a rueful smile, ‘Much shoe leather.’  He began with old furniture, china, and bric-a-brac, which ere long somewhat inconveniently filled his small rooms.  Prices rose, and means in those days were as small as the rooms.  No more purchases of Louis Seize and blue majolica and Palissy ware could be made.  Drawings by the old masters and small pictures were the next objects of the chase.  Here again the long purses were soon on his track, and the pursuit had to be abandoned, but not till many treasures had been garnered.  Last of all he became a book-hunter, beginning with little volumes of poetry and the drama from 1590 to 1610; and as time went on the boundaries expanded, but never so as to include black letter.

I dare not say Mr. Locker had all the characteristics of a great collector, or that he was entirely free from the whimsicalities of the tribe of connoisseurs, but he was certainly endowed with the chief qualifications for the pursuit of rarities, and remained clear of the unpleasant vices that so often mar men’s most innocent avocations.  Mr. Locker always knew what he wanted and what he did not want, and never could be persuaded to take the one for the other; he did not grow excited in the presence of the quarry; he had patience to wait, and to go on waiting, and he seldom lacked courage to buy.

He rode his own hobby-horse, never employing experts as buyers.  For quantity he had no stomach.  He shrank from numbers.  He was not a Bodleian man; he had not the sinews to grapple with libraries.  He was the connoisseur throughout.  Of the huge acquisitiveness of a Heber or a Huth he had not a trace.  He hated a crowd, of whatsoever it was composed.  He was apt to apologize for his possessions, and to depreciate his tastes.  As for boasting of a treasure, he could as easily have eaten beef at breakfast.

So delicate a spirit, armed as it was for purposes of defence with a rare gift of irony and a very shrewd insight into the weaknesses and noisy falsettos of life, was sure to be misunderstood.  The dull and coarse witted found Locker hard to make out.  He struck them as artificial and elaborate, perhaps as frivolous, and yet they felt uneasy in his company lest there should be a lurking ridicule behind his quiet, humble demeanour.  There was, indeed, always an element of mockery in Locker’s humility.

An exceedingly spiteful account of him, in which it is asserted that ‘most of his rarest books are miserable copies’ (how book-collectors can hate one another!), ends with the reluctant admission:  ’He was eminently a gentleman, however, and his manners were even courtly, yet virile.’  Such extorted praise is valuable.

I can see him now before me, with a nicely graduated foot-rule in his delicate hand, measuring with grave precision the height to a hair of his copy of Robinson Crusoe (1719), for the purpose of ascertaining whether it was taller or shorter than one being vaunted for sale in a bookseller’s catalogue just to hand.  His face, one of much refinement, was a study, exhibiting alike a fixed determination to discover the exact truth about the copy and a humorous realization of the inherent triviality of the whole business.  Locker was a philosopher as well as a connoisseur.