perhaps, in the book-trade.  People find that they possess books highly priced in dealers’ catalogues, and, if they want money, they carry their treasures to the dealers.  But “advantage seldom comes of it.”  The dealer has a different price, very often, when he is a purchaser.  This is intelligible, but, to many persons who are not amateurs, the mania for rare postage-stamps passes all understanding.  Yet it is capable of being explained.  Like many other oddities and puzzling features in the ways of collectors, the high price of certain stamps is the consequence of the passion for perfection.  Any one can collect stamps—­little boys and schoolgirls often do.  But there comes a point at which foreign stamps and old stamps grow rare, and more rare, and, finally, next to impossible to procure.  Here it is that the heart of the mature collector begins to beat.  He is determined to have a perfect collection.  Nothing shall escape him in the way of printed franks on letters.  Now, nineteen-twentieths of his assortment he can buy in the gross, without trouble or great expense; but the last twentieth demands personal care and attention, and the hunting up of old family letters, and the haunting of great dealers’ shops, and peeping through dirty windows in shady lanes and alleys.  As he gets nearer and nearer a complete collection the spoil grows more and more shy, the excitement faster and more furious, till, finally, the amateur would sell an estate for a square inch of paper, and turn large England to a little stamp, if he had the opportunity.  The fury of the pastime is caused by the presence of definite limits.  There is only a certain known number of stamps in the world.  This limit makes perfection possible.

It is not as if you were collecting really beautiful things like Tanagra terra-cottas, or really rare and quaint and mysterious things like aggery beads.  Though Tanagra terra-cottas, and aggery beads, and fine examples of Moorish lustre, or of ancient Nankin, or of gold coins of the Roman Empire, are all rare, yet there is no definite limit to their number.  More may turn up any day when the pickaxe breaks into a new Tanagra cemetery, when a fallen palm in Ashanti brings up aggery beads clinging to its earthy roots, when a pot of coins is found by some old Roman way, and so forth.  To be sure, perfection may be attained in coin collecting, when a man has specimens of all known sorts, but even then he will pine for better specimens, for the best specimens.  In the other branches of the sport we have mentioned the collector may be eager, of course, for good things, but he can never know the passion of the stampomaniac who has all sorts but three, and finds these within his reach.  Perfection is within a step of such a man, and that step we fear he will take, even if it involves ever so many breaches of the Decalogue.  In one of this month’s magazines, in a story called “Mr. Pierrepoint’s Repentance,” Mr. Grant Allen tells the tale of a coin collector’s infamy, and that coin collector a clergyman and fellow of his college.  A pope is said to have stolen a rare book from a painter, and it is certain that enthusiastic collectors are apt to have “their moral tone lowered some,” as the American gentleman said about the lady whom he had wooed with intentions less than honourable.