d, in the course of a not very prolonged life (he died at
sixty), absorbed by degrees mainly all that fell within his reach,
both at home and abroad; and he acquired much which never came to
England, but was warehoused at Antwerp or elsewhere on the Continent,
pending future arrangements, which he did not live to make. The
library is said to have cost L150,000, and to have fetched about a
third of that sum. As the owner had built it up from the ruins of
others, so some more recent collectors found there their opportunity.

A good deal of interesting information about this once conspicuous
figure in book-collecting circles may be found in Dibdin's
_Reminiscences_. Heber seems to have inherited some shares in
Elliott's brewery at Pimlico, and a residence within the precincts.
How far this fortune contributed to enable him to devote so large an
amount to the purchase of books and MSS., we hardly know; it was said
that he derived advantage from the slave trade, but perhaps this was a
calumny. At any rate, there was trouble which saddened his later
years.

Mr. William Henry Miller of Craigentinny bought nearly the whole of
the early English poetry, and made the Britwell Library what it was
and is; and George Daniel of Canonbury carried off, at what might have
then seemed exorbitant prices, the Shakespeare quartos, to have the
enjoyment of them for thirty years, and then leave them as a valuable
inheritance to his family; for his death just occurred, when Henry
Huth had begun to compete more courageously for this class of books,
and when the National Library was in a better position to offer tall
figures for really vital acquisitions. It was in 1864, and the
struggle for the quartos and a few other prizes was principally
between the British Museum, Mr. Huth, and Sir William Tite.

At the present moment the Britwell collection is probably, on the
whole, the finest private library in the kingdom; the founder of it
was a solicitor in Edinburgh, whose name already meets the eye as a
purchaser in 1819, when the Marquis of Blandford's books were sold at
White-Knight's, and it passed by bequest to the Christy family, in
whose hands it now remains.

Had it not been for Heber and for the bibliophobia which prevailed,
when his possessions came to the hammer in 1834, it is doubtful
whether Miller of Craigentinny could have achieved the extraordinary
_coup_, which he did by transferring to his own shelves at one swoop
the harvest of