books that even the most inexperienced amateurs should try to
collect. There are books which no lover of literature can afford to
be without; classics, ancient and modern, on which the world has
pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be
able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the
smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and
Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and
Gibbon, Swift and Scott,--these every lover of letters will desire
to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list
of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the
tastes of men begin to differ very widely. An assortment of
broadsheet ballads and scrap-books, bought in boyhood, was the
nucleus of Scott's library, rich in the works of poets and
magicians, of alchemists, and anecdotists. A childish liking for
coloured prints of stage characters, may be the germ of a theatrical
collection like those of Douce, and Malone, and Cousin. People who
are studying any past period of human history, or any old phase or
expression of human genius, will eagerly collect little contemporary
volumes which seem trash to other amateurs. For example, to a
student of Moliere, it is a happy chance to come across "La Carte du
Royaume des Pretieuses"--(The map of the kingdom of the
"Precieuses")--written the year before the comedian brought out his
famous play "Les Precieuses Ridicules." This geographical tract
appeared in the very "Recueil des Pieces Choisies," whose authors
Magdelon, in the play, was expecting to entertain, when Mascarille
made his appearance. There is a faculty which Horace Walpole named
"serendipity,"--the luck of falling on just the literary document
which one wants at the moment. All collectors of out of the way
books know the pleasure of the exercise of serendipity, but they
enjoy it in different ways. One man will go home hugging a volume