The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

I acquired several curious articles from Ridler himself. He was, as a rule, reluctant to sell anything except through the catalogue. But he made an exception in my favour by pulling out of a drawer on one occasion a very fine copy of the very book which Wake of Cockermouth had previously offered me; and I agreed to give £8, 18s. 6d. for it. It is now in the Museum. In a second case he sold me, with a stern proviso that it was not returnable on any account whatever, a defective copy of John Constable’s Poems, printed by Pynson, 1520, which nearly completed the Museum one—only two copies, both imperfect, being known! The Constable was bound up with a foreign tract of no value in such a manner as to mystify our good friend.

He no longer honours me with his catalogue. I ceased to find much in my way, and perhaps I was not worth the postage. Ridler it was, who once signalised a volume as ‘difficult of procuration.’

It was Arthur who had the only copy ever been with the colophon of Slatyer’s Palœalbion, 1621; he got it for a few shillings of Lazarus in the same street, and sold it to Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill for £15, as Ridler informed me many years ago.

The last mad freak of Phillipps was the transmission of an order to Arthur to send him one of his catalogues en bloc. Some of the lots had been sold; but the remainder was duly shipped to the Broadway, Worcestershire; and a pretty parcel of rubbish it must have been! This is book-scavengering. You only require a besom and a purse, and a block of warehouses.

With the exception of Jeffreys and George of Bristol and Wake above named, I have not known much of the provincial dealers. Jeffreys sent me the Golden Legend by Caxton, as I have said, and a few other rare things, and with George my transactions were limited to just one. Mr Pyne had returned from these parts, and had seen at Jeffreys’ or Lasbury’s (as he thought) Lodge’s Rosalynd, 1592, at £3, 10s., bound up with an imperfect copy of Lyly’s Euphues. He declined it, but on his arrival home he reconsidered the matter, and wrote to the wrong man. I dropped in, just as he was deliberating whether it was worth while to write to the right one; but he concluded by giving up the volume to me. I had to pay £5 for it, George stating that a party had assured him it was quite worth the higher sum. I did not dare to dispute the point; I bound the Lodge, for which Mr Huth gave me £42, and let Mr Pyne have the Lyly. The only other copy known of the Rosalynd is in the Bodleian, and the single antecedent impression (1590) exists in an unique and imperfect one. The book, as it is familiar to most people, has the foundation-story of As You Like It.

The mention of that drama reminds me that Rosalind and Rosaline were rather favourite names with our early poets. Spenser introduces Rose Daniel, the writer’s sister, into his Faëry Queen under that designation, as he had done another lady in his Shepherd’s Calendar. Shakespear himself has Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost and Romeo and Juliet, and Thomas Newton wrote a poem no longer known beyond its registration in 1604, entitled: A pleasant new History; or, a fragrant Posie, made of three Flowers: Rosa, Rosalynd, and Rosemary.

I edited a few small books for Mr Elliot Stock, and had the opportunity of taking notes of one or two very rare volumes in that gentleman’s private library. I met in the shop one day my friend M——, who told me that he had come to buy the new English translation of the Imitatio Christi. I expressed surprise. He explained that it was to give away. I still expressed surprise. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘you see it is the fine style.’ I had thought that that lay in the original Latin; but I scarcely presumed to hint such a thing. I passed for one who had long laboured under a very grave misapprehension, and who was at length undeceived.

I did not grow very rich out of Mr Stock’s commissions; they were, as I have mentioned, little undertakings; perhaps they did not sell very well—I fancy that the general editor of the series gave me to understand that his own contributions were the only ones which did. But one of them—the Old Cookery Books, introduced me to a city gentleman, whose library I assisted in completing. He was a very good fellow, who had been spoiled by companies and company-mongers. He had conceived, before I met him, the design of collecting everything in all languages relative to fermented liquors and the processes of their manufacture. He was not fastidious as to condition, though he preferred a good copy to a bad one; and I left his shelves fuller than I found them. He unconsciously made up the deficiency in Mr Stock’s cheque; and my researches on his behalf were bibliographically useful to me, as they brought under my notice a variety of pamphlets and other ephemerides illustrative of a by no means uninteresting topic. Besides, he threw in my way editorial work worth £700 or more.

A rather curious incident evolved from our temporary acquaintance. Quaritch had in his catalogue just then a Sarum service-book, which purported to have belonged in Queen Mary’s days to one L. Stokes; I looked at it; and I saw that the name was Stopes, and I concluded that the old proprietor was the same Leonard Stopes who printed an Ave Maria to the Queen in or about 1555. The book also bore the signature of his brother, James Stopes. Leonard was of St John’s College, Oxford. The point was, that my casual correspondent was Henry Stopes, and was a descendant of Leonard or James. He was hugely delighted by the discovery; and he purchased the Breviary.

It was his wife, a very pleasant and accomplished Scotish lady, daughter of Mr Carmichael, clerk to Sir Walter Scott as Sheriff-Depute, who wrote the almost superfluous confutation of the claims set up on behalf of Bacon to the authorship of Shakespear’s plays.