eally an important and
curious thing; and since it is apt to be overlooked, owing to the
facility of buying books, in quantities generally far beyond the
available means of any ordinary buyer, it seems worthy of some special
consideration. A man who sets to to form a library will go on
swimmingly for a short way. He will easily get Tennyson's
Poems--Macaulay's and Alison's Histories--the Encyclopaedia
Britannica--Buckle on Civilisation--all the books "in print," as it is
termed. Nay, he will find no difficulty in procuring copies of others
which may not happen to be on the shelves of the publisher or of the
retailer of new books. Of Voltaire's works--a little library in
itself--he will get a copy at his call in London, if he has not set his
mind on some special edition. So of Scott's edition of Swift or Dryden,
Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson, and the like. One can scarcely
suppose a juncture in which any of these cannot be found through the
electric chain of communication established by the book-trade. Of
Gibbon's and Hume's Histories--Jeremy Taylor's works--Bossuet's
Universal History, and the like, copies abound everywhere. Go back a
little, and ask for Kennet's Collection of the Historians--Echard's
History, Bayle, Moreri, or Father Daniel's History of France, you cannot
be so certain of immediately obtaining your object, but you will get the
book in the end--no doubt about that.

Everything has its caprices, and there are some books which might be
expected to be equally shy, but in reality, by some inexplicable
fatality, are as plentiful as blackberries. Such, for instance, are
Famianus Strada's History of the Dutch War of Independence--one of the
most brilliant works ever written, and in the very best Latin after
Buchanan's. There is Buchanan's own history, very common even in the
shape of the early Scotch edition of 1582, which is a highly favourable
specimen of Arbuthnot's printing. Then there are Barclay's Argenis, and
Raynal's Philosophical History of the East and West Indies, without
which no book-stall is to be considered complete, and which seem to be
possessed of a supernatural power of resistance to the elements, since,
month after month, in fair weather or foul, they are to be seen at their
posts dry or dripping.

So the collector goes on, till he perhaps collects some five thousand
volumes or so of select works. If he is miscellaneous in his taste, he
may get on pretty comfortably to ten or fift