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NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. v. APRIL is, 1912.

The National Review has a very pleasantly written article by Mr. Austin Dobson on ' Gray ; s Biographer,' in which the worthy William Mason, if in himself he presents a hopelessly depressing figure, serves well as a means to illustrate the literary and critical capacity of his day. And, after all, it is much that, through an erratic gleam of genius playing upon indolence, he achieved the invention of a new mode of writing biography. Dr. Hookham continues his attack upon M. Bergson's philosophy. The main point of his objection is the unfounded nature as he alleges of some of M. Bergson's statements, yet he himself sometimes launches out into the unveri- fiable as when he declares that " matter existed before intelligence, and has moulded it." Miss Prances Pitt has another paper on bird-life ' Rooks ' this time. It is not burdened with the kind of fact which is called par excellence " scien- tific," but furnishes chiefly pleasing and vivid descriptions of the flight of great flocks of rooks through evening and morning skies, and of their -ways on their feeding-grounds. She is not one of those who pronounce the rook innocent in the matter of interference with agricultural operations. Mr. F. E. Smith writes on ' National Service,' and Mr. J. O. P. Bland discusses the ' Finance of China.'

BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES. APRIL.

MR. W. M. MURPHY of Liverpool in his Catalogue 172 offers much that is of interest, i'n the way of editions of classical authors there is a Shelley an 8 vols. for 121. ; Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall,' 1887, with the notes by Milman and Guizot, Abound in calf, for 4Z,. 10s. ; the first edition of Brotier's ' Tacitus,' printed by Dclatour, 1771, II. 5s. ; and Buckle's ' History of Civilization,' 1858, II. 18s. We were glad to see an early issue of Anne Pratt's ' Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain,' 6 vols., for 30s. thus cheap because some pages happen to be foxed ; and Agnes Strickland's ' Lives of the Queens of England,' 8 vols., a fine clean copy, for 51. In the way of literary curiosities there are a relic of Carlyle, in the shape of an ' Explanatory Pronouncing Dictionary of the French Lan- guage,' by 1' Abb6 Tardy, having on the fly-leaf, in Carlyle's handwriting, " To William Fingland, Thornhill, T. C. Templand, 29 March, 1812," And on the top of the page " Jane Baillie Welsh, Haddington," 41. 10s. ; Zosimus (the Irish Punch), from its start on 18 May, 1870, to 7 Octo- ber, 1871, 11. Is. ; and Shaw's ' Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages from the Seventh to the Seventeenth Centuries,' 1843, 51. 10s. Among the books on art is the late A. W. Tuer's ' Bartolozzi and his Works,' a first edition, 31. 6.

MESSRS. HENRY SOTHERAN & Co., in their Catalogue No. 724 (Architecture, Painting, and Engraving), call attention to a number of rare old engravings and of publications on Art, both those dealing with individual painters and those constituting " galleries " of portraits. They offer for 250L a fine impression in an early state of J. Young's ' The Setting Sun,' and for 501. ' The Show,' by the same engraver, both, it will be remembered, after Hoppner. An exceptionally good copy of the Graves publication, ' Engravings from the Choicest Works of Sir Thomas Lawrence, ' is to be had for 151. ; it contains thirty-four proof

impressions, and resembles the copy which in 1904 sold by auction for 122Z. The books on Architecture are for the most part modern, but we observed a Blondel, ' De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance et de la Decoration des Edifices en General,' which dates from 17378, 17/. 17s. Under ' Keramics,' though there is, of course, nothing interesting merely from the point of view of age, there are many examples of limited editions, the best being an Edition de luxe of the Descriptive Catalogue of the Spitzer Collection, 1892-3, 351., and a collection of eighty- five original drawings of vases and ornamental china belonging to Josiah Wedgwood, 1847, 601. The Catalogue of the Specimens of Cloth collected in Cook's three voyages to the Southern Hemi- sphere, " with a Particular Account of the Manner of the Manufacturing the same in the various Islands of the South Seas, partly extracted from Mr. Anderson and Reinhold Forster's Observa- tions, and the verbal Account of some of the most knowing of the Navigators : with some Anecdotes that happened to them among the Natives," hits attached to it forty actual speci- mens, with descriptions in MS. There is no copy of this work in the British Museum, and it seems to us cheap at 151. 15s. Among books on En- gravers, a special interest attaches to the rare ' Livre de Fleur et de Feullies pour servir a 1'Art d'Orfevrerie,' by Francois le Febure, Maistre Orfevre a Paris, which contains six floral designs for goldsmith's work on copper, by Salomon Savry, " a Amstelredam, 1679," 111. lls. ; and of the Books of Prints, the two outstanding ones are the Collection of Engravings of the French School, sixty-three plates, all brilliant and original impressions, in a calf-bound folio volume, with the Waldegrave arms on one side, Sa>c. XVIII., 105Z., and the ' Houghton Gallery of Pictures,' in 2 vols., published by Boydell in 1788. This is an exceptionally fine copy, uncut, in which the large mezzotint of ' Bathsheba bringing Abishag to David ' is an open-letter proof, and eleven of the smaller mezzotints and engravings are proofs before all letters. It is offered for 101.

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