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.
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