and replied, 'Books like those can never die. So long as learning holds its sway over the few, they will be bought and treasured by the many.' In this he would have been wrong, for few people care nowadays for volumes such as these. The times have changed utterly, and we with them.

At this same sale was a book which sold for less than almost any other, and it lay hidden away under this bald and misleading title: 'Veteris et Novi Testamenti in Ling. Indica, Cantabr. in Nova Anglia.' Simply this, and nothing more. No statement as to date, condition or binding appears in Cooper's catalogue, and yet this Bible is none other than John Eliot's translation into the Indian language, with a metrical version of the Psalms in the same vernacular, published at Cambridge, Mass., in 1663-61. An auctioneer of the present day would print the title of this volume in large capitals, and tell us whether or no it had the rare dedication to King Charles II., of pious memory, which was only inserted in twenty copies sent to England as presents. If it had, then this book, wherever it may be, is now worth much more than its weight in gold, for at Lord Hardwicke's sale, held in London on June 29, 1888, such a desirable copy was knocked down for £580.

Why this immense advance in price, seeing that probably there is no man in England to-day who could read a single line of John Eliot's free translation? The reason is plain. Since 1661 sleepy New England has vanished like the light canoes of countless Indians, and in the busy United States there has grown up a great demand for anything which illustrates the early history of North America. Had such a contingency struck old Lazarus Seaman, he would have made his will to suit the exigences of the case, and perhaps taken more interest in John Eliot and his missionary enterprises than anyone did at the time, or has done since.

It may perhaps be said that Seaman's library must have been of a special kind, one which such a learned divine might be expected to gather within his walls; but as a matter of fact this was not so. Between 1676 and 1682, October to October in each of those years, exactly thirty sales of books were held by auction in London, among them the libraries of Sir Kenelm Digby, Dr. Castell, the author of the 'Lexicon Heptaglotton,' Dr. Gataker, Lord Warwick, and other noted persons. The general character of all the seventeenth-century catalogues which time has spared for our perusal is substantially the same. Every one of them reflects the taste and fashion of the day, as did Agrippa's magic glass the forms of absent friends. Still harping chiefly on theology! as Polonius might say, these catalogues are crammed with polemics and books of grave discourse. Anything which could not, by hook or by crook, be dragged, as to its contents, within the circumference of the fashionable craze, was disposed of for a trifling sum. Even in 1682 the learned world, or at least our narrow corner of it, was inhabited almost entirely by crop-eared Puritans, with sugar-loaf hats on their heads and broad buckles to their shoes, and by Philosophers. True! Cromwell had gone to his account, and Charles II. held Court at St. James's and elsewhere, but the King and his merry companions were not reading men unless a profound knowledge of 'Hudibras,' that book which Pepys could not abide the sight of, could make them so. The anti-Puritans patronized Butler, and doted on Sir Charles Sedley, the Earl of Rochester and a few more, who scribbled love-verses by day, and gambled and fought and drank at night. But these worshipped Thalia and Erato only, with music and dancing and other delights, and knew nothing of solid hard work by the midnight oil. They had no books to speak of, and the few they had were light and airy like themselves, and for the most part as worthless.

On November 25, 1678, a great sale was held at the White Hart, in Bartholomew Close. The books were 'bought out of the best libraries abroad, and out of the most eminent seats of learning beyond the seas,' or, more truthfully, had been removed from the shops of seven London book-sellers who had combined to rig the market. Books of all kinds were dispersed at this sale, which continued de die in diem till the heptarchy was satisfied. Were the members of this pioneer combination alive now, they would weep to think that they gave away on that occasion—practically gave away—scores of what have long since become aristocrats among books. Americana were there in plenty, and some of these are now so extremely rare and valuable that they are hardly to be procured for love or money; some few, indeed, have completely disappeared, tossed lightly aside, probably by disgusted purchasers, or carted back again to the shops from whence they came, to be stacked once more till they perished utterly of damp and neglect, moth, mice and rust. On the other hand our old friends, the Puritans, revelled in grim folios bought up at prices which, the change in the value of money notwithstanding, would hardly be exceeded now. Walton's 'Biblia Sacra Polyglotta' was an immense favourite, a distinction it doubtless deserved, and, indeed, deserves yet, though we can see that Walton must have 'gone down' woefully in the last hundred years, when we come to calculate the necessaries of life that could be bought then with a piece of gold, and to contrast them with the meagre display such a sum would purchase now. The truth perhaps, is that, although education was less widely diffused in the days of the Stuarts, it was more deep and thorough. A savant was then like a huge octopus that devastates whole districts, and daily grows fatter and more bloated at the expense of everything that moves within reach of its spreading tendrils.

To this effect are we taught by these ancient catalogues, which, however, do not exhaust all their interest in mere matters of prices and fashion. We can learn much from their pages and advertisements of the manners and customs of our ancestors in Bookland. It seems that there were travelling auctioneers a couple of centuries ago who prefaced their remarks with eulogies of the Mayor and Corporation of each town at which they stopped, by way, no doubt, of securing their patronage. Sales began at eight o'clock in the morning then, and went on, with a mid-day interval for refreshment, until late at night. Sometimes the auctioneer sold by the candle-end; that is to say, lit a morsel of candle on putting up some coveted volume for competition, and knocked it down to him who had bid the most when the light flickered out. This was, distinctly, an excellent method for bolstering up excitement, for every splutter must have been good for a hasty advance, regretted very possibly when the modicum of tallow entered on a fresh lease of life. When not selling by the candle-end, an auctioneer would dispose of about thirty lots in the course of an hour, and was quite willing to accept the most trifling bids. Business is more rapidly conducted now, for few auctioneers stop to curse their fate, or to regale their audience with anecdotes, as one George Smalridge, who in 1689 wrote and published a skit on the prevalent way of doing business, says was quite the usual custom in his day. His tract is written in Latin, under the title 'Auctio Davisiana,' and gives a fanciful account of the extraordinary proceedings that took place at the sale of the books of Richard Davis, an ancient bookseller of Oxford, who had fallen into the clutches of the bailiffs. The auctioneer commences with a dirge said, or perhaps sung, over the miserable Davis: 'O the vanity of human wishes! O the changeableness of fate and its settled unkindness to us,' etc. Each book is extolled at length, and there are pages of lamentation and woe as Hobbes of Malmesbury, his 'Leviathan,' 'a very large and famous beast,' is knocked down, by mistake, for the miserable sum of five pieces of