Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/282

 270 The Library. of its readers. Connected as I was with a bookselling firm which commenced one hundred and eight years ago, the great number, the high-class character, and the large size of the libraries of the district which passed through their hands on the death of the owners was remarkable; and volumes now of the greatest rarity, such as would put Mr. Quaritch into raptures, were constantly appearing in the most unexpected places; not only in the manses of the parochial clergy, but even in the humble homes of peasants, whose highest ambition generally was to dedicate at least one son to the service of the church and give him a classical and theological education. To book-lovers, like those before me, is not the very sight and perusal of a catalogue of old recherche books a treat of the very highest kind ? but how much more of a treat is it to handle and examine the very books themselves ? Then indeed they become personal acquaintances. Twenty-three years ago it was my good fortune to be asked to give assistance in the cataloguing of a collection of books, the property of a deceased Aberdeen Pro- fessor of Hebrew, and the fruit of his indefatigable book-hunting for many years. It proved to be one of the most extraordinary moraines which any glacier had ever deposited, for the glacier professor in his extensive travels all over Europe, had collected everything he could lay hold of, and in all out of the way places, buying anything rare, and specially books printed in the place visited, while so eager was he in search of rarities, that he would have travelled a hundred miles for the chance of picking a rare book up cheap. And on his death in 1870, the collection, stowed away in boxes which had never been opened by him, was brought to the hammer, and this had to be arranged and catalogued. With little Latin, and less Greek, my early training had given me perhaps a larger acquaintance with old books than any other bookseller in the city at the time. Conjoined with an ex- perienced auctioneer like Mr. Alex. Brown, we had little diffi- culty with the great mass of material, speedily and satisfactorily we catalogued the books in the modern languages, but then there were hundreds of MSS., tracts, and volumes in Persian, Russian, Syriac, Arabic, Romansch, and other languages and dialects, &c., quite beyond our power of decyphering their titles or even their language. A brilliant idea occurred to us. We asked the assistance of Professor W. Robertson Smith, then in Aberdeen, and than whom could we possibly have got a more