ducement for anybody to print it.

It is not at all strange that it should be so. The man who toils in the counting house or in the shop has but little to stimulate his imagination, and he dwells in a land of common place. The novelist supplies for him his romance and his picturesque environment. For the moment, he dwells in fairy-land, and is transported from sordid trade to etherial realms where the ordinary cares of life are unknown. It is a good thing to take him away from money-gathering and labor; it helps him and it relieves the strain of daily drudgery. He is bored by essays and reviews; wearied by poetry; and discouraged by ponder. ous studies in history. Someone will say, perhaps, that this does not account for women novel-readers, and that if a Macaulay should appear, his essays would not be neglected. I am not to be drawn into discussion; this is a monologue, not a debate.

The impatience of the day with anything in the nature of a gossiping series of sketches is illustrated by a profound newspaper notice which I encountered recently in a New York journal. A certain American writer was delivering judgment upon what had seemed to me to be a charming collection of anecdotes and reminiscences well worthy of the approval of an intelligent person possessing a mind capable of appreciating something better than a pot-boiling, swash buckling story. He complained in manner following, and the style sufficiently discloses the writer's men

tal condition. "It isn't a book at all, just a collection of more or less scrappy papers. It brings to my mind [his mind! Oh, Lor'!] something that Lowell said about the book of a really great essayist, than whom there have been few better. I refer to Emerson. In his 'Fable for Critics,' the poet thus speaks. I quote from memory in the absence of my library. [It had gone away for rest, I suppose] Roots, leaves and branches, singly, perfect may be

But clapped hodge-podge together, they don't make a tree."

These lines are incorrectly given, but that is not of much moment.

According to this learned commentator, a collection of chapters on divers subjects, however pleasant and useful, is not a book. He sweeps out of the category of literature Macaulay's Essays, Montaigne, The Autocrat, Noctes Ambrosianae, The Doctor, the Roundabout Papers, and even Elia, with the cruel hand of authority, relying upon a playful figure used by a great man who gave to the world many such collections of his own. He forgets that a nosegay has its value as distinctive as that of a tree. One who wishes to have a basketful of lovely flowers will not be satisfied with any tree, however perfect. The spectacle of a romancing clergyman, proclaiming loudly that he will not have flowers, and that no one shall have flowers, but that he must have a tree and everyone else must and shall have trees, willy-nilly, is amusing if not profitable or instructive.

THE

HE October number of The Library, which was only issued when November was already in its second week, ends with an announcement not very creditable to English bookmen. Mr. MacAlister, whose signature is followed by those of his four advisory editors, Dr. Garnett, M. Delisle, Mr. Dewey and Dr. Dziatsko, after carrying on his magazine for thirteen years finds himself, so his letter states, unable to continue it, owing to the increasing difficulty of obtaining a sufficient supply of good articles. The difficulty is attributed mainly to the preferences which English and Scottish bibliographers evince for doing all their work through societies, so that an independent paper has a hard struggle for existence. Societies have certainly flourished greatly over here of late years. The (London) Bibliographical Society, the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society and the TypeFacsimile Society, have each of them a little string of candidates waiting for admission, and they all give such good value in return for small subscriptions that booklovers may easily expect more from a magazine than is compatible with the necessity of paying contributors and allowing trade-discounts, two heavy charges from which

the finances of most societies are exempt. Nevertheless it is not well that there should be no independent bibliographical magazine in England, whereas, as Mr. MacAlister remarks, most of the civilized countries support one or more, and from what I hear it seems probable that this view will be sufficiently widely taken to keep The Library in existence, despite the formal and dignified leave-taking in its twelfth number. Adequate financial support has already been promised, bookmen are said to be ransacking their portfolios and their brains for papers to offer it, and this rather tardy enthusiasm may suffice to start it on another thirteen years of useful existence. It has already lived longer than any other magazine of the kind in recent years.

In mentioning some of the most thriving of the British Bibliographical Societies, I did not include the Bibliographical Society of Lancashire. Since Mr. Gordon Duff, who was chiefly responsible for its formation, left Manchester, it has shown few signs of life. A facsimile of the unique copy preserved at Ghent of Caxton's Commemoracio Compassionis Beate Marie, with an introduction by Mr. Duff, was issued some months ago,

(bearing the date 1901), and last week arrived a sheaf of four thin pamphlets, which may be supposed to complete the return for the first year's subscription. One of these will be warmly welcomed, since it contains Mr. Duff's annotated list of English books and documents printed on vellum before the end of the sixteenth century. It is true that our English vellum books are as a rule impostors, living on the reputation of other members of the same family. Italian vellums are delightful, a real joy to touch and sight, almost always much better printed than the copies on paper, and decorated, if decorated at all, with modesty and good taste. The French vellum is good enough, but the Hora and Vérard books printed on it are so often spoilt by the heavy and tasteless coloring of both wood-cuts and initials that, taking the average, paper copies are preferable. In Germany and England vellum books are not often spoilt by coloring, but in Germany vellum is mostly coarse and in England so very coarse and discolored that so far from the books arousing any idea of luxury, they look povertystricken and forlorn. Nevertheless, a certain prestige still attaches to them, and Mr. Duff's list will surprise most students of the subject by its length. He enumerates no fewer than thirteen indulgences and sixty different books. Of those printed in the fifteenth century he gives no details as to ownership, reserving these for his longpromised Catalogue of English Incunabula. For the sixteenth century

books, the owner's names given are mostly those of the four great libraries, British Museum (10 examples), Bodleian (9), Cambridge University Library (5), and John Rylands Library (7), the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges and Cathedral Libraries. The number of copies in private ownership is remarkably small, so that Americans may be congratulated on the acquisition of Wynkyn de Worde's Helyas Knight of the Swan at Christie's in 1900, though it was but a shabby book to pay £410 for.

The other three pamphlets issued by the Lancashire Bibliographical Society are special reprints of the description of the John Rylands Library and the contents of its show-cases printed for distribution to visitors, of DeMorgan's note on the Difficulty of the Correct Description of Books, and Mr. Edmund's Suggestions for the Description of Books, printed between 1501 and 1600. These two last are reprinted from the pages of the Library Chronicle, and the reprinting, for a society, of work that has already appeared in the pages of a magazine will hardly commend itself itself to most members.

The mention of the price paid for the Helyas reminds me that I spent yesterday evening in turning over the pages of the new volume of Mr. Slater's Book Prices Current. Like its predecessors the record of last season's sales filled me with admiration for Mr. Slater's industry only tempered with discontent at his persist

ent refusal to supply the kind of information in which I am especially interested. At the Ellis sale a year ago three books bound by Mr. Cobden Sanderson fetched the record prices of £117, £111 and £99 respectively, of which the books themselves, all by William Morris, may have accounted for one-tenth, the credit of the other nine-tenths belonging to the binder. Two of the bindings, as the bills attest, cost Mr. Ellis twenty guineas apiece, the other a guinea less, a good example of how a little extravagance in book-matters, so it be in the right direction, may prove an excellent investment. But as usual Mr. Slater's Index and Subject-List take no note of anyone except the author, and may be searched in vain for the name of Mr. Sanderson. So again as to printers: Mr. Slater's Index is good enough to recognize Caxton, but I shall have to make my own index to the books of Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde and other famous printers, and I resent that this has not been done for me. When information of every other kind is so handsomely and conveniently given, it seems absurd that some of the most important elements in determining the price of a book should be so persistently ignored.

Mr. Slater's preface to his new volume as usual raises some interesting points. He estimates the rise in book values during the last ten years at about 130 per cent., and this is borne out by the average price per lot, which has risen from £1 6s. 7d. in 1893, to £3 3s. 4d. in 1902. In the earlier

year 49,671 lots realized £66,470; in the later, 51,513 lots £163,207, this total being £33,000 higher than that of the previous season, which itself was some £20,000 higher than that of any former year. Mr. Slater also comments on the great increase in the number of miscellaneous sales as compared with those of the books of single collectors, drawing the conclusion that large and important libraries are becoming increasingly rare, owing to the greater cost of bringing them together. The fact is clear; whether it is due to the greater cost of books is more doubtful. It may perhaps rather be attributed to the growth of the "cabinet" ideal in collecting, which causes men to specialize more narrowly and weed their treasures more unsparingly than of yore. One of the chief modern collectors of manuscripts is said to have resolved to restrict his collection to a hundred volumes. Each new purchase displaces an old one, and thus, though the value of the collection is continually enhanced, its size remains the same. This seems to me too vigorous a plan (if the story be true), but it typifies, like Mr. Bennett's objection to any books taller than the First Folio Shakespeare, the fastidiousness of the modern collector, a fastidiousness which certainly springs from no desire to save his pocket.

To the list of bibliographical books published, or about to appear, in England during the present season, which I gave in my last letter, I ought to have added the final volume of Dr.

SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS. Studies in Elizabethan Poetry and its Development from Early English. 2 vols. N. Y. Doubleday, Page & Co. 1902.

When an author dies before his time, and leaves much work unfinished that we had learned to expect from him, we feel that Death has done us an irremediable injury. We gather and publish what fragments we may often against what would be the author's judgment could his voice be heard. Then nothing remains but to turn back to the old books and be thankful for what was done and as little regretful as may be for what was still to be done.

Sidney Lanier's was such a brokenoff life. His thirty-nine years were all

too short and full of struggles and illhealth. His style had not matured, and recognition was tardy. Criticisms of his writings were not often "appreciations." It must have been with some sense of remorse that, when three years after his death his Poems were published, the Nation said, "It grows clearer and clearer how much we lost in Sidney Lanier."

These volumes on Shakspere and his Forerunners come, then, as so much clear gain; and they form, perhaps, Lanier's most important prose work. They contain two series of lectures that were delivered during the winter of 1879-80, one at Johns Hopkins, the other to a class at Peabody Institute.