erhaps to
apply an epithet, and it was all over, but your eyes were opened.
Rapture he never professed, his tones were never loud enough to
express enthusiasm, but his enjoyment of what he considered good,
wherever he found it--and he was regardless of the set judgments of
the critics--was most intense and intimate. His feeling for anything
he liked was fibrous: he clung to it. For all his rare books and
prints, if he liked a thing he was very tolerant of its _format_. He
would cut a drawing out of a newspaper, frame it, hang it up, and be
just as tender towards it as if it were an impression with the unique
_remarque_.

Mr. Locker had probably inherited his virtuoso's whim from his
ancestors. His great-grandfather was certified by Johnson in his life
of Addison to be a gentleman 'eminent for curiosity and literature,'
and though his grandfather, the Commodore, who lives for ever in our
history as the man who taught Nelson the lesson that saved an
Empire--'Lay a Frenchman close, and you will beat him'--was no
collector, his father, Edward Hawke Locker, though also a naval man,
was not only the friend of Sir Walter Scott, but a most judicious
buyer of pictures, prints, and old furniture.

Frederick Locker was born in 1821, in Greenwich Hospital, where Edward
Hawke Locker was Civil Commissioner. His mother was the daughter of
one of the greatest book-buyers of his time, a man whose library it
took nine days to disperse--the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, the friend and
opponent of George Washington, an ecclesiastic who might have been
first Bishop of Edinburgh, but who died a better thing, the Vicar of
Epsom.

Frederick Locker grew up among pretty things in the famous hospital.
Water-colours by Lawrence, Prout, Girtin, Turner, Chinnery, Paul
Sandby, Cipriani, and other masters; casts after Canova; mezzotints
after Sir Joshua; Hogarth's famous picture of David Garrick and his
wife, now well hung in Windsor Castle, were about him, and early
attracted his observant eye. Yet the same things were about his elder
brother Arthur, an exceedingly clever fellow, who remained quite
curiously impervious to the impressiveness of pretty things all his
days.

Locker began collecting on his own account after his marriage, in
1850, to a daughter of Lord Byron's enemy, the Lord Elgin, who brought
the marbles from Athens to Bloomsbury. His first object, at least so
he thought, was to make his rooms pretty. From the beginning of his
life as a