nging to the fine arts,
were William Cooper, a man of considerable literary taste and culture,
whom we have seen disposing of Dr. Seaman's books in 1676; Edward
Millington, Robert Scott, and John Dunton, of whom we know more than
of his predecessors and contemporaries through his publications, and
especially his _Life and Errors_. Commercial rivalry and jealousy
arose among the members of the fraternity before the institution had
grown at all old, and complaints were also made against
gentlemen-bidders. In the preface to the catalogue of a French
library, where he takes occasion to animadvert severely on his
contemporary and confrere Scott, Millington refers to the third
condition of sale, requiring all buyers to give in their place of
abode, "to prevent the inconveniences that have more or less hitherto
attended the Undertakers, and also the Purchasers, by reason that
several persons, out of Vanity and Ostentation, have appeared and
bought, to the damage and disappointment of the Parties they outbid,
and have not been so kind to their own Reputation, or just to the
Proprietors, as to pay for and fetch them away." This was in 1687.

It seems to have been a considerable time after the first institution
of the auction before a fixed place of business was appointed for the
sale of literary and artistic properties consigned to a particular
party for realisation. We find taverns and coffee-houses much in
request for this purpose during the former half of the last century.
The library of printed books and MSS. belonging to Thomas Britton,
"small-coal man," were sold about 1720 at Tom's Coffee-House, and
about the same date portions of Thomas Rawlinson's stupendous
collections, of which the dispersion extended over a dozen years, came
to the hammer at the Paul's Head Tavern in Carter Lane.

It is improbable that any early auction catalogue of consequence has
disappeared, and looking at those which we have, say, from the outset
to 1700, we at once perceive the comparatively limited business
transacted in this direction during a lengthened term of years, and
the numerous instances where a not very considerable catalogue
embraces three or four properties. Collections were, as a rule, made
on a smaller scale prior to the Harley epoch.

The practice of publishing booksellers' and auctioneers' catalogues,
rudimentary as it was at the outset, succeeded by the more systematic
descriptive accounts of public and private collections,