Fourth Sale—

February 21st, 1881, and three following days. One thousand four hundred and nineteen lots = seven hundred and thirty-eight pounds, eighteen shillings.

Large prices were obtained for many of the books, especially for the early ones printed in Scotland.

The following are a few of the rarest of the volumes, together with the amounts for which they were sold:—

A Roman Breviary on vellum, printed by N. Jenson at Venice in 1482, and ornamented with borders to the pages, drawn by a pen, ninety-three pounds; Lo Doctrinal de Sapiensa, in the Catalan dialect, by Guy de Roye, printed about 1495, one hundred pounds; Missale pro usu totius Regni Norvegiæ (Haffniæ, 1519), with the arms and cypher of the King of Denmark on the back of the binding, one hundred and thirty-two pounds; The Falle of Princis, etc., by Boccaccio, translated by John Lydgate, and printed by Pynson in 1527, seventy-eight pounds; The Catechisme of Archbishop Hamilton, printed at 'Sanct Androus' in 1552, one hundred and forty-eight pounds; Tractate concerning ye Office and Dewtie of Kyngis, etc., written by William Lauder, and printed by John Scott at Edinburgh in 1556, seventy-seven pounds; Confessione della Fede Christiana, by Theodore Beza, printed in 1560, containing the autograph of Sir James Melville, and having MARIA R. SCOTOR[=V] stamped in gold on each cover, one hundred and forty-nine pounds; The Forme and Maner of Examination before the Admission to ye Tabill of ye Lord, usit by ye Ministerie of Edinburge (Edinburgh, 1581), seventy pounds; the first edition of the author's corrected text of Don Quixote (Madrid, 1608), together with the first edition of the second part (Madrid, 1615), one hundred and ninety-two pounds; dedication copy to King Charles II. of the Institutions of the Law of Scotland, by Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, afterwards Viscount Stair, two volumes (Edinburgh, 1681), in a remarkably fine contemporary Scotch binding, with the royal arms in gold on the covers, two hundred and ninety-five pounds; a first edition of Robinson Crusoe, three volumes (London, 1719-20), thirty-one pounds; one of the twelve copies, printed at a cost of upwards of ten thousand pounds, of the Botanical Tables of the Earl of Bute, nine volumes, with the arms of the Earl impressed in gold on the bindings, seventy-seven pounds; the first edition of Burns's Poems (Kilmarnock, 1786), with lines in the autograph of Burns, and a letter from J.G. Lockhart, ninety pounds; and a fine collection of Scots Ballads and Broadsides, one hundred and thirty in number, issued between 1669 and 1730, many of great rarity, one hundred and thirty-three pounds. Laing left a collection of drawings to the Royal Scottish Academy of Painting, of which he had been elected Honorary Professor of Ancient History and Antiquities in 1856. His prints were sold by Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge on the 21st of February 1880, in two hundred and thirteen lots, and realised two hundred and seventy pounds, thirteen shillings.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] Dictionary of National Biography.

BERTRAM, FOURTH EARL OF ASHBURNHAM, 1797-1878

Bertram, fourth Earl of Ashburnham, who was born on the 23rd of November 1797, and died on the 22nd of June 1878, was one of the greatest and most ardent of English book-collectors. He developed a taste for book-buying at a very early age. It is said that his first purchase was made in 1814, when, a boy at Westminster School, he bought a copy of the Secretes of Albertus Magnus for eighteenpence at Ginger's well-known shop in Great College Street, and at the time of his death he had amassed a library which ranked among the first in the kingdom. Magnificent as was his collection of printed books, the library was even still more notable for the manuscripts it contained, which amounted to nearly four thousand, and were remarkable for their value and importance. In addition to those which he bought separately, Lord Ashburnham acquired in 1847 the manuscripts of Count Guglielmo Libri for eight thousand pounds, and in 1849 he purchased the Stowe manuscripts for the same sum, and those of Jean Barrois for six thousand pounds. Five years after the death of Lord Ashburnham, his successor, the present Earl, offered the manuscripts, for one hundred and sixty thousand pounds, to the Trustees of the British Museum, who were anxious to purchase them for that sum. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, declined to find the money for the entire collection, but the Stowe manuscripts were acquired by the Government for forty-five thousand pounds, and divided between the British Museum and the library of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. To the latter institution were given the Irish manuscripts and certain volumes specially relating to Ireland. It had long been suspected that many of the manuscripts in the Libri and Barrois collections had been abstracted from French and Italian public libraries, and when this was proved to have been the case, principally through the researches of M. Delisle, the Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, it was arranged between the Trustees of the British Museum and the French authorities that should the former become possessors of the manuscripts, they would return the stolen volumes for the sum of twenty-four thousand pounds. As the Treasury refused to sanction the purchase of the whole of the Ashburnham manuscripts, this arrangement could not be carried out, and in 1887 the manuscripts, one hundred and sixty-six in number, stolen from the French and Italian libraries, were bought by Mr. Karl Trübner, acting as agent for the Grand Duke of Baden and the German Imperial authorities, for the same sum as the French had been willing to pay for them. The primary object of this transaction, says Mr. F.S. Ellis in his excellent account of the library in Quaritch's Dictionary of English Book-Collectors, 'was to recover the famous Manesse Liederbuch, a thirteenth century MS. carried away by the French from Heidelberg in 1656, the loss of which had ever since been regarded as a national calamity in Germany. For £6000 in cash and this precious volume, he handed over the 166 Libri and Barrois MSS. to the Bibliothèque Nationale. By a simple arithmetical process, we can conclude that £18,000 was the net cost to the German Exchequer of a single volume of old German ballads—the highest price ever paid for a book.' The stolen manuscripts which were not required to replace those taken from the French libraries, were purchased by the Italian Government.