LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 349 



unless to some novus homo willing to buy a set of ances- 

 tors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in gene- 

 alogy are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic 

 nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a 

 stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should 

 seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and 

 if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of perma- 

 nent interest to the world at large, he must not less be 

 Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Gue*- 

 rard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more 

 clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there 

 is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cunei- 

 form and other inscriptions, simply because of their il- 

 legibility, so there is another class driven by a like irre- 

 sistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. 

 Whether these have even a philologic value for us de- 

 pends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them 

 by the editor. 



For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out 

 of which something precious may not be raked by the 

 diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since GifFord, 

 the best editor of our literature of the Tudor and Jaco- 

 bean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, 

 so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intel- 

 ligent industry. It would not be easy to name any 

 work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. 

 He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no 

 man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so ex- 

 actly the meaning with which words were used during 

 the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholar 

 ship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and 

 conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and 

 Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. 

 The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy 

 than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-knowl- 



