The auctioneer was a little dried-up mummy of a man, the ugliness of whose countenance was, as it were, emphasized by a disagreeable leer which would ever and anon deepen into a broad grin; this man, with his dreary jokes and vapid small-talk, was equally repulsive to me.

Oh, the tap of his little hammer did knock against my very heart!

Of all the hammers in this busy and hammering world, from the huge forge-hammer with which the brawny blacksmith deals telling blows upon the glowing iron and beats it into shape, to the tiny hammer that the watchmaker so deftly handles, the ivory-headed, ebony-handled instrument of the auctioneer is the most potent.  From the day it was first upraised by the original auctioneer—­the nameless and unknown founder of a mighty line of auctioneers—­over the chattels of some unfortunate mortal, to the present time, when the red flag is constantly waving in all the great cities and towns of the world, what an immense amount of property of all kinds and descriptions has come under that little instrument!  At its fall the ancestral acres of how many spendthrift heirs have passed away from their families forever into the hands of wealthy plebeian parvenus!  By a few strokes Dives’s splendid mansion, and Croesus’s magnificent country-seat, and Phaeton’s famous fast horses become the property of others.  At its tap human beings have been sold into worse than Egyptian bondage.

Horace Walpole confidently hoped that his famous collection of virtu would be the envy and admiration of the relic-mongers and the curiosity-seekers of two or three hundred years hence; but he had not been dead fifty years before the red flag was waving over Strawberry Hill, and it was not taken down till the villa had been despoiled of all the curious and costly toys and bawbles with which it was packed and crammed.  At each stroke of the hammer,—­and for four-and-twenty days the quaint Gothic mansion resounded with the “Going, going, gone” of the auctioneer,—­at every stroke of the hammer Walpole must have turned uneasily in his grave; for at every stroke of that fatal implement some beautiful miniature, or rare engraving, or fine painting, or precious old coin, or beloved old vase, or bit of curious old armor, or equally curious relic of the olden time, passed into the possession of some unknown person or other.

And the Duke of Roxburghe’s magnificent collection of rare, curious, and valuable books, in the gathering of which he spent a goodly portion of his life, and evinced the policy and finesse of the most wily statesman and the shrewdness and cunning of a Jew money-lender, was soon after his decease scattered, by the hammer of Evans, over England and the Continent.  A circumstantial history of this memorable sale was written by Dibdin the bibliomaniac.