About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession belonged to some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned the bookstalls a little before and after the year 1790. He marked them with certain ciphers, always at the end of the volume. They are in various languages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worth buying, or that I should not have bought without that indication to induce me. All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, upon the owner's death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they had returned; and there I found this portion of them just before my old haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room for the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road. I have endeavoured without success to discover the name of their former possessor. He must have been a remarkable man, and the whole of his collection, judging of it by that part which has come into my hands, must have been singularly curious. A book is the more valuable to me when I know to whom it has belonged, and through what "scenes and changes" it has passed. _Sir Thomas More_.--You would have its history recorded in the fly-leaf as carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse is preserved. _Montesinos_.--I confess that I have much of that feeling in which the superstition concerning relics has originated, and I am sorry when I see the name of a former owner obliterated in a book, or the plate of his arms defaced. Poor memorials though they be, yet they are something saved for a while from oblivion, and I should be almost as unwilling to destroy them as to efface the _Hic jacet_ of a tombstone. There may be sometimes a pleasure in recognising them, sometimes a salutary sadness.