I do not know whether Mr Huth suspected me of extravagance in the purchase of curiosities, but I remember that he one day, at Prince’s Gate, when we were together, rather gravely, yet with his usual gentleness, observed that it was very important to husband one’s resources—to use his own phrase. He entered more with me than with any other stranger into trivial and ordinary matters; and apropos of expenditure I recall his allusion to the habit of some of his clerks in the city laying out a larger sum on their luncheons than he did. Possibly they went home, not to dinner, but to tea. I have mentioned in Four Generations of a Literary Family farther particulars of Mr Huth, which I of course do not here reproduce. I recollect being at Prince’s Gate one Sunday, when Professor —— called, and began to eulogise the palatial residence, the splendid book-room, the noble cases, and so forth; and I at once saw that he was making our host rather uncomfortable by his gaucherie. On some pretext I induced the Professor to accompany me, when I took my leave, and I am sure that Mr Huth was grateful. I do not know that I grudged Huth anything, for he was worthy of his fortune. Perhaps I was a little envious of his knowledge of the notes of birds, which he told me that he possessed, and of which I have the most imperfect and inaccurate idea. I judge that he was reticent even to his family about his affairs, for, after his sudden death, his widow, to whom he left everything, found to her surprise, I was told, that there was more even than she had expected. So that he had acted up to his own maxim. A man may be frugal with £100,000 a year as he may be with the thousandth part of it—more so indeed, as there is a so much wider margin.
CHAPTER IV
Literary Results of My Acquaintance with Mr Huth—The New Bibliography in Progress, and the 1867 Book gradually superseded—Some Other Literary Acquaintances—George Daniel—John Payne Collier and Frederic Ouvry, His Son-in-Law—The Millers of Craigentinny—‘Inch-rule’ Miller—He purchases at the Heber Sale by Cartloads—My Efforts to procure Particulars of all the Rare Books at Britwell—I let Mr Christie-Miller have One or Two Items—An Anecdote—Mr Miller’s London House formerly Samuel Rogers’s—His Son—Where They are all buried—The Rev. Thomas Corser—His Fine Library—What It cost and what It fetched—His Difficulties in Forming It—Whither Much of It went—My Exploits at the Sale—Description of the House where the Books were kept—Mr Corser’s Peculiar Interest in My Eyes—His Personal Character—The Sad Change in the Book Market since Corser’s Day—Mr Samuel Sanders—A Curious Incident—Mr Cosens, Mr Turner and Mr Lawrence—Their Characteristics—Some Account of Mr Cosens as He gave It to Me—His Line of Collecting—My Assistance requested—A Few of His Principal Acquisitions and Their Subsequent Fortunes—Frederic Locker—His Idiosyncrasies—His Want of Judgment—His Confidences.
My bibliographical pursuits and exigencies, setting aside my concurrent literary ventures, themselves sufficiently numerous and onerous to have employed a person of average application, had the inevitable effect of making me more or less intimately known to most of the persons who in my time have studied or possessed books. My commerce was with the holders as well as with the buyers and sellers of them. On the one hand I had to face the problem of Life, and on the other that of Title-taking. Of my purely literary work, which is not unknown to a few, I may say that the proportion of pot-boilers is not unreasonably large; it might have been larger, had I not chosen as an alternative to turn to account my conversance with old books as a moyen de parvenir, but during all the term of my relationship with Mr Huth I was incessantly engaged in storing up notes on the volumes, which came and which went, against an opportunity for publication. That aim and my contributions to literature, such as the Venetian History, the Warton, the Dodsley, the Blount’s Tenures, united to constitute my compensation for the rather distasteful ordeal of espousing the commercial side. The bibliographical toil was enormous, for the few hundreds of articles, which Mr Huth and others acquired, were a mere handful in comparison with the mass which I gradually digested into my system, and reduced to form and method.
I judge it to be the most intelligible plan, with a view to tracing my somewhat peculiar and anomalous career in connection with books, china, coins and other objects of general interest, to proceed, after furnishing the previous sketch of Mr Huth and my participation in his experiences as a collector, with some account of certain other individuals who influenced me and proved more or less valuable as instruments for carrying out my central and cardinal policy.
George Daniel of Canonbury and John Payne Collier were practically before my time; but I corresponded with the latter on literary subjects, and Daniel I occasionally met in the street or in the sale-room. With Collier’s relative, Frederic Ouvry the solicitor, I had some transactions; but I found him an undecided and capricious sort of person, who had evidently imbibed from Collier a tincture of feeling for the older literature without having any solid convictions of his own. The best part of his library consisted of books which he had purchased from his connexion by marriage, and which the latter had obtained more or less accidentally in the course of his prolonged career. Ouvry, however, did not get all. For in a note to myself, Collier expressly says that his unique copy of Constable’s Diana, 1592, was exchanged by him with Heber for ‘books he more wanted.’ It was he who lent me the fragment of Adam Bel, Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudisle, more ancient and correct than Copland’s text in the British Museum, for my Early Popular Poetry, 1864, before I met with the second and yet more curious and valuable one of 1536 in the hands of the late Mr Henry Bradshaw, which I collated for my Early Popular Poetry of Scotland and the Northern Border, 1896.
The name most directly and intimately associated with that of Mr Heber, in a bibliographical sense, is that of Mr William Henry Miller of Craigentinny, near Edinburgh, a gentleman who amassed a fortune by occupations outside his profession as a solicitor, and whom we find bidding at least as early as 1819 for books of price against all comers. Mr Miller made it his speciality to take only the finest and tallest copies, and he thence gained the sobriquet of Inch-rule or Measure Miller, because he invariably carried with him the means of comparing the height of any book with which he met against his own; and if the new one had a superior altitude, out went the shorter specimen to make room for the more Millerian example. At the Heber sale, this gentleman saw his opportunity, and used it well. The bibliophobia had set in; prices were depressed, so far as the early English poetry was concerned, and Thorpe the bookseller, under his instructions, swept the field—the Drama, the Classics, and the Miscellanea he left to others. Nearly the whole of the rarities in that particular division, set forth in the second, fourth, sixth and eighth parts of the catalogue, fell to Mr Miller; and of many no duplicates have since occurred. The purchaser must have laid out thousands, and have added to his collection positive cartloads.
He died in 1849. Of his successor, Mr Samuel Christy, the hatter of Piccadilly, who assumed the name of Christie-Miller, I saw comparatively little; but I used to hear odd things about him from David Laing and from Riviere the bookbinder. In my ardour for organising my own Bibliography on an enlarged and exhaustive footing, I jesuitically availed myself of the periodical consignments of books to Riviere for binding; and, with the leave of the latter, took notes of everything in his hands. Mr Christie-Miller himself vouchsafed me a certain amount of information, and from David Laing I derived many other particulars about the Britwell library, so that with these channels of help and light, and others in the shape of occurrences of duplicate copies of recent years, I flatter myself that there is very little in that rather jealously-guarded repository which I have not put on record in print or in MS.