Dring of old plays on sale by him at the White Lion in
Chancery Lane, and inserted posterior to the issue of this particular
drama, which does not bear Dring's name; and we all know the list of
dramatic performances appended to _Tom Tyler and his Wife_, 1661, and
probably emanating from Kirkman the bookseller, where we discern items
belonging to an earlier period--of some of which we know nothing
further. This catalogue, the material for which Kirkman had personally
brought together by the expenditure of considerable time and labour,
was re-issued in 1671, and from about that time Clavell and other
members of the trade circulated periodical accounts of all the
novelties of the season, but almost entirely in those classes which
seem to have then appealed to the public: Law, Science, and
Divinity--just the sections with which Maunsell in 1595 began and
ended.

The absence of the machinery supplied by the auction long
necessitated a practice which not only survived sales by inch of
candle and under the hammer, but which still prevails, of disposing of
libraries and small collections _en bloc_ to the trade, and the
dedication by the particular buyer of a serial catalogue to his
purchase. Executors and others long possessed no other means of
realisation; the Harleian printed books were thus dispersed; and even
those of Heber, almost within our own memory, engrossed the resources
of two or three firms of salesmen. The conditions under which a
library was accumulated in former days were not less different than
those under which it passed into other hands; the possibilities of
profit were infinitesimal; a heavy loss was almost a certainty. But
then men bought more generally for the mere love of the objects or for
purposes of study. The speculative element had yet to arise.

Evelyn, in his famous letter to Pepys, August 12, 1689, speaks of Lord
Maitland's library as certainly the noblest, most substantial, and
accomplished, that ever passed _under the spear_. This was within two
decades or so of the commencement of the system of selling literary
effects by auction. We are aware that in the Bristol records of the
fourteenth century the trumpet, introduced from France, is mentioned
as a medium for the realisation of property in the same way; and there
was the much later _inch-of-candle_ principle--a perhaps unconscious
loan from King Alfred's alleged time-candles, which are referred to by
his biographer Asser--a work suspected o