leave, I recalled his attention to the book. The result was that he poured forth an oration delicious to listen to, full of distinct proofs

That what's impossible can't be,

And never, never comes to pass;

that no such book containing what I had stated it did contain could exist; and when he had brought his brilliant discourse to an end shook hands and bade me 'good-bye,' convinced, I have no doubt, in his own mind, that he had convinced me, because, in the face of all he had said, I had not impudence sufficient, even if he had waited, to pull the book in question out of that pocket in which I had brought it with me for the purpose of giving it to him. I would have given much to have had present a shorthand writer who could have taken down that wonderful specimen of Macaulay's power of talk.

I never heard anything at all to be compared with it but once. That was during a stroll over Weybridge Common with that warmhearted friend and profound scholar, the great Saxonist John Mitchell Kemble; when he descanted upon his great theme, the Saxons in England, the nature of the mark,' and other cognate points, with such overpowering eloquence that I could scarcely tear myself away from him when the train came that was to bring me back to London. I remember two things he mentioned on that day. The first was that he never wrote down a single line of any paper or book— the Saxons in England for instance-until the paper or book was arranged and composed in his own mind. The second, that among other illustrations of ancient tenures, forest rights, &c., which he had picked up at Addlestone (where he was then living, and to which the old forest of Windsor had formerly extended), was the custom of deciding how far the rights of the owner of land extended into the stream, on which his property is situated, by a man standing on the brink with 'one foot on the land and the other in the water and throwing a tenpenny hatchet into the water; where the hatchet fell was the limit. This he had learned from an old man born and bred in the forest who remembered having once seen it done.

Such of my readers as know Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Rechts-Alterthümer will remember that a similar practice is recorded in that vast monument of legal archæology. I often wonder that no young barrister has had the courage to translate this work. Probably it would not be remunerative in the shape of pounds, shillings, and pence, but it could not fail to give him a high position in his profession; or what would be unquestionably more popular, use the book as Michelet did in his Origines du Droit Français, make Grimm's work the basis of a clear and interesting history of the antiquities of English law.

But if books occasionally disappear like certain classes of insects, like them also they as suddenly reappear, of which I have myself experienced several curious proofs. Talking of books and insects, I should like to know why it is that so many bookmen and antiquaries,

That inquiry

like Douce and Albert Way, have been entomologists. has connected with it a good story about Francis Douce and Cobbett which must wait some more fitting time to tell.

Reverting to the curious reappearance of books, and to the manner in which, after having given up all hopes of obtaining some muchdesired volume, no sooner is one copy found than a second one turns up, I had a curious experience with respect to one of my Junius volumes. I had long been looking out in vain for a copy of The Vices, a Poem in Three Cantos, from the original MS. in the presumed handwriting of the author of "The Letters of Junius," 1828," and which a well-known Junius collector had repeatedly advertised for without success, when, taking up one of Wilson's catalogues, always worth going through, I saw in it, to my great delight, The Vices. But my delight was somewhat diminished when I recollected I had had the catalogue some days, but had been too busy to read it. I started off at once to Great Russell Street (it was before he removed to King William Street), but, as I feared, the book was gone. On asking Wilson who was the lucky purchaser, he named a nobleman then a member of the House of Commons, who, he said, he was sure would willingly lend it to me for a few days if I asked him. As I had not the advantage of being known to the fortunate purchaser, it was not till I had received reiterated assurances of his invariable kindness in such matters that I summoned up resolution to follow this advice. My application was most promptly and courteously granted. I at once went through the book, and came to the conclusion that it was not by Junius, but by the notorious William Combe, the author of Doctor Syntax, of that precious repository of Georgian scandal in nine volumes, the Royal Register, the Diaboliad, &c. The book contains a facsimile of the original MS., with a facsimile of one of Junius's Letters; but as of the many Junius claimants there is not one whose claim is not based on identity of handwriting, I place no faith in such supposed identity. Of course I returned the book almost immediately, and had no sooner done so than I saw in a catalogue from some bookseller at Islington another copy marked at rather a high figure. This I secured, and it is now before me, and I see by a memorandum in it my attention was first called to The Vices by Lord Brougham, when he mentioned to me the Verses addressed to Betty Giles' which form so important a feature in the magnificent volume on the Handwriting of Junius by M. Chabot, with Preface and Collateral Evidence by the Hon. Edward Twisleton, of which I have a presentation copy from the editor, to whom I had lent for this book. a letter from Lord Lyttelton dated Maestricht, November 27, 1771,' which, by showing, as it does, that Lord Lyttelton had been and was then travelling on the Continent, completely negatives his claim to be the writer of the Letters of Junius which were at that very time publishing in the Public Advertiser. That letter was one of several

by him which I purchased at a second-hand book and print shop in the Blackfriars Road.

But a second instance in my own experience of this turning up, about the same time, of a duplicate copy of a book which had been long and anxiously looked for, is the more curious, inasmuch as the volume to which I am referring is of greater rarity and literary importance than The Vices. I refer to the then very rare and most interesting collection of Neapolitan fairy tales, Il Pentamerone del Cavalier Giovan Battista Basile.'

My interest in the Pentamerone was first excited by the references made to it in Edgar Taylor and Mrs. Austin's admirable selection from it in their German Popular Stories so admirably translated by them from the collection of the Brothers Grimm and so wonderfully illustrated by George Cruikshank, and of which my copy-væ mihi !— has been thumbed away by two generations of juvenile readers: that book stimulating the curiosity as to the history of fiction, and its cognate subject nursery literature, which had been awakened in me by the admirable articles so entitled in the Quarterly from the pen of the late Sir Francis Palgrave; and I mastered German enough to wade through the three little Almain quarto volumes of the original Kinder- und Haus-Märchen published at Göttingen in 1822. There I learned more about the Pentamerone, and tried hard to secure a copy of it, but waited long before that most courteous and clever of caterers for such literary wants (of whom more anon), Tom Rodd, got me that which I now possess, which is of the edition printed at Naples in 1674.

But during the ten or fifteen years which elapsed before I got this copy of Basile, the idea which I had entertained of mastering the Neapolitan dialect and translating Basile's stories into English had passed away, and I had other work in hand; and I only secured the book in case, at some future time, I might take up again the idea of preparing an English version of it.

Within a month of getting this copy I was offered another—and, strangely enough, at a shop also in Newport Street, and within fifty yards of Tom Rodd's. I of course secured that, and had the pleasure of giving it to Crofton Croker, the author of the Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, who, like myself, had long been on the look-out for one.

What a number of old friends and pleasant associations in connection with them will the sight of an old book sometimes recall to our minds! I have already mentioned the accomplished authors of the Lays of the Minnesingers and of Maistre Wace his Chronicle of the Norman Conquest, Edgar Taylor and Crofton Croker. To these I must add the name of Felix Liebrecht, the learned translator and annotator of Dunlop's History of Fiction, a book which I commend to the attention of any publisher or editor of a new edition of Dunlop. I owe

my knowledge of this accomplished scholar to Sir George Lewis, who, when Liebrecht visited England some five-and-twenty years since, did me the kindness to give him a letter of introduction to me. Strangely enough, I did not then know that he had translated the Pentamerone into German. His translation in two volumes, with a preface by Jacob Grimm, was published at Breslau in 1846. English antiquaries are indebted to him also for a work of special interest to them, but which, I have reason to think, is not known so generally as it ought to be. I allude to Des Gervasius von Tilbury Otia Imperialia. In einer Auswahl neu herausgegeben und mit Anmerkungen begleitet, 8vo, 1856.' It is dedicated to Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, and the fifty or sixty pages of the original text of Gervase are accompanied by upwards of two hundred pages of most valuable notes. I had also the pleasure of numbering among my friends the late John Edward Taylor, the English translator of the Pentamerone, published in 1848 with illustrations by George Cruikshank, and of rendering him some small service in connection with it. He had heard me say that my friend and near connection, the Rev. James Morton, Vicar of Holbeach, the learned editor of the Ancren Riwle and other semi-Saxon and Early English poems, had a Neapolitan glossary, and Taylor asked me if I could borrow it for him. I wrote at once to the vicar, and the answer was one confirmatory of what I have already insisted upon. Mr. Morton presented me with Galiani's Del Dialetto Napolitano and the accompanying two volumes of the same author's Vocabolario Napolitano-Toscana, in order that I might have the pleasure of lending them' to John Edward Taylor.

But perhaps the most curious and valuable recovery of a book long sought for occurred to the late Mr. Grenville, whose most munificent bequest of his extraordinary library to the British Museum entitles him to the gratitude of all scholars. I mention the fact on the authority of my late honoured friend Mr. Amyot, the secretary, friend, and biographer of Wyndham, and for so many years Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries and Director of the Camden Society. Among the choicest books in his library Mr. Grenville possessed one of two volumes of an excessively rare fifteener, I think, the Mazarine Bible, printed on vellum and magnificently bound. Of course he was very anxious to get a copy of the missing volume also on vellum, but he hoped almost against hope. After many years, however, he had the unexpected and almost unexampled good fortune to get not only a copy on vellum, but the identical copy, as shown by the binding, which had been so long separated from the one in his possession. Mr. Grenville, when showing the books to Mr. Amyot and to Samuel Rogers, who was there at the same time, told the history of his good for

tune.

Amyot said it was the most remarkable coincidence he had ever

heard.

Rogers did not quite agree to this, and proceeded to mention the following, which he thought still more remarkable.

An officer who was ordered to India went, on the day before leaving England, to his lawyer's in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The day being wet, he took a hackney coach, and when he got out, as he was paying the driver, dropped a shilling. He looked in the mud and slush for it in vain, and so did the coachman. On his return home after some years' service he had again occasion to go to his lawyer's in Lincoln's Inn Fields. When leaving, he recollected his lost shilling, and by some unaccountable impulse began to look for it, when, strange to say, just at the very spot where he had paid the coachman, and on the very. edge of the kerbstone, he found

'The shilling!' was the hasty conclusion of my excellent friend. 'Not exactly,' said Rogers, but twelve-pennyworth of coppers wrapped up in brown paper!'

Samuel Rogers is said to have been great at what Arbuthnot called The Art of selling Bargains, of which curious tract, with its unquotable and Swiftian leading title (for which the curious reader is referred to Arbuthnot's works, vol. ii. p. 156), I once picked up an original copy which I presented to a worthy member of the Stock Exchange fully capable of enjoying the humour of it. But probably the reader may now be of opinion that that we shake hands and part,' at least for the present.

now 'tis time

So be it!

WILLIAM J. THOмS.