hers by later
editions, such as 'The Life of Long Meg of Westminster,' 'A Lytle and
Bryefe Treatyse called the Defence of Women,'[5] etc. But these were
small volumes of few pages, and were doubtless considered as little
worthy of preservation as is the modern 'penny dreadful.' 'But, when we
consider how very many of these early books have come down to our time
only in single copies or even fragments out of an edition of some
hundreds, it is only natural to suppose that a great number must have
utterly disappeared.'[6]

It is not for want of enterprise that so many of these books have not so
far been recovered. The smaller and more remote towns, even villages, of
these islands and the Continent have been, and are being, ransacked by
dealers as well as collectors. The number of works hitherto undescribed
that has been brought to light during the last sixty years must be
considerable; and one still hears every now and then of some rich trover
that has been unearthed. In 1887 a small octavo manuscript volume, in a
worn brown binding, was offered at the end of a sale at Sotheby's. It had
stood, for how long no man knows, on the shelf of a small parish library
in Suffolk; and it was offered for sale 'presumably as being unreadable
to country folk, and capable of being turned into hard cash wherewith a
few works of fiction might be purchased.' Acquired by the Bodleian
Library for L6, it proved, by perhaps one of the most romantic chains of
evidence ever attached to a book,[7] to be the favourite devotional
volume and constant companion of Saint Margaret, Queen of Scotland, who
died in 1093. It was not until 1905 that the original quarto edition
(1594) of Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus' was known to exist, when a
copy was discovered and sold for L2000.

Books travel far afield. At the dissolution of the monasteries the rich
libraries that many of them possessed were scattered far and wide. One of
these religious houses was famed for its rich store of books; and that
the report was not exaggerated we know from its ancient library
catalogue, still extant. In this case some of the books were taken by the
inmates with them into exile in Flanders; and when the small community
migrated thence to Portugal, the precious tomes were carried reverently
with them. A fire at their convent in 1651 destroyed a large number of
the volumes, and when some of the nuns returned to England in 1809 they
brought the remaining books with them. Some