o rejoice
in the valuable and interesting result.

It is quite natural that their ways of esteeming a collection should not
be as our ways. There is a story of a Cockney auctioneer, who had a
location in the back settlements to dispose of, advertising that it was
"almost entirely covered with fine old timber." To many there would
appear to be an equal degree of verdant simplicity in mentioning among
the specialties and distinguishing features of a collection--the
Biographia and Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lowndes's Manual, the Quarterly
and Edinburgh Reviews, Boyle, Ducange, Moreri, Dodsley's Annual
Register, Watt's Bibliotheca, and Diodorus Siculus.

The statement that there is in Dr Francis's collection a "complete set
of the Recueil des Causes Celebres, collected by Maurice Mejan, in
eighteen volumes--a scarce and valuable work"--would throw any of our
black-letter knight-errants into convulsions of laughter. There are also
some instances of perhaps not unnatural confusion between one merely
local British celebrity and another, as where it is set forth that in Mr
Noyes's collection "there is a fine copy of Sir Robert Walpole's works,
in five large quarto volumes, embellished with plates." But under all
this inexperience of the ways of the craft as it is cultivated among us,
and unconsciousness of such small parochial distinctions as may hold
between Sir Robert Walpole, our Prime Minister, and Horace Walpole, the
man of letters and trinkets, the book contains a quantity of valuable
and substantial matter, both as a record of rich stores of learning
heaped up for the use of the scholar, and marvellous varieties to dazzle
the eyes of the mere Dibdinite. The prevailing feature throughout is the
lavish costliness and luxury of these collections, several of which
exceed ten thousand volumes. Where collections have grown so large that,
on the principles already explained, their increase is impeded, the
owner's zeal and wealth seem to have developed themselves in the lavish
enshrining and decorating of such things as were attainable.[52]

[Footnote 52: Take as a practical commentary on what has been said (p.
82) on "illustrating" books, the following passage describing some of
the specialties of a collection, the general features of which are
described further on:--

"But the crowning glory is a folio copy of Shakespeare, illustrated by
the collector himself, with a prodigality of labour and expense, that
places it far abo