But to the artificial inflation of prices in our salerooms there is more than one side and one key. There was not so long since an instance at Christie's, and a second at Sotheby's, where the high quotations were entirely due to the competition of a so-called interloper, who bade, as he thought, on the judgment of the room, and was signally handicapped. Again, something has ere now been carried to a prodigious figure owing to an unlimited commission inadvertently given to two agents. The old Duke of Wellington once gave £105 in this way for a shilling pamphlet, and even then the bidding was only stopped by arrangement. However, of all the miraculous surprises, the most signal on record was one of the most recent--the Frere sale at Sotheby's in 1896, already alluded to, where the prices realised for books in very secondary preservation set all records and precedents at thorough defiance. The phenomenon, if it could be referred to any cause, arose from the peculiar atmosphere and surroundings; it was a _bonâ fide_ old library, formed partly by the Freres of Roydon Hall, Norfolk, and partly by their relative Sir John Fenn, editor of the _Paston Letters_, and a rather noted antiquary of the eighteenth century. It was all straight and fair, so far as one could see; there was no "rigging," and the competition was simply insane. A portion of the Paston Correspondence struck us as cheap by comparison at £400; it was that which was offered at Christie's some time since, and bought in at about the same figure.
There were one or two singular errors in the catalogue. An Elizabethan edition of Sir John Mandeville's Travels was ascribed to 1503 and the press of Wynkyn de Worde, and the Tylney Psalter, belonging to the fifteenth century, was stated in a note by a former possessor to be of the age of Richard Coeur de Lion. One of the most unaccountable blunders in an auctioneer's catalogue which we can call to mind was the description of a Sarum service book as a grammatical treatise. But solecisms of various kinds are periodical. A German book is said to be printed at Gedruckt, and a copy of Sir John Mandeville in Italian is entered as _Questo_, that being its compiler's frugal method of giving the title (_Questo e il libro_).