ged to Thomas
Martin of Palgrave, and includes two leaves of signature D, which are
deficient in the Capell copy of this work at Cambridge. The latter is
described as a quarto; but it would be interesting to discover that
from the fragment the text could be completed. The inconvenience
attending the examination of rare books in provincial libraries is
very great and serious.

A copy of Statham's _Abridgement of the Statutes_, printed at Rouen
about 1491, and bound in England, had as flyleaves two sheets of
Caxton's _Chronicles of England_, possibly some of the waste found in
Caxton's warehouse after his death.

There is a weird fascination about a newly found fragment of some lost
literary composition. Only a few months since, in a copy of Cicero's
_Rhetorica_, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1546, in the possession of
Mr. Neal, quite a number of pieces of wastrel were disclosed on the
removal of the covers, and among them portions of English metrical
effusions of the period (for the volume must have been bound here). We
view this _treasure trove_ wistfully and indulgently; there it is; no
mortal eye had fallen on it in the course of three and a half
centuries; and how can we be expected to judge its value or quality
by the ordinary standard--on an ordinary critical principle? It has
come to us like an unlooked-for testamentary windfall. We are not to
look at it in the mouth too curiously or fastidiously, or we deserve
to have lost it; and it is the very same thing with scores of remains
of the kind, brought to light in various directions and ways from
season to season, and (to the utmost extent of my power and
opportunity) chronicled by me on my accustomed principle.

When I was younger by some thirty years, I received the catalogue of a
provincial bookseller, and was sanguine enough to suppose that I
should become the happy master at the marked price (7s. 6d.) of No.
2084, which ran as follows:--

"Pynson and others--Specimens of Early Printing, comprising
_Twenty Leaves of the Ballad of Robin Hood, &c. &c._, taken from
the cover of an old Missal."

No time was lost in giving the order; _but the lot was sold, and the
proprietors did not even know who had bought it_. I comforted myself
as the fox did. Yet such is the frailty of one's nature, that one
cannot refrain, after long, long years, from sentimentalising over it.
There is something so taking in the notion of a tattered,
semi-illegible, unappro