The spirit of the collector cropped out early in Rice. I remember to have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young man, he was shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a Boston bookstall. His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet entitled "The Cow-Chace." He picked it up and read it. It was a poem founded upon the defeat of Generals Wayne, Irving, and Proctor. The last stanza ran in this wise:
And now I've closed my epic strain,
I tremble as I show it,
Lest this same warrior-drover, Wayne,
Should ever catch the poet.
Rice noticed that the pamphlet bore the imprint of James Rivington, New York, 1780. It occurred to him that some time this modest tract of eighteen pages might be valuable; at any rate, he paid the fifteen cents demanded for it, and at the same time he purchased for ten cents another pamphlet entitled "The American Tories, a Satire."
Twenty years later, having learned the value of these exceedingly rare tracts, Mr. Rice sent them to London and had them bound in Francis Bedford's best style—"crimson crushed levant morocco, finished to a Grolier pattern." Bedford's charges amounted to seventy-five dollars, which with the original cost of the pamphlets represented an expenditure of seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents upon Mr. Rice's part. At the sale of the Rice library in 1870, however, this curious, rare, and beautiful little book brought the extraordinary sum of seven hundred and fifty dollars!
The Rice library contained about five thousand volumes, and it realized at auction sale somewhat more than seventy-two thousand dollars. Rice has often told me that for a long time he could not make up his mind to part with his books; yet his health was so poor that he found it imperative to retire from business, and to devote a long period of time to travel; these were the considerations that induced him finally to part with his treasures. "I have never regretted having sold them," he said. "Two years after the sale the Chicago fire came along. Had I retained those books, every one of them would have been lost."
Mrs. Rice shared her husband's enthusiasm for books. Whenever a new invoice arrived, the two would lock themselves in their room, get down upon their knees on the floor, open the box, take out the treasures and gloat over them, together! Noble lady! she was such a wife as any good man might be proud of. They were very happy in their companionship on earth, were my dear old friends. He was the first to go; their separation was short; together once more and forever they share the illimitable joys which await all lovers of good books when virtue hath mournfully writ the colophon to their human careers.
Although Mr. Rice survived the sale of his remarkable library a period of twenty-six years, he did not get together again a collection of books that he was willing to call a library. His first collection was so remarkable that he preferred to have his fame rest wholly upon it. Perhaps he was wise; yet how few collectors there are who would have done as he did.
As for myself, I verily believe that, if by fire or by water my library should be destroyed this night, I should start in again to-morrow upon the collection of another library. Or if I did not do this, I should lay myself down to die, for how could I live without the companionships to which I have ever been accustomed, and which have grown as dear to me as life itself?
Whenever Judge Methuen is in a jocular mood and wishes to tease me, he asks me whether I have forgotten the time when I was possessed of a spirit of reform and registered a solemn vow in high heaven to buy no more books. Teasing, says Victor Hugo, is the malice of good men; Judge Methuen means no evil when he recalls that weakness—the one weakness in all my career.
No, I have not forgotten that time; I look back upon it with a shudder of horror, for wretched indeed would have been my existence had I carried into effect the project I devised at that remote period!