Lilly was a bluff, plain-spoken, imperfectly-bred man; but I always found him civil and obliging, and he lent me any book which I required for editorial or other purposes without hesitation. He compiled his catalogues with no ordinary care, and would often take a pleasure in pointing out some little discovery which he had made about an edition or copy of an old writer. He presented me in 1869 with a bound collection of these, and they contain a variety of useful notices. He was no scholar or linguist, yet it was said of him that, if he had a Hebrew or Sanscrit book, he seemed to know whether it possessed value or not. He left behind him a large stock, which was publicly sold, and of which I was a purchaser here and there. It struck me as a curious trait in a man who had much natural shrewdness that he allowed many volumes of the rarest character to remain on his shelves, when they might have been with very slight trouble converted into money. Under the hammer they commanded prices which paid homage to the departed owner’s supposed capability of placing everything to the best advantage; the trade hung off a good deal; and Lilly was not popular, besides. The British Museum wanted nearly all that I bought. There was one very early volume of prayers, printed on vellum, for which Lilly had asked £12, 12s.; it came to me at £4, 12s., and I might, if John Pearson had not suspected it to be something valuable, have had it for half that amount. But the odd feature about the matter was that, although I submitted it to Mr Blades, and to everyone else likely to be able to tell me, no one could say where it was printed. The Museum gladly gave me the sum which its former proprietor had justly deemed it worth without finding anybody to agree with him.
The Daniel sale in 1864 and the Corser one, the latter spread over two or three seasons (1868-70), represented the most profitable and conspicuous incidents in Lilly’s career, as they supplied the material, each in its way, which most largely helped to raise the library of his principal, Mr Huth, to the rank which it occupied, and still occupies in the hands of a son. The Daniel books had been collected under specially favourable circumstances. They were selected at leisure during a period of over thirty years from auction-room and book-shop, whenever an item, which struck their proprietor’s practical instinct as a safe and desirable investment, occurred; and some of the most important—the quarto Shakespears, the unique chapbooks, and the Elizabethan poetry, were secured just when a marked depression had set in—Dibdin’s Bibliophobia, which was to the Bibliomania what the anti-cyclone is to the whirlwind; while not a few highly remarkable lots—
The Ballads
The quarto edition of the Book of St. Albans
The Lucrece, 1594,
The Chester’s Love’s Martyr, 1601,
besides others, no doubt, were obtained sub rosâ by a mysterious strategy, at which Daniel would darkly hint in conversation with you, but of which you were left to surmise for yourself the whole truth. The general opinion is, that he procured them through Fitch of Ipswich, whose wife had been a housekeeper or confidential servant of the Tollemaches, from Helmingham Hall, Bentley, the Suffolk seat of that ancient family. But when I consider the numberless precious volumes, which have dropped, so to speak, into my hands, coming, as I of course did, at a far less auspicious juncture, I arrive at the conclusion, not that Daniel bought freely everything really valuable and cheap, but that he must have had abundant opportunities, as a person of leisure and means, of becoming the master of thousands of other literary curiosities, which would have brought him or his estate a handsome profit by waiting for the return of the tide.
This gentleman improved the occasion, however, so far as his acquisitions went, by making flyleaves the receptacles of a larger crop of misleading statements than I ever remember to have seen from the hand of a single individual; let us charitably suppose that he knew no better; and the compiler of his catalogue must be debited with a similar amount of ignorance or credulity, since there probably never was one circulated with so many unfounded or hyperbolical assertions, from the time that Messrs Sotheby & Co. first started in business. If the means are justified by the end, however, the retired accountant had calculated well; the bait, which he had laid, was greedily swallowed; and the prices were stupendous. It was a battle à l’outrance between the British Museum, Mr Huth, Sir William Tite, and one or two more. But the national library and Mr Huth divided the spolia opima, and doubtless the lion’s share fell to the latter. The Museum authorities can always wait.
Mr Huth did not want the first folio Shakespear, 1623, as he had acquired at the Gardner sale in 1854 a very good one in an eighteenth-century russia binding, not very tall, but very sound and fine. The Daniel one, which went to Lady Coutts at over £700, came from William Pickering, and cost about £200, as I was informed by a member of the Daniel family. It thoroughly jumped with the owner’s idiosyncrasy to pronounce his copy, whenever he spoke of it, as the finest in existence, which it neither was nor is. One of the best which I have seen was that sold at Sotheby’s for Miss Napier of Edinburgh through the recommendation of Mr Pyne aforesaid, who admonished the lady to put a reserve of £100 on it. This was wholesome advice, for it was put in at that figure, and the only advance was £1 from a member of a solid ring opposite to myself, who had looked in from curiosity to see how the bidding went. At £101 it would have fallen a prey to the junto; it was in the old binding; it only wanted the verses; the condition was large, crisp, and clean, the title-page (which had been shifted to the middle for some reason, and was said in the catalogue to be deficient) immaculate; and I was prompted to say £151. Angry and disconcerted looks met me from the enemy’s line, and I weighed the utility of pursuing the matter. At £151 it became the property of six or eight gentlemen, and I understood that the ultimate price left £400 behind it.
But the volume even in perfect state is not very rare. It is merely that, in common with the first editions of Walton’s Angler, the Faëry Queene, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, Burns, and a few more, everybody desires it. The auctioneers have a stereotyped note to the effect that the first Shakespear is yearly becoming more difficult to procure, which may be so, but simply because, although fresh copies periodically occur, the competition more than proportionately increases. There is a steadfast run on capital books, not only in English, but in all languages—ay, let them be even in Irish, Welsh, Manx, or Indian hieroglyphics.