ject for treatment, and forms a small
gathering of the literary material necessary for his purpose, shooting
it back perchance into the market, his immediate task accomplished.
There is the man like Coleridge, who regarded the volumes which fell
in his way as casual and welcome visitors, of whom he asked questions,
or who answered his, and whose margins gave themselves up to his
untiring habit of registering whatever occurred to him, before the
passing--possibly borrowed--volume went on its way again. There is
Lamb, who was less addicted to annotating his acquisitions, but who
gave them a permanent home, if they had come to him _jure emptionis_,
and were of the elect--not presentation--copies, cold and crude,
thrust into his hand by some well-meaning acquaintance. There is
Edward Fitzgerald, dissimilar from all these, yet so far cognate that
he bought only the books which struck him as worth reading, if not
turning to some practical account. Nor should we in strict fairness
refuse admittance within this highest circle even to such as Selden,
Burton, Pepys, and others who might be easily enumerated, who may
have been little more than curiosity-hunters, but who had a genuine
relish for pieces of old popular literature, the greatest rarities in
the language inclusive, when there was barely any competition for
them. The man of the old school, who ransacked the shops and the
stalls, and even attended the auction, may have been a faddist and a
superficial student; but his was an honest sort of zeal and affection;
there was no vanity or jealousy; and we meet with cases where one
collector would surrender to another an acquisition which the latter
happened to have missed, and to want very badly indeed. So Isaac Reed
gave up to George Steevens Marlowe's _Dido_, and so George III.
enjoined his agent not to bid for him against a student or a scholar.

I have not yet quite done with this aspect of the matter. I have to
speak of the personages who have thought fit to impose on themselves a
chronological or a financial limit, who drew the line at a given year,
or would not go beyond a certain figure. Mr. Henry Pyne laid down 1600
as the latest date which he would admit, and rarely exceeded a
sovereign or two for a single article (Dr. Doran gave me to understand
that fourpence was _his maximum_). It may appear strange to suggest
that the higher the sum paid for a book (assuming it to be worth the
money), the slighter the risk grows of