[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON, READING "MAUD" TO ROBERT AND MRS. BROWNING, BY ROSSETTI]
Thus are linked indissolubly together the great Victorians: Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Mrs. Browning. It would be difficult to procure a more interesting memento.
At 27 New Oxford Street, West, is a narrow, dingy little shop, which you would never take to be one of the most celebrated bookshops in London--Spencer's. How he does it, where he gets them, is his business, and an inquiry he answers only with a smile; but the fact is, there they are--just the books you have been looking for, presentation copies and others, in cloth and bound. Spencer owes it to book-collectors to issue catalogues. They would make delightful reading. He has always promised to do it, but he, as well as we, knows that he never will.
But he is kind in another way, if kindness it is: he leaves you alone for hours in that wonderful second-story room, subjected to temptation almost too great to be resisted. Autograph letters, first drafts of well-known poems, rare volumes filled with corrections and notes in the hand of the author, are scattered about; occasionally, such an invaluable item as the complete manuscript of "The Cricket on the Hearth."
It was from the table in this room that I picked up one day a rough folder of cardboard tied with red tape and labeled "Lamb." Opening it, I found a letter from Lamb to Taylor & Hessey, "acknowledging with thanks receit of thirty-two pounds" for the copyright of "Elias (Alas) of last year," signed and dated, June 9, 1824. I felt that it would look well in my presentation "Elia," in boards, uncut, and was not mistaken.
My acquaintance with Mr. Dobell I owe to a paragraph that I read many years ago in Labouchere's "Truth." One day this caught my eye:--
From the catalogue of a West End Bookseller I note this: "Garrick, David. 'Love in the Suds. A Town Eclogue,' first edition. 1772. Very rare. 5 guineas." The next post brought me a catalogue from Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller in the Charing Cross Road. There I read, "Garrick, David. 'Love in the Suds. A Town Eclogue,' first edition, 1772, boards, 18 pence." The purchaser of the former might do well to average by acquiring Mr. Dobell's copy.