It was, if I remember correctly, Ernest Dressel North who first aroused my interest in Lamb, bibliographically. I had learned to love him in a dumpy little green cloth volume, "Elia and Eliana," published by Moxon, which I had picked up at Leary's, and which bears upon its title-page the glaring inaccuracy,--"The Only Complete Edition." I have this worthless little volume among my first editions; to me it is one, and it is certainly the last volume of Lamb I would part with.
It must be all of thirty years ago that I went to London with a list of books by and about Charles Lamb--some twenty volumes in all--which North had prepared for me. I came across this list not long ago, and was amused at the prices that he suggested I might safely pay. Guineas where his list gives shillings would not to-day separate the books from their owners.
[Illustration: Title of Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"]
It was at this time, too, that I made my first Lamb pilgrimage, going to every place of interest I could find, from Christ's Hospital, then in Newgate Street, where I saw the Blue-Coat boys at dinner, to the neglected grave in Edmonton Churchyard, where Charles and Mary Lamb lie buried side by side. The illustration facing page 54 is made from a negative I procured in 1890, of the house at Enfield in which Lamb lived from October, 1829, until May, 1833.
A good story is told of my friend, Edmund D. Brooks, the bookseller of far-off Minneapolis. Brooks, who knows his way about London and is as much at home with the talent there as any other man, set out one day to make a "quick turn," in stock-market parlance. Armed with a large sum of money, the sinews of book-buying as well as of war, he casually dropped in on Walter Spencer, who was offering for sale the manuscript of Dickens's "Cricket." The price was known to be pretty steep, but Brooks was prepared to pay it. What he did not know was that, in an upper room over Spencer's shop, another bookseller, also with a large sum in pocket, was debating the price of this very item, raising his offer by slow degrees. But it did not take Brooks long to discover that negotiations were progressing and that quick action was necessary. Calling Spencer aside, he inquired the price, paid the money, and took the invaluable manuscript away in a taxi. The whole transaction had occupied only a couple of minutes. Spencer then returned to his first customer, who continued the attack until, to close the argument, Spencer quietly remarked that the manuscript had been sold, paid for, and had passed out of his possession.