n amateur chooses to compete for a dozen articles, which he
does not want, for the sake of one, which he does.

The steadily accumulating volume of literary production in the
seventeenth century inspired two successive movements, which we regard
to-day as peremptory necessities and matters of course, but which, so
long as books were scarcer, and the demand for them correspondingly
restricted, failed to strike any one as likely to prove popular and
advantageous. These movements were the second-hand department and the
auction-room. It is a sufficiently familiar fact that during the
reign of Charles II. both sprang into existence, although among the
Hollanders the usage of putting up books to public competition had
commenced three-quarters of a century prior; but in 1661 there do not
appear to have been any facilities for disposing of libraries or
collections, as in that year John Ogilby, the historian, arranged to
sell his books--the remainder of his own publications--through the
medium of a lottery. It was within a very brief interval, however,
that the sale by auction is shown to have become an accomplished fact.
The earliest of which an actual catalogue has come down to us is that
of Dr. Lazarus Seaman, sold by Cooper in 1676; but there were in all
probability anterior experiments, and side by side with the auctioneer
grew up the professional ancestor of the Thorpes and the Rodds--the
men who supplied Burton, Drummond, Evelyn, Pepys, Selden, and many
more, with the rarities which are yet associated with their names. The
system of selling under the hammer in its various stages of
development and different ramifications is not an unimportant factor
in our modern social and commercial life; it did not require many
years from its introduction into the metropolis to recommend it to the
provinces and to Scotland; and we possess catalogues of libraries or
properties dispersed in this manner at Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham,
Cambridge, Edinburgh, and elsewhere in the last quarter of the last
but one century; and in one case at least of this kind of property
being offered at a fair.[7] Occasionally, as in the case of Secondary
Smith, 1682, a precocious feeling for the early English school reveals
itself; but, for the most part, the articles accentuated by the
old-fashioned auctioneer are foreign classics, history, and
theology--the literary wares, in fact, in vogue. Annexed to the
_Memoirs of Thomas_ (or _Tom_) _Brown_, 1704, is