"This to the man I most affect I send,
The faithfull Shepherd to as true a friend.
There on each page thou'lt tenderest passion see,
But none more tender than my own for thee."
The volume belongs to the series of memorials, which we possess in not too ample abundance, of the regard entertained by men of letters of former days for each other, or for their intimates, and ranks with the priceless copies of his own books presented by Jonson to some of his distinguished contemporaries. If he, or any one else, made gifts of such things to the greatest of them all, every trace of such an incident has apparently disappeared.
Rarity of occurrence is not by any means an imperative feature in influencing or determining the value of inscriptions. No examples are probably more abundant than the books of Izaak Walton, either with an ordinary note of presentation, or with MSS. notes in the writer's hand, if not with both; yet they invariably command a liberal price from the admission of Walton by common acknowledgment into the select circle of literary men, whose works we love for the sake of the author.
The following inscription in contemporary MS. occurs on the reverse of the Old Testament title to a Cranmer's Bible of 1540: "Thys byble ys John Crogdens, Cytyzen and merchant taylor of London, dwellynge in Wattlynge Street at ye syne of Ye Whyte Horse, 1550."
Occasionally more or less curious personal traits or family clues are yielded by the memoranda on fly-leaves. A Latin Testament of 1563 bears: "e libris Thomæ Northcote e dono Joh. Rolle Armig. de Stephenstone in agro Devoniensi;" a copy of Jewell's Sermons, 1583, has "John Willoughby, 1591," and "Amor vincit omnia." In the Savile copy of Sir Thomas More's Works, 1557, we read: "de dono H. Savile anno 1600; found by Mary Savile, Dec. 12, 1635, amongst other books at Metheby: for my daughter Mary Savile."
If the reader will cross over with us into Scotland for a moment or so, we will introduce him to a very interesting relic in the shape of a Latin Aristotle of 1526, in which a Cistercian monk of Kinloss Abbey, Andrew Langland, has enshrined two metrical compositions from his own pen; an epitaph on the Regent Murray, and an epistle to Joannes Ferrerius, Professor at Kinloss, 1542, and continuator of Hector Boece. The epitaph is dialogue-wise between the Bishop of Orkney, who was absent from the funeral, and Ferrerius, who attended it.
At the sale of the library of the Duke of Leeds, a large-paper copy of Wycherley's Miscellany Poems, 1704, apparently given by the poet to Lord Treasurer Danby, produced the outrageous price of £46. A far more interesting example was that which he presented to Mistress Mary Twysden, as noticed in the Bibliographer. A more important souvenir was the Latin Testament given by Pope to Bolingbroke in 1728 (Christie's, April 3, 1895, No. 339); and a yet stronger sympathy must be felt with the Juvenal and Persius, 8vo, Amsterdam, 1684, which once belonged to T. Killigrew, and subsequently to Pope, whose English version occupies the interleaves, if the description given by Wake of Derby be correct, as the book itself we have not seen.
