The centenary of George Eliot was celebrated at Messrs. Hodgsons' by the sale of a first edition of Scenes of Clerical Life, a fine uncut copy. It went for £17. The library of the late James Nicol Dunn was disposed of at the same rooms. Mr. Dunn was a journalist whose career included the editorship of the Morning Post and that of the Johannesburg Star. In earlier years—he always retained some flavour of that association—he was Henley's assistant on the National Observer. He was thus in a position to obtain books, manuscripts, and autograph letters which have since become valuable. His Edinburgh set of Stevenson (accompanied by a note from Charles Baxter, "Louis will have nett complete about £5200 over this") went for £65, and a set of the Scots Observer and National Observer for £47. An inscribed copy of Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies sold for ten guineas, and three first editions, with letters, of John Davidson £5—which suggests that Davidson is at last getting a little notice from collectors.
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Among the autographs were several corrected proofs and typescripts of Mr. Kipling's. A freely corrected typescript of Tomlinson fetched £81, the MS. of Fuzzy-Wuzzy £50. Three manuscript poems of Henley's, with a letter from Mr. Yeats thrown in, brought only £6 10s. Still more surprising was the sale of Mr. Yeats's MS. of The Lake Isle of Innisfree, with another, for £5 15s. In a sale on the following day a first edition of The Shropshire Lad turned up: it was sold for £4.
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The Arbury Library, a portion of which is to be sold at Sotheby's on January 22nd, has an interest apart from the high rarity of many of the books which are to be sold; for these found their way to Arbury, not at the fancy of any individual collector of rare volumes—none of the Newdigates have been great book-collectors in this modern sense—but simply as current literature of the period in which they were published. The First Folio Shakespeare, for instance, which is described as "probably the largest available," has been at Arbury since 1660, when it belonged to Serjeant Newdegate, who was Chief Justice under Cromwell and was made a Baronet at the Restoration; and it is likely that it came into his possession or into that of the elder brother whom he succeeded soon after its publication in 1623. Sir Richard Newdegate's mother was Anne Fitton, sister to Mary Fitton, Queen Elizabeth's frolicsome and wayward maid-of-honour, whom a modern edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets has sought to identify with the Dark Lady. Family papers at Arbury give no support to the late Mr. Tyler's theory, and Mary Fitton's portraits there show her to have been fair rather than dark. It is probable that some of the volumes which are to be sold at Sotheby's were at Arbury when Mary Fitton found a home there with her sister, Lady Newdigate, after her disgrace at Court. No one whose interest in old books lies in their character, their history, and their associations rather than in the price which they may fetch under the hammer can fail to regret the fate by which these precious volumes are at length taken from the home in which they have stood side by side for some three centuries.
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Sounds unheard are the sweetest, and the books that were never written and the books that once existed and have been lost are by far the world's best books. Those chapters on Chambermaids and Buttonholes would have been the most amusing in Tristram Shandy; Milton's epic on King Arthur, great and glorious in itself, would also have nipped The Idylls of the King in the bud, thus earning our gratitude as well as our admiration. The lost books of the Satyricon were the best things Petronius ever wrote, and the vanished poems of Sappho—one dare not think of them.
And now we have news of yet another little work that has joined the great army of the lost. But not, we hope, for ever; for the volume can hardly fail to turn up some time, sooner or later, in some bookseller's shop or some collector's library. The history of this lost volume is not uninteresting, and we propose to quote at some length from an account of it furnished by the owner, Miss E. M. Green, of Modbury, Ivy Bridge, South Devon:
"In 1913 a MS. book fell into my hands, thought first to be a manuscript of Little Gidding, which proved, however, to be the work of the Rev. Richard White, Chaplain to the English nuns of St. Monica in Louvain from 1630 to 1687. This I published with Messrs. Longmans under the title of Celestial Fire. This volume contains in the preface an account of these Louvain Manuscripts, which are singularly beautiful specimens of seventeenth-century script. Consequent on this publication, the community of St. Augustine's Priory, Newton Abbot, who fled to England during the French Revolution, sent me a similar manuscript, Cordial Prayer, to be published also. It was a leather volume, 4 inches by 2¾ inches, 1 inch in depth, bound in holland with quaint brass clasps, and the top of the pages was a beautiful blue. Taking it from the inspection of the Keeper of MSS., British Museum, and from the MSS. Room home with me, I found on entering an omnibus in Sloane Street that I had lost it. It was tied in white paper with my address on the outside."
All efforts have so far, Miss Green tells us, proved unavailing, and no word can be heard of the lost volume. Perhaps some of our readers may have seen or heard of this interesting little manuscript.