Copies of these later productions must have found their way to
Shakespeare's country at the time. Malone met with the _Venus and
Adonis_ of 1593 at Manchester in 1805, and another collector with that
of 1594 in the same shire; and the Florio's _Montaigne_ of 1603, the
only volume with the poet's autograph yet seen, was long preserved at
Smethwick, near Birmingham. It was at Manchester, too, that the copy
of the _Tragedy of Richard III._, 1594, came to light as recently as
1881. Several of the works of Nicholas Breton and Samuel Rowlands
survive in isolated copies. Upwards of a century has elapsed since a
medical man picked up in Ayrshire in 1788 an assemblage of quarto
tracts belonging to the ancient verna