er, 1459, to which full reference is made in a subsequent chapter.

II.

The history of literature, it is said, teaches us to consider its
decline only as the development of a great principle of succession by
which the treasures of the mind are circulated and equalized; as shoots
by which the stream of improvement is forcibly directed into new
channels, to fertilize new soils and awaken new capabilities. The
history of book-collecting teaches us a similar lesson. The love which
so often amounted to a positive passion for the exquisite productions of
the Age of Illuminated Manuscripts, all but died with the introduction
of the printing-press, which in reality was but a continuation of the
old art in a new form. And so on, down through the successive decades
and generations of the past four centuries, the decline--but not the
death, for such a term cannot be applied to any phase of
book-collecting--of one particular aspect of the hobby has synchronized
with the birth of several others, sometimes more worthy, and at others
less. An exhaustive inquiry into the various and manifold changes
through which the human mind passed alone might account for these
various developments, which it is not the intention of the present
writer on this occasion to analyze.

The rise and progress of what Sir Egerton Brydges calls 'the
black-letter mania' gave the death-blow to the long-cherished school of
poetry of which Pope may be taken as the most distinguished exponent.
'Men of loftier taste and bolder fancy early remonstrated against this
chilling confinement of the noblest, the most aspiring, and most
expansive of all the Arts. . . . It was not till the commotion of Europe
broke the chain of indolence and insipid effeminacy that the stronger
passions of readers required again to be stimulated and exercised and
soothed, and that the minor charms of correctness were sacrificed to the
ardent efforts of uncontrolled and unfearing genius. The authors of this
class began to look back for their materials to an age of hazardous
freedom, and copious and untutored eloquence: an age in which the world
of words and free and native ideas was not contracted and blighted by
technical critics and cold and fastidious scholars.' To abandon the
abstract for the more matter-of-fact details of sober history, the mania
to which Brydges alludes may be said to date itself from the spring of
1773. The occasion was the sale in London of the library of James W