ey's Collections, and another in
Nichols's _Anecdotes_. There we perceive that Lord Oxford was indebted
for many rarities to John Bagford and other private purveyors of
printed books as well as MSS. In a letter of 1731 to Hearne, his
Lordship mentions his impression that he had forty-two Caxtons at that
date. He seems to have possessed seventy-three examples of Wynkyn de
Worde.[8]

With respect to some of the college libraries at Oxford, Cambridge,
and even Dublin, it is easier to arrive at the facts, so far as they
go, or, in other words, many of the rare and important acquisitions of
those institutions came to them at a period anterior to what may be
termed the bibliographical era, and were often contemporary gifts from
the authors of the volumes or from early owners of them.

The value of the auction became manifest at a comparatively early
date, when a clear demand for certain descriptions of literary
property had set in, particularly when the formation of the Harleian
library was in progress. In 1757 the representatives of Sir Julius
Caesar, Master of the Rolls under James I., proposed to sell his MSS.,
and eventually negotiated with a cheesemonger, who offered L10 for the
collection as waste paper. Paterson, the auctioneer, fortunately heard
of the affair, dissuaded the family from it, and prepared a careful
catalogue of the articles, by which he realised to the owners L356.
Take another case. In 1856 the Wolfrestons decided on parting with a
lot of old books and pamphlets which an ancestor had collected under
the Stuarts, or even earlier, and would, as one of them informed us,
have gladly accepted L30 for the whole. But they were sent to
Sotheby's, and realised L750.

On the other hand, instances are by no means unknown, in spite of what
the auctioneers may assert, where it has suited a bookseller to give
for a library or a parcel of books a sum at all events sufficient to
tempt the owner, who has always before his eyes, in the case of a sale
under the hammer, a variety of risks and draw-backs, which an
immediate cheque, even for a lower amount, at once removes.

After all, the book-lover must, as a rule, be satisfied with the
pleasure attendant on temporary possession.

Of the houses which lend themselves in our own day, and have done so
during the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, to the incessant
redistribution of literary acquisitions, and have gradually reduced an
originally rather rudimentary p