The Christie-Miller library contains many other books of extraordinary interest, among them three unique copies of works by Nicholas Breton: _A Smale Handfull of Fragrant Flowers, Selected and Gathered out of the Lovely Garden of Sacred Scripture_; _A Floorish upon Fancie_, _As Gallant a Glose upon so Triflinge a Text as ever was Written_; and _The Workes of a Young Wit Trust up with a Fardell of Prettie Fancies_. Robert Greene is represented by three unique copies, one of _Gwydonius_, and another of _Arbasto, The Anatomie of Fortune_; and the third of the earliest edition of _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier_, containing the passage, suppressed in all the later editions, in abuse of Gabriel Harvey and his brothers, which started the literary war between Greene and the pedant of Cambridge.
It is possible, with a bundle of booksellers' catalogues, to waste more time more pleasantly than in any other way. As one idly turns the pages, catching sight here and there of a strange title or a book on some impossibly queer subject, one realises, more fully than one could do in years of social intercourse with one's fellow-men, how fantastic a thing is the human mind--a stable full of prancing hobby-horses for crochety horsemen to ride about the world. We can speculate pleasantly on the character of the practical parson who wrote the _Clergyman's Intelligencer; or, a Compleat Alphabetical List of all the Patrons in England and Wales, with the ... Benefices in their Gift and their Valuation Annexed_ (1745), for which Mr. Mayhew asks 5_s._ In the same catalogue is offered that curiosity in the history of science, P. H. Gosse's _Creation (Omphalus); an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot_, published in 1857, two years before the _Origin of Species_. The title, _Ode to the Duke of Wellington and Other Poems, Written Between the Ages of Eleven and Thirteen Years_, by Robert Charles Dallas (1819), calls up visions of some tight-trousered infant prodigy; and we wish that the book were not an example of fine binding, and that Mr. Chaundy could part with it for less than 30_s._ Just above the infant, alphabetically and perhaps also in order of merit, we find the name of D'Adelsward, the author of a volume of poems (of which, in our ignorance, we had never heard) entitled _Les Cortèges Qui Sont Passés_. The volume, which was published in 1903, is bound in pink watered silk, and costs four guineas. We have a vision of something even more prodigious than the infant of 1819.