tEAVES) fast HAVE TOUCHED. 327 



Literatiire to P'rancis Douce. " To Francis Douce, Esq.," tile inscrip-^ 

 tion reads, " these volumes of some Literary Researches are inscribed 

 as a slight memorial of Friendship, and a gi^ateful acknowledgment to 

 a LoVer of Litei'ature." In the preface to the collected Works of Isaac 

 Disraeli, issued by his son, the present Bgnjamin Disraeli, We are 

 informed that at the close of the last century the number of readers 

 in the Library of the British Museum seldom ever exceeded six at a 

 time, and that one of these was very constantly Francis Douce. He 

 became the aixthoi' of a highly-i^rized seiies of Illustrations of Shak- 

 speare and Ancient Manners, and other cognate productions ; he 

 gathered likewise a private library — -of which Dibdin, in his Biblio- 

 mania, says : " The library of Prospero (i.e. DoUce) is acknowledged 

 to be w'ithout a rival in its way. How pleasant it is," he exclaims, 

 " only to contemplate such a goodly prospect of elegantly-bound 

 volumes of old English and French literature ! and to think of the 

 matchless Stores which they contain, relating to our ancient popular 

 tales and romantic legends !" The volume from Douce's library 

 which I possess is Francis Grose's " Provincial Glossary, with a Col- 

 lection of Local Proverbs and Popular Superstitions." It has Douce's 

 bookplate and a MS. note in his handwriting. Grose, in his preface? 

 tells us of his having gathered his accounts of popular superstitions 

 from the mouths of village historians as they were related to a closing 

 circle of attentive hearers, assembled on a winter's evening round the 

 capacious chimney of an old hall or manor-house; "for formerly," 

 he goes on to say, rather amusingly to us in these later days of steam 

 and electricity — •" formerly, in countries remote from the metropolis, 

 or which had no immediate intercourse with it, before newspapers 

 and stagecoaches had imj^orted skepticism and made every ploughman 

 and thresher a politician and freethinker, ghosts, fairies and witches, 

 with bloody murders committed by tinkers, formed a priilcipal part 

 of rural conversation in all large assemblies, and particularly those 

 in Christmas holidays, during the burning of the yule-block." Then 

 speaking of the habiliments in which ghosts were reported to have 

 appeared, Grose happens to say : " One instance of an English ghost 

 dressed in black is found in the celebrated ballad of William and 

 Margaret, in the following lines : ' And clay-cold was her lily hand, 

 That held her sable shroud.' " It is upon this point that Douce makes 

 his manuscript remark in the margin. He desires us to note that 

 " Mr. Bourne, the elegant translator of this song, thought this licence, 



