In a letter to Justin Windsor, the late J. Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps gave some very curious and interesting information respecting book-collecting in the earlier half of the present century. 'About the year 1836,' he wrote, 'when I first began hunting for old books at the various stalls in our famous London city, black-letter ones and rare prints were "plenty as blackberries," and I have often found such things in unlikely places and amidst a mass of commonplace rubbish, exposed for sale in boxes labelled, "These books and pamphlets 6d. or 1s. each," outside an old bookseller's window, where another notice informed the passer-by that "Libraries were purchased or books bought;" and thus plainly showed how such now indeed rarities came into the possession of an ignorant bibliopole. It was not, however, till about 1840 that I turned my attention to the more special work of collecting Shakespeare quartos, in which, I may say, I have been very successful. It was at one of George Chalmers' sales that I first bought one or two, and after that I hunted for them in all parts of the country, and met with considerable success, often buying duplicates, and even triplicates, of the same edition and play. At one time I possessed no less than three copies of the very rare quarto edition of "Romeo and Juliet," 1609, and sometimes even had four copies of more than one of the other quartos. Not so very long before this period, old Jolley, the well-known collector, picked up a Caxton at Reading, and a "Venus and Adonis," 1594, at Manchester, in a volume of old tracts, for the ignoble sum of 1s. 3d. Jolley was a wealthy orange-merchant of Farringdon Street, London, and entertained me often with many stories of similar fortunate finds of rare books, which served to whet my appetite only the more. But I was soon stopped in my book-hunting career by the appearance all at once on the scene of a number of buyers with much longer purses than my own, and thus I was driven from a market I had derived so much pleasure from with great regret. Some time afterwards circumstances rendered it desirable that I should part with a large number of my book-treasures by auction and to the British Museum; but even then I retained enough to be instrumental in founding the first Shakespearian library in Scotland, by presenting to the University of Edinburgh, amongst other rarities, nearly fifty copies of original quartos of Shakespeare's plays, printed before the Restoration, and to keep sufficient myself of the rarest and most valuable examples.'