PREFACE.

THE totally unexpected delay which has taken place in the completion of the General Index to my Bibliography has, combined with the successive dispersion of numerous collections of books during the last two or three years, and my habitual practice of registering every item hitherto undescribed or imperfectly so, to produce a further Appendix to what I fully believed at the time to be a final issue of titles on the sectional principle.

It might be supposed to be quite possible to hold over such new material until an opportunity arose for incorporating it with a consolidated alphabet. But as that is a distant contingency, and the labour of acquiring these entries from an infinite variety of sources is so arduous, and the likelihood of the recurrence of the articles more or less slender, the risk of the destruction of my MSS. records is more than I care to encounter; while every title preserved in type is a gain and a relief.

Since the First Supplement appeared in 1889, I have had under my eyes the large and important libraries of Sir Edward Sullivan, Mr. F. W. Cosens, Mr. Crawford of Cork, and Mr. Hailstone, besides numerous minor sales and an assortment of scarce books, tracts, and broadsides, obligingly lent to me by the always friendly booksellers. But the bulk of my acquisitions is necessarily derived from the incessant stores on view from season to season at the rooms of Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge.

I wish it were in my power to speak as favourably of some private possessors of rare or unique volumes in early English literature. I have not been exceptionally unfortunate in this respect; but in one or two instances where a so-called nobleman or gentleman is the owner of the only known copy of an ancient printed work, I have found it impracticable to prevail upon him to let me see it even for a few minutes under inspection by himself or his deputy.

The Right Honourable the Earl of Dysart refused to allow me to take a note of his unique copy of the Pastime of Pleasure, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509, because, his secretary wrote to me, the library was in a chaotic state. This patrician did not, or could not, see that it was a disgrace

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to him to keep his books in a chaotic state; but from collateral information I infer that the statement was false. Such men do not deserve to be entrusted with the possession of unique works, and I should like to be able to pass an Act of Parliament compelling them to surrender them to the country at a fair valuation. The Right Honourable the Earl of Dysart has it in his power to refuse access to literary monuments and records, which he is too ignorant to understand. His lordship does not probably know what Bibliography signifies; his noble mind cannot rise to the conception of a national undertaking. It is more in sympathy with barbed wire.

BARNES COMMON, SURREY,
October 1891.

W. C. H.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

COLLECTIONS AND NOTES.