Conchology is no child's play. As to collecting marine animals for an aquarium, the trouble begins when you forget your acquisitions, and carry them about for some time in the pockets of your jacket. That jacket is apt to be dusted by the bigger boys, who also interfere with your affections for toads, lizards, snakes and other live stock dear to youth. The common ambition of boyhood is to be a great rabbit-grower, but, somehow, my rabbits did not thrive. The cats got at them, and, in shooting at the cats with a crossbow, I had the misfortune to break several windows, and riddle a conservatory.
The chief objects of my later ambition have been rare old books, gems, engravings, china, and so forth. All these things, if they are to be collected, demand that you shall have your wits about you; and the peculiarity of the Duffer is that his wits are always wool-gathering. A nice collection of wool they must have stored up somewhere. As to books, one invariably begins by collecting the wrong things. In novels and essays you read of "priceless Elzevirs," and "Aldines worth their weight in gold." Fired with hope, you hang about all the stalls, where you find myriads of Elzevirs, dumpy, dirty little tomes, in small illegible type, and legions of Aldines, books quite as dirty, if not so dumpy, and equally illegible, for they are printed in italics. You think you are in luck, invest largely, and begin to give yourself the airs of an amateur and a discoverer. Then comes somebody who knows about the matter in hand, and who tells you, with all the savage joy of a collector, that nobody wants any Elzevirs and Aldines, except a very few, and they must be in beautiful old bindings, uncut down, or scarcely cut down by the binder. These you may long for, but you certainly will never find them in the fourpenny box. The Duffer is always making the mistake of buying small bargains, as he thinks them, and so he will spend, in some time, perhaps, a hundred pounds. With a hundred pounds, and with luck, and prudence, and cunning, he might perhaps buy one small volume which a collector who knew his business would not wholly disdain. But, as it is, he has squandered his money, and has nothing to show for it but a heap of trash, of the wrong date, without the necessary misprints in the right places, ragged, short, and, above all, imperfect. I suppose I have the richest collection of imperfect books in the world. One hugs oneself on one's Lucasta (very rare), or one's Elzevir Cæsar of the right date, or one's first edition of MOLIÈRE, and then comes, with fiendish glee, the regular collector, and shows you that Lucasta has not the portrait of LOVELACE, that Cæsar has not his pagination all wrong (as he ought to have), that the Molières are Lyons piracies, that half of GILBERT's Gentleman's Diversion is not bound up with the rest, that, generally speaking, there are pages missing here and there all through your books, which you have never "collated," that "a ticket of PADELOUP, the binder, has been taken off some broken board of a book, and stuck on to a modern imitation, and so forth, all through the collection. You cannot sell it; nobody will take as a present this Library of a Gentleman who has given up collecting; even Free Libraries do not want this kind of treasure, and so it remains, littering your shelves, a monument of folly. Happy are the Duffers whose eyes are impenetrably sealed, and who can go on believing, in spite of a modern water-mark, in their sham BURNS MSS. and their volumes with autographs of all the celebrated characters in history. But my eyes are purged, and I do not think you shall find me collecting old books any more. Certainly I shall not venture into auction-rooms, compete with the Trade, and get left with a book artfully run up, thanks to my enthusiasm, to four or five times its market value.
As to china, what the Duffer buys is invariably cracked, and the "marks" on which he places confidence are flagrant imitations. He usually begins by supposing that Crown Derby is a priceless possession, also he has a touching faith in chipped blue and white cups and saucers, marked with a crescent. Worcester they may be, but not the right sort of Worcester. And Crown Derby is the very Aldine or Elzevir of this market. You might as well collect shares in the Great Montezuma Gold Mine, and expect to derive benefit from the investment.
Gems are among the things that the Duffer may most wisely collect, for the excellent reason that, in this country, he very seldom indeed finds any for sale. He cannot come to much sorrow, for lack of opportunities. In Italy it is different. How many beautiful works of Art I have acquired in Florence, at considerable ransoms, all of them signed in neat, but illegible Greek capitals. I puzzled over them with microscopes. The names seemed to end in ΙΧΛΗΣ. I thought myself a rival of BLACAS, or Lord KILSYTH, or the British Museum. Then my friend, WILKINS, came in. "Pretty enough pastes of the last century I see," he remarks. "Pastes!—last century!" I indignantly exclaim; "why they're of the best period: Sards, all of them signed, but I can't make out the artist's name." "It is PICHLER," says WILKINS, "he usually signed, for fear his things should be sold as antiques." I had to give in about PICHLER (which certainly does not sound very Greek); "but here," I said, "you can't call this paste, you can't scratch the back of it." "I know I can't," says WILKINS, examining the ring, "for a very good reason, because a thin layer of sard has been inserted behind. But it's paste, for all that."
"Well," I say, "here's a genuine ancient ring, old gold, and a lovely head of Prosperine in cornelian."
"Well, this is odd," says WILKINS, "I know the setting is genuine, I have seen it before. But then it had a rubbishy late bit of work in it, and I was in the atelier when a gem-cutter shaved away the top of the stone, and copied your head of Prosperine on it from a Sicilian coin. I can show you a coin of the same stamp in my collection."
