them. The
Maioli bindings have long been subject to this treatment and abuse;
but at present almost every other book which offers itself in a fine
state of preservation is suspicious from a wholesale system of
forgery, which has more or less recently been introduced with
considerable success, and culminated in an entire sale at a leading
auction-room of a library almost exclusively composed of such
fabrications.

Of the genuine old English bindings, the usual materials are vellum or
parchment and sheep or calf. All these may be, and in general are,
ostentatiously plain; but they are, on the contrary, susceptible of
being rendered in the highest degree ornamental. Nothing is more
agreeable to the eye, and even the touch, than an old book in
contemporary gilt calf, with arms on the sides, or in the original
vellum wrapper, or, again, in the plebeian _mutton_.

The two former modes of treatment may, as we have said, be developed
to any extent in the direction of tooling and gilding; the sheep has
to be left unadorned--_simplex munditiis_.

What can we desire more characteristic and harmonious than a Caxton,
uncut and in oaken boards, or even in a secondary vesture of vellum,
like the Holford copy of the _Life of Godfrey of Bouillon_? Or than a
volume of Elizabethan poetry or a first Walton's _Angler_, in the
primitive sheep, as clean as a new penny, like the Huth examples of
Turbervile, 1570, and Walton? The purest copy of the first folio
Shakespeare we ever saw was Miss Napier's, in the original calf, but
wanting the verses. It sold at the sale for L151, and subsequently for
over L400. There exist such things as Laneham's _Letter from
Kenilworth_, 1575, Spenser's _Faery Queen_, 1590, Allot's _England's
Parnassus_, 1600, and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1611, in the
pristine vellum wrappers; and one of the Bodleian copies of
Brathwaite's most rare _Good Wife_, 1618, is just as it was received
280 years since from the stationer who issued it. Would any one wish
to see these remains tricked out in the sprucest, or even the richest,
modern habiliments?

Among ourselves in these islands we commonly prize and preserve (even
in a leathern case) a highly preserved specimen of Tudor or Stuart
binding; and there are instances where to exchange the old coat for a
new one, however magnificent or (so to speak) appropriate, is not
merely sacrilege, but absolute surrender of value. A copy of the first
folio Shakespeare, of a Cax