ss night and
many an anxious calculation. Lamb, although he probably never bound a
volume of his own in his life, or purchased one for the sake of its
cover, could grow enthusiastic over his favourite _Duchess of
Newcastle_, and declare that no casket was rich enough, no casing
sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.

Collectors of the abstract type looked, and still look, at the essence
or soul--at the object pure and simple. A book is a book for a' that.
It may be imperfect, soiled, wormed, cropped, shabbily bound--all
those things belong to its years; let it suffice that there is just
enough of the author to be got in glimpses here and there to enable
the proprietor of him in type to judge his quality and power. That is
what such men as Lamb wanted--all they wanted. A copy of Burton's
_Anatomy_, of Wither's _Emblems_, or Browne's _Urn-Burial_, in the
best and newest morocco, was apt to be a hinderance to their enjoyment
of the beauties of the text, was almost bound to strike them as an
intrusion and an impertinence--perchance as a sort of sacrilege--as
though the maker of the cover was seeking to place himself on a level
with the maker of the book. Nor are there wanting successive renewers
of this school of collector--of men who have bought books and other
literary property for their own sake, for their intrinsic worth,
irrespectively of rarity and price. A relative of the writer devoted a
long life--a very long one--to the acquisition of what struck him as
being curious and interesting in its way and fell within his
resources, which were never too ample; and in the end he succeeded in
gathering together, without much technical knowledge of the subject, a
fairly large assortment of volumes, not appealing for the most part to
the severer taste of the more fastidious and wealthier amateur, but
endeared to him at least, as Lamb's were, by the circumstances under
which they came to his hands. Each one had its _historiette_. This
gentleman represented, as I say, a type, and a very genuine and
laudable one, too. I admired, almost envied him, not in his
possession, but in his enjoyment of these treasures; they were to him
as the apple of his eye. When I speak of him as a type, I mean that
the same phenomenon still exists. In a letter of 1898 from the extreme
North of England there is the ensuing passage, which strongly
impressed my fancy: "Ever since I had a house of my own--nearly twenty
years--I have