ill show a tendency to distribute themselves
over a more numerous body of owners, including the public repository,
which year by year removes a certain body of rare books of all kinds
beyond the reach of competition. The Bright episode was to a
considerable extent a duel between Mr. Corser and the British Museum.
But Mr. Miller and Lord Ashburnham, and (it may be added) Mr. Henry
Cunliffe of the Albany, were also in the field; and two years prior,
Maitland in his _Account of the Early Printed Books at Lambeth_, 1843,
already takes occasion to animadvert on what he terms the puerile
competition for rarities, which had then set in.

Miss Richardson Currer, of Eshton Hall, Craven, Yorkshire, whose
extensive and valuable library came to the hammer in 1864, was one of
the most distinguished lady-collectors of the century. There is a
privately printed catalogue of the books, of which two editions
appeared in 1820 and 1833. Miss Currer was a competitor side by side
with those already named for a certain proportion of the literary
treasures which were in the market in her time. The late Lady
Charlotte Schreiber confined herself to a few subjects, of which
playing-cards were one; but both these personages have been eclipsed
in our immediate day by Mrs. Rylands, who conceived, as a tribute to
the memory of a deceased husband, the princely design of founding on
the theatre of his commercial success a grand literary monument, of
which the Spencer books should be the nucleus and central feature.

One of the greatest surprises of our time in a bookish way was not the
sale of the library at Althorp, which had been rumoured as a
contingency many years before it occurred, but its transfer by the
purchaser to Manchester. We were all rather sorry to learn that the
climax had at length been reached; the sacrifice was doubtless a
painful one on more than one account; but it was presumably
unavoidable, and the noble owner was encouraged by numerous
precedents: the fashion for selling had quite set in then. I visited
Althorp in 1868 for the purpose of examining some of its treasures. I
remember the room, and the corner of it where the largest private
collection of Caxtons in the world was kept, and the glass case which
enshrined quite a number of Elizabethan rarities. His Lordship mounted
a ladder to get me one or two of his Aldines printed on vellum. He
showed me a delightful old volume of tracts, bound in a vellum
wrapper, some absolutely