id of him that "youthful misfortunes, of a kind
against which neither wealth nor rank possess a talisman, cast an early
shade of gloom over his prospects, and gave to one splendidly endowed
with the means of enjoying society that degree of reserved melancholy
which prefers retirement to the splendid scenes of gaiety." Dibdin, with
more specific precision, after rambling over the house where the great
auction sale occurred, as inquisitive people are apt to do, tells us of
the solitary room occupied by the Duke, close to his library, in which
he slept and died: "all his migrations," says the bibliographer, "were
confined to these two rooms. When Mr Nichol showed me the very bed on
which this bibliomaniacal Duke had expired, I felt--as I trust I ought
to have felt on the occasion." Scott attributed to an incidental
occurrence at his father's table the direction given to the great
pursuit of his life. "Lord Oxford and Lord Sunderland, both famous
collectors of the time, dined one day with the second Duke of Roxburghe,
when their conversation happened to turn upon the _editio princeps_ of
Boccaccio, printed in Venice in 1474, and so rare that its very
existence was doubted of." It so happened that the Duke remembered this
volume having been offered to him for L100, and he believed he could
still trace and secure it: he did so, and laid it before his admiring
friends at a subsequent sitting. "His son, then Marquess of Bowmont,
never forgot the little scene upon this occasion, and used to ascribe to
it the strong passion which he ever afterwards felt for rare books and
editions, and which rendered him one of the most assiduous and judicious
collectors that ever formed a sumptuous library."[34] And this same
Boccaccio was the point of attack which formed the climax in the great
contest of the Roxburghe roup, as the Duke's fellow-countrymen called
it. I am not aware that any of the English bibliographers have alluded
to any special cause for this volume's extreme rarity. Peignot
attributes it to a sermon preached by the Italian pulpit orator
Savonarola, on the 8th of February 1497, against indecorous books, in
consequence of which the inhabitants of Florence made a bonfire of their
Boccaccios,--an explanation which every one who pleases is at liberty to
believe.[35]

[Footnote 34: Article on Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, in the 21st vol. of
Miscellaneous Prose Works.]

[Footnote 35: Predicatoriana, p. 23]

The historian of the