f. One might fill a volume with a list of all
the sales which the last forty years have witnessed; but, taking the
principal names, let us enumerate:--

Addington
Ashburnham
Auchinleck (Boswell)
Bandinel
Beckford
Blew
Bliss
Bolton Corney
Collier
Corser
Cosens
Crossley
Dunn-Gardner
Fountaine
Fraser of Lovat
Frere
Fry
Gibson-Craig
Halliwell-Phillipps
Hamilton Palace
Hartley
Henry Cunliffe
Inglis
Ireland
Johnson of Spalding
Laing
Maidment
Makellar of Edinburgh
Middle Hill
Mitford
Offor
Osterley Park
Ouvry
Rimbault
Sir David Dundas
Sir John Fenn
Sir John Simeon
Singer
Stourhead
Sunderland
Surrenden
Syston Park
Way
William Morris (residue after private sale)
Wolfreston

Within these broad lines, which do not include libraries privately
acquired by institutions, such as the Dyce, Forster, and Sandars, or
by the trade, which is an almost daily incidence, are comprehended a
preponderant share of all the important books which have come to the
front since the earliest period, of which there is an authentic
register.

For we have to recollect that many of the persons whose possessions
were dispersed only in our time were buyers a century or more ago, and
had from Osborne, at what still appear to our weak minds provokingly
low prices, his Harleian bargains. By the way, he kept them a
tolerably long time. Did some one help him to find the money, or did
he pay it by instalments? Seriously speaking, it was rather a white
elephant. One of the most notorious private transactions in the way of
sales of books _en bloc_ was that by the Royal Society in 1873 of the
printed portion of the Pirkheimer Library, presented to it by Henry
Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the first president, and originally purchased
by his ancestor, the celebrated Earl of Arundel, in 1636.

The dispersion of the Harleian Library doubtless gave an impetus to
the revival in the eighteenth century of a taste for book-collecting;
but of course a large proportion of the purchases from Osborne himself
was on the part of buyers who parted with their acquisitions, and of
whom we have no further record. But the Osterley Park and Ham House
collections, the latter still intact, owed many indeed of their
greatest treasures to this source. In 1768 Dr. Johnson, who had had a
leading hand in the compilation of the Harleian Catalogue, and had so
gained a considerable experience of the bearings of the matter, as
they were then understood, addressed