Excerpt from The Confessions of a Collector Scotish blood of his maternal progenitors, the Stoddarts and Moncrieffs, a certain share of taste for antiquities, or, at any rate, for memorials of the past in a literary shape, was inherited by the Hazlitts. My immediate paternal ancestor, the late Mr Registrar Hazlitt, undoubtedly possessed a strong in stinctive disposition to form around him a collection of books. He was emphatically acquisitive almost to the last; and had he been a richer man, he would probably have left behind him a fairly good and extensive library. My father was deficient in know ledge and insight - I might add, in judgment. He bought the wrong copies, or he allowed the right ones to be massacred by a pagan binder; but he was a book-lover. The nucleus of his collection had been a set of Hazlitt's works, a few volumes given to him by Miss Lamb and others, and, of course, his own publications. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.