osed in this manner of the library
belonging to the Rev. Dr. Lazarus Seaman. With regard to the
book-auctions held by the Elzeviers, you must consult that great
authority, M. Alphonse Willems.

Before leaving this subject of catalogues I cannot forbear quoting from
one to whom I am already indebted:

'In perusing these old catalogues one cannot help being astonished at the
sudden and great increase of books; and when one reflects that a great,
perhaps the greater, part of them no longer exists, this perishableness
of human labours will excite the same sensations as those which arise in
the mind when one reads in a church-yard the names and titles of persons
long since mouldered into dust. In the sixteenth century there were few
libraries, and these, which did not contain many books, were in
monasteries, and consisted principally of theological, philosophical, and
historical works, with a few, however, on jurisprudence and medicine:
while those which treated of agriculture, manufactures, and trade, were
thought unworthy of the notice of the learned and of being preserved in
large collections. The number of these works was, nevertheless, far from
being inconsiderable; and at any rate many of them would have been of
great use, as they would have served to illustrate the instructive
history of the arts. Catalogues, which might have given occasion to
inquiries after books that may be still somewhere preserved, have
suffered the fate of tomb-stones, which, being wasted and crumbled to
pieces by the destroying hand of time, become no longer legible. A
complete series of them, perhaps, is now nowhere to be found.'[70]

* * * * *

There is yet another side of book-collecting with which it is essential
that the bibliophile become acquainted, and that is a knowledge of the
scarce and valuable editions of the more modern classic writers. By
'modern' I intend those authors who flourished during the nineteenth and
latter part of the eighteenth centuries, and include such writers as
Arnold, the Brontes, the Brownings, Burns, Byron, Carlyle, Coleridge,
Dickens, Keats, Lamb, Shelley, Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, Thackeray,
and other famous contemporaries. You may meet with their works
continually, and many a prize may slip through your hands unless you are
acquainted with the collector's _desiderata_ regarding each of these
authors. Many of them, perhaps the majority, published their earliest
works