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VI

"T IS NOT IN MORTALS TO COMMAND SUCCESS."

INDEED it is not, nor has "deserving" anything whatever to do with it. We who, by dint of saving here and scraping there, manage at the end of twenty years or so to have a respectable collection of books, know that the battle is not always to the brave, but generally to the side of the heaviest artillery; for this is no puny game we collectors are playing, and we are playing it against giants. I am not alluding to those men who, with the instincts and fortunes of the Medici, get their names in the paper every day; I refer to the collector who quietly, almost stealthily, goes on, day after day and year after year, buying in some well-defined line, until at last he and some

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times she may be said to have everything. But this is only in the way of speaking, for no collection is ever complete; one may drop dead in the race with the goal not yet in sight; that's where the excitement lies.

Such thoughts as these came into my head when, some time ago, I spent several days with a man in Buffalo, a man so modest and retiring that not all of his friends know that he has the greatest collection of Johnson and Boswell material in the world. I refer, of course, to Mr. R. B. Adam.1 Sixteen years ago

1 See illustration opposite page 74.

Mr. Adam inherited from his father, the late Robert B. Adam, the finest collection of Johnsoniana in the world.

As I am accused of being given to exaggeration whenever I speak of Dr. Johnson, let me hasten to say that this is not my opinion only, but that it was the mature judgment of that great Johnsonian editor, Birkbeck Hill. In a paper printed many years ago in the "Atlantic Monthly," and subsequently delivered in a somewhat changed form before the Johnson Club in London, Dr. Hill said:

"On the shores of Lake Erie, in the flourishing town of Buffalo, I found a finer collection of Johnsonian and Boswellian curiosities than exists elsewhere on our side of the Atlantic." He then went on to describe at length what he saw, adding, "Great as has been the liberality of some of our collectors in letting me see their stores, Mr. Adam in his liberality has far surpassed them all. . . . The devout Johnsonian may count on receiving a warm welcome and the shrine will be thrown open to him. shall never join in the lament that is raised among us Englishmen when autographs and rare editions of our great writers are bought by an American.'

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With these words in my head and a visiting card in my hand, I presented myself to the present Adam some few years ago. Twenty-seven years have passed since Dr. Hill's experience, but there has been no change in the family manner. Instantly I was made to feel at home, and a warm friendship has been the result of an almost chance meeting. Indeed, I am

always suspicious of the man to whom Samuel Johnson does not make appeal, and I have never met a good Johnsonian who was not a good fellow.

But if there has been no falling off in the kindly hospitality of the Adam family, important additions have been made to the collection by its present owner. A Johnson or a Boswell item of supreme interest comes to the surface in London, New York, or elsewhere. It is for a moment conspicuous and then disappears, subsequently to reappear in Buffalo. I am something of a Johnsonian myself. Ever since I first read Boswell's "Life of Johnson" in Napier's admirable edition, in 1884, I have kept a copy near at hand to dip into, always with pleasure and with profit; but when I was given the "freedom of the city," so to speak, of Mr. Adam's collection, I knew there was no place for me in that line, and I turned to Oliver Goldsmith, with the same result; for I came to know that Mr. William M. Elkins of Philadelphia was on the lookout for first editions of everything that Goldsmith had written, until at last, he got them all all except one item, the "Threnodia Augustalis," of which only two copies are known; and finally one of these two fell before his practically unlimited bid at the Wallace Sale-that holocaust which took place in New York in the winter of 1920.

I never look at that fine old mezzotint of Goldsmith across the room without thinking of my purchase of it from George Rigby. I dropped in on him

one day and saw the print, saw that it was in good condition, and asked him the price.

"Thirty dollars," said George; "but I have laid it aside for your friend Hawley McLanahan.'

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"Has he seen it? Have you told him about it ?” I inquired.

"No," said George, "but he will buy it; he's rather going in for these eighteenth-century prints."

The print was worth a hundred. Taking from my pocket three ten-dollar bills, for money talks even in so uncommercial an establishment as Rigby's, I told him to roll up the print. As he was doing so, rather reluctantly, George said, "You won't say anything about it to McLanahan?"

"Oh, won't I!" I replied; "you shall hear from him, and promptly."

When I got back to my office, I called Mac on the phone and told him that if he had any more of that brand of Scotch for which he was famous, I would stop in during the evening and tell him a good story. "Come along," he said; "the bottle shall be on the table by the time you get here.'

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With the wisdom of a man from Aberdeen, I let several glasses of the divine liquor trickle down my throat, and then, and not until then, I told him the story of my purchase.

It did not take me long to discover that I was too late to become either a Goldsmith collector or to write an essay about him, and yet I should like to do both: out of pity and of love. Goldsmith has always been misunderstood -in his own day, because he was

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