rst bought one or two, and after that
I hunted for them in all parts of the country, and met with considerable
success, often buying duplicates, and even triplicates, of the same
edition and play. At one time I possessed no less than three copies of
the very rare quarto edition of "Romeo and Juliet," 1609, and sometimes
even had four copies of more than one of the other quartos. Not so very
long before this period, old Jolley, the well-known collector, picked up
a Caxton at Reading, and a "Venus and Adonis," 1594, at Manchester, in
a volume of old tracts, for the ignoble sum of 1s. 3d. Jolley was a
wealthy orange-merchant of Farringdon Street, London, and entertained me
often with many stories of similar fortunate finds of rare books, which
served to whet my appetite only the more. But I was soon stopped in my
book-hunting career by the appearance all at once on the scene of a
number of buyers with much longer purses than my own, and thus I was
driven from a market I had derived so much pleasure from with great
regret. Some time afterwards circumstances rendered it desirable that I
should part with a large number of my book-treasures by auction and to
the British Museum; but even then I retained enough to be instrumental
in founding the first Shakespearian library in Scotland, by presenting
to the University of Edinburgh, amongst other rarities, nearly fifty
copies of original quartos of Shakespeare's plays, printed before the
Restoration, and to keep sufficient myself of the rarest and most
valuable examples.'

Sometimes the notes of a former possessor have a considerable literary
interest, as, for example, the copy of Stowe's 'Survey of London,' 1618,
presented to the Penzance Library by the late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps,
who has written, under date December 24, 1867, the following note: 'This
is a favourite book of mine. I like to read of London as it was, with
the bright Thames crowded with fish, and its picturesque
architecture. . . . I should not have discarded this volume for any
library, had I not this day picked up a beautiful _large paper_ copy of
it, the only one in that condition I ever saw or heard of.'

As an illustration of the enhanced value possessed by books having notes
written in them by their owners, it may be mentioned that when the great
Mr. Fox's furniture was sold by auction after his death in 1806, amongst
the books there happened to be the first volume of Gibbon's 'Decline and
Fall,' which a