many
rare books was the result, and more than counter-balanced any benefit
bibliographers will ever receive from them. When here and there
throughout those volumes you meet with titles of books now either
unknown entirely, or of the greatest rarity; when you find the Colophon
from the end, or the "insigne typographi" from the first leaf of a rare
"fifteener," pasted down with dozens of others, varying in value, you
cannot bless the memory of the antiquarian shoemaker, John Bagford. His
portrait, a half-length, painted by Howard, was engraved by Vertue, and
re-engraved for the Bibliographical Decameron.

A bad example often finds imitators, and every season there crop up for
public sale one or two such collections, formed by bibliomaniacs, who,
although calling themselves bibliophiles, ought really to be ranked
among the worst enemies of books.

The following is copied from a trade catalogue, dated April, 1880, and
affords a fair idea of the extent to which these heartless destroyers
will go:--

"MISSAL ILLUMINATIONS.

FIFTY DIFFERENT CAPITAL LETTERS _on_ VELLUM; _all in rich Gold and
Colours. Many 3 inches square: the floral decorations are of great
beauty, ranging from the XIIth to XVth century. Mounted on stout
card-board_. IN NICE PRESERVATION, L6 6_s_.

These beautiful letters have been cut from precious
MSS., and as specimens of early art are extremely
valuable, many of them being worth 15_s_. each."

Mr. Proeme is a man well known to the London dealers in old books. He is
wealthy, and cares not what he spends to carry out his bibliographical
craze, which is the collection of title pages. These he ruthlessly
extracts, frequently leaving the decapitated carcase of the books, for
which he cares not, behind him. Unlike the destroyer Bagford, he has
no useful object in view, but simply follows a senseless kind of
classification. For instance: One set of volumes contains nothing but
copper-plate engraved titles, and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios
of the seventeenth century if they cross his path. Another is a volume
of coarse or quaint titles, which certainly answer the end of showing
how idiotic and conceited some authors have been. Here you find Dr.
Sib's "Bowels opened in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the
discourse attributed falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and
be damned," with many others too coarse to be quoted. The odd titles
adopted for his poems by Taylor, the