days when for one small gilded manuscript men would willingly exchange broad manors, with pasture—­lands, chases, and blowing woodlands; days when kings would send anxious embassies across the sea, burdened with rich gifts to abbot and prior, if haply gold might purchase a single poet’s book.

But, says the scoffer, these limited editions and so forth foster the vile passions of competition.  Well, and if they do?  Is it not meet that men should strive together for such possessions?  We compete for the allotments of shares in American-meat companies, we outbid each other for tickets ’to view the Royal procession,’ we buffet at the gate of the football field, and enter into many another of the ignoble rivalries of peace; and are not books worth a scrimmage?—­books that are all those wonderful things so poetically set forth in a preceding paragraph!  Lightly earned, lightly spurned, is the sense, if not the exact phrasing, of an old proverb.  There is no telling how we should value many of our possessions if they were more arduously come by:  our relatives, our husbands and wives, our presentation poetry from the unpoetical, our invitation-cards to one-man shows in Bond Street, the auto-photographs of great actors, the flatteries of the unimportant, the attentions of the embarrassing:  how might we not value all such treasures, if they were, so to say, restricted to a limited issue, and guaranteed ’not to be reprinted’—­’plates destroyed and type distributed.’

Indeed, all nature is on the side of limited editions.  Make a thing cheap, she cries from every spring hedgerow, and no one values it.  When do we find the hawthorn, with its breath sweet as a milch-cow’s; or the wild rose, with its exquisite attar and its petals of hollowed pearl—­when do we find these decking the tables of the great? or the purple bilberry, or the boot-bright blackberry in the entremets thereof?  Think what that ‘common dog-rose’ would bring in a limited edition!  And new milk from the cow, or water from the well!  Where would champagne be if those intoxicants were restricted by expensive licence, and sold in gilded bottles?  What would you not pay for a ticket to see the moon rise, if nature had not improvidently made it a free entertainment; and who could afford to buy a seat at Covent Garden if Sir Augustus Harris should suddenly become sole impresario of the nightingale?

Yes, ‘from scarped cliff and quarried stone,’ Nature cries, ’Limit the Edition!  Distribute the type!’—­though in her capacity as the great publisher she has been all too prodigal of her issues, and ruinously guilty of innumerable remainders.  In fact, it is by her warning rather than by her example that we must be guided in this matter.  Let us not vulgarise our books, as she has done her stars and flowers.  Let us, if need be, make our editions smaller and smaller, our prices increasingly ‘prohibitive,’ rather than that we should forget the wonder and beauty of printed dream and thought, and treat our books as somewhat less valuable than wayside weeds.