e
forge-hammer with which the brawny blacksmith deals telling blows upon
the glowing iron and beats it into shape, to the tiny hammer that the
watchmaker so deftly handles, the ivory-headed, ebony-handled instrument
of the auctioneer is the most potent. From the day it was first upraised
by the original auctioneer--the nameless and unknown founder of a mighty
line of auctioneers--over the chattels of some unfortunate mortal, to
the present time, when the red flag is constantly waving in all the
great cities and towns of the world, what an immense amount of property
of all kinds and descriptions has come under that little instrument! At
its fall the ancestral acres of how many spendthrift heirs have passed
away from their families forever into the hands of wealthy plebeian
parvenus! By a few strokes Dives's splendid mansion, and Croesus's
magnificent country-seat, and Phaeton's famous fast horses become the
property of others. At its tap human beings have been sold into worse
than Egyptian bondage.

Horace Walpole confidently hoped that his famous collection of _virtu_
would be the envy and admiration of the relic-mongers and the
curiosity-seekers of two or three hundred years hence; but he had not
been dead fifty years before the red flag was waving over Strawberry
Hill, and it was not taken down till the villa had been despoiled of all
the curious and costly toys and bawbles with which it was packed and
crammed. At each stroke of the hammer,--and for four-and-twenty days the
quaint Gothic mansion resounded with the "Going, going, gone" of the
auctioneer,--at every stroke of the hammer Walpole must have turned
uneasily in his grave; for at every stroke of that fatal implement some
beautiful miniature, or rare engraving, or fine painting, or precious
old coin, or beloved old vase, or bit of curious old armor, or equally
curious relic of the olden time, passed into the possession of some
unknown person or other.

And the Duke of Roxburghe's magnificent collection of rare, curious, and
valuable books, in the gathering of which he spent a goodly portion of
his life, and evinced the policy and finesse of the most wily statesman
and the shrewdness and cunning of a Jew money-lender, was soon after his
decease scattered, by the hammer of Evans, over England and the
Continent. A circumstantial history of this memorable sale was written
by Dibdin the bibliomaniac.

I do not, however, grieve much--indeed, to state the precise t