nother person to do the collating, and it
was not until some considerable time after, and on examining thoroughly
the volume himself, that he discovered it to contain a large series of
emendations, which Collier included in his 'Notes and Emendations to the
Text of Shakespeare's Plays,' 1853, which set the whole town by the
ears. Collier's library was dispersed at Sotheby's in 1884; it was an
unusually interesting sale, and included many very rare and curious
books.

[Illustration: _Samuel Taylor Coleridge._

From the Portrait by G. Dawe, R.A., 1812.]

Southey, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt were
book-collectors of a type which deserves a niche to itself. Writing to
Coleridge in 1797, Lamb says: 'I have had thoughts of turning Quaker,
and have been reading, or am, rather, just beginning to read, a most
capital book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn's "No Cross,
no Crown." I like it immensely.' Lamb's ideas of book-marking are to be
found in his correspondence with Coleridge, in which he states that a
book reads the better when the topography of its plots and notes is
thoroughly mastered, and when we 'can trace the dirt in it, to having
read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe.' Lamb's library
consisted for the most part of tattered volumes in a dreadful state of
repair. Lamb, like Young, the poet, dog-eared his books to such an
extent that many of them would hardly close at all. From the
correspondence of Bernard Barton we get a glimpse at Lamb's cottage in
Colebrook Row, Islington--a white house with six good rooms. 'You enter
without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough
with old books.' Barton also writes: 'What chiefly attracted me was a
large old book-case full of books. I could but think how many long walks
must have been taken to bring them home, for there were but few that
did not bear the mark of having been bought at many a bookstall--brown,
dark-looking books, distinguished by those white tickets which told how
much their owner had given for each.'

[Illustration: _Lamb's Cottage at Colebrook Row, Islington._]

In an edition of Donne [? 1669] which belonged to Lamb, Coleridge
scrawled: 'I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not
be vexed that I have be-scribbled your book. S. T. C., 2nd May, 1811.'
Lamb was too good-natured to be a book-collector. On one occasion
William Hazlitt[77:A] sent Martin Burney to Lamb