essays you read of “priceless Elzevirs,” and “Aldines worth their weight in gold.”  Fired with hope, you hang about all the stalls, where you find myriads of Elzevirs, dumpy, dirty little tomes, in small illegible type, and legions of Aldines, books quite as dirty, if not so dumpy, and equally illegible, for they are printed in italics.  You think you are in luck, invest largely, and begin to give yourself the airs of an amateur and a discoverer.  Then comes somebody who knows about the matter in hand, and who tells you, with all the savage joy of a collector, that nobody wants any Elzevirs and Aldines, except a very few, and they must be in beautiful old bindings, uncut down, or scarcely cut down by the binder.  These you may long for, but you certainly will never find them in the fourpenny box.  The Duffer is always making the mistake of buying small bargains, as he thinks them, and so he will spend, in some time, perhaps, a hundred pounds.  With a hundred pounds, and with luck, and prudence, and cunning, he might perhaps buy one small volume which a collector who knew his business would not wholly disdain.  But, as it is, he has squandered his money, and has nothing to show for it but a heap of trash, of the wrong date, without the necessary misprints in the right places, ragged, short, and, above all, imperfect.  I suppose I have the richest collection of imperfect books in the world.  One hugs oneself on one’s Lucasta (very rare), or one’s Elzevir Caesar of the right date, or one’s first edition of MOLIERE, and then comes, with fiendish glee, the regular collector, and shows you that Lucasta has not the portrait of LOVELACE, that Caesar has not his pagination all wrong (as he ought to have), that the Molieres are Lyons piracies, that half of GILBERT’s Gentleman’s Diversion is not bound up with the rest, that, generally speaking, there are pages missing here and there all through your books, which you have never “collated,” that “a ticket of PADELOUP, the binder, has been taken off some broken board of a book, and stuck on to a modern imitation, and so forth, all through the collection.  You cannot sell it; nobody will take as a present this Library of a Gentleman who has given up collecting; even Free Libraries do not want this kind of treasure, and so it remains, littering your shelves, a monument of folly.  Happy are the Duffers whose eyes are impenetrably sealed, and who can go on believing, in spite of a modern water-mark, in their sham BURNS MSS. and their volumes with autographs of all the celebrated characters in history.  But my eyes are purged, and I do not think you shall find me collecting old books any more.  Certainly I shall not venture into auction-rooms, compete with the Trade, and get left with a book artfully run up, thanks to my enthusiasm, to four or five times its market value.