ffered at Christie's some time since, and bought
in at about the same figure.

There were one or two singular errors in the catalogue. An Elizabethan
edition of Sir John Mandeville's Travels was ascribed to 1503 and the
press of Wynkyn de Worde, and the Tylney Psalter, belonging to the
fifteenth century, was stated in a note by a former possessor to be
of the age of Richard Coeur de Lion. One of the most unaccountable
blunders in an auctioneer's catalogue which we can call to mind was
the description of a Sarum service book as a grammatical treatise. But
solecisms of various kinds are periodical. A German book is said to be
printed at Gedruckt, and a copy of Sir John Mandeville in Italian is
entered as _Questo_, that being its compiler's frugal method of giving
the title (_Questo e il libro_).

One striking feature in the Frere sale was that it was only a part of
the library, and that not the part which the auctioneers'
representative saw at Roydon. Some further instalments occurred at
another saleroom a few months later; and perhaps there is yet more to
come. But in a bibliographical respect the dispersion proved of
interest, as many of the items, formerly Sir John Fenn's, had remained
imperfectly known and described; and it was not absolutely certain
that they survived.

An element in the modern auctions which is patent to all fairly
conversant with such _mysteria_, and has become one not less
indispensable than normal, is what is commonly known as the _Rig_. A
Rig is a sale which departs or declines from the strict line of _bona
fides_ so far as not to be precisely what the forefront of the
catalogue avouches it, and by one or two houses it is discountenanced.
Nevertheless it exists, and will continue from the nature of things to
do so; and we observe in the very opening decade of auctions, in the
very infancy of the system, a trace or germ of this commencing
impurity or abuse. For some of the catalogues, so far back as 1678,
purport to register within their covers the libraries of certain
noblemen or gentleman "and others" (_aliorumque_, in the Latin diction
then so much in favour), and so it has been ever since. When we go to
the rooms and lift up our voices, we do not always know whose property
we are trying to secure; nor, if our own judgment is worth anything,
does it greatly signify.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Hazlitt's _Venice_, 1860, iv. 431.

[7] The library of James Chamberlain, sold at Stourbridge Fair in 16