subject of automobiles, and especially discussion relative to parts thereof, we try to show an intelligent interest in another's hobby, even if it happen to be a collection of postage-stamps. Our own hobby may be, probably is, ridiculous to some one else, but in all the wide range of human interest, from postagestamps to paintings, the sport of the millionaire, there is nothing that begins so easily and takes us so far as the collecting of books.

And hear me. If you would know the delight of book-collecting, begin with something else, I care not what. Book-collecting has all the advantages of other hobbies without their drawbacks. The pleasure of acquisition is common to all that's where the sport lies; but the strain of the possession of books is almost nothing; a tight, dry closet will serve to house them, if need be.

It is not so with flowers. They are a constant care. Some one once wrote a poem about "old books and fresh flowers." It lilted along very nicely; but I remark that books stay old, indeed get older, and flowers do not stay fresh: a little too much rain, a little too much sun, and it is all over.

Pets die too, in spite of constant care — perhaps by reason of it. To quiet a teething dog I once took him, her, it, to my room for the night and slept soundly. Next morning I found that the dog had committed suicide by jumping out of the window.

The joys of rugs are a delusion and a snare. They cannot be picked up here and there, tucked in a

traveling-bag, and smuggled into the house; they are hard to transport, there are no auction records against them, and the rug market knows no bottom. I never yet heard a man admit paying a fair price for a rug, much less a high one. "Look at this Scherazak, a friend remarks; "I paid only nine dollars for it and it's worth five hundred if it's worth a penny." When he is compelled to sell his collection, owing to an unlucky turn in the market, it brings seventeen-fifty. And rugs are ever a loafing place for moths But that's a chapter by itself.

Worst of all, there is no literature about them. I know very well that there are books about rugs; I own some. But as all books are not literature, so all literature is not in books. Can a rug-collector enjoy a catalogue? I sometimes think that for the overworked business man a book-catalogue is the best reading there is. Did you ever see a rug-collector, pencil in hand, poring over a rug-catalogue?

Print-catalogues there are; and now I warm a little. They give descriptions that mean something; a scene may have a reminiscent value, a portrait suggests a study in biography. Then there are dimensions for those who are fond of figures and states and margins, and the most ignorant banker will tell you that a wide margin is always better than a narrow one. Prices, too, can be looked up and compared, and results, satisfactory or otherwise, recorded. Prints, too, can be snugly housed in portfolios. But for a lasting hobby give me books.

Book-collectors are constantly being ridiculed by scholars for the pains they take and the money they spend on first editions of their favorite authors; and it must be that they smart under the criticism, for they are always explaining, and attempting rather foolishly to justify their position. Would it not be better to say, as Leslie Stephen did of Dr. Johnson's rough sayings, that "it is quite useless to defend them to any one who cannot enjoy them without defense"?

I am not partial to the "books which no gentleman's library should be without," fashionable a generation or two ago. The works of Thomas Frognall Dibdin do not greatly interest me, and where will one find room to-day for Audubon's "Birds" or Roberts's "Holy Land" except on a billiard-table or under a bed?

The very great books of the past have become so rare, so high-priced, that it is almost useless for the ordinary collector to hope ever to own them, and fashion changes in book-collecting as in everything else. Aldines and Elzevirs are no longer sought. Our interest in the Classics being somewhat abated, we pass them over in favor of books which, we tell ourselves, we expect some day to read, the books written by men of whose lives we know something. I would rather have a "Paradise Lost" with the first title-page,1 in

The facsimile (page 6) is from the first edition, with the first title-page. From the Hagen collection. Mr. Hagen has written on the fly-leaf, "Rebound from original calf binding which was too far gone to repair." In the process of binding it was seen that the title-page was part of a signature and not a separate leaf as in the case of the issue with the "Second" title, 1667, which would seem to settle the priority of these two titles.

Paradise loft.

A

POEM

Written in

TEN BOOKS

By JOHN MILTON.

Licensed and Entred according to Order.

LONDON

Printed, and are to be fold by Peter Parker under Creed Church neer Aldgate; And by Robert Boulter at the Turks Head in Bishopsgate-street; And Matthias Walker, under St. Dunstons Church in Fleet-freet, 1667.

contemporary binding, or an "Angler," than all the Aldines and Elzevirs ever printed.

That this feeling is general, accounts, I take it, for the excessively high prices now being paid for first editions of modern authors like Shelley, Keats, Lamb, and, to come right down to our own day, Stevenson. Would not these authors be amazed could they know in what esteem they are held, and what fabulous prices are paid for volumes which, when they were published, fell almost stillborn from the press? We all know the story of Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat": how a "remainder" was sold by Quaritch at a penny the copy. It is now worth its weight in gold, and Keats's "Endymion," once a "remainder" bought by a London bookseller at fourpence, now commands several hundred dollars. I paid three hundred and sixty dollars for mine but it was once Wordsworth's and has his name on the title-page.

But it is well in book-collecting, while not omitting the present, never to neglect the past. "Old books are best," says Beverly Chew, beloved of all collectors; and I recall Lowell's remark: "There is a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us." It was a recollection of these sayings that prompted me, if prompting was necessary, to pay a fabulous price the other day for a copy of "Hesperides, or the Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq.," a beautiful copy of the first edition in the original sheep.

We collectors know the saying of Bacon: "Some