isting tendency to exorbitant prices for
the later poets and playwrights, as the rise is due to ephemeral
causes, and the demand, for the most part, is not likely to exhaust
the supply.

If the truth may be told, the literature of past ages in all
countries, and nowhere more so than in England, is, in proportion to
its immense extent, excessively barren of high-class writers or
written matter. Each generation of collectors discovers this fact at
last; but it discovers it for itself. We disdain to profit by the
experience of our precursors, just as the little girl insisted on
learning at her own cost how foolish it was to do a certain thing.
Because there are a few highly interesting catholic publications, your
amateur must be absolutely complete in the series. If it seems
expedient to possess an example or two of ancient typography, he ends
by doing his best to accumulate every example in the market. There is
more than a probability that the service-books of the Romish Church
have their archaeological and literary value: _ergo_, he orders every
one which he sees advertised, albeit the differences are substantially
far from momentous. He understands that some very curious volumes
illustrative of ritualism and the various holy orders were printed
here or abroad, and he proceeds to drain the booksellers' shelves
throughout the universe of every bit of sorry stuff answering to this
description. There are a dozen or so of Collections of Emblems,
English or foreign, which are supposed to throw light on passages in
Shakespeare and other authors; this is sufficient leverage for the
concentration under the unfortunate gentleman's roof of a closely
packed cartload.

Seriously and bibliographically speaking, there is a fairly wide
difference and disparity among the old editions of the poets and
romancists; and there are, and always will be, a distinguished
minority, of which the selling prices may be expected to remain firm.
Such men as Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman,
Massinger, and among the lyric group Barnfield, Watson, Constable,
Wither (earlier works and _Hallelujah_), Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and
Lovelace, are to be viewed as standard and stable.

Then in the Scotish series there is permanence in Lyndsay, Drummond,
and Burns. But, on the contrary, the minor, more obscure, or commoner
productions must be carefully distinguished and circumspectly handled
by those who do not desire or cannot afford to thr