of _Beowulf_ and the
miscellanies which go by the names of the _Exeter Book_ and the
_Vercelli Book_ have no contemporary parallels in the rest of Europe.
[Footnote 1: _English Illuminated Manuscripts._ By Sir Edward Maunde
Thompson, K. C. B. (Kegan Paul, 1895), pp. 66, 67.]
When we turn from books, printed or in manuscript, to their possessors,
it is only just to begin with a compliment to our neighbours across the
Channel. No English bookman holds the unique position of Jean Grolier,
and 'les femmes bibliophiles' of England have been few and
undistinguished compared with those of France. Grolier, however, and his
fair imitators, as a rule, bought only the books of their own day,
giving them distinction by the handsome liveries which they made them
don. Our English collectors have more often been of the omnivorous type,
and though Lords Lumley and Arundel in the sixteenth century cannot,
even when their forces are joined, stand up against De Thou, in Sir
Robert Cotton, Harley, Thomas Rawlinson, Lord Spencer, Heber, Grenville,
and Sir Thomas Phillips (and the list might be doubled without much
relaxation of the standard), we have a succession of English collectors
to whom it would be difficult to produce foreign counterparts. Round
these _dii majores_ have clustered innumerable demigods of the
book-market, and certainly in no other country has collecting been as
widely diffused, and pursued with so much zest, as in England during
the present century.
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