So long as the original gatherer lived, his books were at the service of all who approached him with a legitimate aim, and more particularly at that of the scholar and the editor. We repeatedly hear from Mr Dyce how greatly he was indebted to Heber for the means of completing his texts of the early dramatists and poets, of whose works the original copies were often nowhere else to be found. Heber was the warm friend and helper of the men of letters of his time, and deserves to be classed among them. Many of his rarest volumes unfortunately passed into hands where they still remain, and where they are not so readily available. I am thinking of the Britwell and other closed private libraries, of which the proprietors are indifferent to literature or jealous of intrusion. The zealous bibliographer blesses them both, and prays for the music of the hammer.
A careful survey of the Heber Catalogue leads to the conclusion, from the immense number of rarities there offered for sale for the first time, that the owner succeeded in obtaining a notable proportion of his early books direct from the trade or from private sources by that most powerful of inducements—the known willingness to pay promptly and well for everything brought to him. The note to Thorpe the bookseller, enclosing an order on his bankers for £200 for the Ballads, of which the Daniel volume was merely a selection, is still extant; the money seems to have reached Thorpe’s hands before the purchase left them, in consequence of Heber being from home; even he speaks there of being ashamed of himself for his extravagance, and he asks the vendor whether it was the inheritance of the Stationers’ Company. He was not aware that the lot came from Helmingham Hall through Fitch of Ipswich, and that it had been milked by Daniel.
My association with the London Library and gradual contact with the British Museum, with collectors, and with the book trade, tended to stimulate a natural affection for old books, while it gradually and, at first, unconsciously gave to the movement a bibliographical and commercial direction. I conceived in my mind, apart from any collateral matters, a grand literary scheme. I saw before me all that former men, Heber included, had achieved toward a British Bibliography; and I determined to combine and collate the whole, and make it the nucleus of a New Work. The result was the appearance in 1867 of the Handbook of Early English Literature.
I made not only the British Museum, and the Oxford and Cambridge libraries, but Sion College, South Kensington, and Lambeth, pay me toll. I did not at first attend personally at Lambeth; but the present Bishop of Oxford, who was then librarian, copied such titles as I indicated to him, and his Lordship, I have to say, was very accurate, and wrote a very clear hand. I always found Dr Stubbs extremely kind and obliging in this way. Maitland was before my time.
I did not consider at the time that I had much ground for being ashamed of this performance; it was undeniably a long advance on my precursors; that I had a great deal to learn and unlearn was an experience to be gained by degrees, and at more or less casual opportunities; and it will become necessary to enter into some particulars of the circumstances which led and enabled me to undo piecemeal my maiden essay, and to build up from the ruins such a colossal structure as, on its near completion, no other civilised country can boast of possessing.
Thirty years have passed away. The Handbook has become only one of a series.
In the Hazlitt Memoirs I judged it to be high time to expose the ingenious strategy of the Rev. Canon Ainger and Mr Alexander Ireland in respect to my Lamb and Hazlitt labours. I have been, as a rule, fairly reticent and forbearing in these cases, and have refrained from appealing to the press. But I procured the insertion in two journals of protests against the assumption of Mr Frederic Harrison that a bibliography of English history was a novel project, and the apparent claim of Sir Walter Besant, as I infer from a paragraph in the Globe, to the rectification of the Whittington legend. I ought to be pleased that so illustrious a personage as Sir Walter thinks so humble an one as myself worth such flattering recognition. Peradventure, if I should reproduce my work, I shall be charged with having borrowed my statements from a great author and scholar.