Much has of late been written, however, and pleasantly written, about the collecting and preserving of books.  It is not my intention here to add to this department of modern literature.  But I shall select from among my volumes some which seem less known in detail to modern readers than they should be, and I shall give brief “retrospective reviews” of these as though they were new discoveries.  In other cases, where the personal history of a well-known book seems worth detaching from our critical estimate of it, that shall be the subject of my lucubration.  Perhaps it may not be an unwelcome novelty to apply to old books the test we so familiarly apply to new ones.  They will bear it well, for in their case there is no temptation to introduce any element of prejudice.  Mr. Bludyer himself does not fly into a passion over a squat volume published two centuries ago, even when, as in the case of the first edition of Harrington’s Oceana, there is such a monstrous list of errata that the writer has to tell us, by way of excuse, that a spaniel has been “questing” among his papers.

These scarce and neglected books are full of interesting things.  Voltaire never made a more unfortunate observation than when he said that rare books were worth nothing, since, if they were worth anything, they would not be rare.  We know better nowadays; we know how much there is in them which may appeal to only one man here and there, and yet to him with a voice like a clarion.  There are books that have lain silent for a century, and then have spoken with the trumpet of a prophecy.  We shall disdain nothing; we shall have a little criticism, a little anecdote, a little bibliography; and our old book shall go back to the shelves before it has had time to be tedious in its babbling.

CAMDEN’S “BRITANNIA”

BRITAIN:  or a chorographical description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning; out of the depth of Antiquitie:  beautified with Mappes of the severall Shires of England; Written first in Latine by William Camden, Clarenceux K. of A. Translated newly into English by Philemon Holland.  Londini, Impensis Georgii Bishop & Joannis Norton, M.DC.X.

There is no more remarkable example of the difference between the readers of our light and hurrying age and those who obeyed “Eliza and our James,” than the fact that the book we have before us at this moment, a folio of some eleven hundred pages, adorned, like a fighting elephant, with all the weightiest panoply of learning, was one of the most popular works of its time.  It went through six editions, this vast antiquarian itinerary, before the natural demand of the vulgar released it from its Latin austerity; and the title-page we have quoted is that of the earliest English edition, specially translated, under the author’s eye, by Dr. Philemon Holland, a laborious schoolmaster