personage tellingly reproved me by suggesting that the first thing for me to do was to learn Italian.

My perseverance, however, was indomitable. I had set my heart on writing about Venice. It was enough. I did not, as Mr Quaritch observed, know much about Italian. I had never seen the place. When I wrote to Mr Ruskin respectfully soliciting helpful suggestions, he left my letter unanswered. What could be done? Why, I borrowed the few works which were to be found at our library, bought some which were not, and for others I sent to Italy through Molini. I taught myself French and Italian, and the Venetian dialect. I studied all the views of the city which I could find, and I brought out my first rough draft in 1857, when I was three-and-twenty.

An amusing illustration of my early faculty of inspiring confidence in the minds of those with whom I dealt was afforded by the perfect trust of Molini in my solvency and his unwillingness to allow my father any credit, while the latter actually discharged both my obligations and his own. The elder Molini was himself of Venetian origin, and of a family which gave more than one Doge to the Republic; he always impressed my fancy as the ideal of a decayed Italian grandee. Not only his appearance, but his deportment, was that of a gentleman. He served me excellently well; but true it is that, in spite of his ducal ancestry and exalted traditions, there was the Lombard beneath and not far from the surface. The representative of Doges, this sovereign prince by inheritance and blood, was the only man who ever charged me interest on an overdue account.

As to my book, it is familiar enough that it was reprinted in 1860 by Messrs Smith, Elder & Co., and is viewed as the standard English work on the subject, so far as it goes. But I contemplate a third and greatly improved edition, which will carry the narrative to the end. My collections for the task are now in the library, to which I partly gave, and partly sold, them a generation since. They included a copy of the much overestimated Squittinio della Liberta Veneta, published at Mirandola in 1612.

There are very few now living who recollect, as I do, the library as it originally appeared, when Mr Cochrane was curator, and the institution occupied only the upper part of the house in the Square. I was not a personal subscriber till 1869; but I had the complete range of the shelves jure patris, and my loan of an unlimited number of books for an unlimited term was never called in question. I have kept volumes at our house for three years uninterruptedly. In those days there were fewer members, and the demand for the class of publications which I required was extremely limited.

One of the staff at the library, a subordinate dignitary, used to dabble a little in books on his own account, and occasionally offered me his purchases. I think that his more distinguished colleagues gradually learned to do the same. But the first-indicated individual, I remember very well, once had on sale a set of fourteen volumes of some neglected publication, for which he submitted a proposal of eighteenpence. He resided at Hammersmith, while I was at Kensington, and I am sure that I do not exaggerate when I say that he carried this merchandise half a dozen times between his abode and St James’s Square before I agreed to take the lot off his hands. I thought of Corporal Nym and the lute-case.

I was even now beginning to be multifarious and polygonal. I have sketched out in my Four Generations of a Literary Family my apprenticeship to bibliography. The starting-point was about 1857, when Mr Bohn produced his revision of the Manual of Lowndes, 1834, of which Mr F. S. Ellis used to speak as a very creditable performance for a drunken bookseller. My haunt in St James’s Square again befriended me. I met with the Heber Catalogue, Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities, and such like. I was unconsciously shifting my ground; yet it was to be long enough before the new departure took form. I allowed myself ample time to ruminate over the matter, to reconnoitre, and to make notes. A copy of the augmented and revised Lowndes became my memorandum book.

The original meagre sketch of the Venetian work had introduced me to Mr Russell Smith the publisher, who undertook it on my father agreeing to contribute to the cost. I acquired the habit of frequenting Smith’s shop in Soho Square; I bought a few trifles from him, and in 1858 he took my commission for a book at the Bliss sale—Lord Westmoreland’s Otia Sacra, 1648—for which my father, to his consternation, learned that I had to give nearly £9. The copy was in the original calf binding, and was one of the very few which were entirely perfect. It was my earliest purchase at an auction. 1858-9-60 passed away—the second edition of the Venetian History appeared—and I, after sundry experiments, finally resolved to cast my lot in with antiquarian literature as an editor and a bibliographer.

It is not my present mission to enter into detail respecting my innumerable experiences of a normal character in connection with publishers and booksellers. These are matters of no permanent value or interest to anyone. I have had, in common with the majority of folks similarly situated, my sorrows, my disappointments, my wrongs and my triumphs. Luctor et Emergo. I have known what it has been to be unfairly abused and perhaps unfairly commended. I have kept myself proudly and wilfully apart, and under circumstances, of which no other person has ever comprehended or measured the difficulties, I have held my ground, although once or twice the keel of my dingy has grazed the rocks.

CHAPTER II