Page:The librarians of Harvard College 1667-1877.djvu/527

 PREFACE

BOSWELL records that Dr. Johnson "approved of the famous collection oi editions of Horace by Douglas, mentioned by Pope, who is said to have  had a closet filled with them; and he added, 'every man should try to collect  one book in that manner, and present it to a publick library.'" Of James  Douglas, an eminent physician in the eighteenth century (1675-1742), very  little was distinctly recalled until the publication of the Dictionary of National  Biography, which contains a good account of him. Pope in a note to the Dunciad (iv, 392) had said that he collected every edition, translation, and comment to  the number of several hundred volumes. Watson in his edition of Horace (1750) notes that the collection amounted to 'about 450 of various editions.' The Dictionary states that he published in 1739 a Catalogus Editionum Horatii, 'which  enumerates all the editions in his library from that of 1476 to 1739.' What  became of the collection seems to be unknown, and perhaps librarians of to-day  in the present crowded state of their shelves would not rejoice if 'every man'  should follow the suggestion of Dr. Johnson.

However that may be, it was this bit of Johnsoniana which originally stimulated me, more than twenty years ago, to begin to collect Persius, an author  in whom I had become interested while a student in the University. After some time, when I had gathered what seemed to me, in my ignorance, a pretty  complete census of titles and a fairly large number of the books themselves, the  late librarian, Dr. Justin Winsor, offered to publish my lists in the form of a  Bibliography of Persius, and this was done in 1893 as No. 49 of the Bibliographical Contributions which he established. That Bibliography included the titles of 328 editions, 167 translations and reissues of translations, and 167 writings on  Persius, while I myself then possessed 63 editions, 29 translations, and many of  the writings.

Soon after this, my friend Mr. Daniel B. Fearing, himself an unrivalled collector of angling and fishing books in all languages, was good enough to  become interested in my own more limited aims. Being in correspondence with booksellers everywhere and frequently travelling through Europe and visiting  continental libraries, his opportunities were naturally far greater than mine,  although I myself hunted for Persiana in many Italian, French, and English  libraries and shops during the year 1906-07. It is therefore in large measure due to Mr. Fearing's activity and generosity that both the bibliography and my  collection have reached their present much enlarged form. The bibliography as now published includes 486 editions, 291 translations, revisions, and reissues, and