patient man is frequently rewarded by a find of peculiar interest.

One day, a few years ago, I picked up two square folio volumes of manuscript bound in old, soft morocco, grown shabby from knocking about. The title was "Lyford Redivivus, or A Grandame's Garrulity."

Lyford Redivivus

or

A Grandami's Garrulity.
By

On Old Woman

Examination showed me that it was a sort of dictionary of proper names. In one volume there were countless changes and erasures; the other was evidently a fair copy. Although there was no name in either volume to suggest the author, it needed no second glance to see that both were written in the clear, bold hand of Mrs. Piozzi. The price was but trifling, and I promptly paid it and carried the volumes home. Some months later, I was reading a little volume, "Piozziana," by Edward Mangin, the first book about Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi, when, to my surprise, my eye met the following:

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX

TILDEN FUNDATIONS

Early in the year 1815, I called on her [Mrs. Piozzi] then resident in Bath, to examine a manuscript which she informed me she was preparing for the press. After a short conversation, we sat down to a table on which lay two manuscript volumes, one of them, the fair copy of her work, in her own incomparably fine hand-writing. The title was "Lyford Redivivus"; the idea being taken from a diminutive old volume, printed in 1657, and professing to be an alphabetical account of the names of men and women, and their derivations. Her work was somewhat on this plan: the Christian or first name given, Charity, for instance, followed by its etymology; anecdotes of the eminent or obscure, who have borne the appellation; applicable epigrams, biographical sketches, short poetical illustrations, &c.

I read over twelve or fourteen articles and found them exceedingly interesting; abounding in spirit, and novelty; and all supported by quotations in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Celtic, and Saxon. There was a learned air over all, and in every page, much information, ably compressed, and forming what I should have supposed, an excellent popular volume. She was now seventy-five; and I naturally complimented her, not only on the work in question, but on the amazing beauty and variety of her hand-writing. She seemed gratified and desired me to mention the MS. to some London publisher. This I afterwards did, and sent the work to one alike distinguished for discernment and liberality, but with whom we could not come to an agreement. I have heard no more of "Lyford Redivivus" since, and know not in whose hands the MS. may now be.

A moment later it was in mine, and I was examining it with renewed interest.

My secret is out. I collect, as I can, human-interest books-books with a provenance, as they are called;

but as I object to foreign words, I once asked a Bryn Mawr professor, Dr. Holbrook, to give me an English equivalent. "I should have to make one," he said. "You know the word whereabouts, I suppose." I admitted that I did. "How would whenceabouts do?" I thought it good.

In recent years, presentation, or association, books have become the rage, and the reason is plain. Every one is unique, though some are uniquer than others. My advice to any one who may be tempted by some volume with an inscription of the author on its flyleaf or title-page is, "Yield with coy submission" and at once. While such books make frightful inroads on one's bank account, I have regretted only my economies, never my extravagances.

I was glancing the other day over Arnold's "Record of Books and Letters." He paid in 1895 seventy-one dollars for a presentation Keats's "Poems," 1817, and sold it at auction in 1901 for five hundred.1 A few years later I was offered a presentation copy of the work, with an inscription to Keats's intimate friends, Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, for a thousand dollars, and while I was doing some preliminary financing the book disappeared, and forever; and I have never ceased regretting that the dedication copy of Boswell's "Life of Johnson," to Sir Joshua Reynolds, passed into the collection of my lamented

1 See infra, chapter II. p. 104, where the further adventures of this book are related, and where its price at the Hagen sale, May 14, 1918, becomes $1950, with A. E. N. as the bidder-up.