return I inquired with eager hope whether it had been secured. "No," the librarian replied. "The amateur collectors have of late so much run up the price of autographs that it is almost useless for us to bid against them." Chief among these collectors, if I remember rightly, he reckoned those wicked Americans, who, with their wealth, are sacking, as it were, the literary treasures of Europe. In the present case, however, these devastators were really not to blame. The librarian's reserve price, I ascertain, had been fixed. considerably below a pound; at twelve shillings and sixpence, if my memory does not deceive me. For three dollars, even against Englishmen, Oxford could scarcely have hoped to secure so interesting an autograph of one of the most distinguished of her sons.

It too often happens that letters of great interest are destroyed through ignorance, indifference, or a perverted sense of duty. Boswell's curious correspondence with his friend Temple, the grandfather of the present Bishop of London, was sold for waste paper in Boulogne. Some of it was rescued from the butterman and published, but there are great and melancholy gaps left. The letters which Boswell had himself received from many of the most eminent men of his time were, it is believed, destroyed by his executors. A lady who gave me a copy of one of Johnson's

autograph letters informed me that, many years ago, an old friend had sent her a whole bundle of them, bidding her keep as many as she pleased. In her unfortunate modesty she retained but one. He told her afterwards that she need not have been so scrupulous, for all that she had returned he had thrown into the fire. A man who burns an autograph shows such an insensibility of nature, such a want of imagination, that it is likely that, in a more cruel age, he would have burnt heretics. Like the inquisitors of old, men have condemned to the flames letters full of life and thought and feeling, in the belief that they were only doing their duty. They have been shocked by the wrong that at times has been done by the publication of matters which either should not have been divulged, or at all events should have been kept secret till one or two generations had passed away. Literary men, even, have been guilty of this crime, - men whose hours have slipped pleasantly by over the correspondence of Horace Walpole, Cowper, and Lamb. As I am writing, I see that Mr. Froude directed his executors to destroy all private letters belonging to him. In his case, this seems an affectation of discretion and of regard for the feelings of others. He is like the miser whose first and only display of charity is seen in the provisions of his will. If a man cannot trust his executors, he can at least

bequeath his correspondence to a public library, with a direction that it shall be kept unpublished till after a long lapse of years.

Of my own modest collection I have no anecdotes to relate. No such luck ever befell me as befell the late James T. Fields, who, in a book picked up at a stall, found inserted an autograph letter of Dr. Samuel Johnson's. To my letters, such as they are, I now beg leave to introduce my readers. I shall venture to act the part of showman, and to treat my audience as I sometimes treat my friends when I have got them safe in my study, and know that politeness will not for a good half-hour allow them to save themselves by flight. There, as I place an autograph before them, I delight to talk about the writer, and, taking down from the shelves one book after another, to read out passages by way of illustration. As I am addressing mainly an American audience, I cannot do better than begin with an extract about America from a letter addressed by Miss Edgeworth, on July 27, 1826, to "Mr. Hunter, 72 St. Paul's Churchyard, London." He was her publisher. Publishers have risen in the world since those days. No author would now venture to deprive them of the title of "Esquire." But Miss Edgeworth belonged to the old landed gentry, and perhaps would not willingly have abandoned class distinctions. She writes: