uits of a long
neglect--Want of discrimination among private buyers--Necessity
for a better training or sounder advice--Remarks on our early
literature--Small proportion of high-class authors--Safe and
unsafe investments--Condition of copies--Writers whose works are
of mysterious rarity--Nicholas Breton--"Three-halfpenny
ware"--Paucity of great names in the post-Restoration period down
to our own--Foreign works belonging to the English series: their
chief places of origin--English presses--Typographical
vicissitudes of London--The Scotish Series--Scotish presses--The
Irish Series--Irish presses--The Irish Stock--The List of Claims,
1701--Anglo-American literature and early American editions of
English Classics--The American Colonial group of books--The _Bay
Psalm-Book_, 1640--The volumes of Statutes printed at Boston,
Philadelphia, and New York--Sources of information on
Anglo-American bibliography--Caution against impatience and
enthusiasm.

THE entire range of the earlier English and Scotish romantic,
poetical, and even historical literature embraces so many items, which
are either unattainable from their rarity or their cost, if they
happen once in a lifetime to occur, that it may be said to be ground
almost closed against the ordinary private buyer. Articles which are
to be seen by the hundred in the priced catalogues of libraries
dispersed twenty or thirty years since with fairly moderate figures
attached to them, have, owing to severer competition from America as
well as at home, either for public or private purchasers, trebled or
quadrupled in value. With the more modern literature, of which the
positive scarcity does not warrant this great inflation, we may
reasonably look for a fall; but in the case of volumes which are
really rare, it is hard to see how the chances of collectors can be
improved in the future. The upshot will be, that they must be
satisfied with smaller fish or modify their lines; for of old and
elderly books of intrinsic value and interest there is a plentiful
choice. With regard to a considerable body of Early English volumes,
which formerly appeared in the catalogues of Thorpe, Rodd, the elder
Pickering, and others, it is to be said that the fewness of survivors
was not appreciated, and half-a-dozen public or closed libraries have
absorbed them all.

It exemplifies the remarkable revolution in feeling and ta