accompanied these books on their
original realisation was absent, or was no more than a tradition. Some
judged the Queen of Scots volume very dear even at the lower
quotation. We saw it knocked down, and such was our own judgment.

These samples we adduce for the advantage of ordinary purchasers of
literary property, whose estimation principally depends on its
_provenance_. There is an inherent proneness to shrinkage of interest
and value in the hands of any one who is not equally celebrated, or is
not going to become so.

Even an approximately accurate appreciation in a commercial sense of
books of various classes can only be reached by one who is behind the
scenes, who can feel the pulse of the market, and who follows the
incessant changes in its temperature and feeling. It is absurd for a
simple amateur, who passes his time in a study or an office, to
attempt or presume to instruct us on this subject. He knows what he
has given for his own library, and what some of his friends have given
for theirs, and he reads the accounts in the papers of periodical
sales. But it is a widely different affair, when one sets about the
task, intrusted to this or that individual by a friendly publisher or
editor-general, in a scientific manner; and it is only under such
circumstances that one realises, or can render intelligible to others,
what prices actually mean and are, how much they depend on perpetually
modifying and varying influences, and how little the quotations found
in works of reference are to be trusted. The turns of the book-market
are as sudden and strange, as delicate and mysterious, as those of a
Bourse; and the steadfast and keen onlooker alone can keep pace with
them--not he always; the wire-pullers are so many.

How, then, shall collectors of books, for example, protect themselves?
They cannot. It is their diversion, their by-play; their time and
thought are engaged elsewhere in business, where it is their turn to
reap the fruit of special study and experience, and they hand over a
percentage of this to the caterer for their pleasure. The whole world
is, in other words, perpetually intent on gathering and distributing;
we are, every one of us, buyers and sellers, not of necessaries only,
but of luxuries and amusements.

Coming to the more immediate point, men nowadays, in the presence of a
severe and almost homicidal competition for subsistence, have to
devote their whole attention to their chosen employment,