'I imagine so,' said Robert; 'if so, he might well have felt a little more charity towards the human race in writing it. The race cannot be said to have treated him badly on the whole. But now look, Langham, look at these books—the most precious things are here.'

[Pg 194]And he turned the key of a particular section of the wall, which was not only latticed but glazed.

'Here is A Mirror for Magistrates. Look at the title-page; you will find Gabriel Harvey's name on it. Here is a first edition of Astrophel and Stella, another of the Arcadia. They may very well be presentation copies, for the Wendover of that day is known to have been a wit and a writer. Imagine finding them in situ like this in the same room, perhaps on the same shelves, as at the beginning! The other rooms on this floor have been annexed since, but this room was always a library.'

Langham took the volumes reverently from Robert's hands into his own, the scholar's passion hot within him. That glazed case was indeed a storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson's Underwoods with his own corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell's Poems, with autograph notes; manuscript volumes of letters, containing almost every famous name known to English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the quartos—everything that the heart of the English collector could most desire was there. And the charm of it was that only a small proportion of these precious things represented conscious and deliberate acquisition. The great majority of them had, as it were, drifted thither one by one, carried there by the tide of English letters as to a warm and natural resting-place.

But Robert grew impatient, and hurried on his guest to other things—to the shelves of French rarities, ranging from Du Bellay's Visions, with his autograph, down to the copy of Les Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe presented by Chateaubriand to Madame Récamier, or to a dainty manuscript volume in the fine writing of Lamartine.

'These,' Robert explained, 'were collected, I believe, by the squire's father. He was not in the least literary, so they say, but it had always been a point of honour to carry on