The history of literature, it is said, teaches us to consider its decline only as the development of a great principle of succession by which the treasures of the mind are circulated and equalized; as shoots by which the stream of improvement is forcibly directed into new channels, to fertilize new soils and awaken new capabilities. The history of book-collecting teaches us a similar lesson. The love which so often amounted to a positive passion for the exquisite productions of the Age of Illuminated Manuscripts, all but died with the introduction of the printing-press, which in reality was but a continuation of the old art in a new form. And so on, down through the successive decades and generations of the past four centuries, the decline--but not the death, for such a term cannot be applied to any phase of book-collecting--of one particular aspect of the hobby has synchronized with the birth of several others, sometimes more worthy, and at others less. An exhaustive inquiry into the various and manifold changes through which the human mind passed alone might account for these various developments, which it is not the intention of the present writer on this occasion to analyze. The rise and progress of what Sir Egerton Brydges calls 'the black-letter mania' gave the death-blow to the long-cherished school of poetry of which Pope may be taken as the most distinguished exponent. 'Men of loftier taste and bolder fancy early remonstrated against this chilling confinement of the noblest, the most aspiring, and most expansive of all the Arts. . . . It was not till the commotion of Europe broke the chain of indolence and insipid effeminacy that the stronger passions of readers required again to be stimulated and exercised and soothed, and that the minor charms of correctness were sacrificed to the ardent efforts of uncontrolled and unfearing genius. The authors of this class began to look back for their materials to an age of hazardous freedom, and copious and untutored eloquence: an age in which the world of words and free and native ideas was not contracted and blighted by technical critics and cold and fastidious scholars.' To abandon the abstract for the more matter-of-fact details of sober history, the mania to which Brydges alludes may be said to date itself from the spring of 1773. The occasion was the sale in London of the library of James West, President of the Royal Society. George Nicol, the bookseller, was an extensive purchaser at this sale for the King, for whom, indeed, he acted in a similar capacity up to the last. Nicol told Dibdin 'with his usual pleasantry and point, that he got abused in the public papers, by Almon and others, for having purchased nearly the whole of the Caxtonian volumes in this collection for his Majesty's library. It was said abroad that a Scotchman had lavished away the King's money in buying old black-letter books.' The absurdity of this report was soon proved at subsequent sales.