, taking a prominent rank in the
latter category.

The leading collectors on Irish lines have been Sir Robert Peel, Mr.
Grenville, Mr. Huth, Mr. Bradshaw, Canon Tierney, Mr. Shirley, and
Bishop Daly.

In the English series I have supposed the admission of a certain
number or proportion of foreign books, which are of catholic interest,
and have acquired a standing among many classes of collectors whose
bias is principally national. But there are two other series of very
unequal extent, importance, and costliness, which more directly appeal
to the buyers of these islands, namely, the earlier Anglo-American
literature belonging to the Colonial period, and the American
reproductions of the favourite books of Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt,
Thackeray, and others in the present century. The latter category
enters into the department of curiosities, and has yet to acquire
bibliographical importance. In one or two cases, works issued at home
in numbers have been published in the States in book-form prior to
their appearance here. This happened with the _Yellow-Plush
Correspondence_, reprinted direct from _Fraser's Magazine_ at
Philadelphia in 1838, and curious as the writer's earliest separate
publication. These papers were not collected in England till 1841.

The products of the Colonial period include all the books emanating
from American presses between 1640, the date of the _Bay Psalm-Book_
at Cambridge, N.E., from the press of Stephen Day, and the Declaration
of Independence. There has been a disposition to treat the whole of
this output of printed matter with a special tenderness and reverence
on political grounds; but it obviously is of a very mixed and unequal
character, and, as time goes on, there must be a continuous winnowing
process, and a consignment to oblivion of a vast assortment of the
dullest theology and of political _ephemerides_. There will always
remain a rich heirloom to our American kinsfolk and ourselves of
historical nuggets in the shape of narratives of the fortunes and
careers of the Pilgrim Fathers, their experiments in statecraft, their
religious trials, their early superstitions and strange intolerance of
personal liberty in a land chosen by its settlers for liberty's sake;
and of course there is a section of literary products appertaining to
the New World, namely, ritualistic ordinances, liturgical manuals, and
collections of statutes, which derive what one is bound to term an
artificial interest