n late years after a
busy life by purchasing such works or such descriptions of literature
as appealed to them and fell within their resources; again, the
scholar or investigator who assembled round him what illustrated his
studies, not merely with an aim at emulating others; or, once more,
the gentleman of fortune, who evolved from his school-day acquisitions
a feeling or a passion for higher things, and made it the business of
his maturer time--even made it his career--to carry out on a scale and
on lines dictated and governed by circumstances the predilection
formed in boyhood. On the contrary, there are for our consideration
and instruction the libraries which owed their existence to less
interesting motives, to the vague and untrained pursuit of rare and
expensive books and MSS., on the judgment of others in rivalry of
others, and the enterers into the field of competition with a
practical eye and a financial side-look. Of all these great divisions
there are varieties naturally arising from personal character; but of
the collector pure and simple of the older school, that type, we avow,
most warmly and potently attracts us which limited itself to the small
and unpretentious book-closet, with just those things which the master
loved for their own sakes or for the sakes of the donors--where the
commercial element was wanting, and where the library was not viewed
in the same light as railway or mining stock. It is a famous principle
to invest money prudently and well; but happy is he who is wise enough
to keep his library within narrow limits, and rich enough to leave it,
such as it may be, out of the category of realisable assets.

Mr. Quaritch's project possesses in our eyes the incidental merit of
providing us with personal accounts in a succinct form of many of the
past proprietors of English and American libraries, and enables us to
see at once how varied and fortuitous were the conditions under which
the task was begun and accomplished, with what different measures of
success and financial means; and in what a preponderance of instances
it was an individual rather than an hereditary trait. Broadly
speaking, we recognise two varieties of collector from all time: the
one who confers his name on a library, and the other whose library
confers a name on him.

Even the family of genuine book-lovers--neither virtuosos nor
speculators--presents more than a single type to our notice. We have
the student who takes a sub