Mr. Henry Spencer Ashbee, of Bedford Square, has a small but charming library, nearly every volume being beautifully bound. The books are, for the most part, modern, and chiefly French. There are, for example, Sainte-Beuve's 'Livre d'Amour,' which was suppressed after a few copies were struck off, with the author's own corrections; the Fortsas 'Catalogue,' the cruel joke of M. Renier Chalon; first editions of 'The English Spy,' an exceptionally fine copy; Coryat's 'Crambe, or, his Colwork,' 1611; Roger's 'Poems' and 'Italy'; a number of books illustrated by Chodowiecki, the Cruikshank of Germany; practically all the books published by M. Octave Uzanne and Paul Lacroix in the finest possible states. Mr. Ashbee possesses several extra-illustrated or grangerized books of exceptional interest--the nine volumes of Nichols' 'Literary Anecdotes' are extended to thirty-four, there being upwards of 5,000 additional portraits, views, and so forth. Mr. Ashbee's library comprises several thousand volumes, the binding alone of which must have cost a small fortune. [Illustration: _Portrait Bookplate of Mr. H. S. Ashbee._] [Illustration: _Mr. T. J. Wise, Book-collector._] The libraries of Mr. Thomas J. Wise and Mr. Walter Slater may be bracketed together, partly because they have been formed side by side. They differ in many respects, however. Mr. Wise's is a small but choice collection of books, autographs, and manuscripts of modern writers. He possesses, for the most part, in first editions of the finest quality, practically everything written by Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Robert Browning and Mrs. Browning, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, George Eliot, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Landor, Meredith, William Morris, John Ruskin, Swinburne, and Tennyson. Of Shelley, for example, Mr. Wise has a collection of 400 books and pamphlets by or concerning him. There is only one other collection comparable to it, and it is that possessed by Mr. Buxton Forman. Of Byron Mr. Wise has everything, including 'The Waltz,' 'Poems on Various Occasions,' and all the other excessively rare publications of this prolific poet, the only exception, indeed, being 'The Curse of Minerva,' 1812. Mr. Wise's collection of Ruskiniana is practically complete, and includes a number of privately-printed pamphlets issued to a few personal friends. Mr. Walter Slater's books and manuscripts include a unique series of both Dante G. Rossetti and Walter Savage Landor. Of the former, it contains the manuscript of three-fourths of the 'House of Life' series of sonnets, the manuscript of 'St. Agnes,' and the whole of the extant manuscript of 'The King's Tragedy'; these manuscripts usually include not only the 'copy' as it was sent to the printer, but usually the first and second drafts. The series of Landor books and pamphlets is quite complete, from his first book of poems, 'Moral Epistles,' issued in 1795, and the equally excessively rare 'Poems from the Arabic and Persian,' issued at Warwick