I know that to my more recent acquaintances and auxiliaries I must have appeared rather niggard of presentation copies of my publications. But I used to be generous enough in distributing such things, till I was thoroughly disheartened and disgusted. Some stopped short of acknowledgment; others might without much disadvantage have done the same. I sent a privately-printed volume worth several pounds as a gift to a reverend professor at Cambridge, and he wrote back on a card: ‘Thanks. Curious.’ My former schoolmaster at Merchant Taylors had only to say that I had left out a Greek accent in a quotation, and a female relative, after two years’ deliberation, apprised me that I was guilty of printing the wrong article in a French maxim. When I forwarded to Mr William Chappell direct as from myself an important volume edited for Mr Huth, he pointed out to the latter, leaving me unrecognised, that I had made a slip in a particular place. An official at the British Museum, who solicited one of my books as a memorial, which would be cherished as an heirloom in his family, forthwith passed it on to a bookseller, who priced it in his catalogue at £12, 12s., and Mr Huth, till I explained the circumstances, imagined that I was the culprit.

CHAPTER X

As an Amateur—Old China—Dr Diamond of Twickenham—Unfavourable Results of His Tutorship—My Adventure at Lowestoft—Alderman Rose—I turn over a New Leaf—Morgan—His Sale to Me of Various Objects—The Seventeenth Century Dishes—The Sèvres Tray of 1773—The Pair of Japanese Dishes—Blue and White—Hawthorn—The Odd Vase—My Finds at Hammersmith—Mr Sanders of Chiswick and his Chelsea China—Gale—The Ruby-backed Eggshell—A Recollection of Ralph Bernal—Buen Retiro and Capo di Monte—Reynolds of Hart Street—The Wedgewood Teapot—The Rose du Barri Vases—My Bowls—An Eccentric Character and His Treasures—Reminiscences of Midhurst and Up Park—The Zurich Jug and My Zurich Visitor—The Diamond Sale.

In crossing over from the literary to other fields, where I have instructed and amused myself and a few others by my studies, I pass to ground, where I occupy a somewhat different position—that of an absolute, incorruptible amateur. I see clearly enough that, whatever advantage may attach itself to the commercial side in these matters, the genuine pleasure lies in purchasing for oneself, even if the price is here and there such as to ensure loss on realisation; for there is the sense of patronage and superiority. I never descended to petty transactions; but where an appreciable amount was involved; I would far liefer have stood aloof, or have acquired for myself. There was only the sovereign motive in the background, which conquered my instinctive repugnance to the conversion of literary monuments into a commodity and of my hardly-acquired knowledge into a mint.

Outside Books, I have conceived, as I proceeded, and as I mingled with other hobby-riders, an interest in such matters of secondary human concernment as China, Coins, Plate, Postage Stamps, Pictures, and Furniture. The two former have occupied in my thought a station not much less prominent than that of literature; and as I abandoned the practical inquiry into the first subject after ten years’ devotion to it, I shall commence by giving some account of my observations and experiences in that particular market, which, like all others, offers its peculiarities and idiosyncrasies.

There is hardly a triter remark than that we are slaves to our passions; and the genuine collector certainly is unto his, whatever his line may be. Where there are ample resources, it signifies less; but the servitude presses very heavily on the more necessitous or more moderately endowed. It is in vain to say that a man ought not to buy luxuries, if he cannot afford them; he will have them, as another will drink alcohol or chew opium. To secure something which he covets he is capable of pawning his coat or ‘dining with Duke Humphrey.’ Had I been exempt from fancies, I might have spared myself the ordeal of going into the highways and byways in quest of that doubtful benefactor a publisher; I might have dispensed with ingratiating myself with booksellers and bookbuyers; I might have enjoyed the pleasures of reading and thinking amid some sort of paterna rura. But as a citizen, who leaves London only for the sake of the satisfaction which it yields to return to it (for your Londoner, if he likes to see and feel the country must live in urbe), I naturally contracted certain pleasant and costly vices incidental to a metropolis, and became an unthrift and through my unthriftiness a hireling. I often resolve to break my fetters; but I lack the courage. The tastes, in which I have graduated, have sweetened my life, and enlarged my vision, if they have trenched a little on my freedom; and I even think that they have tended to humanise me, and subdue a not too tractable temper to the harder and sterner uses of the world.

I have not the least objection to avow that, when I accidentally acquired in 1869 at Llandudno an example or two of Oriental ceramic art, I was deplorably ignorant of the bearings and merits of the pursuit, and had, as usual, no idea that I had embarked in one. A good-natured and well-informed relative, who was always ready and pleased to serve and flatter me, suggested that my Eastern porcelain was Brom’ichham. Of course an English factory could not, in the first place, have produced the things at the price. I received a good deal of encouragement and sympathy from those near and dear to me just about this time; my extravagance was censured; and my early insolvency considered probable.

Through my father I became acquainted about that time with Dr Diamond of Twickenham House, the possessor of one of the most extensive and miscellaneous assemblages of porcelain and pottery of all ages and countries ever formed in this country. Who had first bitten the doctor, I never heard; I found him, on my first introduction, the owner of a mass of examples, good, bad and indifferent, of all of which, however insignificant and obscure, he could tell you the pedigree and place of origin. He had many other tastes; he was curious about photography, books, pictures, prints, coins, and plate; his house was a museum, of which he was the curator and showman; but I think that during the last years of his life old china and plate kept the ascendancy.