ow away their money.
The names above cited are themselves very unequal; some, like Breton,
Churchyard, Whetstone, Barnfield, Watson, and Constable, are sought,
and will ever be sought, by reason of their peculiar rarity; and, save
in a sentimental way, no one would probably dream of placing Beaumont,
Chapman, Wither, and some of the rest on a par with Shakespeare,
Fletcher, and Massinger. There has been, however, a tendency to force
on the notice of book-buyers, _faute de mieux_, many writers whose
productions are neither rare nor of the first class--Heywood, Dekker,
Webster, Ford, and Shirley--and to bracket them commercially with
authentic _desiderata_ either on the score of merit or of scarcity. Of
the three former, the most difficult pieces to procure are the Civic
Pageants. Nearly all Ford's and Shirley's works, except the _Echo_ of
the latter, 1618, are classable among common books even in the first
editions.

Again, condition is a postulate which begins to assert itself in the
book-market. Poor and bad copies are eschewed by many or most of those
who are willing to pay handsomely for fine specimens; and the worst
type of indifferent exemplars is the sophisticated volume, which can
be manipulated by experts to such an extent that even a person of
considerable experience will now and then be at fault. The American
collector grows more fastidious every day, and discovers blemishes
which we on this side of the water try to tolerate, if the article is
rare or we badly want it. Our Transatlantic friends, however, are more
inexorable, and go so far as to return purchases not answering the
description in the auctioneer's catalogue to their English
commission-agents.

We have instanced above two or three writers whose works command
excessive prices mainly by virtue of the paucity of surviving copies,
seconded by a faint and indirect literary interest; but we see that
the list is open to extension. During the last half-century and upward
the publications of Nicholas Breton have fetched sums, when they have
occurred, totally incompatible with any intrinsic value; with some few
exceptions they belong to the category of "three-halfpenny ware," as
Chamberlain the letter-writer styles such things in his correspondence
with Sir Dudley Carleton; half-a-dozen or so out of forty and more
are undoubtedly curious and illustrative; but Mr. Corser and one or
two other collectors made a speciality of the author. It is only the
other