I personally attended the Corser sales, although Mr Ellis held my commissions for all that I particularly coveted. I was therefore a spectator rather than an actor in that busy and memorable scene; I now and then intervened, if I felt that there was a lot worth securing on second thoughts, not comprised in my instructions to my representative. The glut of rarities was so bewildering, that I got nearly everything which I had marked. It was before the day, when Mr Quaritch asserted himself so emphatically and so irrepressibly, and John Pearson was not yet very pronounced in his opposition. I had therefore to count only on Lilly and Ellis, apart from the orders of the British Museum through Boone. By employing Ellis I substantially narrowed the hostile competition to two, and Lilly was not very formidable beyond those lots which Mr Huth had singled out, nor Boone, save for such as he was instructed to buy for the nation at a price—not generally a very high one. The Britwell library just nibbled here and there at a desideratum, and had to pay very smartly for it, when it traversed me.
Lilly, Ellis and myself (when I was there) usually sat side by side; neither of them knew what my views were till some time afterward. But I occasionally stood behind. There was an amusing little episode in relation to a large-paper copy in the old calf binding of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars, 1595, with the autograph of Lucy, Lady Lyttelton. Two copies occurred in successive lots, the large paper first; the others did not notice the difference in size, till I had bought the rare variety, and then Lilly, holding the usual sort of copy in his hand, and turning round to the porter, asked him to bring the other. But he was of course too late in his discovery. Mr Corser had given £20 for the book, which was knocked down to me under such circumstances at £4, 6s., and at the higher rate, one endorsed by the excellent judgment of the late proprietor, it passed in due course to Mr Huth.
One of my direct acquisitions at this sale was the exceedingly rare volume of Poems by James Yates, 1582; there were two copies in successive lots; and I suggested that they should be sold together. The price was £31; but most unfortunately they both proved imperfect, so that my hope of obtaining a rich prize for my friend’s library was frustrated. By the way, the copy given by Mr Reynardson to the public library at Hillingdon about 1720 has long gone astray.
Lilly did not actively interfere in the book-market subsequently to the dispersion of the Corser treasures. I confess that, if I had had a free hand, I should have bought far more than he did; and if it had not been for my personal offices, the Huth collection would have missed many undeniably desirable and almost unique features in the Catalogue, as it stands. Mr Huth himself was not very conversant with these matters, and his leading counsellor had much to learn. I retain to this hour a foolish regret, that I permitted Mr Christie-Miller to carry off anything, but I am sufficiently patriotic to be glad, that the British Museum was so successful. I have in my mind’s eye the long rows of old quarto tracts as they lay together, while Mr Rye, the then keeper, was looking through them preparatorily to their consignment to a cataloguer; and I felt some remorse at having been directly instrumental without his knowledge in making many of them costlier. Poor Mr Huth was not prosperous as an utterer of bons-mots. The only one I ever heard him deliver—and it was weak to excess—was that he had bought at the Corser auction a good dish of Greenes.
I apprehend that it was not so very long prior to this signal event in my bibliographical history, that I had regular dealings with F. S. Ellis, then in King Street, Covent Garden. I invariably found him most well-informed, most obliging, and most liberal. While I was finishing my Handbook, he volunteered (as I have said) the loan of Sir Francis Freeling’s interleaved Bibliotheca Anglo-poetica, on the blank pages of which Freeling had often recorded the sources, whence he procured his rare books at a very different tariff from that prevailing in Longman & Co.’s catalogue. It may not be generally known that this eminent collector, whose curious library was sold in 1836, enjoyed through his official position at the General Post Office peculiar facilities for establishing a system of communication with the authorities in the country towns, and he certainly owed to this accident quite a number of bargains (as we should now esteem them) from Dick of Bury St Edmunds. I must not repeat myself, and I have already transcribed from the volume above-mentioned several of Freeling’s memoranda in my own publication of 1867.
CHAPTER VI
My Transactions with Mr Ellis—Rarities which came from Him, and How He got Them—Riviere the Bookbinder—How He cleaned a Valuable Volume for Me—His Irritability—A Strange Tale about an Unique Tract—The Old Gentleman and the Immoral Publication—Dryden’s Copy of Spenser—The Unlucky Contretemps at Ellis’s—A Second Somewhere Else—Mr B. M. Pickering—Our Pleasant and Profitable Relations—Thomas Fuller’s MSS. Epigrams—Charles Cotton’s Copy of Taylor the Water-Poet’s Works—A Second One, which Pickering had, and sold to Me—He has a First Edition of Paradise Lost from Me for Two Guineas and a Half—Taylor’s Thumb Bible.
Ellis after a while penetrated my pharisaical duplicity in acquiring from him and others, to keep my pot boiling at home, while I amassed material for my barren bibliographical enterprise, every item calculated to fit my purpose; he now and then resisted my overtures; but as a rule he gave way on my undertaking to pay his price. I owed to him a large number of eminently rare volumes, of which he did not always appreciate the full significance. I could specify scores of unique or all but unique entries in the Huth Catalogue, which filtered through me from this source, and ministered to my leading aim—not the earning of money so much as the advancement of bibliographical knowledge.