nd critical acumen, peculiarly his own, which have had a
perceptible and substantial effect in raising archaeology out of that
quackish repute which it had long to endure under the name of
antiquarianism. For Ireland, of which I have something farther to say at
length, let it suffice in the mean time to name Dean Butler, Dr Reeves,
Mr O'Donovan, Mr Eugene Curry, and Dr Henthorn Todd.

There is another and distinct class of services which have been
performed through the medium of the club books. The Roxburghe having
been founded on the principle that each member should print a volume, to
be distributed among his colleagues, an example was thus set to men of
easy fortune and scholarly tastes, which has been followed with a large
liberality, of which the public have probably but a faint idea. Not only
in those clubs founded on the reciprocity system of each member
distributing and receiving, but in those to be presently noticed, where
the ordinary members pay an annual sum, to be expended in the printing
of their books, have individual gentlemen come forward and borne the
expense of printing and distributing costly volumes. In some instances
valuable works have thus been presented to the members at the cost of
those who have also undergone the literary labour of editing them.

There is something extremely refined and gentlemanlike in this form of
liberality. The recipient of the bounty becomes the possessor of a
handsome costly book without being subjected in any way to the
obligation of receiving a direct gift at the hands of the munificent
donor; for the recipient is a sort of corporation--a thing which the
lawyers say has no personal responsibility and no conscience, and which
all the world knows to have no gratitude.

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_PART IV.--BOOK-CLUB LITERATURE._

Generalities.

Nearly a quarter of a century after the birth of the first book club, a
new era was ushered in by its brother, the Camden, established for the
printing of books and documents connected with the early civil,
ecclesiastical, and literary history of the British Empire. It discarded
the rule which threw on each member the duty of printing and
distributing a book, and tried the more equitable adjustment of an
annual subscription to create a fund for defraying the expense of
printing volumes to be distributed among the members. These, at first
limited to 1000, expanded to 1200. Clubs with various objects now
thick