Blessed is the man who has a hobby! declared Lord Brougham; and of all the hobbies it is doubtful if any are more blessed than those of the collector of antiques and curios, old prints, coins and medals, rare books and bindings, and the like. “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation,” good old Isaac Walton said of angling. But that is true, too, of collecting, which, figuratively speaking, is in itself a species of the art of angling, of dipping into the quiet pools of unfrequented places, there to angle for quaint curios and interesting mementos of bygone days, conscious that though the bait may be small, the catch may be large--besides, there is the fun of fishing! In “Le Jardin d’Epicure,” Anatole France has written: “People laugh at collectors, who perhaps do lay themselves open to raillery, but that is also the case with all of us when in love with anything at all. We ought rather to envy collectors, for they brighten their days with a long and peaceable joy. Perhaps what they do a little resembles the task of the children who spade up heaps of sand at the edge of the sea, laboring in vain, for all they have built will soon be overthrown, and that, no doubt, is true of collections of books and pictures also. But we need not blame the collectors for it; the fault lies in the vicissitudes of existence and the brevity of life. The sea carries off the heaps of sand, and auctioneers disperse the collections; and yet there are no better pleasures than the building of heaps of sand at ten years old, of collections at sixty. Nothing of all we erect will remain, in the end; and a love for collecting is no more vain and useless than other passions are.” Anatole France might well have added Sir James Yoxall’s observation, that “good for health of mind and body it is to walk and wander in by-ways of town and country, searching out things beautiful and old and rare with which to adorn one’s home.” Indeed, collecting has aspects other than the one of discovery, of acquisition, of entertainment, or of furnishing a pastime: it has its utilitarian one as well. There is an undeniable and oftentimes indefinable charm about a home in which well-chosen antiques and curios form part of the decorative scheme and become part of its furnishing and adornment. Many collectors have become such through an increasing interest in old furniture, rare china, early silver, and other classes of antiques and curios, inspired in the beginning by the acquisition of some object of the sort, personal contact with which has served as an example of the pleasure which collecting holds in store for one. The true collector is not merely “a gatherer of things,” indifferent to the guidance of a discriminating taste. Rather, when he finds an object at hand, he considers it from many points of view--its historical value, its significance in the development of the arts, its anecdotal interest, its worth as a work of art, and its workmanship.