sively and tastefully" illustrated with hundreds or thousands of
portraits and views; and the bidding or demand, as the case may be, is
carried to L20, L50, or L100. Our advice is, Not to touch. It is
preferable to have a few chosen examples in a portfolio.

It is not always that the Illustrated Copy is restricted to
engravings and other works of art. Autograph letters enter into the
plan, and facsimiles of title-pages or other cognate and more or less
relevant objects. One of the most recent enterprises of this nature--a
Boswell's _Johnson_--cost the actual possessor about L10,000; it was
extended to forty-two volumes, and aimed at having a token of some
kind of every one mentioned in the text. So we advance. It was deemed
a piece of extravagance when, forty or fifty years ago, the late Sir
William Stirling-Maxwell expended about L1000 in forming an
illustrated copy of his own _Cloister Life of Charles V._

The Nature-printing, Autotype, Photogravure, Collotype, and other
processes strike us as hardly falling within the category here
contemplated, although that they are material accessions to our
resources is undoubted. They are the fruit of a combination between
nature and mechanical science; their fidelity for portraiture and
technical purposes may be granted; but they do not realise the notion
of artistic embellishment or interpretation, nor are they capable of
rendering with anything approaching truth the more delicate and subtle
touches of the miniaturist.

The _Edition de Luxe_ is dilettantism _in extremis_. It is a movement
which seems to rest on a false theory and basis. It should have
limited itself to _nugae literariae_, to _bagatelles_, which no mortal
sought to read, and which might be harmlessly printed on any material,
of any latitude and longitude, in any type, or else to graphic works
where the luxury would more comfortably and more suitably make itself
manifest in illustrations varied and duplicated to whatever extent it
pleased the issuer, or was calculated to gratify his clients. But to
apply the principle to books so essentially appealing to practical
readers as Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and others, was an unfortunate
step and precedent, which has thrown on the market a large amount of
stock not easily moved even at a heavy discount on the published
price.

Merely looking at the _bibliophile_ pure and simple, and shutting our
eyes to those phases of book-collecting, where the principle or sole