ld, William Blake, Robert
Browning and Mrs. Browning, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, George Eliot,
Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Landor, Meredith, William Morris, John Ruskin,
Swinburne, and Tennyson. Of Shelley, for example, Mr. Wise has a
collection of 400 books and pamphlets by or concerning him. There is
only one other collection comparable to it, and it is that possessed by
Mr. Buxton Forman. Of Byron Mr. Wise has everything, including 'The
Waltz,' 'Poems on Various Occasions,' and all the other excessively
rare publications of this prolific poet, the only exception, indeed,
being 'The Curse of Minerva,' 1812. Mr. Wise's collection of Ruskiniana
is practically complete, and includes a number of privately-printed
pamphlets issued to a few personal friends. Mr. Walter Slater's books
and manuscripts include a unique series of both Dante G. Rossetti and
Walter Savage Landor. Of the former, it contains the manuscript of
three-fourths of the 'House of Life' series of sonnets, the manuscript
of 'St. Agnes,' and the whole of the extant manuscript of 'The King's
Tragedy'; these manuscripts usually include not only the 'copy' as it
was sent to the printer, but usually the first and second drafts. The
series of Landor books and pamphlets is quite complete, from his first
book of poems, 'Moral Epistles,' issued in 1795, and the equally
excessively rare 'Poems from the Arabic and Persian,' issued at Warwick
in 1800, to 'Savonarola,' in Italian, 1860. Mr. Slater has a complete
series of the first editions of the curious works of Mrs. Behn.

[Illustration: _Mr. Clement Shorter's Bookplate._]

Mr. Clement K. Shorter, the editor of the _Illustrated London News_, the
_Sketch_, and several other publications, is a book-collector who, like
Mr. Wise and Mr. Slater, has pitched his 'tent' on the northern heights
of London. Mr. Shorter has an unusually complete set of the works of
Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte
Bronte--besides the 'Cottage Poems' of old Mr. Bronte--and Matthew
Arnold. Of the last named there are copies of the very limited editions
of 'Geist's Grave,' 'St. Brandran,' 'Home Rule for Ireland,' and 'Alaric
at Rome.' Mr. Shorter's Ruskin treasures include a volume of the plates
of 'Modern Painters,' on India paper, bound up in vellum. There are also
several first editions of the earlier works of Carlyle, and William
Watson's 'Lachrymae Musarum,' on vellum, with the original manuscript
bound up with it. Mr