Lang--not Andrew--has informed us that no copy of the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound books in _letres blake_, and what is singular, they are generally works quite unknown to the world--first discoveries--unique! And then--oh! then--how bitter is the waking! There was in Mr. Walker's school library a book, one well known as Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." This I read, as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the end, ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, "a blind bundle" of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," "The Rejected Addresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in which at the end was my boyish signature. "And still wider." In 1887 I passed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ every evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read _not_ to a good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps _directly_, but simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time. My father took in those years _Blackwood's_ and the _New Monthly Magazine_, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" in the latter:-- "In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place, And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base; Fly, Honesty, fly--seek some safer retreat, For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street."