each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand."

But even this exciting sort of narrative will tire one when it goes on
page after page, so that we must take a leap to the conclusion. "Two
thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The
spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds
his usual _ten_" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell,
made a short pause--and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the
ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid
air. However, at last down dropped the hammer."

Such a result naturally created excitement beyond the book-collectors'
circle, for here was an actual stroke of trade in which a profit of more
than two thousand per cent had been netted. It is easy to believe in
Dibdin's statement of the crowds of people who imagined they were
possessors of the identical Venetian Boccaccio, and the still larger
number who wanted to do a stroke of business with some old volume,
endowed with the same rarity and the same or greater intrinsic value.
The general excitement created by the dispersal of the Roxburghe
collection proved an epoch in literary history, by the establishment of
the Roxburghe Club, followed by a series of others, the history of which
has to be told farther on.

Of the great book-sales that have been commemorated, it is curious to
observe how seldom they embrace ancestral libraries accumulated in old
houses from generation to generation, and how generally they mark the
short-lived duration of the accumulations of some collector freshly
deposited. One remarkable exception to this was in the Gordonstoun
library, sold in 1816. It was begun by Sir Robert Gordon, a Morayshire
laird of the time of the great civil wars of the seventeenth century. He
was the author of the History of the Earldom of Sutherland, and a man of
great political as well as literary account. He laid by heaps of the
pamphlets, placards, and other documents of his stormy period, and thus
many a valuable morsel, which had otherwise disappeared from the world,
left a representative in the Gordonstoun collection. It was increased by
a later Sir Robert, who had the reputation of being a wizard. He
belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to
take a victim annually; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get
off with merely the loss of his shadow; and many a Morayshire peasant
has testified to hav