The one active and incessant pursuit of this noiseless career was the gathering together of the most choice books, the finest coins and gems, the most exquisite drawings and prints, which money could buy, without the toils of travel. Our Collector’s liberality of purse enabled him to profit, at his ease, by the truth expressed in one of the wise maxims of John SELDEN:—‘The giving a dealer his price hath this advantage;—he that will do so shall have the refusal of whatsoever comes to the dealer’s hand, and so by that means get many things which otherwise he never should have seen.’ The enjoyment—almost a century ago—of six hundred pounds a year in land, and of nearly one hundred thousand pounds invested in the ‘sweet simplicity’ of the three per cents., enabled Mr. CRACHERODE to outbid a good many competitors. His natural wish that what he had so eagerly gathered should not be scattered to the four winds on the instant he was carried to his grave, and also the public spirit which dictated the choice of a national repository as the permanent abode of his Collections, has already made that long course of daily visits to the London dealers in books, coins, and drawings, fruitful of good to hundreds of poorer students and toilers, during more than two generations. From stores such as Mr. CRACHERODE’S—when so preserved—many a useful labourer gets part of his best equipment for the tasks of his life. He, too, would enjoy a visit to the ‘PAYNES’ and the ‘ELMSLYS’ of the day as keenly as any book-lover that ever lived, but is too often, perhaps, obliged to content himself with an outside glance at the windows. Public libraries put him practically on a level with the wealthiest connoisseur. When, as in this case—and in a hundred more—such libraries derive much of their best possessions from private liberality, a life like Mordaunt CRACHERODE’S has its ample vindication, and the sting is taken out of all such sarcasms as that which was levelled—in the shape of the query, ‘In all that big library is there a single book written by the Collector himself?’—by some snarling epistolary critic, when commenting on a notice that appeared in _The Times_ on the occasion of Mr. CRACHERODE’S death. On another point our Collector was exposed to the shafts of sarcastic comment. He loved a good book to be printed on the very choicest material, and clothed in the richest fashion. The treasure within would not incline him to tolerate blemishes without.— ‘Nusquam blatta, vel inquinata charta, Sed margo calami notæque purus, Margo latior, albus integerque, Nec non copia larga pergainenæ.— Adsint Virgilius, paterque Homerus, Mundi pumice, purpuraque culti; Et quicquid magica quasi arte freti Faustusque Upilioque præstiterunt. · · · · ·