break, from Chaucer to
Tennyson. A large number of histories of England and works of British
biography are due to a time when I was chiefly occupied in writing the
letterpress to "The Photographic Historical Portrait Gallery,"--a very
beautiful publication illustrated with photographs of historical
miniatures, which never reached a second volume, and is now, I
believe, extremely scarce. An equally voluminous series of histories
of Greece and Rome, and of translations of the Greek and Latin poets,
marks the time when I first became deeply interested in classic
antiquity. To this phase also belong the beginnings of those
archaeological works which I have of late years accumulated almost to
the exclusion of all other books, as well as my collection of volumes
upon Homer, which nearly fill one division of a bookcase. When I left
London some six and twenty years ago to settle at Westbury-on-Trym, I
also added to my library a large number of works on the fine arts,
feeling, as every lover of pictures must do, that it is necessary, in
some way or another, to make up for the loss of the National Gallery,
the South Kensington Museum, and other delightful places which I was
leaving behind. At this time, also, I had a passion for Turner, and
eagerly collected his engraved works, of which I believe I possess
nearly all. I think I may say the same of Samuel Prout. Of Shakespeare
I have almost as many editions as I have translations of Homer; and of
European histories, works of reference generally, a writer who lives
in the country must, of course, possess a goodly number. Of rare books
I do not pretend to have many. A single shelf contains a few good old
works, including a fine black-letter Chaucer, the Venetian Dante of
1578, and some fine examples of the Elizabethan period. I soon found,
however, that this taste was far too expensive to cultivate. Last of
all, in what I may call the upper Egyptological stratum of my books,
come those on Egypt and Egyptian archaeology, a class of works deeply
interesting to those who make Egyptology their study, but profoundly
dull to everybody else.

Such are my books. If, however, I were to show my visitor what I
consider my choicest treasures, I should take down volumes which have
been given to me by friends, some now far distant, others departed.
Here, for instance, is the folio edition of Dore's "Don Quichotte," on
the fly-leaf of which he signs himself as my "_ami affectueux_;" or
some of t