I knew the elder Quaritch well, and over a cup of tea one winter afternoon years ago, in a cold, dingy little room filled with priceless volumes in the old shop in Piccadilly, he confided to me his fears for his son Alfred. This remarkable old man, who has well been called the Napoleon of booksellers, was certain that Alfred would never be able to carry on the business when he was gone. “He has no interest in books, he is not willing to work hard as he will have to, to maintain the standing I have secured as the greatest bookseller in the world.” Quaritch was very proud, and justly, of his eminence.
How little the old man knew that this son, when the time came, would step into his father’s shoes and stretch them. Alfred, when he inherited the business, assumed his father’s first name and showed all his father’s enthusiasm and shrewdness. He probably surprised himself, as he surprised the world, by adding lustre to the name of Bernard Quaritch, so that, when he died, the newspapers of the English-speaking world gave the details of his life and death as matters of general interest.
The book-lovers’ happy hunting-ground is the Charing Cross Road. It is a dirty and sordid street, too new to be picturesque; but almost every other shop on both sides of the street is a bookshop, and the patient man is frequently rewarded by a find of peculiar interest.
One day, a few years ago, I picked up two square folio volumes of manuscript bound in old, soft morocco, grown shabby from knocking about. The title was “Lyford Redivivus, or A Grandame’s Garrulity.”
Examination showed me that it was a sort of dictionary of proper names. In one volume there were countless changes and erasures; the other was evidently a fair copy. Although there was no name in either volume to suggest the author, it needed no second glance to see that both were written in the clear, bold hand of Mrs. Piozzi. The price was but trifling, and I promptly paid it and carried the volumes home. Some months later, I was reading a little volume, “Piozziana,” by Edward Mangin,—the first book about Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi,—when, to my surprise, my eye met the following:—