w greater ones than himself.

Do we not under existing conditions view with too uncharitable
sentiments the marvellous good fortune of the book-hunters of the last
century, at the very outset of a revival of the taste for our own
vernacular literature? Does it not seem tantalising to hear that
Warton the historian could pick up for sixpence a volume containing
_Venus and Adonis_, 1596, and seven other precious _morceaux_, off a
broker's counter in Salisbury, when the British Museum gave at the
Daniel sale L336 for the Shakespeare alone? What a thrill passes
through the veins, as we read of Rodd the bookseller meeting at a
marine store-shop on Saffron Hill, somewhere about the thirties, with
a volume of Elizabethan tracts, and having it weighed out to him at
threepence three-farthings! Our space is far more limited than such
anecdotes; but they all strike us as pointing the same moral. If one
happens on a Caxton or a quarto Shakespeare to-day for a trifle, it is
the isolated ignorance of the possessor which befriends one. But till
the market came for these things, the price for what very few wanted
was naturally low; and an acquirer like George Steevens, Edward
Capell, or Edmond Malone was scarcely apt to feel the keen
gratification on meeting with some unique find that a man would now
do, seeing that its rarity was yet unascertained, and even had it been
so, was not likely to awaken much sensation.

Low prices do not alone establish cheapness. Cheap books are those
which are obtained by accident under the current value. In the time of
the later Stuarts, Narcissus Luttrell found from one penny to sixpence
sufficient to satisfy the shopkeepers with whom he dealt for some of
the most precious volumes in our language; and a shilling commanded a
Caxton. The Huths of those days could not lay out their money in these
things; they had to take up the ancient typography in the form of the
classics, or large-paper copies of contemporary historians, or the
publications of Hearne.

We do not know that the celebrated Chevalier D'Eon was singular in his
views as a collector in the last century. He bought in chief measure,
if we may judge from a document before us, what we should now term
nondescripts, and in the aggregate gave a very handsome price at a
London auction in 1771 for an assemblage of items at present
procurable, if any one wanted them, at a far lower rate. There is not
a lot throughout which would recommend itself to m