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among the goodly company of rare engravings and choice etchings some wretched little newspaper portrait or clipping which is as much out of place as one of our street-sweepers would be in a brilliant drawing-room. Yet I have done the deed myself, and do not know why I did it; probably from sheer wilfulness.

There are on the library table two privately illustrated copies of Edmund Clarence Stedman's Poets of America, to which I beg leave to refer because they are examples. One copy was the property of the late Irving Browne, the accomplished editor and writer, who was an enthusiastic disciple of the Shiplake parson. In 1874 he printed An Account of Some Books Containing Extra Illustrations in a Private Library, limited to twenty-five copies, some containing illustrations, the inlaying by Trent, whose work is superior to that of the most vaunted English

man.

It deals with some eighty titles, all but five of them being books illustrated by Browne himself. He must have been wonderfully industrious, but his copy of Stedman is curiously made up, the portraits and other illustrations having been taken from all sorts and conditions of newspapers, magazines, and even publishers' catalogues, pasted upon inserted sheets, or on margins, or at the ends of chapters, with only two or three items of any appreciable value. Yet Browne evidently enjoyed it, and he had the volume bound at the Club Bindery in "half crushed blue levant, gilt top," as the salescatalogues describe such things. I am almost ashamed to confess that I like it, but it speaks to me of the loving labor of a charming author and a brilliant man. I can see him, in my mind's eye, "fussing" with it, as my friend the Chief-Justice of Arizona would say.

Browne was an enthusiast, and we who share in his enthusiasm can appreciate his verse on "The Shy Portraits: by a despised Grangerite," particularly those I venture to quote:

Oh, why do you elude me so,

Ye portraits, whom so long I've sought;
That somewhere ye exist, I know,

Indifferent, good, and good for naught.

This country's overrun with "Grangers"-
I'm ignorant of their Christian names-
But my afflicted eyes are strangers

To one I want whom men call James.

The other copy of Stedman was, I believe, arranged by a man of some literary distinction. He has a singular mania for building up books and, after having them handsomely bound, selling them through professional dealers. I hope that he does it at a profit, and, judging by what I have paid for some of them, I feel quite confident that he is not a loser; but one can never tell. It contains sixty-one portraits and plates, almost all of them steel engravings, and it is as dignified as Browne's is the reverse. Yet, with all its scrappy little cuts, I am much fonder of the Browne book.

One commanding error which is commonly committed by the extra-illustrator is the overdoing of it. He is seldom able to limit himself to the addition of matters which belong naturally to the text. If in a Life of Andrew Jackson the author makes casual reference to Oliver Cromwell, in goes a portrait of the Protector; or if there is an allusion to George III., there is a representation of the plump countenance of that monarch. I recall that I utterly spoiled a good edition of Edward Everett's Washington by overloading it with two hundred and sixty portraits, plates, and facsimiles, to say nothing of valuable autographs which might much better have been suffered to possess an independence of their own; and a harmless copy of Authors at Home was overburdened with three hundred and fifty-nine portraits and views and three hundred and seventy-five autograph letters. I mention this with regret, as an instructive warning to the innocent and unwary. There is significance in what the experienced bibliographer and collector John H. V. Arnold wrote to me concerning one of my monstrosities: "If you can succeed in making up your mind at some future time that you have gathered enough materials to satisfy you and bind up your bantling, you will be possessed of courage enough to do almost anything. To one who really becomes interested in the 'business,' it is the most fascinating of occupations to 'extend' a good book, but it is hard to say, 'Hold, enough!""

I have elsewhere recorded my impressions in regard to autograph letters in extra-illustration, and I repeat that they should be used sparingly. If one merely employs a text to accompany an autographic collection, a complete "set" of some class of distinguished persons, the case is different. Taking, for example, the extraordinary books which the New York Public Library, through the liberality of Mr. John S. Kennedy, acquired some time ago from Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, and particularly the volumes devoted to the Signers to the Declaration of Independence, we must observe that they are really not Sanderson's Lives illustrated, but a pre-eminent collection of the autographic records of the signers, of portraits, views, and incidental illustrations, to which the interwoven pages of the biographies are a comparatively unimportant incident. The trustees of the library have wisely printed a detailed catalogue of the Emmet Collection, limited, I regret to say, to one hundred copies, although, perhaps, I should be selfishly glad because, through the kindness of one of the board, I am fortunate enough to own a copy. In sadness and despair, after gloating over the astonishing list of treasures described in the concise fashion of the expert, I am forced to exclaim to myself and to my fellow-lovers of choice Americana, in the words of Joey Ladle, reported in No Thoroughfare, "Arter that, ye may all on ye go to bed."

Enthusiasts are not to be discouraged, for we may have our own beloved possessions, dear to us, although perhaps not to be compared with the stores which our superiors have gathered. We are not despondent.

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