gradually
extended the knowledge of the surviving volumes of early literature,
and laid the foundation of a National Bibliography. We shall probably
never fully learn our amount of obliged indebtedness to Richard Heber,
who in his own person, from about 1800 to 1833, consolidated and
concentrated an immense preponderance of the acquisitions of anterior
collectors, and with them gained innumerable treasures, which came to
him through other channels. His marvellous catalogue must have proved
a revelation at the time, and to-day it is a work of reference at once
instructive and agreeable.

What must strike any one who has attentively considered the Heber
library, even if it is not a case of having had the catalogue at his
elbow, as I have, in a manner, all his life, is the presence there of
so large a number of items of which no trace occurs in earlier lists,
and of which no duplicates have since presented themselves. It is
perfectly marvellous how Heber accumulated the vast bibliographical
treasures brought to light, and of which his catalogue is the record
achievement; he must have been not only indefatigable in his own
person, but must have furnished encouragement to many others, who met
with rare books, to afford him the first refusal.

On the other hand, hundreds of early English books and tracts which
this indefatigable and munificent of collectors never succeeded in
obtaining, items and authors whose titles and names were hitherto
utterly unknown, have within the last two generations come piecemeal
into the market, to delight alike, yet in a different way, the
bibliographer and the amateur. The accidental and almost miraculous
survival of literary relics of past ages is curious on account of the
purely casual manner in which they present themselves from season to
season, as well as from the strange hands in which many of them are
found--often persons of obscure character and in humble life, who have
one, two, or half-a-dozen books of which all had somehow eluded the
researches of every collector. Cases are known in which a single
article has come to light in this manner, a unique publication of the
Plantagenet or Tudor era, maybe in sorry state, maybe just as it left
the press two or three centuries ago, but anyhow a monument and a
revelation.

The almost exclusive sources of intelligence on these questions are
the correspondence of the period, a portion of which is printed in the
volumes of 1813 devoted to Aubr