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l _bona fide_ Books. They may be the best editions by the best binders, or they may be antiquarian periodicals or sets of Learned Transactions, reducing much of the elder lore cherished and credited by our ancestors to waste-paper; we feel that it is a sort of superstition which influences us in regarding them; but we fail to shake off the prejudice, or whatever it may be, and we hold up, on the contrary, to the gaze of some sceptical acquaintance a humble little volume in plain mellow sheep--say, a first Walton, or Bunyan, or Carew, nay, by possibility a Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde--which a roomful of perfectly gentlemanly books should not buy from us. It may strike the reader as a heresy in taste and judgment to pronounce the four Shakespeare folios of secondary interest from the highest point of view, as being posthumous and edited productions. But so it is; yet Caxton's first impression of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, if we were to happen upon it by accident, is a possession which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's _Faery Queen_, 1590, with the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter. So, again, Aubrey, in his _Miscellanies_, _Remains of Gentilism and Judaism_, _History of Surrey_, and _Natural History of Wiltshire_, presents us with works very imperfect and empirical in their character--even foolish and irritating here and there; but between those undertakings and such as Manning and Bray's or Brayley and Britton's _Surrey_ there is the difference that the latter are literary compilations, and the former personal relics inalienably identified with an individual and an epoch. It is the same with certain others, ancient as well as modern writers. Take Herodotus, Athenaeus, and Aulus Gellius on the one hand, and Bishop Kennett's _Parochial Antiquities_, White's _Selborne_, Knox's _Ornithological Rambles in Sussex_, or Lucas's _Studies in Nidderdale_ on the other. All these equally tell you, not what some one else saw or thought, but what they saw or thought themselves, and in a manner which will never cease to charm. There are works, again, which, without professing to entertain for the authors any strong personal regard, we read and re-peruse, as we admire a fine piece of sculpture or porcelain, an antique bronze or cameo, as masterpieces of art or m
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