About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession belonged to some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned the bookstalls a little before and after the year 1790.  He marked them with certain ciphers, always at the end of the volume.  They are in various languages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worth buying, or that I should not have bought without that indication to induce me.  All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, upon the owner’s death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they had returned; and there I found this portion of them just before my old haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room for the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road.  I have endeavoured without success to discover the name of their former possessor.  He must have been a remarkable man, and the whole of his collection, judging of it by that part which has come into my hands, must have been singularly curious.  A book is the more valuable to me when I know to whom it has belonged, and through what “scenes and changes” it has passed.

Sir Thomas More.—­You would have its history recorded in the fly-leaf as carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse is preserved.

Montesinos.—­I confess that I have much of that feeling in which the superstition concerning relics has originated, and I am sorry when I see the name of a former owner obliterated in a book, or the plate of his arms defaced.  Poor memorials though they be, yet they are something saved for a while from oblivion, and I should be almost as unwilling to destroy them as to efface the Hic jacet of a tombstone.  There may be sometimes a pleasure in recognising them, sometimes a salutary sadness.

Yonder Chronicle of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes, and yonder “General History of Spain,” by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by their respective authors.  The minds of these laborious and useful scholars are in their works, but you are brought into a more personal relation with them when you see the page upon which you know that their eyes have rested, and the very characters which their hands have traced.  This copy of Casaubon’s Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor.  He had perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one of the most pleasing of his Conversations; these letters had carried him in spirit to the age of their writer, and shown James I. to him in the light wherein James was regarded by contemporary scholars, and under the impression thus produced Landor has written of him in his happiest mood, calmly, philosophically, feelingly, and with no more of favourable leaning than justice will always manifest when justice is in good humour and in charity with all men.  The book came from the palace library at Milan, how or when abstracted I know not, but this beautiful dialogue would never have been written had it remained there in its place upon the shelf, for the worms to finish the work which they had begun.  Isaac Casaubon must be in your society, Sir Thomas, for where Erasmus is you will be, and there also Casaubon will have his place among the wise and the good.  Tell him, I pray you, that due honour has in these days been rendered to his name by one who as a scholar is qualified to appreciate his merits, and whose writings will be more durable than monuments of brass or marble.