A study of early correspondence
and other sources of original information on the present point will be
found to corroborate such a view of the average private collection in
these islands anterior to the last century.

It was not till many years after the dispersion of that noble Harleian
memorial of generous ardour among the public and private collections
of England and the Continent (Dr. Johnson in his letter to Sir F.
Barnard, 1768, says that many books passed direct into the
_Bibliotheque du Roi_ at Paris), that the Shakespeare revival led to
an inquiry, on the one hand, into the literature connected with the
Elizabethan period, and on the other to a partial discovery of how
much of it had perished. That epoch may be regarded as the true
Hegira from which we have to date the modern annals of collecting; the
antecedent time was in a sense pre-historic, for the most precious
remains of our national literature were unheeded and uncalendared; the
means of forming a comprehensive estimate of the printed stores in
actual existence were yet latent or unknown, and the almost undivided
attention of students and purchasers was directed to the ancient
classics and foreign typography. It must be conceded, we think, that
whatever the importance of those branches of inquiry may be, the cause
of British letters is more closely and permanently bound up with our
own classics and the products of our own soil; and we repeat that the
movement which first gave a stimulus to a sort of revolt from the
Continental school and to the formation of a native one was the
persuasion, on the part of a few scholars, that something more was to
be done towards popularising the plays of Shakespeare and his more
eminent contemporaries, and elucidating their writings by the help of
those who lived amid the same scenes and habits of thought and under
the same institutions.

Leigh Hunt used to speak to me of having attended the great Roxburghe
sale in 1812 just for the sake of gaining an idea of what such an
affair was. It was, no doubt, a fine collection which the noble owner
and his predecessors (particularly John, Earl of Roxburghe in the time
of Queen Anne) had acquired, mainly in the preceding century, at very
moderate prices; and the result must have been highly satisfactory to
the estate. But many things have happened since then; the Heber
Library, the most extensive, most valuable, and most ill-fated in its
realisation: the grandest and proudest