One striking feature in the Frere sale was that it was only a part of the library, and that not the part which the auctioneers' representative saw at Roydon. Some further instalments occurred at another saleroom a few months later; and perhaps there is yet more to come. But in a bibliographical respect the dispersion proved of interest, as many of the items, formerly Sir John Fenn's, had remained imperfectly known and described; and it was not absolutely certain that they survived.
An element in the modern auctions which is patent to all fairly conversant with such mysteria, and has become one not less indispensable than normal, is what is commonly known as the Rig. A Rig is a sale which departs or declines from the strict line of bona fides so far as not to be precisely what the forefront of the catalogue avouches it, and by one or two houses it is discountenanced. Nevertheless it exists, and will continue from the nature of things to do so; and we observe in the very opening decade of auctions, in the very infancy of the system, a trace or germ of this commencing impurity or abuse. For some of the catalogues, so far back as 1678, purport to register within their covers the libraries of certain noblemen or gentleman "and others" (aliorumque, in the Latin diction then so much in favour), and so it has been ever since. When we go to the rooms and lift up our voices, we do not always know whose property we are trying to secure; nor, if our own judgment is worth anything, does it greatly signify.
Footnotes
[6] Hazlitt's Venice, 1860, iv. 431.
[7] The library of James Chamberlain, sold at Stourbridge Fair in 1686.
[8] See Catalogue of Early English Miscellanies formerly in the Harleian Library, by W. C. Hazlitt, 1862.
[9] See besides, Hazlitt's Memoirs, 1896, chaps. vii, viii, ix; and Hazlitt's Confessions of a Collector, 1897, p. 150 et seq.
