Thackeray (1888) contains a list of all the pieces which can now be identified, and of the places where they are to be found, so as to put it readily in the power of the biographer, the collector, and the student to refer to them if he will. The Snob, Gownsman, National Omnibus, National Standard, The Constitutional, and Fraser's Magazine all contain essays, articles, or tales from his able pen, which, but for Mr. Johnson's patient efforts, might have been lost in course of time, when the evidence to identify them would have been wanting.

Bibliographies of the works of Carlyle, Swinburne, Ruskin, and Tennyson, as well as those of Dickens and Thackeray, have been compiled by R. H. Shepherd, and of the works of Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb by Alexander Ireland.

That famous artist George Cruikshank illustrated a large number of books, all of which are eagerly sought after by certain bodies of collectors. As in the case of other illustrated books, the value mainly depends upon the earliness of impression of the plates, and the condition; and consequently original editions are more highly esteemed than those which followed. Some capacity for judging engravings is required of the amateur who makes this branch of the subject a speciality, but in other respects he will find almost everything he is likely to require in G. W. Reid's Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of George Cruikshank (London, 1871, 8vo).

Bewick collectors have an infallible guide in the Rev. T. Hugo's Bewick Collector, a Descriptive Catalogue of the Works of T. and J. Bewick (published, with the supplement, in 2 vols., 1866-8, 8vo). It is related of this author that he once found a battered and ragged specimen of a child's book got up on strong-laid paper by the famous engraver. Only one or two copies are known to exist, as Bewick found the enterprise too expensive to pay, and accordingly discontinued it. The owner of this treasure was an old woman, who had derived her infant ideas of lions and tigers from its well-thumbed leaves, and who refused to part with an old friend, though sorely and even desperately pressed to do so.

How often is the enthusiastic book hunter thwarted when his hopes are on the point of being realised; how often must he succumb to what he may consider to be nothing better than prejudice or obstinacy? This is a question which every amateur learns in time to answer for himself.