.^ THE BOOK-HUNTER etc. I BOOK-HUNTER JOHN HILL BURTON WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXII Annex 2~ AD VERTISEMENT. HIS book owes its existence to a concurrence of accidents. The Author had the honour of contributing to Blackwood's Magazine some sketches of the ways of book-col- lectors, scholars, literary investigators, de- sultory readers, and other persons whose pursuits revolve round books and litera- ture. Some friendly criticisms having induced him to reflect on what he had written, he saw, as will generally happen vi ADVERTISEMENT. in such cases, that were he to go over the ground again, he would find much that he would desire to alter, and many things that might be added. He therefore re- solved to recast the whole and expand it to the compass of a thin volume. The thin volume, however, fattened as it ap- proached maturity, until it reached the respectable dimensions in which it now awaits the appreciation of any reader who may think it worthy of his attention. ISoofc = Jguntir* CONTENTS. INTRODUCTORY, ...... A VISION OF MIGHT? BOOK-HUNTERS, . REMINISCENCES, ..... CLASSIFICATION, THE PROWLER AND THE AUCTION-HAUNTER, PAGE 1 13 55 58 76 t E& Ijte THE HOBBY, ........ 88 THE DESULTORY READER OR BOHEMIAN OF LITERATURE, 95 THE COLLECTOR AND THE SCHOLAR, .... 101 THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST, .... 110 PRETENDERS, ........ 150 HIS ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE CREATION OF LIBRARIES, 150 THE PRESERVATION Of LITERATURE, . . .193 LIBRARIANS, 213 CONTENTS. . %! Club. PAOK CLUBS IN GENERAL, . . . 219 THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK-CLUBS, . . . 226 THE ROXBURGHE CLUB, ...... 240 SOME BOOK-CLUB MEN, ...... 258 $art 5$. 380ofc-CIu6 JUteraturr. GENERALITIES, JOHN SPALDING, 281 300 ROBERT WODROW, 308 THE EARLY NORTHERN SAINTS, 322 SERMONS IN STONES 371 THE BOOK-HUNTER. PART I. HIS NATURE. intrattuctorp. HE Title under which the discur- sive contents of the following pages are ranged, has no better justifica- tion than that it suited myself. I hope it may also suit the reader. If they laid any claim to a scientific character, or professed to contain an exposition of any estab- lished department of knowledge, it might have been their privilege to appear under a title of Greek de- rivation, with all the dignities and immunities con- ceded by immemorial deference to this stamp of scientific rank. I not only, however, consider my A 2 HIS NATURE. OAvn trifles unworthy of such a dignity, but am. in- clined to strip it from other productions which might appear to have a more appropriate claim to it. ISTo doubt, the ductile inflections and wonder- ful facilities for decomposition and reconstruction make Greek an excellent vehicle of scientific pre- cision, and the use of a dead language saves your nomenclature from being confounded with your common talk. The use of a Greek derivative gives notice that you are scientific. If you speak of an acanthopterygian, it is plain that you are not dis- cussing perch in reference to its culinary merits ; and if you make an allusion to monomyarian ma- lacology, it will not naturally be supposed to have reference to the cooking of oyster-sauce. Like many other meritorious things, however, Greek nomenclature is much abused. The very reverence it is held in the strong disinclination on the part of the public to question the accuracy of anything stated under the shadow of a Greek name, or to doubt the infallibility of the man who uses it makes this kind of nomenclature the frequent protector of fallacies and quackeries. It is an in- strument for silencing inquiry and handing over the judgment to implicit belief. Get the passive student once into palaeozoology, and he takes your other hard names your ichthyodorulite, trogon- therium, lepidodendron, and bothrodendron for granted, contemplating them, indeed, with a kind of religious awe or devotional reverence. If it be a INTRODUCTORY. 3 question, whether a term is categorematic, or is of a quite opposite description, and ought to be described as swttcategorematic, one may take up a very abso- lute positive position without finding many people prepared to assail it. Antiquarianisni, which used to be an easy-going slipshod sort of pursuit, has sought this all-powerful protection and called itself Archaeology. An obli- terated manuscript written over again is called a pa- limpsest, and the man who can restore and read it a paleographist. The great erect stone on the nioor, which has hitherto defied all learning to find the faintest trace of the age in which it was erected, its purpose, or the people who placed it there, seems as it were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If there be any remains of sculpture on the stone, it becomes a lythoglyph or a hieroglyph ; and if the nature and end of this sculpture be quite incomprehensible to the adepts, they may term it a cryptoglyph, and thus dignify, by a sort of title of honour, the absoluteness of their ignorance. It were a pity if any more ingenious man should after- wards find a key to the mystery, and destroy the significance of the established nomenclature. The vendors of quack medicines and cosmetics are aware of the power of Greek nomenclature, and ap- parently subsidise scholars of some kind or other to supply them with the article. A sort of shaving soap 4 HIS NATURE. used frequently to be advertised under a title which was as complexly adjusted a piece of mosaic work as the geologists or the conchologists ever turned out. But perhaps the confidence in the protective- power of Greek designations has just at this moment reached its climax, in an attempt to save thieves from punishment by calling them kleptomaniacs. It is possible that, were I to attempt to dignify the class of men to whom the following sketches are devoted by an appropriate scientific title, a difficulty would start up at the very beginning. As the reader will perhaps see, from the tenor of my dis- course, I would find it difficult to say whether I should give them a good name or a bad to speak more scientifically, and of course more clearly, whether I should characterise them by a predicate eulogistic, or a predicate dyslogistic. On the whole, I am con- tent with my first idea, and shall stick to the title of " The Book-Hunter." * Few wiser things have ever been said than that remark of Byron's, that " man is an unfortunate fellow, and ever will be." Perhaps the originality * To afford the reader, however, an opportunity of noting at a glance the appropriate learned terms applicable to the different sets of persons who meddle with books, I subjoin the following definitions, as rendered in D' Israeli's Curiosities, from the Chasse aux Bibliographes et A ntiquaires mal advises of Jean Joseph Rive : "A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title- pages and colophons, and in editions ; the place and year INTRODUCTORY. 5 of the fundamental idea it expresses may be ques- tioned, on the ground that the same warning has been enounced in far more solemn language, and from a far more august authority. But there is originality in the vulgar everyday- world way of put- ting the idea, and this makes it suit the present pur- pose, in which, a human frailty having to be dealt with, there is no intention to be either devout or philosophical about it, but to treat it in a thoroughly worldly and practical tone, and in this temper to judge of its place among the defects and ills to which flesh is heir. It were better, perhaps, if we human creatures sometimes did this, and discussed our com- mon frailties as each himself partaking of them, than that we should mount, as we are so apt to do, into the clouds of theology or of ethics, according as our temperament and training are of the serious or of the intellectual order. True, there are many of our brethren violently ready to proclaim themselves frail mortals, miserable sinners, and no better, in theological phraseology, than the greatest of crimi- nals. But such has been my own unfortunate ex- when printed ; the presses whence issued ; and all the minu- tiae of a book." "A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements. " " A bibliomane is an in- discriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy." "A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure." "Abibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases." 6 HIS NATURE. perience in life, that whenever I find a man coming forward with these self-denunciations on his lips, I am prepared for an exhibition of intolerance, spiri- tual pride, and envy, hatred, malice, and all unchari- tableness, towards any poor fellow- creature who has floundered a little out of the straight path, and, being all too conscious of his errors, is not prepared to proclaim them in those broad emphatic terms which come so readily to the lips of the censors, who at heart believe themselves spotless, just as complaints about poverty, and inability to buy this and that, come from the fat lips of the millionaire, when he shows you his gallery of pictures, his stud, and his forcing-frames. No ; it is hard to choose between the two. The man who has no defect or crack in his character no tinge of even the minor immoralities no fan- tastic humour carrying him sometimes off his feet no preposterous hobby such a man, walking straight along the surface of this world in the arc of a circle, is a very dangerous character, no doubt ; of such all children, dogs, simpletons, and other creatures that have the instinct of the odious in their nature, feel an innate loathing. And yet it is questionable if your perfectionised Sir Charles Grandison is quite so dangerous a character as your "miserable sinner," vociferously conscious that he is the frailest of the frail, and that he can do no good thing of himself. And indeed, in practice, the external symptoms of these two characteristics have been known so to INTRODUCTORY. 7 alternate in one disposition as to render it evident that each is but the same moral nature under a different external aspect, the mask, cowl, varnish, crust, or whatever you like to call it, having been adapted to the external conditions of the man that is, to the society he mixes in, the set he belongs to, the habits of the age, and the way in which he pro- poses to get on in life. It is when the occasion arises for the mask being thrown aside, or when the internal passions burst like a volcano through the crust, that terrible events take place, and the world throbs with the excitement of some wonder- ful criminal trial.* * It has often been observed that it is among the Society of Friends, who keep so tight a rein on the passions and propensities, that these make the most terrible work when they break loose. De Quincey, in one of his essays on his contemporaries, giving a sketch of a man of great genius and high scholarship, whose life was early clouded by in- sanity, gives some curious statements about the effects of the system of rigid restraint exercised by the .Society of Friends, which I am not prepared either to support or con- tradict. After describing the system of restraint itself, he says : ' ' This is known, but it is not equally known that this unnatural restraint, falling into collision with two forces at once the force of passion and of youth not unfrequently records its own injurious tendencies, and publishes the re- bellious movements of nature by distinct and anomalous diseases. And, further, I have been assured, upon most ex- cellent authority, that these diseases strange and elaborate affections of the nervous system are found exclusively among the young men and women of the Quaker Society ; that they are known and understood exclusively amongst physi- 8 HIS NA TURE. The present, however, is not an inquiry into the first principles either of ethics or of physiology. The object of this rambling preamble is to win from the reader a morsel of genial fellow-feeling towards the human frailty which we are going to examine and lay bare before him, trusting that he will treat it neither with the haughty disdain of the inimacu- cians who have practised in great towns having a large Quaker population, such as Birmingham ; that they assume a new type and a more inveterate character in the second or third generation, to whom this fatal inheritance is often transmitted ; and, finally, that if this class of nervous de- rangements does not increase so much as to attract public attention, it is simply because the community itself the Quaker body- -does not increase, but, on the contrary, is rather on the wane." There exist many good stories which have for their point the passions of the natural man breaking forth, in members of this persuasion, in a shape more droll than distressing. One of the best of these is a north- country anecdote pre- served by Francis Douglas in his description of the east coast of Scotland. The hero was the first Quaker of that Barclay family which produced the apologist and the pugil- ist. He was a colonel in the great civil wars, and had seen wild work in his day ; but in his old age a change came over him, and, becoming a follower of George Fox, he re- tired to spend his old age on his ancestral estate in Kin- cardineshire. Here it came to pass that a brother laird thought the old Quaker could be easily done, and began to encroach upon his marches. Barclay, a strong man, with the iron sinews of his race, and their tierce spirit still burn- ing in his eyes, strode up to the encroacher, and, with a grim smile, spoke thus : ' ' Friend, thou knowest that I have become a man of peace and have relinquished strife, and therefore thou art endeavouring to take what is not INTRODUCTORY. 9 late, nor the grim charity of the "miserable sinner:" that he may even, when sighing over it as a failing, yet kindly remember that, in comparison with many others, it is a failing that leans to virtue's side. It Avill not demand that breadth of charity which even rather rigid fathers are permitted to exercise by the licence of the existing school of French fiction.* thine own, but mine, because thou believest that, having abjured the arm of the flesh, I cannot hinder thee. And yet, as thy friend, I advise thee to desist ; for shouldst thou suc- ceed in rousing the old Adam within me, perchance he may prove too strong, not only for me, but for thee." There was no use of attempting to answer such an argument. * In the renowned Dame aux Camelias, the respectable, rigid, and rather indignant father, addresses his erring son thus : "Que vous ayez une maitresse, c'est fort bien ; que vous la payiez comme un galant homme doit payer 1'amour d'une fille entretenue- c'est on ne peut mieux ; mais que vous oubliez les choses les plus saintes pour elle, que vous permettiez que la bruit de votre vie scandaleuse arrive jus- qu'au fond de ma province, et jette 1'ombre d'une tache sur le nom honorable que je vous ai donng voilS, ce qui ne peut etre, voila ce qui ne sera pas." So even the French novelists draw the line " somewhere," and in other departments of morals they may be found drawing it closer than many good uncharitable Christians among us would wish. In one very popular novel the vic- tim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to starve, lives with another woman, and, having com- mitted forgery, plots with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains. It is told in a smothered whisper, by the faithful domestic, to the horrified family, that he has reason to suspect his master of having indulged, once at least, if not oftener, in brandy-and-water ! 10 HIS NATURE. Neither will it exact such extensive toleration as that of the old Aberdeen laird's wife, who, when her sister lairdesses were enriching the tea-table con- versation with broad descriptions of the abominable vices of their several spouses, said her own " was just a gueed, weel-tempered, couthy, queat, innocent, daed- lin, drucken body wi' nae ill practices aboot him ava ! " But all things in their own time and place. To understand the due weight and bearing of this feeling of optimism, it is necessary to remember that its happy owner had probably spent her youth in that golden age when it was deemed churlish to bottle the claret, and each filled his stoup at the fountain of the flowing hogshead ; and if the darker days of dear claret came upon her times, there was still to fall back upon the silver age of smuggled usquebah, when the types of a really hospitable country-house were an anker of whisky always on the spigot, a caldron ever on the bubble with boil- ing water, and a cask of sugar with a spade in it, all for the manufacture of toddy. But, in truth, the feeling that in some quarters might be raised by this cool way of treating such social phenomena, excites some misgivings about calling attention to any kind of human frailty or folly, since the world is full of people who are pre- pared to deal with and cure it, provided only that they are to have their own way with the disease and the patient, and that they shall enjoy the simple privilege of locking him up, dieting him, INTRODUCTORY. 11 and taking possession of his worldly goods and interests, as one who, by his irrational habits, or his outrages on the laws of physiology, or the fitness of things, or some other neology, has satis- factorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his own affairs. No ! This is not a cruel age ; the rack, the wheel, the boot, the tlmmbikins, even the pillory and the stocks, have disappeared ; death - punishment is dwindling away, and if con- victs have not their full rations of cooked meat, or get damaged coffee or sour milk, or are inadequately supplied with flannels and clean linen, there will be an outcry and an inquiry, and a Secretary of State will lose a percentage of his influence, and learn to look better after the administration of patronage. But, at the same time, the area of punishment or of " treatment," as it is mildly termed becomes alarmingly widened, and people require to look sharply into themselves lest they should be tainted with any little frailty or peculiarity which may transfer them from the class of free self-regulators to that of persons " under treatment." In Owen's parallelograms there were to be no prisons : he ad- mitted no power in one man to inflict punishment upon another for merely obeying the dictates of natural propensities which could not be resisted. But, at the same time, there were to be "hospitals" in which not only the physically diseased, but also the mentally and morally diseased, were to be de- tained until they were cured ; and when we reflect 12 HIS NATURE. that the laws of the parallelogram were very stringent and minute, and required to be absolutely enforced to the letter, otherwise the whole machinery of society would come to pieces, like a watch with a broken spring, it is clear that these hospitals would have contained a very large proportion of the un- rationalised population. There is rather au alarming amount of this sort of communism now among us, and it is therefore with some little misgiving that one sets down anything that may betray a brother's weakness, and lay bare the diagnosis of a human frailty. Indeed, the bad name that proverbially hangs the dog has already been given to it, for bibliomania is older in the technology of this kind of nosology than dipsomania, which is now understood to be an almost established ground for seclusion, and deprivation of the manage- ment of one's own affairs. There is one ground of consolation, however, the people who, being all right themselves, have undertaken the duty of keeping in order the rest of the world, have far too serious a task in hand to afford time for idle read- ing. There is a good chance, therefore, that this little book may pass them unnoticed, and the harm- less class, on whose peculiar frailties the present occasion is taken for devoting a gentle and kindly exposition, may yet be permitted to go at large. So having spoken, I now propose to make the reader acquainted with some characteristic speci- mens of the class. Wteian of S the first case, let us summon from the shades my venerable friend Arch- deacon Meadow, as he was in the body. You see him now tall, straight, and meagre, but with a grim dignity in his air which warms into benignity as he inspects a pretty little clean Elzevir, or a tall portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a peculiar grunting chuckle, known by the initiated to be an important announcement. This is no doubt one of the milder and more inoffensive types, but still a thoroughly confirmed and obstinate case. Its parallel to the classes who are to be taken charge of by their wiser neighbours is only too close and awful ; for have not sometimes the female members of his household been known on occasion of some domestic emergency or, it may be, for mere sake of keeping the lost man out of mischief to have been search- ing for him 011 from bookstall unto bookstall, just as the mothers, wives, and daughters of other lost men hunt them through their favourite taverns? Then, again, can one forget that occasion of his going to London to be examined by a committee of the House of Commons, when he suddenly disap- peared with all his money in his pocket, and re- 14 HIS NATURE. turned penniless, followed by a waggon containing 372 copies of rare editions of the Bible 1 All were fish that came to his net. At one time you might find him securing a minnow for sixpence at a stall and presently afterwards he outbids some princely collector, and secures with frantic impetuosity, " at any price," a great fish he has been patiently watch- ing year after year. His hunting-grounds were wide and distant, and there were mysterious rumours about the numbers of copies, all identically the same in edition and minor individualities, which he pos- sessed of certain books. I have known him, indeed, when beaten at an auction, turn round resignedly and say, " Well, so be it but I daresay I have ten or twelve copies at home, if I could lay hands on them." It is a matter of extreme anxiety to his friends, and, if he have a well-constituted mind, of sad mis- giving to himself, when the collector buys his first duplicate. It is like the first secret dram swallowed in the forenoon the first pawning of the silver spoons or any other terrible first step downwards you may please to liken it to. There is no hope for the patient after this. It rends at once the veil of decorum spun out of the flimsy sophisms by which he has been deceiving his friends, and partially de- ceiving himself, into the belief that his previous purchases were necessary, or, at all events, service- able for professional and literary purposes. He now becomes shameless and hardened ; and it is observ- able in the career of this class of unfortunates, that MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 15 the first act of duplicity is immediately followed by an access of the disorder, and a reckless abandon- ment to its propensities. The Archdeacon had long passed this stage ere he crossed my path, and had become thoroughly hardened. He was not remark- able for local attachment ; and in moving from place to place, his spoil, packed in innumerable great boxes, sometimes followed him, to remain unreleased during the whole period of his tarrying in his new abode, so that they were removed to the next stage of his journey through life with modified inconvenience. Cruel as it may seem, I must yet notice another and a peculiar vagary of his malady. He had re- solved, at least once in his life, to part with a con- siderable proportion of his collection better to suffer the anguish of such an act than endure the fretting of continued restraint. There was a won- drous sale by auction accordingly ; it was something like what may have occurred at the dissolution of the monasteries at the Eeformation, or when the contents of some time-honoured public library were realised at the period of the French Revolution. Be- fore the affair was over, the Archdeacon himself made his appearance in the midst of the miscellaneous self-invited guests who were making free with his treasures. He pretended, honest man, to be a mere casual spectator, who, having seen, in passing, the announcement of a sale by auction, stepped in like the rest of the public. By degrees he got excited, gasped once or twice as if mastering some desperate 16 HIS NATURE. impulse, and at length fairly "bade. He could not brazen out the effect of this escapade, however, and disappeared from the scene. It was remarked, how- ever, that an unusual number of lots were afterwards knocked down to a military gentleman, who seemed to have left portentously large orders with the auctioneer. Some curious suspicions began to arise, which were settled by that presiding genius bending over his rostrum, and explaining in a confidential whisper that the military hero was in reality a pillar of the Church so disguised. The Archdeacon lay under what, among a portion of the victims of his malady, was deemed a heavy scandal. He was suspected of reading his own books that is to say, when he could get at them ; for there are those who may still remember his rather shamefaced apparition of an evening, peti- tioning, somewhat in the tone with which an old schoolfellow down in the world requests your assist- ance to help him to go to York to get an appoint- ment petitioning for the loan of a volume of which he could not deny that he possessed numberless copies lurking in divers parts of his vast collection. This reputation of reading the books in his collection, which should be sacred to external inspection solely, is, with a certain school of book-collectors, a scandal, such as it would be among a hunting set to hint that a man had killed a fox. In the dialogues, not always the most entertaining, of Dibdin's Biblioma- nia, there is this short passage : " ' I will frankly MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 17 confess/ rejoined Lysander, ' that I am an arrant bibliomaniac that I love books dearly that the very sight, touch, and mere perusal ' ' Hold, my friend,' again exclaimed Philemon ; ' you have re- nounced your profession you talk of reading books do bibliomaniacs ever read books ? ' " Yes, the Archdeacon read books he devoured them ; and he did so to full prolific purpose. His was a mind enriched with varied learning, which he gave forth with full, strong, easy flow, like an inex- haustible perennial spring coming from inner reser- voirs, never dry, yet too capacious to exhibit the brawling, bubbling symptoms of repletion. It was from a majestic heedlessness of the busy world and its fame that he got the character of indolence, and was set down as one who would leave no lasting memorial of his great learning. But when he died, it was not altogether without leaving a sign ; for from the casual droppings of his pen has been pre- served enough to signify to many generations of students in the walk he chiefly affected how richly his mind was stored, and how much fresh matter there is in those fields of inquiry where compilers have left their dreary tracks, for ardent students to cultivate into a rich harvest. In him truly the bibliomania may be counted among the many illus- trations of the truth so often moralised on, that the highest natures are not exempt from human frailty in some shape or other. Let us now summon the shade of another departed B 18 HIS NATURE. victim Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq. He too, through a long life, had been a vigilant and enthusiastic collector, but after a totally different fashion. He was far from omnivorous. He had a principle of selection peculiar and separate from all other's, as was his own individuality from other men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the accepted nomenclatures peculiar to the initiated. He was not a black-letter man, or a tall-copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an early-Eng- lish-dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or an old-brown-calf man, or a Granger- ite, or a tawny-moroccoite, or a gilt-topper, a marbled- insider, or an editio princeps man ; neither did he come under any of the more vulgar classifications of an antiquarian, or a belles-lettres, or a classical col- lector. There was no way of defining his peculiar walk save by his own name it was the Fitzpatrick- Smart walk. In fact, it wound itself in infinite windings through isolated spots of literary scenery, if we may so speak, in which he took a personal interest. There were historical events, bits of family history, chiefly of a tragic or a scandalous kind, efforts of art or of literary genius on which, through some intellectual law, his mind and memory loved to dwell ; and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 19 the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly as it could be. It was difficult, almost impossible, for others to predicate what would please this wayward sort of taste, and he was the torment of the book-caterers, who were sure of a princely price for the right article, but might have the wrong one thrown in their teeth with contumely. It was a perilous, but, if successful, a gratifying thing to present him with a book. If it happened to hit his fancy, he felt the full force of the compliment, and overwhelmed the giver with his courtly thanks. But it required great observation and tact to fit one for such an adventure, for the chances against an ordinary thoughtless gift-maker were thousands to one ; and those who were acquainted with his strange nervous temperament, knew that the existence within his dwelling-place of any book not of his own special kind, would impart to him the sort of feeling of uneasy horror which a bee is said to feel when an earwig comes into its cell. Presentation copies by authors were among the chronic torments of his existence. While the complacent author was per- haps pluming himself on his liberality in making the judicious gift, the recipient was pouring out all his sarcasm, which was not feeble or slight, on the odious object, and wondering why an author could have entertained against him so steady and enduring a malice as to take the trouble of writing and printing all that rubbish with no better object than disturb- 20 HIS NATURE. ing the peace of mind of an inoffensive old man. Every tribute from such dona ferentes cost him much uneasiness and some want of sleep for what could he do with it ? It was impossible to make merchandise of it, for he was every inch a gentle- man. He could not burn it, for under an acrid exterior he had a kindly nature. It was believed, indeed, that he had established some limbo of his own, in which such unwelcome commodities were subject to a kind of burial or entombment, where they remained in existence, yet were decidedly out- side the circle of his household gods. These gods were a pantheon of a very extraordi- nary description, for he was a hunter after other things besides books. His acquisitions included pictures, and the various commodities which, for want of a distinctive name, auctioneers call " mis- cellaneous articles of vertu." He started on his accumulating career with some old family relics, and these, perhaps, gave the direction to his subse- quent acquisitions, for they were all, like his books, brought together after some self-willed and peculiar law of association that pleased himself. A bad, even an inferior picture he would not have for his taste was exquisite unless, indeed, it had some strange history about it, adapting it to his wayward fancies, and then he would adopt the badness as a peculiar recommendation, and point it out with some pungent and appropriate remark to his friends. But though, with these peculiar exceptions, his MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 21 works of art were faultless, no dealer could ever calculate on his buying a picture, however high a work of art or great a bargain. With his ever- accumulating collection, in which tiny sculpture and brilliant colour predominated, he kept a sort of fairy world around him. But each one of the mob of curious things he preserved had some story linking it with others, or with his peculiar fancies, and each one had its precise place in a sort of epos, as certainly as each of the persons in the confusion of a panto- mime or a farce has his own position and functions. After all, he was himself his own greatest curi- osity. He had come to manhood just after the period of gold-laced waistcoats, small-clothes, and shoe-buckles, otherwise he would have been long a living memorial of these now antique habits. It happened to be his lot to preserve down to us the earliest phase of the pantaloon dynasty. So, while the rest of the world were booted or heavy shod, his silk - stockinged feet were thrust into pumps of early Oxford cut, and the predominant garment was the surtout, blue in colour, and of the original make before it came to be called a frock. Round his neck was wrapped an ante-Brummelite neckerchief (not a tie), which projected in many wreaths like a great poultice and so he took his walks abroad, a figure which he could himself have turned into admirable ridicule. One of the mysteries about him was, that his clothes, though unlike any other person's, were 22 HIS NATURE. always old. This characteristic could not even be accounted for by the supposition that he had laid in a sixty years' stock in his youth, for they always appeared to have been a good deal worn. The very umbrella was in keeping it was of green silk, an obsolete colour ten years ago and the handle was of a peculiar crosier -like formation in cast -horn, obviously not obtainable in the market. His face was ruddy, but not with the ruddiness of youth ; and, bearing on his head a Brutus wig of the light- brown hair which had long ago legitimately shaded his brow, when he stood still except for his linen, which was snowy white one might suppose that he had been shot and stuffed on his return home from college, and had been sprinkled with the frowzy mouldiness which time imparts to stuffed animals and other things, in which a semblance to the fresh- ness of living nature is vainly attempted to be pre- served. So if he were motionless ; but let him speak, and the internal freshness was still there, an ever-blooming garden of intellectual flowers. His antiquated costume was no longer grotesque it har- monised with an antiquated courtesy and high-bred gentleness of manner, which he had acquired from the best sources, since he had seen the first company in his day, whether for rank or genius. And con- versation and manner were far from exhausting his resources. He had a wonderful pencil it was potent for the beautiful, the terrible, and the ridi- culous ; but it took a wayward wilful course, like MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 23 everything else about him. He had a brilliant pen, too, when he chose to wield it ; but the idea that he should exercise any of these his gifts in common display before the world, for any even of the higher motives that make people desire fame and praise, would have sickened him. His faculties were his own as much as his collection, and to be used accord- ing to his caprice and pleasure. So fluttered through existence one who, had it been his fate to have his own bread to make, might have been a great man. Alas for the end ! Some curious annotations are all that remain of his literary powers some drawings and etchings in private collections all of his artistic. His collection, with its long train of legends and asso- ciations, came to what he himself must have counted as dispersal. He left it to his housekeeper, who, like a wise woman, converted it into cash while its mysterious reputation was fresh. Huddled in a great auction-room, its several catalogued items lay in humiliating contrast with the decorous order in which they were wont to be arranged. Sic transit gloria mundi. Let us now call up a different and a more com- monplace type of the book-hunter it shall be Inch- rule Brewer. He is guiltless of all intermeddling with the contents of books, but in their external attributes his learning is marvellous. He derived his nickname from the practice of keeping, as his inseparable pocket-companion, one of those gradu- ated folding measures of length which may often be 24 HIS NATURE. seen protruding from the moleskin pocket of the joiner. He used it at auctions, and on other appro- priate occasions, to measure the different elements of a book the letterpress the unprinted margin the external expanse of the binding ; for to the perfectly scientific collector all these things are very signifi- cant.* They are, in fact, on record among the craft, like the pedigrees and physical characteristics recorded in stud-books and short-horn books. One so accomplished in this kind of analysis could tell at once, by this criterion, whether the treasure under the hammer was the same that had been knocked down before at the Eoxburghe sale the Askew, Gordonstown, or the Heber, perhaps or was veri- tably an impostor or was in reality a new and pre- viously unknown prize well worth contending for. The minuteness and precision of his knowledge excited wonder, and, being anomalous in the male sex even among collectors, gave occasion to a rumour * Of the copy of the celebrated 1635 Elzevir Ccesar, in the Imperial Library at Paris, Brunet triumphantly informs us that it is four inches and ten-twelfths in height, and occupies the high position of being the tallest copy of that volume in the world, since other illustrious copies put in competition with it have been found not to exceed four inches and eight, or, at the utmost, nine, twelfths. " Ces details," he subjoins, "paroitront sans doute puerils a bien des gens : mais puisque c'est la grandeur des marges de ces sorts de livres qu'en determine la valeur, il faut bien fixer le maximum de cette grandeur, afin que les amateurs puissent apprgcier les exemplaires qui approchent plus ou moins de la mesure donnee. " MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 25 that its possessor must veritably be an aged maiden in disguise. His experience, aided by a heaven-born genius tending in that direction, rendered him the most merciless detector of sophisticated books. Nothing, it might be supposed on first thought, can be a simpler or more easily recognised thing than a book genuine as printed. But in the old-book trade there are opportunities for the exercise of ingenuity in- ferior only to those which render the picture-dealer's and the horse-dealer's functions so mysteriously in- teresting. Sometimes entire facsimiles are made of eminent volumes. More commonly, however, the problem is to complete an imperfect copy. This will be most satisfactorily accomplished, of course, if another copy can be procured imperfect also, but not in the same parts. Great ingenuity is some- times shown in completing a highly esteemed edition with fragments from one lightly esteemed. Some- times a colophon or a decorated capital has to be imitated, and bold operators will reprint a page or two in facsimile ; these operations, of course, in- volve the inlaying of paper, judiciously staining it, and other mysteries. Paris is the great centre of this kind of work, but it has been pretty extensively pursued in Britain ; and the manufacture of first folio Shakespeares has been nearly as staple a trade as the getting up of genuine portraits of Mary Queen of Scots. It will establish a broad distinction to note the fact, that whereas our friend the Archdeacon 26 HIS NATURE. would collect several imperfect copies of the same book in the hope of finding materials for one perfect one among them, Inchrule would remorselessly spurn from him the most voluptuously got-up specimen (to use a favourite phrase of Dibdin's) were it tainted by the very faintest " restoration." Among the elements which constitute the value of a book rarity of course being equal one might say he counted the binding highest. He was not alone in this view, for it would be difficult to give the uninitiated a conception of the importance attached to this mechanical department of book- making by the adepts. About a third of Dibdin's Bibliographical Decameron is, if I recollect rightly, devoted to bindings. There are binders who have immortalised themselves as Staggemier, Walther, Payne, Padaloup, Hering, De Rome, Faulkner, Lewis, Hayday, and Thomson. Their names may sometimes be found on their work, not with any particularities, as if they required to make them- selves known, but with the simple brevity of illus- trious men. Thus you take up a morocco-bound work of some eminence, on the title-page of which the author sets forth his full name and profession, with the distinctive initials of certain learned socie- ties to which it is his pride to belong ; but the simple and dignified enunciation, deeply stamped in his own golden letters, " Bound by Hayday," is all that that accomplished artist deigns to tell. And let us, after all, acknowledge that there are MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 27 few men who are entirely above the influence of binding. Ko one likes sheep's clothing for his literature, even if he should not aspire to russia or morocco. Adam Smith, one of the least showy of men, confessed himself to be a beau in his books. Perhaps the majority of men of letters are so to some extent, though poets are apt to be ragamuffins. It was Thomson, I believe, who used to cut the leaves with the snuffers. Perhaps an event in his early career may have soured him of the proprieties. It is said that he had an uncle, a clever active me- chanic, who could do many things with his hands, and contemplated James's indolent, dreamy, " feck- less" character with impatient disgust. When the first of Tlie Seasons " Winter" it was, I believe had been completed at press, Jamie thought, by a presentation copy, to triumph over his uncle's scep- ticism, and to propitiate his good opinion he had the book handsomely bound. The old man never looked inside, or asked what the book was about, but, turn- ing it round and round with his fingers in gratified admiration, exclaimed " Come, is that really our Jamie's doin' now? weel, I never thought the cratur wad hae had the handicraft to do the like ! " The feeling by which this worthy man was influ- enced was a mere sensible practical respect for good workmanship. The aspirations of the collectors, however, in this matter, go out of the boundaries of the sphere of the utilitarian into that of the lesthetic. Their priests and prophets, by the way, 28 HIS NA TURE. do not seem to be aware how far back this venera- tion for the coverings of books may be traced, or to know how strongly their votaries have been influenced in the direction of their taste by the traditions of the middle ages. The binding of a book was, of old, a shrine on which the finest workmanship in bullion and the costliest gems were lavished. The psalter or the breviary of some early saint, a portion of the Scriptures, or some other volume held sacred, would be thus enshrined. It has happened sometimes that tattered fragments of them have been preserved as effective relics within outer shells or shrines ; and in some instances, long after the books themselves have disappeared, speci- mens of these old bindings have remained to us beautiful in their decay ; but we are getting far beyond the Inchrule. Your affluent omnivorous collector, who has more of that kind of business on hand than he can per- form for himself, naturally brings about him a train of satellites, who make it their business to minis- ter to his importunate cravings. With them the phraseology of the initiated degenerates into a hard business sort of slang. Whatever slight remnant of respect towards literature as a vehicle of know- ledge may linger in the conversation of their em- ployers, has never belonged to theirs. They are dealers who have just two things to look to the price of their wares, and the peculiar propensities of the unfortunates who employ them. Not that they MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 29 are destitute of all sympathy with the malady which they feed. The caterer generally gets infected in a superficial cutaneous sort of way. He has often a collection himself, which he eyes complacently of an evening as he smokes his pipe over his brandy-and- water, but to which he is not so distractedly devoted but that a pecuniary consideration will tempt him to dismember it. It generally consists, indeed, of blunders or false speculations books which have been obtained in a mistaken reliance on their suit- ing the craving of some wealthy collector. Caterers unable to comprehend the subtle influences at work in the mind of the book-hunter, often make miscal- culations in this way. Fitzpatrick Smart punished them so terribly that they at last abandoned him in despair to his own devices. Several men of this class were under the autho- rity of the Inchrule, and their communings were instructive. " Thorpe's catalogue just arrived, sir several highly important announcements," says a portly person with a fat volume under his arm, hustling forward with an air of assured consequence. There is now to be a deep and solemn consultation, as when two ambassadors are going over a heavy protocol from a third. It happened to me to see one of these myrmidons returning from a bootless errand of inspection to a reputed collection ; he was hot and indignant. " A collection" he sput- tered forth "that a collection! mere rubbish, sir irredeemable trash. What do you think, sir 1 ? 30 HIS NATURE. a set of the common quarto edition of the Delphini classics, copies of Newton's works and Bacon's works, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and so forth nothing better, I declare to you : and to call that a collection ! " Whereas, had it contained The Par- doner and the Frere, Sir Clyomon and Clamydes, A Knacke to Jcnowe a Knave, Banlce's Bay Horse in a trance, or the works of those eminent dramatists, Nabbes, May, Glapthorne, or Chettle, then would the collection have been worthy of distinguished notice. On another occasion, the conversation turning on a name of some repute, the remark is ventured, that he is " said to know something about books," which brings forth the fatal answer "He know about books ! Nothing nothing at all, I assure you ; unless, perhaps, about their insides." The next slide of the lantern is to represent a quite peculiar and abnormal case. It introduces a strangely fragile, unsubstantial, and puerile figure, wherein, however, resided one of the most potent and original spirits that ever frequented a tenement of clay. He shall be called, 011 account of associa- tions that may or may not be found out, Thomas Papaverius. But how to make palpable to the ordinary human being one so signally divested of all the material and common characteristics of his race, yet so nobly endowed with its rarer and loftier attributes, almost paralyses the pen at the very be- ginning. In what mood and shape shall he be brought MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 31 forward 1 Shall it be as first we met at the table of Lucullus, whereto he was seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who entertained novel and anarchical opinions regarding the Golden Ass of Apuleius 1 No one speaks of waiting dinner for him. He will come and depart at his own sweet will, neither burdened with punc- tualities nor burdening others by exacting them. The festivities of the afternoon are far on when a commotion is heard in the hall as if some dog or other stray animal had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be 1 a street-boy of some sort 1 His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a parti- coloured belcher handkerchief : on his feet are list- shoes, covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night ; and the trousers some one suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing- ink, but that Papaverius never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them. What can be the theory of such a costume 1 The simplest thing in the world it consisted of the fragments of apparel nearest at hand. Had chance thrown to him a court single-breasted coat, with a bishop's apron, a kilt, and top-boots, in these he would have made his entry. The first impression that a boy has appeared vanishes instantly. Though in one of the sweetest 32 HIS NATURE. and most genial of his essays he shews how every man retains so much in him of the child he origin- ally was and he himself retained a great deal of that primitive simplicity it was buried within the depths of his heart not visible externally. On the con- trary, on one occasion when he corrected an errone- ous reference to an event as being a century old, by saying that he recollected its occurrence, one felt almost a surprise at the necessary limitation in his age, so old did he appear with his arched brow loaded with thought, and the countless little wrinkles which engrained his skin, gathering thick- ly round the curiously expressive and subtle lips. These lips are speedily opened by some casual re- mark, and presently the flood of talk passes forth from them, free, clear, and continuous never rising into declamation never losing a certain mellow earnestness, and all consisting of sentences as ex- quisitely jointed together, as if they were destined to challenge the criticism of the remotest posterity. Still the hours stride over each other, and still flows on the stream of gentle rhetoric, as if it were labitur et labetur in omne volubilis cevuni. It is now far in to the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of civilisa- tion, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the special, he could testify to the incon- venience of late hours ; for, was it not the other MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 33 night that, coining to what was, or what he believed to be, his own door, he knocked, and knocked, but the old woman within either couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and having taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme unpleasantness of such a couch. The predial groove might indeed nourish kindly the infant seeds and shoots of the peculiar vegetable to which it was appropriated, but was not a comfortable place of repose for adult man. Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel- stained and foot-sore, he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he should get a penny and go home a pro- posal which he subjected to some philosophical cri- ticism very far wide of its practical tenor. How far he had wandered since he had last refreshed him- self, or even whether he had eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting articu- late utterance from him. Though his costume was muddy, however, and his communications about the material wants of life very hazy, the ideas which he had stored up during his wandering poured them- selves forth as clear and sparkling, both in logic and language, as the purest fountain that springs from a Highland rock. How that wearied, worn, little body was to be re- freshed was a difficult problem : soft food disagreed with him the hard he could not eat. Suggestions c 34 HIS NATURE. pointed at length to the solution of that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to be treated in the house that night. How many drops ? Drops ! nonsense. If the wine glasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal size, there was no risk and so the weary is at rest for a time. At early morn a triumphant cry of Eureka ! calls me to his place of rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books and lugged a considerable heap of them around him. That one which spe- cially claims his attention my best bound quarto is spread upon a piece of bedroom furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of attire to separate him from the condi- tion in which Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his un- earthly face from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it occurred to me that I had seen something like the scene in Dutch paintings of the Temptation of St Anthony. Suppose the scene changed to a pleasant country house, where the enlivening talk has made a guest forget " The lang Scots miles, The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles," MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 35 that lie between him and his place of rest. He must be instructed in his course, but the instruction reveals more difficulties than it removes, and there is much doubt and discussion, which Papaverius at once clears up as effectually as he had ever dispersed a cloud of logical sophisms ; and this time the feat is performed by a stroke of the thoroughly practical, which looks like inspiration he will accompany the forlorn traveller, and lead him through the difficul- ties of the way for have not midnight wanderings and musings made him familiar with all its intrica- cies 1 Roofed by a huge wideawake, which makes his tiny figure look like the stalk of some great fungus, with a lantern of more than common dimensions in his hand, away he goes down the wooded path, up the steep bank, along the brawling stream, and across the waterfall and ever as he goes there comes from him a continued stream of talk concern- ing the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and other kindred matters. Surely if we two were seen by any human eyes, it must have been supposed that some gnome, or troll, or kelpie was luring the list- ener to his doom. The worst of such affairs as this was, the consciousness that, when left, the old man would continue walking on until, weariness over- coming him, he would take his rest, wherever that happened, like some poor mendicant. He used to denounce, with his most fervent eloquence, that bar- barous and brutal provision of the law of England which rendered sleeping in the open air an act of 36 HIS NATURE. vagrancy, and so punishable, if the sleeper could not give a satisfactory account of himself a thing which Papaverius never could give under any circum- stances. After all, I fear this is an attempt to de- scribe the indescribable. It was the commonest of sayings when any of his friends were mentioning to each other "his last," and creating mutual shrugs of astonishment, that, were one to attempt to tell all about him, no man would believe it, so separate would the whole be from all the normal conditions of human nature. The difficulty becomes more inextricable in pass- ing from specific little incidents to an estimation of the general nature of the man. The logicians lucidly describe definition as being per genus et differentiam. You have the characteristics in which all of the genus partake as common ground, and then you individualise your object by showing in what it differs from the others of the genus. But we are denied this standard for Papaverius, so entirely did he stand apart, divested of the ordinary characteris- tics of social man of those characteristics without which the human race as a body could not get on or exist. For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a loose man in money matters ; those who knew him closer laughed at the idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like re- sponsibility with his nature. You might as well attack the character of the nightingale, which may have nipped up your five-pound note and torn it to MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 37 shreds to serve as nest-building material. Only immediate craving necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civilised society; and only while the necessity lasted did the acknow- ledgment exist. Take just one example, which will render this clearer than any generalities. He arrives very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission a process in which he often endured impediments he represents, with his usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the realm the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or fancying he discovers, signs that his eloquence is likely to be unproductive, he is fortunately reminded that, should there be any difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he is at that moment in possession of a document, which he is prepared to deposit with the lender a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove any feeling of anxiety which the most prudent person could experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled bit of paper, and spreads it out a fifty-pound bank-note ! The friend, who knew him well, was of opinion that, had 38 HIS NATURE. he, on delivering over the seven shillings and six- pence, received the bank-note, he never would have heard anything more of the transaction from the other party. It was also his opinion that, before coming to a personal friend, the owner of the note had made several efforts to raise money on it among persons who might take a purely business view of such transactions ; but the lateness of the hour, and something in the appearance of the thing altogether, had induced these mercenaries to forget their cun- ning, and decline the transaction. He stretched till it broke the proverb, Bis dat qui cito dat. His giving was quick enough on the rare occasions when he had wherewithal to give, but then the act was final, and could not be repeated. If he suffered in his own person from this peculi- arity, he suffered still more in his sympathies, for he was full of them to all breathing creatures, and, like poor Goldy, it was agony to him to hear the beggar's cry of distress, and to hear it without the means of assuaging it, though in a departed fifty pounds there were doubtless the elements for ap- peasing many a street wail. All sums of money were measured by him through the common standard of immediate use; and with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note, might he inform you that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be nearest to him at the time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 39 in negotiating a loan of " twopence." He was and is a great authority in political economy. I have known great anatomists and physiologists as careless of their health as he was of his purse, whence I have inferred that something more than a knowledge of the abstract truth of political economy is necessary to keep some men from pecuniary imprudence, and that something more than a knowledge of the re- ceived principles of physiology is necessary to bring others into a course of perfect sobriety and general obedience to the laws of health. Further, Papaverius had an extraordinary insight into practical human life ; not merely in the abstract, but in the concrete ; not merely as a philosopher of human nature, but as one who saw into those who passed him in the walk of life with the kind of intuition attributed to expert detectives a faculty that is known to have belonged to more than one dreamer, and is one of the myste- ries in the nature of J. J. Eousseau ; and, by the way, like Rousseau's, his handwriting was clear, angular, and unimpassioned, and not less uniform and legible than printing as if the medium of con- veying so noble a thing as thought ought to be care- fully, symmetrically, and decorously constructed, let all other material things be as neglectfully and scornfully dealt with as may be. This is a long proemium to the description of his characteristics as a book-hunter but these can be briefly told. Not for him were the common enjoy- ments and excitements of the pursuit. He cared 40 HIS NATURE. not to add volume unto volume, and heap up the relics of the printing-press. All the external niceties about pet editions, peculiarities of binding or of printing, rarity itself, were to him as if they were not. His pursuit, indeed, was like that of the savage who seeks but to appease the hunger of the moment. If he catch a prey just sufficient for his desires, it is well ; yet he will not hesitate to bring down the elk or the buffalo, and, satiating himself with the choicer delicacies, abandon the bulk of the carcass to the wolves or the vultures. So of Papa- verius. If his intellectual appetite were craving after some passage in the OEdipus, or in the Medeia, or in Plato's Republic, he would be quite contented with the most tattered and valueless fragment of the volume if it contained what he wanted ; but, on the other hand, he would not hesitate to seize upon your tall copy in russia gilt and tooled. Nor would the exemption of an editio princeps from everyday sordid work restrain his sacrilegious hands. If it should contain the thing he desires to see, what is to hinder him from wrenching out the twentieth volume of your EncydopSdie Methodique, or Ersch und Gruber, leaving a vacancy like an extracted front tooth, and carrying it off to his den of Cacus? If you should mention the matter to any vulgar- mannered acquaintance given to the unhallowed practice of jeering, he would probably touch his nose with his extended palm and say, " Don't you wish you may get it ? " True, the world at large has MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 41 gained a brilliant essay on Euripides or Plato but what is that to the rightful owner of the lost sheep 1 The learned world may very fairly be divided into those who return the books borrowed by them, and those who do not. Papaverius belonged decidedly to the latter order. A friend addicted to the mar- vellous boasts that, under the pressure of a call by a public library to replace a mutilated book with a new copy, which would have cost 30, he recovered a volume from Papaverius, through the agency of a person specially bribed and authorised to take any necessary measures, insolence and violence excepted but the power of extraction that must have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble- work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a con- fiding landlady. In other instances the book has been recognised at large, greatly enhanced in value by a profuse edging of manuscript notes from a gifted pen a phenomenon calculated to bring into practical use the speculations of the civilians about pictures painted on other people's panels.* What * "Si quis in alien a tabula pinxerit, quidani putant, tabu- lam picturse cedere : aliis videtur picturam (qualiscunque 42 HIS NATURE. became of all his waifs and strays, it might be well not to inquire too curiously. If he ran short of legitimate tabula raza to write on, do you think he would hesitate to tear out the most convenient leaves of any broad-margined book, whether be- longing to himself or another 1 Nay, it is said he once gave in " copy " written on the edges of a tall octavo, Somnium Sdpionis; and as he did not obli- terate the original matter, the printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny jumble between the letterpress Latin and the manuscript English. All these things were the types of an intellectual vitality which despised and thrust aside all that was gross or material in that wherewith it came in contact. Surely never did the austerities of monk or ancho- rite so entirely cast all these away as his peculiar nature removed them from him. It may be ques- tioned if he ever knew what it was ' ' to eat a good dinner," or could even comprehend the nature of such a felicity. Yet in all the sensuous nerves Avhich connect as it were the body with the ideal, he was painfully susceptible. Hence a false quan- tity or a wrong note in music was agony to him ; and it is remembered with what ludicrous solemnity he apostrophised his unhappy fate as one over whom a cloud of the darkest despair had just been drawn sit) tabulee cedere : sed nobis videtur melius esse tabulam pictures cedere. Ridiculum est enim picturam Apellis 'vel Parrhasii in accessionem vilissiruse tabulae cedere." Inst. ii. 1, 34. MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 43 a peacock had come to live within hearing distance from him, and not only the terrific yells of the ac- cursed biped pierced him to the soul, but the con- tinued terror of their recurrence kept his nerves in agonising tension during the intervals of silence. Peace be with his gentle and kindly spirit, now for some time separated from its grotesque and humble tenement of clay. It is both right and pleasant to say that the characteristics here spoken of were not those of his latter days. In these he was tended by affectionate hands ; and I have always thought it a wonderful instance of the power of domestic care and management that, through the ministrations of a devoted offspring, this strange being Avas so cared for, that those who came in con- tact with him then, and then only, might have admired him as the patriarchal head of an agree- able and elegant household. Let us now, for the sake of variety, summon up a spirit of another order Magnus Lucullus, Esq. of Grand Priory. He is a man with a presence tall, and a little portly, with a handsome pleasant coun- tenance looking hospitality and kindliness towards friends, and a quiet but not easily solvable reserve towards the rest of the world. He has no literary pretensions, but you will not talk long with him without finding that he is a scholar, and a ripe and good one. He is complete and magnificent in all his belongings, only, as no man's qualities and char- acteristics are of perfectly uniform balance and 44 HIS NATURE. parallel action, his library is the sphere in which his disposition for the complete and the magnificent has most profusely developed itself. As you enter its Gothic door a sort of indistinct slightly musky perfume, like that said to frequent Oriental bazaars, hovers around. Everything is of perfect finish the mahogany-railed gallery the tiny ladders the broad- winged lecterns, with leathern cushions on the edges to keep the wood from grazing the rich bindings the books themselves, each shelf uniform with its facings or rather backings, like well- dressed lines at a review. Their owner does not pro- fess to indulge much in quaint monstrosities, though many a book of rarity is there. In the first place, he must have the best and most complete editions, whether common or rare ; and, in the second place, they must be in perfect condition. All the classics are there one complete set of Yalpy's in good rus- sia, and many separate copies of each, valuable for text or annotation. The copies of Bayle, Moreri, the Trevoux Dictionary, Stephens's Lexicon, Du Gauge, Mabillon's Antiqirities, the Benedictine historians, the Bolandists' Lives of the Saints, Greevius and Gro- novius, and heavy books of that order, are in their old original morocco, without a scratch or abrasure, gilt-edged, vellum- jointed, with their backs blazing in tooled gold. Your own dingy well-thumbed Bayle or Moreri possibly cost you two or three pounds, his cost forty or fifty. Further, in these affluent shelves may be found those great costly works which cross MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 45 the border of "three figures," and of which only one or two of the public libraries can boast, such as the Celebri Famiglie Italiane of Litta, Denon's Egypt,^the great French work on the arts of the middle ages, and the like; and many is the scholar who, unable to gratify his cravings elsewhere, has owed it to Lucullus that he has seen something he was in search after in one of these great books, and has been able to put it to public use. Throughout the establishment there is an appear- ance of care and order, but not of restraint. Some inordinately richly - bound volumes have special grooves or niches for themselves lined with soft cloth, as if they had delicate lungs, and must be kept from catching cold. But even these are not guarded from the hand of the guest. Lucullus says his books are at the service of his friends ; and, as a hint in the same direction, he recommends to your notice a few volumes from the collection of the celebrated Grollier, the most princely and liberal of collectors, on whose classic book-plate you find the genial motto, " Joannis Grollierii et amicorum." Having conferred on you the freedom of his library, he will not concern himself by observing how you use it. He would as soon watch you after dinner to note whether you eschew common sherry and show an expensive partiality for that madeira at twelve pounds a dozen, which other men would probably only place on the table when it could be well in- vested in company worthy of the sacrifice. Who 46 HIS NATURE. shall penetrate the human heart, and say whether a hidden pang or gust of wrath has vibrated behind that placid countenance, if you have been seen to drop an ink-spot on the creamy margin of the Men- telin Virgil, or to tumble that heavy Aquinas from the ladder and dislocate his j obits 1 As all the world now knows, however, men assimilate to the conditions by which they are surrounded, and we civilise our city savages by substituting cleanness and purity for the putrescence which naturally ac- cumulates in great cities. So, in a noble library, the visitor is enchained to reverence and courtesy by the genius of the place. You cannot toss about its trea- sures as you would your own rough calfs and obdu- rate hogskins ; as soon would you be tempted to pull out your meerschaum and punk-box in a ca- thedral. It is hard to say, but I would fain believe that even Papaverius himself might have felt some sympathetic touch from the spotless perfection around him and the noble reliance of the owner ; and that he might perhaps have restrained himself from tearing out the most petted rarities, as a wolf would tear a fat lamb from the fold. Such, then, are some " cases " discussed in a sort of clinical lecture. It will be seen that they have differing symptoms some mild and genial, others ferocious and dangerous. Before passing to another and the last case, I propose to say a word or two on some of the minor specialties which characterise the pursuit in its less amiable or dignified form. It is, MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 47 for instance, liable to be accompanied by an affec- tion, known also to the agricultural world as affect- ing the wheat crop, and called "the smut." For- tunately this is less prevalent among us than the French, who have a name for the class of books affected by this school of collectors in the Biblio- theque bleue. There is a sad story connected with this peculiar frailty. A great and high-minded scholar of the seventeenth century had a savage trick played on him by some mad wags, who col- lected a quantity of the brutalities of which Latin literature affords an endless supply, and published them in his name. He is said not long to have survived this practical joke ; and one does not wonder at his sinking before such a prospect, if he anticipated an age and a race of book-buyers among whom his great critical works are forgotten, and his name is known solely for the spurious volume, sacred to infamy, which may be found side by side with the works of the author of Trimalcion's Feast " par nobile fratrum." There is another failing, without a leaning to virtue's side, to which some collectors have been, by reputation at least, addicted a propensity to obtain articles without value given for them a tendency to be larcenish. It is the culmination, indeed, of a sort of lax morality apt to grow out of the habits and traditions of the class. Your true collector not the man who follows the occupation as a mere expensive taste, and does not cater for himself 48 HIS NATURE. considers himself a finder or discoverer rather than a purchaser. He is an industrious prowler in un- likely regions, and is entitled to some reward for his diligence and his skill. Moreover, it is the essence of that very skill to find value in those things which, in the eye of the ordinary possessor, are really worthless. From estimating them at little value, and paying little for them, the steps are rather too short to estimating them at nothing, and paying nothing for them. What matters it, a few dirty black-letter leaves picked out of that volume of miscellaneous trash leaves which the owner never knew he had, and cannot miss which he would not know the value of, had you told him of them r ( What use of putting notions into the greedy barba- rian's head, as if one were to find treasures for him ] And the little pasquinade is so curious, and will fill a gap in that fine collection so nicely ! The notions of the collector about such spoil are indeed the con- verse of those which Cassio professed to hold about his good name, for the scrap furtively removed is supposed in no way to impoverish the loser, while it makes the recipient rich indeed. Those habits of the prowler which may gradually lead a mind not strengthened by strong principle into this downward career, are hit with his usual vivacity and wonderful truth by Scott. The speaker is our delightful friend Oldenbuck of Monkbarns, the Antiquary, and it has just enough of confession in it to show a consciousness that the narrator has MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 49 gone over dangerous ground, and, if we did not see that the narrative is tinged with some exaggeration, has trodden a little beyond the limits of what is gentlemanly and just. " See this bundle of ballads, not one of them later than 1700, and some of them a hundred years older. I wheedled an old woman out of these, who loved them better than her psalm-book. Tobacco, sir, snuff, and the Complete Syren, were the equiva- lent ! For that mutilated copy of the Complaynt of Scotland I sat out the drinking of two dozen bottles of strong ale with the late learned proprietor, who in gratitude bequeathed it to me by his last will. These little Elzevirs are the memoranda and trophies of many a walk by night and morning through the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Bow, St Mary's Wynd wherever, in fine, there were to be found brokers and trokers, those miscellaneous dealers in things rare and curious. How often have I stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer's first price he should be led to suspect the value I set upon the article ! How have I trembled lest some passing stranger should chop in between me and the prize, and regarded each poor student of divinity that stopped to turn over the books at the stall as a rival amateur or prowling bookseller in disguise ! And then, Mr Lovel the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference while the hand is trembling with 50 HIS NATURE. pleasure ! Then to dazzle the eyes of our wealthier and emulous rivals by showing them such a treasure as this (displaying a little black smoked book about the size of a primer) to enjoy their surprise and envy; shrouding, meanwhile, under a veil of mys- terious consciousness, our own superior knowledge and dexterity; these, my young friend these are the white moments of life, that repay the toil and pains and sedulous attention which our profession, above all others, so peculiarly demands." There is a nice subtle meaning in the worthy man calling his weakness his " profession," but it is in complete keeping with the mellow Teniers-like tone of the whole picture. Ere we have done we shall endeavour to show that the grubber among book- stalls has, with other grubs or grubbers, his useful place in the general dispensation of the world. But his is a pursuit exposing him to moral perils, which call for peculiar efforts of self-restraint to save him from them ; and the moral Scott holds forth for a sound moral he always has is, If you go as far as Jonathan Oldenbuck did and I don't advise you to go so far, but hint that you shoiild stop earlier say to yourself, Thus far, and no farther. So much for a sort of clinical exposition of the larcenous propensities which accompany book-hunt- ing. There is another peculiar, and, it may be said, vicious propensity, exhibited occasionally in con- junction with the pursuit. It is entirely antagon- istic in spirit to the tenth commandment, and con- MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 51 sists in a desperate coveting of the neighbour's goods, and a satisfaction, not so much in possessing for one's self, as in dispossessing him. This spirit is said to burn with still fiercer flame in the breasts of those whose pursuit would externally seem to be the most innocent in the world, and the least excitive of the bad passions namely, among flower-fanciers. From some mysterious cause, it has been known to develop itself most flagrantly among tulip-collectors, insomuch that there are legends of Dutch devotees of this pursuit who have paid their thousands of dollars for a duplicate tuber, that they might have the satisfaction of crushing it under the heel.* This line of practice is not entirely alien to the book-hunter. Dibdin warmed his convivial guests at a comfortable fire, fed by the woodcuts which had been printed from in the impression of the Biblio- * ' ' The great point of view in a collector is to possess that not possessed by any other. It is said of a collector lately deceased, that he used to purchase scarce prints at enormous prices, in order to destroy them, and thereby render the remaining impressions more scarce and valuable." GROSE'S Olio, p. 57. I do not know to whom Grose alludes ; but it strikes me, in realising a man given to such propensities taking them as a reality and not a joke that it would be interesting to know how, in his moments of serious thought, he could contemplate his favourite pursuit as, for instance, when the conscientious physician may have thought it neces- sary to warn him in time of the approaching end how he could reckon up his good use of the talents bestowed on him, counting among them his opportunities for the encourage- ment of art, or an elevator and improver of the human race. 52 HIS NATURE. graphical Decameron. It was a quaint fancy, and deemed to be a pretty and appropriate form of hos- pitality, while it effectually assured the subscribers to his costly volumes that the vulgar world who buy cheap books was definitively cut off from parti- cipating in their privileges. Let us, however, summon a more potent spirit of this order. He is a different being altogether from those gentle shades who have flitted past us already. He was known in the body by many hard names, such as the Vampire, the Dragon, &c. He was an Irish absentee, or, more accurately, a refugee, since he had made himself so odious on his ample estate that he could not live there. How on earth he should have set about collecting books, is one of the inscrutable mysteries which ever surround the diag- nosis of this peculiar malady. Setting aside his using his books by reading them as out of the ques- tion, he yet was never known to indulge in that fondling and complacent examination of their ex- terior and general condition, which, to Inchrule and others of his class, seemed to afford the highest gratification that, as sojourners through this vale of tears, it was their lot to enjoy. Nor did he luxuriate in the collective pride like that of David when he numbered his people of beholding how his volumes increased in multitude, and ranged with one another, like well-sized and properly-dressed troops, along an ample area of book-shelves. His collection if it deserved the name was piled in great heaps in MIGHTY BOOK-HUNTERS. 53 garrets, cellars, and warerooms, like unsorted goods. They were accumulated, in fact, not so much that the owner might have them, as that other people might not. If there were a division of the order into positive, or those who desire to make collec- tions and negative, or those who desire to prevent them heing made, his case would properly helong to the latter. Imagine the consternation created in a small circle of collectors by a sudden alighting among them of a heluo librorum with such pro- pensities, armed with illimitable means, enabling him. to desolate the land like some fiery dragon ! What became of the chaotic mass of literature he had brought together no one knew. It was supposed to be congenial to his nature to have made a great bonfire of it before he left the world ; but a little consideration showed such a feat to be impossible, for books may be burnt in detail by extraneous assistance, but it is a curious fact that, combustible as paper is supposed to be, books won't burn. If you doubt this, pitch that folio Swammerdam or Puf- fendorf into a good rousing fire, and mark the result. No it is probable that, stored away in some forgotten repositories, these miscellaneous relics still remain ; and should they be brought forth, some excitement might be created ; for, ignorant as the monster was, he had an instinct for knowing what other people wanted, and was thus enabled to snatch rare and curious volumes from the grasp of syste- matic collectors. It was his great glory to get hold 54 HIS NATURE. of a unique "book and shut it up. There were known to be just two copies of a spare quarto, called Rout upon Rout, or the Rabblers Rabbled, by Felix Nixon, Gent. He possessed one copy; the other, by indomitable perseverance, he also got hold of, and then his heart was glad within him; and he felt it glow with well-merited pride when an accom- plished scholar, desiring to complete an epoch in literary history on which that book threw some light, besought the owner to allow him a sight of it, were it but for a few minutes, and the request was refused. " I might as well ask him," said the animal, Avho was rather proud of his firmness than ashamed of his churlishness, " to make me a present of his brains and reputation." It was among his pleasant ways to attend book- sales, there to watch the biddings of persons on whose judgment he relied, and cut in as the contest was becoming critical. This practice soon betrayed to those he had so provoked the chinks in the monster's armour. He was assailable and punish- able at last, then, this potent monster but the attack must be made warily and cautiously. Ac- cordingly, impartial bystanders, ignorant of the plot, began to observe that he was degenerating by degrees in the rank of his purchases, and at last becoming utterly reckless, buying, at the prices of the sublimest rarities, common works of ordinary literature to be found in every book-shop. Such was the result of judiciously drawing him on, by biddings for value- REMINISCENCES. 55 less books, on the part of those whom he had outbid in the objects of their desire. Auctioneers were sur- prised at the gradual change coming over the book- market, and a few fortunate people obtained consider- able prices for articles they were told to expect nothing for. But this farce, of course, did not last long ; and whether or not he found out that he had been beaten at his own weapons, the devouring monster disap- peared as mysteriously as he had come. U C H incidents bring vividly before the eye the scenes in which they took place long long ago. If any one in his early youth has experienced some slight symptoms of the malady under discussion, which his constitution, through a tough struggle with the world, and a busy training in after life, has been enabled to throw off, he will yet look back with fond associations to the scenes of his dangerous indulgence. The auction-room is often the centre of fatal attraction towards it, just as the billiard-room and the rouge-et-noir table are to excesses of another kind. There is that august tribunal, over which at one time reigned Scott's genial friend Ballantyne, succeeded by the sententious Tait, himself a man of taste and a collector, and now presided over by the great Nisbet. I bow with deferential awe to the 56 HIS NATURE. august tribunal "before which so vast a mass of literature has changed hands, and where the future destinies of so many thousands or, shall it be rather said, millions of volumes have been decided, each carrying with it its own little train of suspense and triumph. More congenial, however, in my recollection, is that remote and dingy hall where rough Carfrae, like Thor, flourished his thundering hammer. There it was that one first marked, with a sort of sym- pathetic awe, the strange and varied influence of their peculiar maladies on the book-hunters of the last generation. There it was that one first handled those pretty little pets, the Elzevir classics, a sort of literary bantams, which are still dear to memory, and awaken old associations by their dwarfish ribbed backs like those of ponderous folios, and their ex- quisite, but now, alas ! too minute type. The eyesight that could formerly peruse them with ease has suffered decay, but they remain unchanged ; and in this they are unlike to many other objects of early interest. Children, flowers, animals, scenery even, all have undergone mutation, but no percep- tible shade of change has passed over these little reminders of old times. There it was that one first could comprehend how a tattered dirty fragment of a book once common might be worth a deal more than its weight in gold. There it was too, that, seduced by bad example, the present respected pastor of Ardsnischen purchased REMINISCENCES. 57 that beautiful Greek New Testament, by Jansen of Amsterdam, which he loved so, in the freshness of its acquisition, that he took it with him to church, and, turning up the text, handed it to a venerable woman beside him, after the fashion of an absorbed and absent student who was apt to forget whether he was reading Greek or English. The presiding genius of the place, with his strange accent, odd sayings, and angular motions, accompanied by good- natured grunts of grotesque wrath, became a sort of household figure. The dorsal breadth of pronun- ciation with which he would expose " Mr Ivory's Ersktne," used to produce a titter which he was always at a loss to understand. Though not the fashionable mart where all the thorough libraries in perfect condition went to be hammered off though it was rather a place where miscellaneous collections were sold, and therefore bargains might be expected by those who knew what they were about yet sometimes extraordinary and valuable collections of rare books came under his hammer, arid created an access of more than ordinary excitement among the denizens of the place. On one of these occa- sions a succession of valuable fragments of early English poetry brought prices, so high and far be- yond those of ordinary expensive books in the finest condition, that it seemed as if their imperfections were their merit ; and the auctioneer, momentarily carried off with this feeling, when the high prices be- gan to sink a little, remonstrated thus, " Going so low 58 HIS NA TURE. as thirty shillings, gentlemen, this curious book so low as thirty shillings and quite imperfect I" Those who frequented this howf, being generally elderly men, have now nearly all departed. The thunderer's hammer, too, has long been silenced by the great quieter. One living memorial still exists of that scene the genial and then youthful assist- ant, whose partiality for letters and literary pursuits made him often the monitor and kindly guide of the raw student, and who now, in a higher field, exer- cises a more important influence on the destinies of Literature. I passed the spot the other day it was not desolate and forsaken, with the moss growing on the hearth -stone ; on the contrary, it flared with many lights a thronged gin-palace. When one heard the sounds that issued from the old familiar spot, the reflection not unnaturally occurred that, after all, there are worse pursuits in the world than book- hunting. Clarification. jERHAPS it would be a good prac- tical distribution of the class of per- sons under examination, to divide them into private prowlers and auction- hunters. There are many other modes of classify- ing them, but none so general. They might be clas- sified by the different sizes of books they affect as folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos but this CLASSIFICATION. 59 would be neither an expressive nor a dignified classi- fication. In enumerating the various orders to which Fitzpatrick Smart did not belong, I have mentioned many of the species, but a great many more might be added. Some collectors lay themselves out for vellum- printed volumes almost solely. There are such not only among very old books, but among very new ; for of a certain class of modern books it frequently hap- pens that a copy or two may be printed on vellum, to catch the class whose weakness takes that direction. It may be cited as a signal instance of the freaks of book-collecting, that of all men in the world Junot, the hard-fighting soldier, had a vellum library but so it was. It was sold in London for about 1400. "The crown octavos," says Dibdin, " espe- cially of ancient classics, and a few favourite English authors, brought from four to six guineas. The first virtually solid article of any importance, or rather of the greatest importance, in the whole, collection, was the matchless Didot Horace, of 1799, folio, containing the original drawings from which the exquisite copperplate vignettes were executed. This was purchased by the gallant Mr George Hibbert for 140. Nor was it in any respect an extravagant or even dear purchase." It now worthily adorns the library of Norton Hall. Some collectors may be styled Eubricists, being influenced by a sacred rage for books having the contents and marginal references printed in red ink. Some " go at" flowered capitals, others at broad 60 HIS NATURE. margins. These have all a certain amount of mag- nificence in their tastes ; but there are others again whose priceless collections are like the stock-in-trade of a wholesale ballad-singer, consisting of chap-books, as they are termed the articles dealt in by pedlars and semi-mendicants for the past century or two. Some affect collections relating to the drama, and lay great store by heaps of play-bills arranged in volumes, and bound, perhaps, in costly russia. Of a more dignified grade are perhaps those who have lent themselves to the collection of the theses on which aspirants after university honours held their disputations or impugnments. Sometimes out of a great mass of rubbish of this kind the youthful pro- duction of some man who has afterwards become great turns up. Of these theses and similar tracts a German, Count Dietrich, collected some hundred and forty thousand, which are now in this country. Collectors there have been, not xiniuiportant for number and zeal, whose mission it is to purchase books marked by peculiar mistakes or errors of the press. The celebrated Elzevir Ccesar of 1635 is known by this, that the number of the 149th page is misprinted 153. All that want this peculiar dis- tinction are counterfeits. The little volume being, as Brunet says, "une des plus jolies et plus rares de la collection des Elzevier," gave a temptation to fraudulent imitators, who, as if by a providential arrangement for their detection, lapsed into accuracy at the critical figure. CLASSIFICATION. 61 The mere printers' blunders that have been com- mitted upon editions of the Bible are reverenced in literary history ; and one edition the Vulgate issued under the authority of Sixtus V. achieved immense value from its multitude of errors. The well-known story of the German printer's wife, who surrepti- tiously altered the passage importing that her hus- band should be her lord (Herr) so as to make him be her fool (Narr), needs confirmation. If such a misprint were found, it might quite naturally be attributed to carelessness. Valarian Flavigny, who had many controversies on his hand, brought on the most terrible of them all with Abraham Ecchellensis for a mere dropped letter. In the rebuke about the mote in thy brother's eye and the beam in thine own, the first letter in the Latin for eye was care- lessly dropped out, and left a word which may be found occasionally in Martial's Epigrams, but not in books of purer Latin and purer ideas.* * A traditional anecdote represents the Rev. William Thomson, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, as having got into a scrape by a very indecorous alteration of a word in Scripture. A young divine, on his first public appear- ance, had to read the solemn passage in 1st Corinthians, " Behold, I show you a mystery ; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump." Thomson scratched the letter c out of the word changed. The effect of the passage so mutilated can easily be tested. The person who could play such tricks was ill suited for his profession, and, being re- lieved of its restraints, he found a more congenial sphere of life among the unsettled crew of men of letters in London, 62 HIS NATURE. Questions as to typographical blunders in editions of the classics are mixed up with larger critical inquiries into the purity of the ascertained text, and thus run in veins through the mighty strata of philological and critical controversy which, from the days of Poggio downwards, have continued to form that voluminous mass of learning which the outer world contemplates with silent awe. To some extent the same spirit of critical inquiry has penetrated into our own language. What we have of it clusters almost exclusively around the mighty name of Shakespeare. Shakespearian criti- over whom Smollett had just ceased to reign. He did a deal of hard work, and the world owes him at least one good turn in his translation of Cunningham's Latin History of Britain, from the Revolution to the Hanover Succession. The value of this work, in the minute light thrown by it on one of the most memorable periods of British history, is too little known. The following extract may give some notion of the curious and instructive nature of this neglected book. It describes the influences which were in favour of the French alliance, and against the Whigs, during Marl- borough's campaign. " And now I shall take this oppor- tunity to speak of the French wine -drinkers as truly and briefly as I can. On the first breaking out of the Confede- rate war, the merchants in England were prohibited from all commerce with France, and a heavy duty was laid upon French wine. This caused a grievous complaint among the topers, who have great interest in the Parliament, as if they had been poisoned by port wines. Mr Portman Sey- mour, who was a jovial companion, and indulged his appe- tites, but otherwise a good man ; General Churchill, the Duke of Maryborough's brother, a man of courage, but a lover of wine ; Mr Pereira, a Jew and smell-feast, and other CLA SSIFICA Tl ON. 63 cism is a branch of knowledge by itself. To record its triumphs from that greatest one by "which the senseless " Table of Greenfield," which interrupted the touching close of Falstaffs days, was replaced by '"a babbled of green fields" would make a large book of itself. He who would undertake it, in a perfectly candid and impartial spirit, would give us, varied no doubt with much erudition and acuteness, a curious record of blundering ignorance and presumptuous conceit, the one so intermingling Avith the other that it would be often difficult to dis- tinguish them.* hard drinkers, declared, that the want of French wine was not to be endured, and that they could hardly bear up under so great a calamity. These were joined by Dr Aldridge, who, though nicknamed the priest of Bacchus, was other- wise an excellent man, and adorned with all kinds of learn- ing. Dr Ratcliffe, a physician of great reputation, who ascribed the cause of all diseases to the want of French wines, though he was very rich, and much addicted to wine, yet, being extremely covetous, bought the cheaper wines ; but at the same time he imputed the badness of his wine to the war, and the difficulty of getting better. Therefore the Duke of Beaufort and the Earl of Scarsdale, two young noblemen of great interest among their acquaintance, who had it in their power to live at their ease in magnificence or luxury, merrily attributed all the doctor's complaints to his avarice. All those were also for peace rather than war. And all the bottle companions, many physicians, and great numbers of the lawyers and inferior clergy, and, in fine, the loose women too, were united together in the faction against the Duke of Marlborough." ii. 200. * Without venturing too near to this very turbulent arena, where hard words have lately been cast about with 64 HIS NATURE. The quantity of typographical errors exposed in those pages, where they are least to be expected, and are least excusable, opens up some curious con- siderations. Compositors are a placid and unim- pressionable race, who do their work dutifully, with- out yielding to the intellectual influences repre- sented by it. A clause of an Act of Parliament, with all its whereases, and be it enacteds, and here- by repealeds, creates quite as much emotion in them as the most brilliant burst of the fashionable poet of the day. They will set you up a psalni or a blas- phemous ditty with the same equanimity, not re- taining in their minds any clear distinction between them. Your writing must be something very won- derful indeed, before they distinguish it from other " copy," except by the goodness or badness of the hand. A State paper which all the world is mad to know about, is quite safe in a printing-office ; and they will set up what is here set down of them, without noting that it refers to themselves. It is much reckless ferocity, I shall just offer one amended read- ing, because there is something in it quite peculiar, and characteristic of its literary birthplace beyond the Atlan- tic. The passage operated upon is the wild soliloquy, where Hamlet resolves to try the test of the play, and says " The devil hatli power T' assume a pleasing shape ; yea, aud perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me." The amended reading stands " As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me too damme." CLASSIFICATION. 65 said that this stoic indifference is a wonderful provision for the preservation of the purity of lit- erature, and that, were compositors to think with the author under "the stick," they might make dire havoc. Allowing for these peculiarities, it may surely be believed that, between the compositors who put the types together and the correctors of the press, the printing of the Bible has generally been executed with more than average care. Yet the editions of the sacred book have been the great mine of dis- covered printer's blunders. The inference from this, however, is not that blunders abound less in other literature, but that they are not worth finding there. The issuing of the true reading of the Scripture is of such momentous consequence, that a mistake is sure of exposure, like those minute incidents of evidence which come forth when a murder has been com- mitted, but would never have left their privacy for the detection of a petty fraud. The value to literature of a pure Shakespearian text, has inspired the zeal of the detectives who work on this ground. Some casual detections have occurred in minor literature, as, for instance, when Akenside's description of the Pantheon, which had been printed as " serenely great," was restored to " severely great." The reason, however, why such detections are not common in common books, is the rather humiliating one that they are not worth mak- ing. The specific weight of individual words is in 66 HIS NATURE. them of so little influence, that one does as well as another. Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to achieve as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which the cunning of his hand cannot ac- complish. Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the contrary, sometimes rather im- proved. I might refer to a signal instance of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second and fourth of each quatrain changed places. This transposition was pronounced to operate a decided improvement on the spirit and originality of the piece, an opinion in which, unfortunately, the author did not concur ; nor could he appreciate the compliment of a critic, who remarked that the experiment tested the soundness of the lines, which could find their feet whatever way they were thrown about.* * One curious service of printer's blunders, of a char- acter quite distinct from their bibliological influence, is their use in detecting plagiarisms. It may seem strange that there should be any difficulty in critically deter- mining the question, when the plagiarism is so close as to admit of this test ; but there are pieces of very hard work in science, tables of reference, and the like, where, if two people go through the same work, they CL A SSIFICA TI03T. 67 There have been, no doubt, cruel instances of printer's blunders in our own days, like the fate of the youthful poetess in the Fudge family : " When I talked of the dewdrops on freshly-blown roses, The nasty things printed it freshly-blown noses." A solid scholar there was, who, had he been called to his account at a certain advanced period of his career, might have challenged all the world to say that he had ever used a false quantity or committed an anomaly in syntax, or misspelt a foreign name, or blundered in a quotation from a Greek or Latin classic to misquote an English author is a far lighter crime, but even to this he could have pleaded not guilty. He never made a mistake in a date, nor left out a word in copying the title-page of a volume ; nor did he ever, in affording an intelligent analysis of its contents, mistake the number of pages devoted to one head. As to the higher literary virtues too, his sentences were all carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the most sensitive will come to the same conclusion. In such cases, the prior worker has sometimes identified his own by a blunder, as he would a stolen china vase by a crack. Peignot complains that some thirty or forty pages of his Dictionnaire BibUographvpie were incorporated in the Siecles Litteraires de la France, "avec une exactitude si admirable, qu'on y a precieusement conserv toutes les fautes typographiques." 68 HIS NATURE. kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of end- ing a sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the same five lines, choos- ing always some judicious method of circumlocution to obviate reiteration. Poor man ! in the pride of his unspotted purity, he little knew what a humili- ation fate had prepared for him. It happened to him to have to state how Theodore Beza, or some contemporary of his, went to sea in a Candian vessel. This statement, at the last moment, when the sheet was going through the press, caught the eye of an intelligent and judicious corrector, more conversant with shipping-lists than with the literature of the sixteenth century, who saw clearly what had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting the author. The con- sequence was, that people read with some surprise, under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had gone to sea in a Canadian vessel The victim of this calamity had undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophi- cal equanimity ; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, destitute of the organ of veneration, thought- lessly asked him about the last new popular work, as if it were something that he had read or even heard of, and actually went so far in their contumelious disrespect as to speak to him about the productions of a certain Charles Dickens. The " Canadian ves- sel," however, was a more serious disaster, and was CLASSIFICATION. 69 treated accordingly. A charitable friend broke his calamity to the author at a judicious moment, to prevent him from discovering it himself at an un- suitable time, with results the full extent of which no one could foresee. It was an affair of much anxiety among his friends, who made frequent in- quiries as to how he bore himself in his affliction, and what continued to be the condition of his health, and especially of his spirits. And although he was a confirmed book-hunter, and not uncon- scious of the merits of the peculiar class of books now under consideration, it may be feared that it was no consolation to him to reflect that, some century or so hence, his books and himself would be known only by the curious blunder which made one of them worth the notice of the book- fanciers. An odd accident occurred to a well-known book lately published, called The Men of the Time. It sometimes happens in a printing-office that some of the types, perhaps a printed line or two, fall out of " the forme." Those in whose hands the accident occurs, generally try to put things to rights as well as they can, and may be very successful in restoring appearances with the most deplorable results to the sense. It happened thus in the instance referred to. A few lines dropping out of the Life of Robert Owen, the parallelogram Communist, were hustled, as the nearest place of refuge, into the biography of his closest alphabetical neighbour "Oxford, 70 HIS NATURE. Bishop of." The consequence is, that the article begins as follows : " OXFORD, THE RIGHT REVEREND SAMUEL "VYiL- BERFORCE, BISHOP OF, was born in 1805. A more kind-hearted and truly benevolent man does not exist. A sceptic, as regards religious revelation, he is nevertheless an out-and-out believer in spirit movements." Whenever this blunder was discovered, the leaf was cancelled; but a few copies of the book had got into circulation, which some day or other may be very valuable. In the several phases of the book-hunter, he whose peculiar glory it is to have his books illus- trated the Grangerite, as he is technically termed must not be omitted. " Illustrating" a volume con- sists in inserting in or binding up with it portraits, landscapes, and other works of art bearing a refer- ence to its contents. This is materially different from the other forms of the pursuit, in as far as the quarry hunted down is the raw material, the fin- ished article being a result of domestic manufacture. The illustrator is the very Ishmaelite of collectors his hand is against every man, and every man's hand is against him. He destroys unknown quan- tities of books to supply portraits or other illustra- tions to a single volume of his own ; and as it is not always known concerning any book that he has been at work on it, many a common book-buyer has cursed him on inspecting his own last bargain, and CLASSIFICATION. 71 finding that it is deficient in an interesting portrait or two. Tales there are, fitted to make the blood run cold in the veins of the most sanguine book- hunter, about the devastations committed by those who are given over to this special pursuit. It is generally understood that they received the impulse which has rendered them an important sect, from the publication of Granger's biographical history hence their name of Grangerites. So it has hap- pened that this industrious and respectable com- piler is contemplated with mysterious awe as a sort of literary Attila or Gengis Khan, who has spread terror and ruin around him. In truth the illus- trator, whether green-eyed or not, being a monster that doth make the meat he feeds on, is apt to be- come excited with his work, and to go on ever widening the circle of his purveyances, and open- ing new avenues toward the raw material on which he works. To show how widely such a person may levy contributions, I propose to take, not a whole volume, not even a whole page, but still a specific and distinguished piece of English literature, and describe the way in which a devotee of this pecu- liar practice woiild naturally proceed in illustrat- ing it. The piece of literature to be illustrated is as follows : "How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower ! 72 If IS NATURE. The first thing to "be done is to collect every engraved portrait of the author, Isaac Watts. The next, to get hold of any engravings of the house in which he was born, or houses in which he lived. Then will come all kinds of views of Southampton of its Gothic gate, and its older than Gothic wall. Any scrap connected with the inauguration of the Watts statue must of course he scrupulously gath- ered. To go hut a step heyond such commonplaces there is a traditional story about the boyhood of Isaac which has been told as follows. He took precociously to rhyming : like Pope, he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. It happened that this practice was very offensive to his father, a practical man, who, finding admonition useless, resolved to stop it in an effectual manner. He ac- cordingly, after the practice of his profession being a schoolmaster assailed with a leathern thong, duly prepared, the cuticle of that portion of the body which has from time immemorial been devoted to such inflictions. Under torture, the divine songster abjured his propensity in the following very hopeful shape " Oh, father, do some pity take, And I will no more verses make." It is not likely that this simple domestic scene has been engraved either for the Divine Hymns, or the improvement of the mind. The illustrator will therefore require to get a picture of it for his own CLASSIFICATION. 73 special use, and will add immensely to the value of his treasure while he gives scope to the genius of a Cruikshank or a Doyle. We are yet, it will be observed, only on the threshold. "We have next to illustrate the sub- stance of the poetry. All kinds of engravings of bees Attic and other, and of bee-hives, will be appro- priate, and will be followed by portraits of Huber and other great writers on bees, and views of Mount Hybla and other honey districts. Some Scripture prints illustrative of the history of Samson, who had to do with honey and bees, will be appropriate, as well as any illustrations of the fable of the bear and the bees, or of the Eoman story of the Sic vos non vobis. A still more appropriate form of illustration may, however, be drawn upon by re- membering that a periodical called The Bee was edited by Dr Anderson ; and it is important to observe that the name was adopted in the very spirit which inspired Watts. In both instances the most respected of all winged insects was brought forward as the type of industry. Portraits, then, of Dr Anderson, and any engravings that can be con- nected with himself and his pursuits, will have their place in the collection. It will occur, perhaps, to the intelligent illustrator, that Dr Anderson Avas the grandfather of Sir James Outram, and he Avill thus have the satisfaction of opening his collection for all illustrations of the career of that distinguished officer. Having been aptly called the Bayard of the 74 HIS NATURE. Indian service, the collector who has exhausted him and his services, will be justified by the principles of the craft in following up the chase, and pick- ing up any woodcuts or engravings referring to the death of the false Bourbon, or any other scene in the career of the knight, without fear or reproach. Here, by a fortunate and interesting coincidence, through the Bourbons the collector gets at the swarms of bees which distinguish the insignia of royalty in France. When the illustrator comes to the last line, which invites him to add to what he has already collected a representation of " every open- ing flower," it is easy to see that he has indeed a rich garden of delights before him. In a classification of book-hunters, the aspirants after large-paper copies deserve special notice, were it only for the purpose of guarding against a common fallacy which confounds them with the lovers of tall copies. The difference is fundamental, large- paper copies being created by system, while tall copies are merely the creatures of accident ; and Dibdin bestows due castigation in a celebrated in- stance in which a mere tall copy had, whether from ignorance or design, been spoken of as a large-paper copy. This high development of the desirable book is the result of an arrangement to print so many copies of a volume on paper of larger size than that of the bulk of the impression. The tall copy is the result of careful cutting by the binder, or of no cut- ting at all. In this primitive shape a book has CLASSIFICATION. 75 separate charms for a distinct class of collectors who esteem rough edges, and are willing, for the sake of this excellence, to endure the martyrdom of consult- ing books in that condition.* The historian of the private libraries of l^ew York makes us acquainted with a sect well known in the actually sporting world, but not heretofore familiar in the biblical. Here is a description of the Wal- tonian library of the Eeverend Dr Bethune. In the sunshine*he is a practical angler, and " During the darker seasons of the year, when forbidden the actual use of his rod, our friend has occupied himself with excursions through sale cata- logues, fishing out from their dingy pages whatever tends to honour his favourite author or favourite art, so that his spoils now number nearly five hun- dred volumes, of all sizes and dates. Pains have been taken to have not only copies of the works in- cluded in the list, but also the several editions ; and when it is of a work mentioned by Walton, an edi- "But devious oft, from ev'ry classic muse, The keen collector meaner paths will choose : And first the margin's breadth his soul employs, Pure, snowy, broad, the type of nobler joys. In vain might Homer roll the tide of song, Or Horace smile, or Tully charm the throng ; If crost by Pallas' ire, the trenchant blade, Or too obliqiie, or near the edge, invade, The Bibliomane exclaims, with haggard eye, 'No Margin ! 'turns in haste, and scorns to buy." FERRIAR'S Bibliomania, v. 34-43. 76 SIS NATURE. tion which the good old man himself may have seen. Thus the collection has all the editions of Walton, Cotton, and Venables in existence, and, with few exceptions, all the works referred to by Walton, or which tend to illustrate his favourite rambles by the Lea or the Dove. Every scrap of Walton's writing, and every compliment paid to him, have been care- fully gathered and garnered up, with prints and autographs and some precious manuscripts. Nor does the department end here, but embraces most of the older and many of the modern writers on ichthyology and angling." H E S E incidental divisions are too numerous and complex for a proper classification of book-hunters, and I am inclined to go back to the idea that their most effective and comprehensive division is into the private prowler and the auction-haunter. The difference between these is something like, in the sporting world, that between the stalker and the hunter proper. Each function has its merits, and calls for its special qualities and sacrifices. The one demands placidity, patience, caution, plausibility, and unwearied industry such attributes as those which have been already set forth in the words of the THE A UCTIOX-HA (INTER. 77 Antiquary. The auction-room, on the other hand, calls forth courage, promptness, and the spirit of ad- venture. There is wild work sometimes there, and men find themselves carried off by enthusiasm and competition towards pecuniary sacrifices which at the threshold of the auction-room they had solemnly vowed to themselves to eschew. But such sacrifices are the tribute paid to the absorbing interest of the pursuit, and are looked upon in their own peculiar circle as tending to the immortal honour of those who make them. This field of prowess has, it is said, undergone a prejudicial change in these days, the biddings being nearly all by dealers, while gentle- men-collectors are gradually moving out of the field. In old days one might have reaped for himself, by bold and emphatic biddings at a few auctions, a niche in that temple of fame, of which the presiding deity is I)r Frognal Dibdin a name familiarly abbreviat- ed into that of Foggy Dibdin. His descriptions of auction contests are perhaps the best and most read- able portions of his tremendously overdone books. Conspicuous beyond all others stands forth the sale of the Eoxburghe library, perhaps the most eminent contest of that kind on record. There were of it some ten thousand separate "lots," as auctioneers call them, and almost every one of them was a book of rank and mark in the eyes of the col- lecting community, and had been, with special pains and care and anxious exertion, drawn into the vortex of that collection. Although it was created by a 78 HIS NATURE. Duke, yet it has been rumoured that most of the books were bargains, and that the noble collector drew largely on the spirit of patient perseverance and enlightened sagacity for which Monkbarns claims credit. The great passion and pursuit of his life having been of so peculiar a character he was al- most as zealous a hunter of deer and wild swans, by the way, as of books, but this was not considered in the least peculiar it was necessary to find some strange influencing motive for his conduct ; so it has been said that it arose from his having been crossed in love in his early youth. Such crosses, in general, arise from the beloved one dying, or proving faith- less and becoming the wife of another. It was, however, the peculiarity of the Duke's misfortune, that it arose out of the illustrious marriage of the sister of his elected. She was the eldest daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Though pur- chased by a sacrifice of regal rank, yet there would be many countervailing advantages in the position of an affluent British Duchess which might reconcile a young lady, even of so illustrious a descent, to the sacrifice, had it not happened that Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales selected her younger sister to be the wife of George III. and the Queen of Great Britain, long known as the good Queen Charlotte. Then there arose, it seems, the necessity, as a matter of state and political etiquette, that the elder sister should abandon the alliance with a British subject. So, at all events, goes the story of the origin of THE AUCTION-HAUNTER. 79 the Duke's bibliomania ; and it is supposed to have been in the thoughts of Sir Walter Scott, when he said of him that "youthful misfortunes, of a kind against which neither wealth nor rank possess a talisman, cast an early shade of gloom over his pros- pects, and gave to one splendidly endowed with the means of enjoying society that degree of reserved melancholy which prefers retirement to the splendid scenes of gaiety." Dibdin, with more specific pre- cision, after rambling over the house where the great auction sale occurred, as inquisitive people are apt to do, tells us of the solitary room occupied by the Duke, close to his library, in which he slept and died : " all his migrations," says the bibliographer, "were confined to these two rooms. When Mr Nichol showed me the very bed on which this bibliomaniacal Duke had expired, I felt as I trust I ought to have felt on the occasion." Scott attri- buted to an incidental occurrence at his father's table the direction given to the great pursuit of his life. " Lord Oxford and Lord Sunderland, both famous collectors of the time, dined one day with the second Duke of Roxburghe, when their con- versation happened to turn upon the editio prmceps of Boccaccio, printed in Venice in 1474, and so rare that its very existence was doubted of." It so hap- pened that the Duke remembered this volume hav- ing been offered to him for 100, and he believed he could still trace and secure it : he did so, and laid it before his admiring friends at a subsequent 80 HIS NATURE. sitting. " His son, then Marquess of Beaumont, never forgot the little scene upon this occasion, and used to ascribe to it the strong passion which he ever afterwards felt for rare books and editions, and which rendered him one of the most assiduous and judicious collectors that ever formed a sumptuous library." * And this same Boccaccio was the point of attack which formed the climax in the great contest of the Roxburghe roup, as the Duke's fellow-coun- trymen called it. The historian of the contest terms it " the Water- loo among book- battles," whereto " many a knight came far and wide from his retirement, and many an unfledged combatant left his father's castle to partake of the glory of such a contest." He also tells us that the honour of the first effective shot was due to a house in the trade Messrs Payne and Foss by whom "the Aldine Greek Bible was killed off the first in the contest. It produced the sum of 4, 14s. 6d. Thus measuredly, and guardedly, and even fearfully, did this tremendous battle begin." The earliest brilliant affair seems to have come off when Lord Spencer bought two Caxtons for 245, a feat of which the closing scene is recorded, with a touching simplicity, in these terms : " His Lord- ship put each volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of victory and con- * Article on Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, in the 21st vol. of Miscellaneous Prose Works. THE AUCTION-HAUNTER. 81 sciousness of triumph." As every one does not pos- sess a copy of the three costly volumes of which the Bibliographical Decameron consists and, further, as many a one so fortunate as to possess them has not had patience and perseverance enough to pene- trate to the middle of the third volume, where the most readable part is to be found a characteristic extract, describing the heat of the contest, may not be unwelcome : 'Tor two -and -forty successive days with the exception only of Sundays were the voice and ham- mer of Mr Evans heard with equal efficacy in the dining-room of the late Duke, which had been appro- priated to the vendition of the books ; and within that same space (some thirty-five feet by twenty) were such deeds of valour performed, and such feats of book-heroism achieved, as had never been pre- viously beheld, and of which the like will probably never be seen again. The shouts of the victors and the groans of the vanquished stunned and appalled you as you entered. The striving and press, both of idle spectators and determined bidders, was un- precedented. A sprinkling of Caxtons and De Wordes marked the first day, and these were ob- tained at high, but, comparatively with the subse- quent sums given, moderate prices. Theology, juris- prudence, philosophy, and philology chiefly marked the earlier days of this tremendous contest ; and occasionally during these days there was much stir- ring up of courage, and many hard and heavy blows 82 HIS NATURE. were interchanged ; and the combatants may be said to have completely wallowed themselves in the con- flict. At length came poetry, Latin, Italian, and French : a steady fight yet continued to be fought ; victory seemed to hang in doubtful scales some- times on the one, sometimes on the other side of Mr Evans, who preserved throughout (as it was his bounden duty to preserve) a uniform, impartial, and steady course ; and who may be said on that occa- sion, if not ' to have rode the whirlwind,' at least to have ' directed the storm.' " But the dignity and power of the historian's nar- rative cannot be fully appreciated until we find him in the midst of the climax of the contest the battle, which gradually merged into a single combat, for the possession of the Venetian Boccaccio. Accord- ing to the established historical practice, we have in the first place a statement of the position taken up by the respective " forces." " At length the moment of sale arrived. Evans prefaced the putting-up of the article by an appro- priate oration, in which he expatiated on its extreme rarity, and concluding by informing the company of the regret, and even anguish of heart, expressed by Mr Van Praet that such a treasure was not to be found in the Imperial collection at Paris. Silence followed the address of Mr Evans. On his right hand, leaning against the wall, stood Earl Spencer ; a little lower down, and standing at right angles with his Lordship, appeared the Marquess of Bland- THE AUCTION-HAUNTER. 83 % ford. Lord Althorp stood a little backward, to the right of his father, Earl Spencer." The first movement of the forces gives the histo- rian an opportunity of dropping a withering sneer at an unfortunate man, so provincial in his notions as to suppose that a hundred pounds or two would be of any avail in such a contest. " The honour of firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil from the rever- beration of the report himself had made. ' One hundred guineas,' he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued ; but anon the biddings rose rapidly to five hundred guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident that the firing was but masked and desultory. At length all random shots ceased, and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other, re- solving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths. A thousand guineas were bid by Earl Spencer to which the Marquess added ten. You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned all breathing wellnigh stopped every sword was put home within its scabbard and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter except that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand." But even this exciting sort of narrative will tire one when it goes on page after page, so that we must take a leap to the conclusion. " Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. 84 HIS NATURE. " The spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds his usual ten," and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a short pause and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid air. However, at last down dropped the hammer." Such a result naturally created excitement beyond the book-collectors' circle, for here was an actual stroke of trade in which a profit of more than two thousand per cent had been netted. It is easy to believe in Dibdin's statement of the crowds of people who imagined they were possessors of the identical Venetian Boccaccio, and the still larger number who wanted to do a stroke of business with some old volume, endowed with the same rarity and the same or greater intrinsic value. The general excitement created by the dispersal of the Eoxburghe collection proved an epoch in literary history, by the establish- ment of the Eoxburghe Club, followed by a series of others, the history of which has to be told farther on. Of the great book-sales that have been commemo- rated, it is curious to observe how seldom, they em- brace ancestral libraries accumulated in old houses from generation to generation, and how generally they mark the shortlived duration of the accu- mulations of some collector freshly deposited. One remarkable exception to this was in the Gordon- stoun library, sold in 1816. It was begun by Sir Robert Gordon, a Moraysliire laird of the time of THE AUCTION-HAUNTER. 85 the great civil wars of the seventeenth century. He was the author of the History of the Earldom of Sutherland, and a man of great political as well as literary account. He laid by heaps of the pam- phlets, placards, and other documents of his stormy period, and thus many a valuable morsel, which had otherwise disappeared from the world, left a repre- sentative in the Gordonstoun collection. It was in- creased by a later Sir Eobert, who had the reputation of being a wizard. He belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to take a victim annually ; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get off with merely the loss of his sha- dow ; and many a Morayshire peasant has testified to having seen him riding forth on a sunny day, the shadow of his horse visible, with those of his spurs and his whip, but his body offering no impediment to the rays of the sun. He enriched the library with books on necromancy, demonology, and alchemy. The greatest book-sale probably that ever was in the world, was that of Heber's collection in 1834. There are often rash estimates made of the size of libraries, but those who have stated the number of his books in six figures, seem justified when one looks at the catalogue of the sale, bound up in five thick octavo volumes. For results so magnificent, Eichard Heber's library had but a small beginning, according to the memoir of him in the Gentleman's Magazine, where it is said, that " having one day accidentally met with a little volume, called The 86 HIS NATURE. Vallie of Varietie, by Henry Peacham, he took it to the late Mr Bindley of the Stamp-office, the cele- brated collector, and asked him if this -was not a ciirious book. Mr Bindley, after looking at it, answered, ' Yes not very but rather a curious book.' This faint morsel of encouragement was, it seems, sufficient to start him in his terrible career, and the trifle becomes important as a solemn illus- tration of the obsta principiis. His labours, and even his perils, were on a par with those of any veteran commander who has led armies and fought battles during the great part of a long life. He would set off on a journey of several hundred miles any day in search of a book not in his collection. Sucking in from all around him whatever books were afloat, he of course soon exhausted the ordinary market ; and to find a book obtainable which he did not already possess, was an event to be looked to with the keenest anxiety, and a chance to be seized with promptitude, courage, and decision. At last, however, he could not supply the cravings of his appetite without recourse to duplicates, and far more than duplicates. His friend Dibdin said of him, " He has now and then an ungovernable pas- sion to possess more copies of a book than there were ever parties to a deed or stamina to a plant ; and therefore I cannot call him a duplicate or a triplicate collector." He satisfied his own con- science by adopting a creed, which he enounced thus : " Why, you see, sir, no man can comfortably THE AUCTION-HAUNTER. 87 do without three copies of a book. One he must have for a show copy, and he will probably keep it at his country-house ; another he will require for his own use and reference ; and unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends." This last necessity is the key-note to Heber's popularity : he was a liberal and kindly man, and though, like Wolsey, he was unsatisfied in getting, yet, like him, in bestowing he was most princely. Many scholars and authors obtained the raw mate- rial for their labours from his transcendent stores. These, indeed, might be said less to be personal to himself than to be a feature in the literary geography of Europe. " Some years ago," says the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, " he built a new library at his house at Hodnet, which is said to be full. His residence at Pimlico, where he died, is filled, like Magliabechi's at Florence, with books, from the top to the bottom every chair, every table, every passage containing piles of erudition. He had another house in York Street, leading to Great James's Street, Westminster, laden from the ground- floor to the garret with curious books. He had a library in the High Street, Oxford, an immense library at Paris, another at Antwerp, another at Brussels, another at Ghent, and at other places in the Low Countries and in Germany." PART II. HIS FUNCTIONS. AVING devoted the preceding pages to the diagnosis of the book-hunt- er's condition, or, in other words, to the different shapes which the phenomena peculiar to it assume, I now propose to offer some account of his place in the dispensations of Providence, which will proba- bly show that he is not altogether a mischievous or a merely useless member of the human family, but does in reality, however unconsciously to himself, minister in his own peculiar way to the service both of himself and others. This is to be a methodical discourse, and therefore to be divided and subdi- vided, insomuch that, taking in the first place his services to himself, this branch shall be subdivided into the advantages which are purely material and those which are properly intellectual. THE HOBBY. 89 And, first, of material advantages. Holding it to be the inevitable doom of fallen man to inherit some frailty or failing, it would be difficult, had he a Pandora's box-ful to pick and choose among, to find one less dangerous or offensive. As the judicious physician informs the patient, suffering under some cutaneous or other external torture, that the poison lay deep in his constitution that it must have work- ed in some shape and well it is that it has taken one so innocuous so may even the book-hunter be congratulated on having taken the innate moral mal- ady of all the race in a very gentle and rather a salu- brious form. To pass over gambling, tippling, and other practices which cannot be easily spoken of in good society, let us look to the other shapes in which man lets himself out for instance to horse-racing, hunting, photography, shooting, fishing, cigars, dog- fancying, dog-fighting, the ring, the cockpit, phre- nology, revivalism, socialism ; which of these con- tains so small a balance of evil, counting of course that the amount of pleasure conferred is equal for it is only on the datiTin that the book-hunter has as nrnch satisfaction from his pursuit as the fox-hunter, the photographer, and so on, has in his that a fair comparison can be struck 1 These pursuits, one and all, leave little or nothing that is valuable behind them, except, it may be, that some of them are con- ducive to health, by giving exercise to the body and a genial excitement to the mind ; but every hobby gives the latter, and the former may be easily ob- 90 HIS FUNCTIONS. tained in some other shape. They leave little or nothing behind even the photographer's portfolio will bring scarcely anything under the hammer after the death of him whose solace and pursuit it had been, should the positives remain visible, which may be doubted. And as to the other enumerated pursuits, some of them, as we all know, are im- mensely costly, all unproductive as they are. But the book-hunter may possibly leave a little fortune behind him. His hobby, in fact, merges into an investment. This is the light in which a celebrated Quaker collector of paintings put his con- duct, when it was questioned by the brethren, in virtue of that right to admonish one another con- cerning the errors of their ways, which makes them so chary in employing domestic servants of their own persuasion. " What had the brother paid for that bauble (a picture by Wouvermans), for in- stance ? " "Well, 300." "Was not that then an awful wasting of his substance on vanities 1 " " No. He had been offered 900 for it. If any of the Friends was prepared to offer him a better invest- ment of his money than one that could be realised at a profit of 200 per cent, he was ready to alter the existing disposal of his capital." It is true that amateur purchasers do not, in the long-run, make a profit, though an occasional bar- gain may pass through their hands. It is not main- tained that, in the general case, the libraries of collectors would be sold for more than they cost, or THE HOBBY. 91 even for nearly so much ; but they are always worth something, which is more than can be said of the residue of other hobbies and pursuits. Nay, farther ; the scholarly collector of books is not like the or- dinary helpless amateur ; for although, doubtless, nothing will rival the dealer's instinct for knowing the money- value of an article, though he may know nothing else about it, yet there is often a subtle depth in the collector's educated knowledge which the other cannot match, and bargains may be ob- tained off the counters of the most acute. A small sprinkling of these even the chance of them excites him, like the angler's bites and rises, and gives its zest to his pursuit. It is the reward of his patience, his exertion, and his skill, after the manner in which Monkbarns has so well spoken ; and it is certain that, in many instances, a collector's library has sold for more than it cost him. No doubt, a man may ruin himself by purchas- ing costly books, as by indulgence in any other costly luxury, but the chances of calamity are com- paratively small in this pursuit. A thousand pounds will go a great way in book-collecting, if the col- lector be true to the traditions of his pursuit, such as they are to be hereafter expounded. There has been one instance, doubtless, in the records of bibliomania, of two thousand pounds having been given for one book. But how many instances far more flagrant could be found in picture-buying 1 ? Look around upon the world and see how many men are the 92 HIS FUNCTIONS. victims of libraries, and compare them with those whom the stud, the kennel, and the preserve have brought to the Gazette. Find out, too, anywhere, if you can, the instances in which the money scat- tered in these forms comes back again, and brings with it a large profit, as the expenditure of the Duke of Roxburghe did when his library was sold. But it is necessary to arrest this train of argu- ment, lest its tenor might be misunderstood. The mercenary spirit must not be admitted to a share in the enjoyments of the book-hunter. If, after he has taken his last survey of his treasures, and spent his last hour in that quiet library, where he has ever found his chief solace against the wear and worry of the world, the book-hunter shall be taken to his final place of rest, and it is then discovered that the circumstances of the family require his treasures to be dispersed, should the unexpected result be that his pursuit has not been so ruin- ously costly after all nay, that his expenditure has actually fructified it is well. But if the book- hunter allow money-making even for those he is to leave behind to be combined with his pursuit, it loses its fresh relish, its exhilarating influence, and becomes the source of wretched cares and paltry anxieties. Where money is the object, let a man speculate or become a miser a very enviable con- dition to him who has the saving grace to achieve it, if we hold with Byron that the accumulation of money is the only passion that never cloys. THE HOBBY. 93 Let not the collector, therefore, ever, unless in some urgent and necessary circumstances, part with any of his treasures. Let him not even have re- course to that practice called barter, which political philosophers tell us is the universal resource of mankind preparatory to the invention of money as a circulating medium and means of exchange. Let him confine all his transactions in the market to purchasing only. No good ever comes of gentlemen amateurs buying and selling. They will either be systematic losers, or they will acquire shabby, ques- tionable habits, from which the professional dealers on whom, perhaps, they look down are exempt. There are two trades renowned for the quackery and the imposition with which they are habitually stained the trade in horses and the trade in old pictures ; and these have, I verily believe, earned their evil reputation chiefly from this, that they are trades in which gentlemen of independent fortune and con- siderable position are in the habit of embarking. The result is not so unaccountable as it might seem. The professional dealer, however smart he may be, takes a sounder estimate of any individual transaction than the amateur. It is his object, not so much to do any single stroke of trade very suc- cessfully, as to deal acceptably with the public, and make his money in the long-run. Hence he does not place an undue estimate on the special article he is to dispose of, but will let it go at a loss, if that is likely to prove the most beneficial course for his 94 HIS FUNCTIONS. trade at large. He has no special attachment to any of the articles in which he deals, and no blindly ex- aggerated appreciation of their merits and value. They come and go in an equable stream, and the cargo of yesterday is sent abroad to the world with the same methodical indifference with which that of to-day is unshipped. It is otherwise with the amateur. He feels towards the article he is to part with all the prejudiced attachment, and all the con- sequent over-estimate, of a possessor. Hence he and the market take incompatible views as to value, and he is apt to become unscrupulous in his efforts to do justice to himself. Let the single-minded and zealous collector then turn the natural propensity to over-estimate one's own into its proper and legiti- mate channel. Let him guard his treasures as things too sacred for commerce, and say, Procul, o procul este, profani, to all who may attempt by bribery and corruption to drag them from their legitimate shelves. If, in any weak moment, he yield to mercenary temptation, he will be for ever mourn- ing after the departed unit of his treasure the lost sheep of his flock. If it seems to be in the decrees of fate that all his gatherings are to be dispersed abroad after he has gone to his rest, let him, at all events, retain the reliance that on them, as on other things beloved, he may have his last look ; there will be many changes after that, and this will be among them. Nor, in his final reflections on his conduct to himself and to those he is to leave, will THE DESULTORY READER. 95 he be disturbed by the thought that the hobby which was his enjoyment, has been in any wise the more costly to him that he has not made it a means of mercenary money-getting.* Cf)e 2Jeutt0rn Meatier at 3B0i)emtan at literature. AY ING so put in a plea for this pur- suit, as about the least costly foible to which those who can afford to indulge in foibles can devote themselves, one might descant on certain auxiliary advantages as, that it is not apt to bring its votaries into low company ; that it offends no one, and is not likely to foster actions of damages for nuisance, trespass, or assault, and the like. But rather let us turn our at- tention to the intellectual advantages accompanying the pursuit, since the proper function of books is in the general case associated with intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that, according to * Atticus was under the scandal of having disposed of his books, and Cicero sometimes hints to him that he might let more of them go his way. In truth, Atticus carried this so far, however, that he seems to have been a sort of dealer, and the earliest instance of a capitalist publisher. He had slaves whom he occupied in copying, and was in fact much in the position of a rich Virginian or Carolinian, who should find that the most profitable investment for his stock of slaves is a printing and publishing establishment. 96 HIS FUNCTIONS. a received prejudice or opinion, there is one excep- tion to this general connection, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who are under a vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps it is true in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand the reading of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power of per- usal that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight through what he has already bought is a supposition alike preposterous and unreasonable. " Surely you have far more books than you can read," is sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume by volume, from some circulat- ing library or reading club, and reads them all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may be sure he has got the value of his money. It is true that there are some books as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, and Scott which every man should read who has the oppor- tunity should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. To neglect the opportunity of becoming familiar with them is deliberately to sacrifice the position in the social scale which an ordinary edu- cation enables its possessor to reach. But is one next to read through the sixty and odd folio vol- umes of the Bolandist Lives of the Saints, and the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the Gentle- man's Magazine from the beginning, each separ- THE DESULTORY READER. 97 ately, and in succession 1 Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity. But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in thousands upon thousands of other Looks, there is precious honey to be gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower. In fact, " a course of reading," as it is sometimes called, is a course of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life allotted to man there is but a cer- tain number of books that it is practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect in the perusal straight on of any large book, is a sort of mental slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's Decline and Fall, luminous and compre- hensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with a little Boston's Fourfold State, or Hervey's Meditations, or Sturm's Reflections for Every Day in the Year, or Don Juan, or "Ward's History of Stoke-upon-Trent. Isaac D' Israeli says, " "Mr Maurice, in his animated memoirs, has recently acquainted us with a fact which may be deemed important in the life of a a 98 HIS FUNCTIONS. literary man. He tells us, '"We have been just informed that Sir William Jones invariably read through every year the works of Cicero.' " What a task ! one would be curious to know whether he felt it less heavy in the twelve duodecimos of Elzevir, or the nine quartos of the Geneva edition. Did he take to it doggedly, as Dr Johnson says, and read straight through according to the editor's arrangement, or did he pick out the plums and take the dismal work afterwards 1 For the first year or two of his task, he is not to be pitied perhaps about the Offices, or the dialogue on Friendship, or Scipio's Dream, or even the capital speeches against Verres and Catiline ; but those tiresome letters, and the Tuscu- lan Questions, and the De datura ! It is a pity he did not live till Angelo Mai found the De Bepublica. What disappointed every one else might perhaps have commanded the admiration of the great orientalist. But here follows, on the same authority, a more wonderful performance still. " The famous Bourda- loue reperused every year St Paul, St Chrysostom, and Cicero."* The sacred author makes but a slight addition to the bulk, but the works of St Chrysostom are entombed in eleven folios ! Bourdaloue died at the age of seventy-two ; and if he began his task at the age of twenty-two, he must have done it over fifty times. It requires nerves of more than ordinary strength to contemplate such a statement with equa- * Curiosities of Literature, iii. 339. THE DESULTORY READER. 99 nimity. The tortures of the classic Hades, and the disgusting inflictions courted by the anchorites of old and the Brahmins of later times, do not approach the horrors of such an act of self-torture. Of course any one ambitious of enlightening the world on either the political or the literary history of Eome at the commencement of the empire, must be as thoroughly acquainted with every word of Cicero as the writer of the Times leader on a critical debate is with the newly delivered speeches. The more fortunate vagabond reader, too, lounging about among the Letters, will open many little veins of curious contemporary history and biography, which he can follow up in Tacitus, Sallust, Caesar, and the contemporary poets. Both are utterly different from the stated-task reader, who has come under a vow to work so many hours or get through so many pages in a given time. They are drawn by their occupa- tion, whether work or play; he drives himself to his. All such work is infliction, varying from the highest point of martyrdom down to tasteless drudgery; and it is as profitless as other supererogatory inflictions, since the task-reader comes to look at his words without following out what they suggest, or even absorbing their grammatical sense, much as the stupid ascetics of old went through their penitential readings, or as their representatives of the present day, chiefly of the female sex, read " screeds of good books," which they have not " the presumption " to understand. The literary Bohemian is sometimes 100 HIS FUNCTIONS. to be pitied when his facility of character exposes him to have a modification of this infliction forced upon him. This will occur when he happens to be living in a house frequented by "a good reader," who solemnly devotes certain hours to the perusal of passages from the English or French classics for the benefit of the company, and makes himself the mortal enemy of every guest who absents himself. As to collectors, it is quite true that they do not in general read their books successively straight through, and the practice of desultory reading, as it is sometimes termed, must be treated as part of their case, and if a failing, one cognate with their habit of collecting. They are notoriously addicted to the practice of standing arrested on some round of a ladder, where, having mounted up for some certain book, they have by wayward chance fallen upon another, in which, at the first opening, has come up a passage which fascinates the finder as the eye of the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding- guest, and compels him to stand there poised on his uneasy perch and read. Peradventure the matter so perused suggests another passage in some other volume which it will be satisfactory and interesting to find, and so another and another search is made, while the hours pass by unnoticed, and the day seems all too short for the pursuit which is a luxury and an enjoyment, at the same time that it fills the mind with varied knowledge and wisdom. The fact is that the book-hunter, if he be genuine, THE COLLECTOR AND THE SCHOLAR. 101 and have his heart in his pursuit, is also a reader and a scholar. Though he may be more or less peculiar, and even eccentric in his style of reading, there is a necessary intellectual thread of connection running through the objects of his search which predicates some acquaintance with the contents of the accumulating volumes. Even although he profess a devotion to mere external features the style of binding, the cut or uncut leaves, the presence or the absence of the gilding yet the department in litera- ture holds more or less connection with this outward sign. He who has a passion for old editions of the classics in vellum bindings Stephenses or Aldines will not be put off with a copy of Robinson Crusoe or the Eeady Eeckoner, bound to match and range with the contents of his shelves. Those who so vehemently affect some external peculiarity are the eccentric ex- ceptions; yet even they have some consideration for the contents of a book as well as for its coat. Ojc Collector ana tije rfjalar. I H E possession, or in some other shape the access to a far larger collection of books than can be read through in a lifetime, is in fact an absolute condi- tion of intellectual culture and expansion. The library is the great intellectual stratification in which the literary investigator works examining 102 HIS FUNCTIONS, its external features, or perhaps driving a shaft through its various layers passing over this stratum as not immediate to his purpose, examining that other with the minute attention of microscopic investigation. The geologist, the botanist, and the zoologist, are not content to receive one specimen after another into their homes, to be thoroughly and separately examined, each in succession, as novel- readers go through the volumes of a circulating library at twopence a -night they have all the world of nature before them, and examine as their scientific instincts or their fancies suggest. For all inquirers, like pointers, have a sort of instinct, sharpened by training and practice, the power and acuteness of which astonish the unlearned. " Head- ing with the fingers," as Basnage said of Bayle turning the pages rapidly over and alighting on the exact spot where the thing wanted is to be found is far from a superficial faculty, as some deem it to be, it is the thoroughest test of active scholarship. It was what enabled Bayle to collect so many flowers of literature, all so interesting, and yet all found in corners so distant and obscure. In fact, there are subtle dexterities, acquired by sagacious experience in searching for valuable little trinkets in great libraries, just as in other pursuits. A great deal of that appearance of dry drudgery which excites the pitying amazement of the bystander is nimbly evaded. People acquire a sort of instinct, picking the valuables out of the useless verbiage or the pas- THE COLLECTOR AND THE SCHOLAR. 103 sages repeated from former authors. It is soon found what a great deal of literature has been the mere "pouring out of one bottle into another," as the Anatomist of melancholy terms it. There are those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations. Compared with these, all the intellectual efforts of our recent degenerate days seem the work of pigmies ; and for any of us even to profess to read all that some of those indomitable giants wrote, would seem an audacious undertaking. But, in fact, they were to a great extent solemn shams, since the bulk of their work was merely that of the clerk who copies page after page from other people's writings. Surely these laborious old writers exhibited in this matter the perfection of literary modesty. Far from secretly pilfering, like the modern plagiarist, it was their great boast that they themselves had not suggested the great thought or struck out the bril- liant metaphor, but that it had been done by some one of old, and was found in its legitimate place a book. I believe that if one of these laborious persons hatched a good idea of his own, he could experience no peace of mind until he found it legiti- mated by having passed through an earlier brain, and that the author who failed thus to establish a paternity for his thought would sometimes auda- ciously set down some great name in his crowded 104 HIS FUNCTIONS. margin, in the hope that the imposition might pass undiscovered. Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in literature. First come Aristotle and Plato, with the other great classical ancients ; next the primitive fathers ; then Abailard, Erigena, Peter Lombard, Eamus, Major, and the like. If the matter be jurisprudence, we shall have Mar- cianus, Papinianus, Ulpianus, Hermogenianus, and Tryphonius to begin with ; and shall then pass through the straits of Bartolus and Baldus, on to Zuichemus, Sanchez, Brissonius, Putterhusius, and Gothofridus. If all these say the same thing, each of the others copying it from the first who uttered it, so much the more valuable to the literary world is deemed the idea that has been so amply backed it is like a vote by a great majority, or a strongly- signed petition. There is only one quarter in which this practice appears to be followed at the present day the composition, or the compilation, as it may better be termed, of English law-books. Having selected a department to be expounded, the first point is to set down all that Coke said about it two centuries and a half ago, and all that Blackstone said about it a century ago, with passages in due subordination from inferior authorities. To these are added the rubrics of some later cases, and a title- page and index, and so a new "authority" is added to the array on the shelves of the practitioner. Whoever is well up to such repetitions has many short cuts through literature to enable him to find THE COLLECTOR AND THE SCHOLAR. 105 the scattered originalities of which he may be in search. Whether he be the enthusiastic investi- gator resolved on exhausting any great question, or be a mere wayward potterer, picking up curiosities by the way for his own private intellectual museum, the larger the collection at his disposal the better it cannot be too great.* ISTo one, therefore, can be * I am quite aware that the authorities to the contrary are so high as to make these sentiments partake of heresy, if not a sort of classical profanity. " Studiorum quoque, qnse liberalissima impensa est, tamdiu rationem habet, quamdiu modum. Quo innume- rabiles libroa et bibliothecas, quarum dominus vix tota vita indices perlegit? Onerat discentem turba, non in- struit : multoque satins est paucis te auctoribus tradere, quam errare per multos. Quadraginta milia librorum Alexandrine arserunt : pulcherrimum regies opulentise mon- umentum alius laudaverit, sicut et Livius, qui elegantiae regum curseque egregium id opus ait fuisse. Non fuit ele- gantia illud aut cura, sed studiosa luxuria. Immo ne studiosa quidem : quoniam non in studium, sed in spec- taculum comparaverant : sicut plerisque, ignaris etiam servilium literarum libri non studiorum instrumenta, sed ccenatiomun ornamenta sunt. Paretur itaque librorum quantum satis sit, nihil in apparatum. Honestius, inquis, hoc te impensse, quam in Corinthia pictasque tabulas eflu- derint. Vitiosum est ubique, quod nimium est. Quid babes, cur ignoscas homini armaria citro atque ebore cap- tanti, corpora conquirenti aut ignotorum auctorum aut improbatorum, et inter tot milia librorum oscitanti, cui Ivoluminum suorum frontes maxime placent trtulique ? Apud desidiosissimos ergo videbis quicquid orationum his- toriarumque est, tecto tenus exstructa loculamenta ; jam enim inter balnearia et thermas bibliotheca quoque ut necessarium domus ornamentum expolitur. Ignoscerem IOC IfIS FUNCTIONS. an ardent follower of such, a pursuit without having his own library. And yet it is probably among those whose stock is the largest that we shall find the most frequent visitors to the British Museum and the State Paper Office; perhaps, for what can- not be found even there, to the Imperial Library at Paris, or the collections of some of the German universities. To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength, there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings, the cus- tody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find ceaseless excitement, either in honest Avork, or some less profitable or more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion plane, si studiorum nimia cupidine oriretur : nunc ista conquisita, cum imagiuibus suis descripta et sacrorum opera ingeniorum in speciem et cultum parietum compar- antur." Seneca, De Tranquillitate, c. ix. There are some good hits here which would tell at the present day. Seneca is reported to have had a large library ; it is certain that he possessed and fully enjoyed enormous wealth ; and it is amusing to find this commendation of literary moderation following on a well-known passage in praise of parsimonious living, and of the good example set by Diogenes. Modern scepticism about the practical stoicism of the ancients is surely brought to a climax by a living writer, M. Fournier, who maintains that the so-called tub of Diogenes was in reality a commodious little dwelling neat but not gorgeous. It must be supposed, then, that he spoke of his tub much as an English country gentleman does of his "box." THE COLLECTOR AND THE SCHOLAR. 107 great enough, for the absorption of its tireless ener- gies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restless- ness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehe- mently and however long it may struggle, the re- sources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inac- tion, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to the life of man. That the night cometh when no man can work, haunts those who have gone so far in their in- vestigations, and draws their entire energies into their pursuit with an exclusiveness which astonishes the rest of the world. But the energies might be more unfitly directed. Look back, for instance no great distance back on the great high-priest of our national school of logic and metaphysics, he who gathered up its divers rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human know- ledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was power- ful within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must have sought it 108 HIS FUNCTIONS. elsewhere. You see in him the nature that must follow up all inquiries, not by languid solicitation but hot pursuit. His conquests as he goes are rapid but complete. Summing up the thousands upon thousands of volumes, upon all matters of human study and in many languages, which he has passed through his hands, you think he has merely dipped into them or skimmed them, or in some other shape put them to superficial use. You are wrong : he has found his way at once to the very heart of the living matter of each one ; between it and him there are henceforth no secrets.* Descending, however, from so high a sphere, we shall find that the collector and the scholar are so closely connected with each other that it is difficult to draw the line of separation between them. As dynamic philosophers say, they act and react on each other. The possession of certain books has * How a nature endowed with powerful impulses like these might be led along with them into a totally different groove, I am reminded by a traditionary anecdote of student life. A couple of college chums are under the impression that their motions are watched by an inquisitive tutor, who for the occasion may be called Dr Fusby. They become both exceeding wroth, and the more daring of the two en- gages on the first opportunity to " settle the fellow." They are occupied in ardent colloquy, whether on the predicates or other matters it imports not, when a sudden pause in the conversation enables them to be aware that there is a human being breathing close on the other side of the " oak." The light is extinguished, the door opened, and a terrific blow from a strong and scientifically levelled fist hurls the THE COLLECTOR AND THE SCHOLAR. 109 made men acquainted with certain pieces of know- ledge which they would not otherwise have acquired. It is, in fact, one of the amiable weaknesses of the set, to take a luxurious glance at a new acquisition. It is an outcropping of what remains in the man, of the affection towards a new toy that nourished in the heart of the boy. Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his new- bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under observation in the course of my own clinical inquiries into the malady ; but I am not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far on in the night. In this incidental manner is a general notion sometimes formed of the true ob- ject and tenor of a book, which is retained in the listener down-stairs to the next landing-place, from which resting-place he hears thundered after him for his informa- tion, ' ' If you come back again, you scoundrel, I'll put you into the hands of Dr Fusby." From that source, however, no one had much to dread for some considerable period, during which the Doctor was confined to his bedroom by serious indisposition. It refreshed the recollection of this anecdote, years after I had heard it, and many years after the date attributed to it, to have seen a dignified scholar make what appeared to me an infinitesimally narrow escape from sharing the fate of Dr Fusby, having indeed just escaped it by satisfactorily proving to a hasty philosopher that he was not the party guilty of keeping a certain copy of Occam on the sentences of Peter Lombard out of his reach. 110 HIS FUNCTIONS. mind, stored for use, and capable of being refreshed and strengthened whenever it is wanted. In the skirmish for the Caxtons, which began the serious work in the great conflict of the Roxburghe sale, it was satisfactory to find, as I have already stated, on the authority of the great historian of the war, that Earl Spencer, the victor, "put each volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of victory and consciousness of triumph."* Ere next morning he would know a good deal more about the contents of the volumes than he did before. anlf HERE are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disappointing surprises in encountering the interiors of books. The title-page is not always a distinct intimation of what is to follow. Whoever dips into the Novelise of Leo, or the Extravagantes, as edited * In the article in Blackwood, the author, from a vitiated reminiscence, made the unpardonable blunder of attributing this touching trait of nature to the noble purchaser of the Valderf aer Boccaccio. For this, as not only a mistake, but in some measure an imputation on the tailor who could have made for his lordship pockets of dimensions so abnor- mal, I received due castigation from an eminent practical man in the book-hunter's field. THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. Ill by Gothofridus, will not find either of them to con- tain matter of a light, airy, and amusing kind. Dire have been the disappointments incurred by the Diversions of Purley one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade over one of our best story-books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the late Mrs Johnston. The great scholar, Leo Allatius, who broke his heart when he lost the special pen with which he wrote during forty years, published a work called Apes Urbanse Urban Bees. It is a biographical work, devoted to the great men who flourished during the Pontificate of Urban VIII., whose family carried bees on their coat-armorial. The History of New York, by Diedrich Knicker- bocker, has sorely perplexed certain strong-minded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search of the absolutely correct and improving ; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders. There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called MacEwen on the Types a theological book, in fact, treating of the types of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might have 112 HIS FUNCTIONS. it and be d d to it, he " thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a word which, it may he necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means rams : hut the other competitor also declined the lot ; he was a compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the hook honestly devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr Euskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing the difference between Popery and Pro- testantism, through the persuasive influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of sheepfolds." I have been in- formed that this work had a considerable run among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a title-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and constitute an in- fallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of all literature, it may be said that man has been continually struggling after this achievement, and struggling in vain ; and it is a humiliating fact, that the greatest adepts, abandon- ing the effort in despair, have taken refuge in some fortuitous word, which has served their purpose better than the best results of their logical analysis. The book which has been the supreme ruler of the intellect in this kind of work, stands forth as an illustrious example of failure. To those writings of THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 113 Aristotle which dealt with mind, his editing pupils could give no name, therefore they called them the things after the physics the metaphysics; and that fortuitous title the great arena of thought to which they refer still bears, despite of efforts to supply an apter designation in such words as Psy- chology, Pneumatology, and Transcendentalism. "Writhing under this nightmare kind of difficulty, men in later times tried to achieve completeness by lengthening the title-page ; but they found that the longer they made it, the more it wriggled itself into devious tracks, and the farther did they depart from a comprehensive name. Some title-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.* One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy titles they afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their malignity towards each * A good modern specimen of a lengthy title-page may be found in one of the books appropriate to the matter in hand, by the diligent French bibliographer Peignot : " DICTIOXXAIRE RAISOXXK DE BIBLIOLOGIE: contenant lino, L'explication des principaux termes relatifs a la bib- liographie, a 1'art typographique, a la diplomatique, aux laagues, aux archives, aux manuscrits, aux medailles, aux antiquites, &c. ; 2do, Des notices historiques detaillees sur les principales bibliotheques anciennes et modernes ; sur les differentes sectes philosophiques ; sur les plus c61ebres imprimeurs, avec un indication des meilleures Editions sorties de leurs presses ; et sur les bibliographes, avec la liste de leurs ouvrages ; 3tio, enfin, L' exposition des diff<- rentes systemes bibliographiqu.es, &c., ouvrage utile aux bibliothe'caires, archtvistes, imprimeurs, &c." Paris, 1802. 114 HTS FUNCTIONS. other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the farce of the adversary. It -will thus often happen that the controversialist states his case first in the title- page ; he then gives it at greater length in the introduction ; again, perhaps, in a preface ; a third time in an analytical form, through means of a table of contents ; after all this skirmishing, he brings up his heavy columns in the body of the book ; and if he be very skilful, he may let fly a few Parthian arrows from the index. It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and had his ears cut off, and be- come one of the chief causes of our great civil wars, all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book containing more than a thousand. It Avas as far down in his very index as W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio Mastyx was found, under the head "Women actors." The words which follow are rather unquotable in this nineteenth cen- tury; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her something like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use the terms " ruffian " and " scoundrel," they say, " You must be speaking of the Emperor." The Histrio Mastyx was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without exa- mination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had. The calamitous discovery of the sting THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 115 in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio Mastyx where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible. Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger, until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he " must put a stop to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immor- ality of stage-plays to exclaim that church-music is not the noise of men, but rather "a bleating of brute beasts choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen, bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney took surely a more nice distinction when he .made a charge against the author in these terms : "All stage-players he terms them rogues : in this he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament ; for unless they go abroad, they are not rogues." In the very difficulties in the way of framing a conclusive and exhaustive title, there is a principle of compensation. It clears literature of walls and hedgerows, and makes it a sort of free forest. To the desultory reader, not following up any special inquiry, there are delights in store in a devious rum- mage through miscellaneous volumes, as there are to 116 HIS FUNCTIONS. the lovers of adventure and the picturesque in any district of country not desecrated by the tourist's guide -hooks. Many readers will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edi- tion of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive book-hunter, Dr Eichard Far- mer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. One who has not tried it, may form an estimate of this kind of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens from the Writings of Fuller. No doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native wilderness, but, like the speci- mens in a conservatory or a musenm, they are ex- amples of Avhat maybe found in the place they have come from. I am here tempted to relieve this de- sultory prattle by offering to the reader a passage or two from some old author, not exactly in the regular beat of our "English classics ; " and I shall take Sir Thomas Browne. "Whether the reader is already acquainted with them or not, I am sure that he will enjoy the beauty of the thoughts and the mellowed sweetness of the style. In the first, the author relieves his mind about his fellow-Chris- tians of the Roniish persuasion. THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 117 The ^Esthetics of Toleration. "We have reformed from them, not against them ; for, omitting those improprieties and terms of scur- rility betwixt us, which only difference our affections and not our cause, there is between us one common name and appellation, one faith and necessary body of principles common to us both ; and therefore I am not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their churches in defect of ours, and either pray with them or for them. I could never per- ceive any rational consequence from those many texts which prohibit the children of Israel to pol- lute themselves with the temples of the heathens ; we being all Christians, and not divided by such de- tested impieties as might profane our prayers, or the place wherein we make them ; or that a resolved conscience may not adore her Creator anywhere, especially in places devoted to his service j where, if their devotions offend him, mine may please him, if theirs profane it, mine may hallow it. Holy water and crucifix (dangerous to the common people) de- ceive not my judgment, nor abuse my devotion at all. I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms superstition : my com- mon conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, sometimes not without morosity ; yet at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may 118 HIS FUNCTIONS. express or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my own arm rather than a church, nor will- ingly deface the name of saint or martyr. At the sight of a cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour. I cannot laugh at, but rather pity the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or contemn the miser- able condition of friars ; for though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of devotion. I could never hear the Ave Maria bell without an elevation ; or think it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to err in all that is, in silence and dumb contempt. Whilst, there- fore, they directed their devotions to her, I offered mine to God, and rectified the errors of their prayers by rightly ordering mine own. At a solemn proces- sion I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an excess of scorn and laughter. There are, question- less, both in Greek, Roman, and African churches, solemnities and ceremonies whereof the wiser zealots do make a Christian use ; and stand condemned by us, not as evil in themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstition to those vulgar heads that look asquint on the face of truth, and those unstable judgments that cannot consist in the narrow point and center of virtue, without a reel or stagger to the circumference." THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 119 Disputation. " I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which, perhaps, within a few days I should dissent myself. I have no genius to disputes in religion, and have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patron- age. Where we desire to be informed, 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves ; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in our- selves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own. Every man is not a proper champion for truth not fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity. Many, from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender ; 'tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazard her on a battle. If, therefore, there arise any doubts in my way, I do forget them, or at least defer them, till my better-settled judg- ment and more manly reason be able to resolve them ; for I perceive every man's own reason is his best (Edipus, and will, upon a reasonable truce, 120 HIS FUNCTIONS. find a way to loose those bonds wherewith the sub- tilties of error have enchained our more flexible and tender judgments." The Harmony of Nature. " 'Natura nihil agit frustra,' is the only indisput- able axiom in philosophy. There are no grotesk in nature, nor anything framed to fill up empty can- tons and unnecessary spaces. In the most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is in these is the wisdom of his hand dis- covered ; out of this rank Solomon chose the object of his admiration. Indeed what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders 1 What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us ? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants, dro- medaries and camels, these, I confess, are the co- lossus and majestick pieces of her hand ; but in these narrow engines there are more curious mathe- maticks, and the civility of these little citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their maker. Who admires Regiomontanus his fly beyond his eagle, or wonders not more at the operation of two souls in those little bodies, than but one in the trunk of a cedar 1 I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conver- THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 121 sion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which without further tra- vel I can do in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us : there is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that stu- dies wisely learns in a compendium, and which others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. " Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity ; besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature, that universal and publick manuscript, that lies expended unto the eyes of all. Those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other. This was the scripture and theology of the heathens. The natural motion of the sun made them more admire him than its supernatural station did the children of Israel ; the ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them than in the other all his miracles. Surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature." The Justification of Martyrdom. " l^o w as all that die in war are not termed soldiers, so neither can I properly term all those that suffer in matters of religion martyrs. The Council of Constance condemns John Huss for an 122 HIS FUNCTIONS. heretick, the stories of his own party stile him a martyr : he must needs offend the divinity of both, who says he was neither the one nor the other. There are many, questionless, canonised on earth, who shall never be saints in heaven ; and have their names in histories and martyrolo- gies, who, in the eyes of God, are not so perfect martyrs as was that wise heathen, Socrates, who suffered on a fundamental point of religion, the unity of God. I have often pitied the miserable bishop who suffered in the cause of antipodes, yet cannot chuse but accuse him of as much madness, for exposing his life on such a trifle, as those of ignorance and folly who condemned him. I think my conscience would not give me the lie, if I say there are not many extant who, in a noble way, fear the face of death less than myself; yet, from the moral duty I owe to the commandment of God, and the natural respects that I tender unto the conser- vation of my essence and being, I would not perish upon a ceremony, politick points, or indifferency ; nor is my belief of that untractable temper as not to bow at their obstacles, or connive at matters wherein there are not manifest impieties. The leaven, therefore, and ferment of all, not only civil but religious actions, is wisdom; without which, to commit ourselves to the flames is homicide, and (I fear) but to pass through one fire into another." * * From the Religio Medici. THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 123 Ashes of the Unknown Dead. "Time, which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments. In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be un- known was the means of their continuation, and obscurity their protection. If they died by violent hands, and were thrust into their urns, these bones become considerable ; and some old philosophers would honour them, whose souls they conceived most pure which were thus snatched from their bodies, and to retain a stronger propension unto them ; whereas they weariedly left a languishing corpse, and with faint desires of reunion, if they fell by long and aged decay. Yet, wrapt up in the bundle of time, they fall into indistinction, and make but one blot with infants What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles as- sumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these assuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solu- tion. But who were the proprietors of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism not to be resolved by men, nor easily, perhaps, by spirits, except we consult the pro- vincial guardians or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names as they have 124 HIS FUNCTIONS. done for their reliques, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in dura- tion. Vain ashes ! which, in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto them- selves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against pride, vainglory, and madding vices." * But there are passages worth finding in books less promising than the works of Browne or Fuller. Those who potter in libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big volumes, sometimes find curious things for all gems are not collected in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of HatselTs Precedents in Parliament for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to throw light on the mysterious process called " naming a member." " A story used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict observance of forms were fond of repeating, that as he often, upon a member's not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder, threatened to name him ' Sir, sir, I must name you ' on being asked what would be the consequence of putting that threat in execution and naming a member, he answered, 'The Lord in heaven knows.' " * From the Hydriotaphia. THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 125 In the perusal of a very solid book on the progress of the ecclesiastical differences of Ireland, written by a native of that country, after a good deal of tedious and vexatious matter, the reader's compla- cency is restored by an artless statement how an emi- nent person "abandoned the errors of the Church of Eome, and adopted those of the Church of England." So also a note I have preserved of a brief passage- descriptive of the happy conclusion of a duel runs thus : "The one party received a slight wound in the breast ; the other fired in the air and so the mat- ter terminated." * * This passage has been quoted and read by many people quite unconscious of the arrant bull it contains. There could be no better testimony to its being endowed with the subtle spirit of the genuine article. Irish bulls, as Burke said of constitutions, "are not made they grow," and that only in their own native soil. Those manufactured for the stage and the anecdote-books betray their artificial origin in their breadth and obviousness. The real bull carries one with it at first by an imperceptible confusion and misplace- ment of ideas in the mind where it has arisen, and it is not until you reason back that you see it. Horace Walpole used to say that the best of all bulls, from its thorough and grotesque confusion of identity, was that of the man who complained of having been "changed at nurse;" and per- haps he is right. An Irishman, and he only, can handle this confusion of ideas so as to make it a more powerful instrument of repartee than the logic of another man : take, for instance, the beggar who, when imploring a dignified clergyman for charity, was charged not to take the sacred 126 HIS FUNCTIONS. Professional law-books and reports are not gene- rally esteemed as light reading, yet something may be made even of them at a pinch. Menage wrote a book upon the amenities of the civil law, which does anything but fulfil its promise. There are many much better to be got in the most unlikely corners ; as, where a great authority on copyright begins a narrative of a case in point by saying, " One Moore had written a book which he called Irish Melodies ; " and again, in an action of trespass on the case, "The plaintiff stated in his declaration that he was the true and only proprietor of the copyright of a book of poems entitled The Seasons, by James Thomson." I cannot lay hands at this moment on the index which refers to Mr Justice Best he was the man, as far as memory serves, but never mind. A searcher after something or other, running his eye down the index through letter B, arrived at the reference " Best Mr Justice his great mind." Desiring to name in vain, and answered, "Is it in vain, then? and whose fault is that ? " I have doubts whether the saying attributed to Sir Boyle Roche about being in two places at once "like a bird," is the genuine article. I happened to discover that it is of earlier date than Sir Boyle's day, having found, when rummaging in an old house among some Jacobite manuscripts, one from Robertson of Strowan, the warrior poet, in which he says about two contradictory military instructions, ' ' It seems a difficult point for me to put both orders in execution, unless, as the man said, I can be in two places at once, like a bird." A few copies of these letters were printed for the use of the Abbotsford Club. This letter of Strowan's occurs in p. 92. THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 127 be better acquainted with, the particulars of this assertion, he turned up the page referred to, and there found, to his entire satisfaction, "Mr Justice Best said he had a great mind to commit the witness for prevarication." The following case is curiously suggestive of the state of the country round London in the days when much business was done on the road : A bill in the Exchequer was brought by Everett against a certain Williams, setting forth that the complainant was skilled in dealing in certain commodities, " such as plate, rings, watches, &c.," and that the defend- ant desired to enter into partnership with him. They entered into partnership accordingly, and it was agreed that they should provide the necessary plant for the business of the firm such as horses, saddles, bridles, &c. (pistols not mentioned) and should participate in the expenses of the road. The declaration then proceeds, "And your orator and the said Joseph Williams proceeded jointly with good success in the said business on Hounslow Heath, where they dealt with a gentleman for a gold watch ; and afterwards the said Joseph Williams told your orator that Finchley, in the county of Middlesex, was a good and convenient place to deal in, and that commodities were very plenty at Finchley aforesaid, and it would be almost all clear gain to them ; that they went accordingly, and dealt with several gentle- men for divers watches, rings, swords, canes, hats, cloaks, horses, bridles, saddles, and other things ; 128 HIS FUNCTIONS. that about a month afterwards the said Joseph Wil- liams informed your orator that there was a gentle- man at Blackheath who had a good horse, saddle, bridle, watch, sword, cane, and other things to dis- pose of, which, he believed, might be had for little or no money ; that they accordingly went, and met with the said gentleman, and, after some small dis- course, they dealt for the said horse, &c. That your orator and the said Joseph Williams continued their joint dealings together in several places viz., at Bagshot, in Surrey ; Salisbury, in Wiltshire ; Hantp- stead, in Middlesex ; and elsewhere, to the amount of 2000 and upwards." * Here follows a brief extract from a law paper, for the full understanding of which it has to be kept in view that the pleader, being an officer of the law who has been prevented from executing his warrant by threats, requires, as a matter of form, to swear that he was really afraid that the threats would be carried into execution. " Farther depones, that the said A. B. said that if deponent did not immediately take himself off he would pitch him (the deponent) down stairs which the deponent verily believes he would have done. " Farther depones, that, time and place aforesaid, * This case has been often referred to in law-books, biit I have never met with so full a statement of the contents of the declaration as in the Retrospective Review (vol. v. p. 81). THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 129 the said A. B. said to deponent, ' If you come an- other step nearer I'll kick you to hell ' which the deponent verily believes he would have done." * I know not whether " lay gents," as the Eng- lish bar used to term that portion of mankind who had not been called to itself, can feel any pleasure in wandering over the case-books, and picking up the funny technicalities scattered over them ; but I can attest from experience that, to a person trained in one set of technicalities, the pottering about among those of a different parish is exceedingly exhilar- ating. "When one has been at work among in- terlocutors, suspensions, tacks, wadsets, multiple- poindings, adjudications in implement, assigna- tions, infeftments, homologations, charges of horn- ing, quadriennium utiles, vicious intromissions, decrees of putting to silence, conjoint actions of declarator and reduction-im probation the brain, being saturated with these and their kindred, becomes refreshed by crossing the border of legal nomenclature, and getting among common recoveries, demurrers, Quare inipedits, tails-male, tails-female, docked tails, latitats, avowrys, nihil dicits, cestui * It is curious to observe how bitter a prejudice Themis has against her own humbler ministers. Most of the bit- terest legal jokes are at the expense of the class who have to carry the law into effect. Take, for instance, the case of the bailiff who had been compelled to swallow a writ, and, rushing into Lord Norbury's court to proclaim the indignity done to justice in his person, was met by the expression of a hope that the writ was " not returnable in this court." I 130 HIS FUNCTIONS. que trusts, estopels, essoigns, darrein presentments, emparlances, mandamuses, qui tarns, capias ad faci- endums or ad withernam, and so forth. After vexa- tious interlocutors in which the Lord Ordinary has refused interim interdict, but passed the bill to try the question, reserving expenses ; or has repelled the dilatory defences, and ordered the case to the roll for debate on the peremptory defences ; or has taken to avizandum ; or has ordered re-revised condescen- dence and answers on the conjoint probation ; or has sisted diligence till caution be found judicio sisti; or has done nearly all these things together in one breath, it is like the consolation derived from meet- ing a companion in adversity, to rind that at West- minster Hall, " In ferniedon the tenant having de- manded a view after a general imparlance, the de- mandant issued a writ of petit cape held irregular." Also, " If, after nulla bona returned, a testatum be entered upon the roll, quod devastavit, a writ of inquiry shall be directed to the sheriff, and if by inquisition the devastavit be found and returned, there shall be a scire facias quare executio non de propriis bonis, and if upon that the sheriff returns scire feci, the executor or administrator may ap- pear and traverse the inquisition." Again, " If the record of Nisi prius be a die Sancti Trinitatis in tres Septimanas nisi a 27 June, prius venerit, which is the day after the day in Bank, which was mistaken for a die Sancti Michaelis, it shall not be amended." .THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 131 It is interesting to observe, that at one end of the island a panel means twelve perplexed agriculturists, who, after having taken an oath to act according to their consciences, are starved till they are of one mind on some complicated question ; while, at the other end, the same term applies to the criminal on whose conduct they are going to give their verdict. It would be difficult to decide which is the more happy application; but it must be admitted that we are a great way behind the South in our power of selecting a nomenclature immeasurably distant in meaning from the thing signified. We speak of a bond instead of a mortgage, and we adjudge where we ought to foreclose. We have no such thing as chattels, either personal or real.* If you want to know the English law of book-debts, you * A late venerable practitioner in a humble department of the law, who wanted to write a book, and was recom- mended to try his hand at a translation of Latin law-maxims as a thing much wanted, was considerably puzzled with the maxim, "Catellarealis non potest legari ; " nor was he quite relieved when he turned up his Ainsworth and found that catella means "a little puppy." There was nothing for it, however, but obedience, so that he had to give currency to the remarkable principle of law, that "a genuine little whelp cannot be left in legacy. " He also translated* ' ' messis sequitur sementem," with a fine simplicity, into "the har- vest follows the seed-time;" and "actor sequitur forum rci," he made "the agent must be in court when the case is going on." Copies of the book containing these gems are exceedingly rare, some malicious person having put the author up to their absurdity. 132 HIS FUNCTIONS. will have to look for it under the head of As- sumpsit in a treatise on Nisi Prius, while a lawyer of Scotland would unblushingly use the word itself, and put it in his index. So, too, our bailments are merely spoken of as bills, notes, or whatever a merchant might call them. Our gar- neshee is merely a common debtor. Baron and feme we call husband and wife, and coverture we term marriage. Still, for the honour of our country, it is possible to find a feAV technicalities which would do no dis- credit to our neighbours. Where one of them would bring a habeas corpus a name felicitously expressive, according to the English method of civil liberty an inhabitant of the North, in the same unfortunate position, would take to running his letters. We have no turbary, or any other easement; but, to com- pensate us, we have thirlage, outsucken multures, iusucken multures, and dry multures ; as also we have a sowmen and rowmen, as any one who has been so fortunate as to hear Mr Outram's pathetic lyric on that interesting servitude, will remember in conjunction with pleasing associations. To do the duty of a Duces Tecun we have a diligence against havers. We have no capias ad faciendum (abbre- viated cap ad fac), nor have we the fieri facias, familiarly termed fi fa, but we have perhaps as good in the in meditatione fugae warrant, familiarly abbre- viated into fugie, as poor Peter Peebles termed it, when he burst in upon the party assembled at Jus- THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 133 tice Foxley's, exclaiming, " Is't here they sell the fugie warrants 1 " * I am not sure but, in the very mighty heart of all legal formality and technicality the Statutes at large some funny things might be found. The best that now occurs to the memory is not to be brought to book, and must be given as a tradition of the time when George III. was King. Its tenor is, that a bill which proposed, as the punishment of an offence, to levy a certain pecuniary penalty, one half thereof to go to his Majesty and the other half to the informer, was altered in committee, in so far that, when it appeared in the form of an act, the punishment was changed to whipping and imprison- ment, the destination being left unaltered. It is wonderful that such mistakes are not of frequent occurrence when one remembers the hot hasty work often done by committees, and the com- plex entanglements of sentences on which they have * There are two old methods of paying rent in Scotland Kane and Carriages ; the one being rent in kind from the farmyard, the other being an obligation to furnish the landlord with a certain amount of carriage, or rather cart- age. In one of the vexed cases of domicile, which had found its way into the House of Lords, a Scotch lawyer argued that a landed gentleman had shown his determination to abandon his residence in Scotland by having given up his "kane and carriages." It is said that the argument went further than he expected the English lawyers admitting that it was indeed very strong evidence of an intended change of domicile when the laird not only ceased to keep a carriage, but actually divested himself of his walking-cane. 134 HIS FUNCTIONS. to work. Bentham was at the trouble of counting the words in one sentence of an Act of Parliament, and found that, beginning with "Whereas" and ending with the word " repealed," it was precisely the length of an ordinary three- volume novel To offer the reader that sentence on the present occa- sion would be rather a heavy jest, and as little reasonable as the revenge offered to a village school- master who, having complained that the whole of his little treatise on the Differential Calculus was printed bodily in one of the earlier editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica (not so profitable as the later), was told that he was welcome, in his turn, to incorporate the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the next edition of his little treatise. In the supposition, however, that there are few readers who, like Lord King, can boast of having read the Statutes at large through, I venture to give a title of an Act a title only, remember, of one of the bundle of acts passed in one session as an in- stance of the comprehensiveness of English statute law, and the lively way in which it skips from one subject to another. It is called " An Act to continue several laws for the better regulating of pilots, for the conducting of ships and vessels from Dover, Deal, and the Isle of Thanet, up the Eiver Thames and Medway; and for the permitting ruin or spirits of the British sugar plan- tations to be landed before the duties of excise are paid thereon ; and to continue and amend an Act THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 135 for preventing fraud in the admeasurement of coals within the city and liberties of Westminster, and several parishes near thereunto ; and to continue several laws for preventing exactions of occupiers of locks and wears upon the River Thames westward ; and for ascertaining the rates of water-carriage upon the said river ; and for the better regulation and government of seamen in the merchant service ; and also to amend so much of an Act made during the reign of King George I. as relates to the better pre- servation of salmon in the River Kibble ; and to regulate fees in trials and assizes at nisi prius," &c. But this gets tiresome, and we are only half way through the title after all. If the reader wants the rest of it, as also the substantial Act itself, whereof it is the title, let him turn to the 23d of Geo. II., chap. 26. No wonder, if he anticipated this sort of thing, that Bacon should have commended " the excellent brevity of the old Scots acts." Here, for instance, is a specimen, an actual statute at large, such as they were in those pigmy days : " Item, it is statute that gif onie of the King's lieges passes in England, and resides and remains there against the King's will, he shall be halden as Traiter to the King." Here is another, very comprehensive, and worth a little library of modern statute-books, if it was duly enforced : " Item, it is statute and ordained, that all our 136 HIS FUNCTIONS. Sovereign lord's lieges being under his obeisance, and especially the Isles, be ruled by our Sovereign lord's own laws, and the common laws of the realm, and none other laws." The Irish statute-book opens characteristically with " An Act that the King's officers may travel by sea from one place to another within the land of Ireland." And further on we have a whole series of acts, with a conjunction of epithets in their titles which, at the present day, sounds rather startling, " for the better suppressing Tories, Robbers, and Rapparees, and for preventing robberies, burglaries, and other heinous crimes." The classes so associ- ated having an unreasonable dislike of being killed, difficulties are thus put in the way of those benefi- cially employed in killing them, insomuch that they, " upon the killing of any one of their number, are thereby so alarmed and put upon their keeping, that it hath been found impracticable for such person or persons to discover and apprehend, or kill any more of them, whereby they are discouraged from dis- covering and apprehending or killing," and so forth. There is a strange and melancholy historical interest in these motley enactments, since they almost ver- batim repeat the legislation about the Highland clans passed a century earlier by the Lowland Par- liament of Scotland. To one shelf of the law library, however, an in- terest attaches which few are ready to deny that devoted to the literature of Criminal Trials. It will THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 137 go hard indeed, if, besides the reports of mere tech- nicalities, there be not here some glimpses of the sad romances which lie at their heart ; and, at all events, when the page passes a very slight degree beyond the strictly professional, the technicalities will be found mingled with abundant narrative. The State Trials, for instance surely a lawyer's book contains the materials of a thousand ro- mances : nor are these all attached to political offences ; as, fortunately, the book is better than its name, and makes a virtuous effort to embrace all the remarkable trials coming within the long period covered by the collection. Some assistance may be got, at the same time, from minor luminaries, such as the Newgate Calendar not to be commended, certainly, for its literary merits, but full of matters strange and horrible, which, like the gloomy forest of the Castle of Indolence, " send forth a sleepy horror through the blood." There are many other books where records of re- markable crimes are mixed up with much rubbish, as, The Terrific Register, God's Eevenge against Murder, a little French book called Histoire Ge"ne- rale des Larrons (1G23), and if the inquirer's taste turn towards maritime crimes, The History of the Bucaniers, by Esquemeling. A little work in four volumes, called The Criminal Eecorder, by a stu- dent in the Inner Temple, can be commended as a sort of encyclopaedia of this kind of literature. It professes and is not far from accomplishing the 138 HIS FUNCTIONS. profession to give biographical sketches of notori- ous public characters, including "murderers, traitors, pirates, mutineers, incendiaries, defrauders, rioters, sharpers, highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, swind- lers, housebreakers, coiners, receivers, extortioners, and other noted persons who have suffered the sen- tence of the law for criminal offences." By far the most luxurious book of this kind, however, in the English language, is Captain Johnston's Lives of Highwaymen and Pirates. It is rare to find it now complete. The old folio editions have been often mutilated by over use : the many later editions in octavo are mutilated by design of their editors ; and for conveying any idea of the rough truthful de- scriptiveness of a book compiled in the palmy days of highway robbery, they are worthless. All our literature of that nature must, however, yield to the French Causes Celebres, a term rendered so significant by the value and interest of the book it names, as to have been borrowed by writers in this country to render their works attractive. It must be noted as a reason for the success of this work, and also of the German collection by Eeuer- bach, that the despotic Continental method of pro- cedure by secret inquiry affords much better material for narrative than ours by open trial We make, no doubt, a great drama of a criminal trial. Everything is brought on the stage at once, and cleared off before an audience excited so as no player ever could excite ; but it loses in reading ; while the Continental inquiry, THE GLEANER AA r D HIS HARVEST. 139 with its slow secret development of the plot, makes the better novel for the fireside. There is a method by which, among ourselves, the trial can be imbedded in a narrative which may carry down to later generations a condensed reflection of that protracted expectation and excitement which disturb society during the investigations and trials occasioned by any great crime. This is by " illus- trating " the trial, through a process resembling that which has been already supposed to have been ap- plied to one of Watts' s hymns. In this instance there will be all the newspaper scraps all the hawker's broadsides the portraits of the criminal, of the chief witnesses, the judges, the counsel, and various other persons, everything in literature or art that bears on the great question. He who inherits or has been able to procure a collection of such illustrated trials, a century or so old, is deemed fortunate among collectors, for he can at any time raise up for himself the spectre as it were of the great mystery and exposure that for weeks was the absorbing topic of attraction to mil- lions. The curtains are down the fire burns bright the cat purrs on the rug ; Atticus, soused in his easy-chair, cannot be at the trouble of going to see Macbeth or Othello he will sup full of horrors from his own stores. Accordingly he takes down an unseemly volume, characterised by a flabby obes- ity by reason of the unequal size of the papers con- tained in it, all being bound to the back, while the 140 HIS FUNCTIONS. largest only reach the margin. The first thing at opening is the dingy pea-green-looking paragraph from the provincial newspaper, describing how the reapers, going to their work at dawn, saw the clay beaten with the marks of struggle, and, following the dictates of curiosity, saw a bloody rag sticking on a tree, the leaves also streaked with red, and, lastly, the instrument of violence hidden in the moss ; next comes from another source the lamentations for a young woman who had left her home then the ex- citement of putting that and that together the search, and the discovery of the body. The next paragraph turns suspense into exulting wrath : the perpetrator has been found with his bloody shirt on a scowling murderous villain as ever was seen an eminent poacher, and fit for anything. But the next paragraph turns the tables. The ruffian had his own secrets of what he had been about that night, and at last makes a clean breast. It would have been a bad business for him at any other time, but now he is a revealing angel, for he noted this and that in the course of his own little game, and gives justice the thread which leads to a wonder- ful romance, and brings home desperate crime to that quarter where, from rank, education, and pro- fession, it was least likely to be found. Then comes the trial and the execution ; and so, at a sitting, has been swallowed all that excitement which, at some time long ago, chained up the public in protracted suspense for weeks. THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 141 The reader will see, from what I have just been saying, that I am not prepared to back Charles Lamb's Index Expurgatorius.* It is difficult, almost impossible, to find the book from which something either valuable or amusing may not be found, if the proper alembic be applied. I know books that are curious, and really amusing, from their excessive badness. If you want to find precisely how a thing ought not to be said, you take one of them down, * "In this catalogue of books which are no books biblia a biblia I reckon court calendars, directories, pocket-books, draught-boards bound and lettered on the back, scientific treatises, almanacs, statutes at large ; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those volumes which ' no gentleman's library should be without ; ' the histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew) and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these excep- tions, I cau read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. I confess that .it moves my spleen to see these things in books' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what ' seem its leaves,' to come bolt upon a withering population essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia or morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably reclothe my shivering folios, would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these impostors but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils." Essays of Elia. 142 HIS FUNCTIONS. and make it perform the service of the intoxicated Spartan slave. There are some volumes in which, at a chance opening, you are certain to find a mere platitude delivered in the most superb and amazing climax of big words, and others in which you have a like happy facility in finding every proposition stated with its stern forward, as sailors say, OT in some other grotesque mismanagement of composi- tion. There are no "better farces on or off the stage than when two or three congenial spirits ransack books of this kind, and compete with each other in taking fun out of them. There is a solid volume, written in an inquiring spirit, but in a manner which reminds one of deep calling unto deep, about the dark superstitions of a country which was once a separate European king- dom. I feel a peculiar interest in it, from the author having informed me, by way of communicating an important fact in literary history, and also as an example to be followed by literary aspirants, that, before committing the book to the press, he had written it over sixteen times. It would have been valuable to have his first manuscript, were it only that one might form some idea of the steps by which he had brought it into the condition in which it was printed. But its perusal in that condition was not entirely thrown away, since I was able to recommend it to a teacher of composition, as containing, within a moderate compass after the manner, in fact, of a handbook good practical specimens of every de- THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 143 scription of depravity of style of which the English language is susceptible. In the present day, when few scholars have op- portunities of enriching the world with then- prison hours, perhaps the best conditions for testing how far any volume or portion of printed matter, how- ever hopeless-looking, may yet yield edifying or amusing matter to a sufficient pressure, will occur when a bookish person finds himself imprisoned in a country inn, say for twenty-four hours. Such things are not impossible in this age of rapid movement. It is not long since a train, freighted with musical artistes, sent express to perform at a provincial concert and be back immediately in town for other engagements, were caught by a great snow-storm, which obliterated the railway, and had to live for a week or two in a wayside alehouse, in one of the dreariest districts of Scotland. The possessor and user of a large library undergoing such a calamity in a modified shape will be able to form a conception of the resources at his disposal, and to calculate how long it will take him to exhaust the intellectual treasures at his command, just as a millionaire, haunted as such people sometimes are by the dread of coming on the parish, might test how long a life his invested capital would support by spending a winter in a Shetland cottage, and living on what he could procure. Having exhausted all other sources of excitement and interest, the belated traveller is supposed to call for the literature 144 HIS FUNCTIONS. of the establishment. Perhaps the Directory of the county town is the only available volume. Who shall say what the belated traveller may make of this 1 He may do a turn in local statistics, or, if his ambition rises higher, he may pursue some valuable ethnological inquiries, trying whether Celtic or Saxon names prevail, and testing the justice of Mr Thierry's theory by counting the Norman patronymics, and observing whether any of them are owned by per- sons following plebeian and sordid occupations. If in after-life the sojourner should come in contact with people interested in the politics or business of that county town, he will surprise them by exhibit- ing his minute acquaintance with its affairs. If, besides the Directory, au Almanac, old or new, is to be had, the analysis may be conducted on a greatly widened basis. The rotations of the changes of the seasons may at the same time suggest many appropriate reflections on the progress of man from the cradle to the grave, and all that he meets with between the alpha and omega ; and if the prisoner is a man of genius, the announcements of eclipses and other solar phenomena will suggest trains of thought which he can carry up to any height of sublimity. A person in the circumstances supposed, after he has exhausted the Directory and the Almanac, may per- haps be led to read (if he can get) Zimmerman On Solitude, Harvey's Meditations, Watts On the Im- provement of the Mind, or Hannah More's Sacred Dramas. Who knows what he may be reduced to 1 THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 145 I remember the great Irish liberator telling how, when once detained in an inn. in Switzerland, he could find no book to beguile the time with but the Lettres Provinciales of Pascal. I have no doubt that the coerced perusal of them to which he had to submit did him a deal of good. Let us imagine that nothing better is to be found than the advertising sheet of an old newspaper never mind. Let the unfortunate man fall to and read the advertisements courageously, and make the best of them. An advertisement is itself a fact, though it may sometimes be the vehicle of a false- hood ; and, as some one has remarked, he who has a fact in hand is like a turner with a piece of wood in his lathe, which he can manipulate to his liking, tool- ing it in any way, as a plain cylinder or a richly orna- mented toy. There have been fortunate instances of people driven to read them finding good jokes and other enjoyable things in advertisements such things as make one almost regret that so little atten- tion has been paid to this department of literature.* * Take, for instance, the announcement of the wants of an affluent and pious elderly lady, desirous of having the services of a domestic like-minded with herself, who appeals to the public for a ' ' groom to take charge of two carriage- horses of a serious turn of mind." So also the simple- hearted innkeeper, who founds on his "limited charges and civility ; " or the description given by a distracted family of a runaway member, who consider that they are affording valuable means for his identification by saying, " age not precisely known but looks older than he is. " K 146 HIS FUNCTIONS. Advertisements, in fact, bring us into the very heart of life and business, and there is a world of interest in them. Suppose that the dirty broadside you pick up in the dingy inn's soiled room contains the annual announcement of the reassembling of the school in which you spent your own years of school- boy life what a mingled and many-figured romance does it recall of all that has befallen to yourself and others since the day when the same advertisement made you sigh, because the hour was close at hand when you were to leave home and all its homely ways to dwell among strangers ! Going onward, you remember how each one after another ceased to be a stranger, and twined himself about your heart ; and then comes the reflection, Where are they all now? You remember how " He, the young and strong, who cherished Noble longings for the strife, By the roadside fell and perished, Weary with the march of life." You recall to your memory also those two insepar- ables linked together, it would seem, because they were so unlike. The one, gentle, dreamy, and romantic, was to be the genius of the set ; but alas, he " took to bad habits," and oozed into the slime of life, imperceptibly almost, hurting no creature but himself unless it may be that to some parent or other near of kin his gentle facility may have caused keener pangs than others give by cruelty and tyranny. The other, bright-eyed, healthy, THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 147 strong, and keen-tempered the best fighter and runner and leaper in the school the dare-devil who was the leader in every row took to Greek much about the time when his companion took to drink- ing, got a presentation, wrote some wonderful things about the functions of the chorus, and is now on the fair road to a bishopric. Next arises the vision of " the big boy," the lout the butt of every one, even of the masters, who, when any little imp did a thing well, always made the appropriate laudation tell to the detriment of the big boy, as if he were bound to be as super- fluous in intellect as in flesh. He has sufficiently dinned into him to make him thoroughly modest, poor fellow, how all great men were little. Napo- leon was little, so was Frederic the Great, William III., the illustrious Conde, Pope, Horace, Anacreon, Campbell, Tom Moore, and Jeffrey. His relations have so thoroughly given in to the prejudice against him, that they get him a cadetship because he is fit for nothing at home ; and now, years afterwards, the newspapers resound with his fame how, when at the quietest of all stations when the mutiny sud- denly broke out in its most murderous shape, and even experienced veterans lost heart, he remained firm and collected, quietly developing, one after an- other, resources of which he was not himself aware, and in the end putting things right, partly by stern vigour, but more by a quiet tact and genial appre- ciation of the native character. But what has be- 148 HIS FUNCTIONS. come of the Dux him who, in the predictions of all, teachers and taught, was to render the institu- tion some day illustrious by occupying the Wool- sack, or the chief place at the Speaker's right hand 1 A curious destiny is his : at a certain point the curve of his ascent was as it were truncated, and he took to the commonest level of ordinary life. He may now be seen, staid and sedate in his walk, which brings him, with a regularity that has rendered him useful to neighbours owning erratic watches, day by day to a lofty three-legged stool, mounted on which, all his proceedings confirm the high char- acter retained by him through several years for the neatness of his handwriting, and especially for his precision in dotting his i's and stroking his t's. This is all along of the use which the reflective man may make of an old advertisement. If it be old, the older the better the more likely is it to contain matter of curious interest or instruction about the waj r s of men. To show this, I reprint two advertisements from British newspapers. From the Public Advertiser of 28th March 17G9. " rriO be SOLD, A BLACK GIRL, the property of J. J. B , eleven years of age, who is extremely handy, works at her needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well: is of an excellent temper, and willing disposition. " Inquire of Mr Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement's Church in the Strand. " THE GLEANER AND HIS HARVEST. 149 From the Edinburgh Evening Courant, 18th April 1768. " A BLACK BOY TO SELL. TO be SOLD, A BLACK BOY, with long hair, stout made, and well-limbed is good-tempered, can dress hair, and take care of a horse indifferently. He has been in Britain near three years. " Any person that inclines to purchase him may have him for 40. He belongs to Captain ABERCROMBIE at Broughton. " This advertisement not to be repeated." There was at that time probably more of this description of property in Britain than in Virginia. It had become fashionable, as one may see in Hogarth. Such advertisements they were abun- dant might furnish an apt text on which a philo- sophical historian could speculate on the probable results to this country, had not Mansfield gone to the root of the matter by denying all property in slaves.* So much for the chances which still remain to * It was on this occasion, and in answer to the plea of the vast property, amounting to millions, at issue on the question, that Mansfield uttered that memorable maxim which nobody can trace back to any other authority, " Fiat justitia mat ccelum." Sir Thomas Browne has, in his Re- ligio Medici, "Ruatccelum fiat voluntas tua." Perhaps he may have found this in one of the Fathers. 150 HIS FUNCTIONS. the heluo Ifbroruni or devourer of books, if, after having consumed all the solid volumes within his reach, he should be reduced to shreds and patches of literature, like a ship's crew having resort to shoe- leather and the sweepings of the locker. [UT now to return to the point whence we started the disposition, and al- most the necessity, which the true enthusiast in the pursuit feels to look into the soul, as it were, of his book, after he has got possession of the body. When he is not of the omnivorous kind, but one who desires to pos- sess a particular book, and, having got it, dips into the contents before committing it to permanent ob- scurity on his loaded shelves, there is, as we have already seen, a certain thread of intelligent associa- tion linking the items of his library to each other. The collector knows what he wants, and why he wants it, and that why does not entirely depend on exteriors, though he may have Ms whim as to that also. He is a totally different being from the animal who goes to all sales, and buys every book that is cheap. That is a painfully low and grovelling type of the malady ; and, fortunately for the honour of PRETENDERS. 151 literature, the bargain-hunter who suffers under it is not in general a special votary of books, but buys all bargains that come in his way clocks, tables, forks, spoons, old uniforms, gas-meters, magic lan- terns, galvanic batteries, violins (warranted real Cre- nionas from their being smashed to pieces), classical busts (with the same testimony to their genuineness), patent coffee-pots, crucibles, amputating knives, wheel - barrows, retorts, cork-screws, boot -jacks, smoke-jacks, melon frames, bath-chairs, and hurdy- gurdies. It has been said that once, a coffin, made too short for its tenant, being to be had an undoubt- ed bargain, was bought by him, in the hope that, some day or other, it might prove of service in his family. His library, if such it may be termed, is very rich in old trade-directories, justices of peace and registers of voters, road-books, and other use- ful manuals ; but there are very learned books in it too. That clean folio Herodotus was certainly extremely cheap at half-a-crown ; and you need not inform him that the ninth book is wanting, for he will never find that out. The day when he has dis- covered that any book has been bought by another person, a better bargain than his own copy, is a black one in his calendar ; but he has a peculiar device of his own for getting over the calamity by bringing down the average cost of his own copy through fresh investments. Having had the misfortune to buy a copy of Goldsmith's History of England for five shillings, while a neighbour flaunts daily in his face 152 HIS FUNCTIONS. a copy obtained for three, he has been busily occu- pied in a search for copies still cheaper. He has now brought down the average price of his own numerous copies to three shillings and twopence, and hopes in another year to get below the three shillings. Neither is the rich man who purchases fine and dear books by deputy to be admitted within the category of the genuine book-hunter. He must hunt himself must actually undergo the anxiety, the fatigue, and, so far as purse is concerned, the risks of the chase. Your rich man, known to the trade as a great orderer of books, is like the owner of the great game-preserve, where the sport is heavy butchery ; there is none of the real zest of the hunter of the wilderness to be had within his gates. The old Duke of Roxburghe wisely sank his rank and his wealth, and wandered industriously and zealously from shop to stall over the world, just as he wandered over the moor stalking the deer. One element in the excitement of the poorer book-hunter he must have lacked the feeling of committing something of extravagance the consciousness of parting with that which will be missed. This is the sacrifice which assures the world, and satisfies the man's own heart, that he is zealous and earnest in the work he has set about. And it is decidedly this class who most read and use the books they possess. How genial a picture does Scott give of himself at the time of the Roxburghe sale the creation of Abbotsford pulling him one way, on the PRETEXDERS. 153 other his desire to accumulate a library round him in his Tusculum. Writing to his familiar Terry he says, " The worst of all is, that while my trees grow and my fountain fills, my purse, in an inverse ratio, sinks to zero. This last circumstance will, I fear, make me a very poor guest at the literary entertain- ment your researches hold out for me. I should, however, like much to have the treatise on Dreams hy the author of the Xew Jerusalem, which, as John Cuthbertson, the smith, said of the minister's ser- mon, 'must be neat wark.' The loyal poems by N. T. are probably by poor Nahum Tate, who was associated with Brady in versifying the Psalms, and more honourably with Dryden in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. I never saw them, however, but would give a guinea or thirty shillings for the collection." One of the reasons why Dibdin's expatiations among rare and valuable volumes are, after all, so devoid of interest, is, that he occupied himself in a great measure in catering for men with measureless purses. Hence there is throughout too exact an esti- mate of everything by what it is worth in sterling cash, with a contempt for small things, which has an unpleasant odour of plush and shoulder-knot about it. Compared with dear old Monkbarns and his prowl- ings among the stalls, the narratives of the Boccaccio of the book-trade are like the accoiint of a journey that might be written from the rumble of the travel- ling chariot, when compared with the adventurous 154 HIS FUNCTIONS. narrative of the pedestrian or of the wanderer in the far east. Everything is too comfortable, luxurious, and easy russia, morocco, embossing, marbling, gilding all crowding on one another, till one feels suffocated with riches. There is a feeling, at the same time, of the utter useless pomp of the whole thing. Books, in the condition in which he gene- rally describes them, are no more fitted for use and consultation than white kids and silk stockings are for hard work. Books should be used decently and respectfully reverently, if you will, but let there be no toleration for the doctrine that there are volumes too splendid for use, too fine almost to be looked at, as Brunimel said of some of his Dresden china. That there should be little interest in the record of rich men buying costly books which they know nothing about and never become acquainted with, is an illus- tration of a wholesome truth, pervading all human endeavours after happiness. It is this, that the active, racy enjoyments of life those enjoyments in which there is also exertion and achievement, and which depend on these for their proper relish are not to be bought for hard cash. To have been to him the true elements of enjoyment, the book-hunter's treasures must not be his mere pro- perty, they must be his achievements each one of them recalling the excitement of the chase and the happiness of success. Like Monkbarns with his Elzevirs and his bundle of pedlar's ballads, he must have, in common with all hunters, a touch of the com- PRETENDERS. 155 petitive in his nature, and be able to take the measure of a rival, as Monkbarns magnanimously takes that of Davie Wilson, " commonly called Snuffy Davie, from his inveterate addiction to black rappee, who was the very prince of scouts for searching blind alleys, cellars, and stalls, for rare volumes. He had the scent of a slow-hound, sir, and the snap of a bull-dog. He would detect you an old black-letter ballad among the leaves of a law-paper, and find an editio princeps under the mask of a school Corderius." In pursuing the chase in this spirit, the sportsman is by no means precluded from indulgence in the adventitious specialties that delight the commonest bibliomaniac. There is a good deal more in many of them than the first thought discloses. An " editio princeps " is not a mere toy it has something in it that may purchase the attention even of a thinking man. In the first place, it is a very old commodity about four hundred years of age. If you look around you in the world you will see very few mov- ables coeval with it. No doubt there are wonderfully ancient things shown to travellers, as in Glammis Castle you may see the identical four-posted bed- stead a very creditable piece of cabinetmakery in which King Malcolm was murdered a thousand years ago. But genuine articles of furniture so old as the editio princeps are very rare. If we should highly esteem a poker, a stool, a drinking-can, of that age, is there not something worthy of observance, as indicating the social condition of the age, in those 156 JUS FUNCTIONS. venerable pages, made to look as like the hand- writing of their day as possible, with their decorated capitals, all squeezed between two solid planks of oak, covered with richly embossed hog skin, which can be clenched together by means of massive decorated clasps ? And shall we not admit it to a higher place in our reverence than some mere item of household convenience, when we reflect that it is the very form in which some great ruling intellect, resusci- tated from long interment, burst upon the dazzled eyes of Europe and displayed the fulness of its face ? te Qtfyitbtmtnte in tfjc Creation of Eftramg. 1 much, then, for the benefit which the class to whom these pages are de- voted derive to themselves from their peculiar pursuit. Let us now turn to the far more remarkable phenomena, in which these separate and perhaps selfish pursuers of their own instincts and objects are found to concur in bringing out a great influence upon the intellectual destinies of mankind. It is said of Brindley, the great canal engineer, that, when a member of a committee, where he was under examination, a little provoked or amused by his entire devotion to canals, asked him if he thought there was any use of rivers, he prompt- ly answered, " Yes, to feed navigable canals." So, if CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 157 there be no other respectable function in life fulfilled by the book-hunter, I would stand up for the pro- position that he is the feeder, provided by nature, for the preservation of literature from age to age, by the accumulation and preservation of libraries, public or private. It will require perhaps a little circum- locutory exposition to show this, but here it is. A great library cannot be constructed it is the growth of ages. You may buy books at any time with money, but you cannot make a library like one that has been a century or two a-growing, though you had the whole national debt to do it with. I remember once how an extensive publisher, speak- ing of the rapid strides which literature had made of late years, and referring to a certain old public library, celebrated for its affluence in the fathers, the civilians, and the medieval chroniclers, stated how he had himself freighted for exportation, within the past month, as many books as that whole library consisted of. This was likely enough to be true, but the two collections were very different from each other. The cargoes of books were probably thou- sands of copies of some few popular selling works. They might be a powerful illustration of the diffusion of knowledge, but what they were compared with was its concentration. Had all the paper of which these cargoes consisted been bank-notes, they would not have enabled their owner to create a duplicate of the old library, rich in the fathers, the civilians, and the medieval chroniclers. 158 HIS FUNCTIONS. This impossibility of improvising libraries is really an important and curious thing ; and since it is apt to be overlooked, owing to the facility of buying books, in quantities generally far beyond the avail- able means of any ordinary buyer, it seems worthy of some special consideration. A man who sets to form a library will go on swimmingly for a short way. He will easily get Tennyson's Poems Mac- aulay's and Alison's Histories the Encyclopaedia Britannica Buckle on Civilisation all the books " in print," as it is termed. Nay, he will find no dif- ficulty in procuring copies of others which may not happen to be on the shelves of the publisher or of the retailer of new books. Of Voltaire's works a little library in itself he will get a copy at his call in London, if he has not set his mind on some special edition. So of Scott's edition of Swift or Dryden, Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson, and the like. One can scarcely suppose a juncture in which any of these cannot be found through the electric chain of communication established by the book trade. Of Gibbon's and Hume's Histories Jeremy Taylor's works Bossuet's Universal History, and the like, copies abound everywhere. Go back a little, and ask for Kennet's Collection of the Historians Echard's History, Bayle, Moreri, or Father Daniel's History of France, you cannot be so certain of im- mediately obtaining your object, but you will get the book in the end no doubt about that. Everything has its caprices, and there are some CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 159 books which might be expected to be equally shy, but in reality, by some inexplicable fatality, are as plentiful as blackberries ; such, for instance, are Famianus Strada's History of the Dutch War of Independence one of the most brilliant works ever written, and in the very best Latin after Buchanan's. There is Buchanan's own history, very common even in the shape of the early Scotch edition of 1582, which is a highly favourable specimen of Arbuth- not's printing. Then there are Barclay's Argenis, and Raynal's Philosophical History of the East and West Indies, without which no book-stall is to be considered complete, and which seem to be possessed of a supernatural power of resistance to the ele- ments, since, month after month, in fair weather or foul, they are to be seen at their posts dry or dripping. So the collector goes on, till he perhaps collects some five thousand volumes or so of select works. If he is miscellaneous in his taste, he may get on pretty comfortably to ten or fifteen thousand, and then his troubles will arise. He has easily got Baker's and Froissart's and Monstrelet's Chronicles, because there are modern reprints of them in the market. But if he want Cooper's Chronicle, he may have to wait for it, since its latest form is still the black- letter. True, I did pick up a copy lately, at Braid- wood's, for half-a- guinea, but that was a catch it might have caused the search of a lifetime. Still more hopeless it is when the collector's ambition 1GO HIS FUNCTIONS. extends to The Ladder of Perfection of Winkin de Worde, or to his King Rycharde Cure de Lion, where- of it is reported in the Repertorium Bibliographicurn, that " an imperfect copy, wanting one leaf, was sold by auction at Mr Evans's, in June 1817, to Mr Watson Taylor for 40, 19s." " Woe betide," says Dibdin, " the young bibliomaniac who sets his heart upon Breton's Flourish upon Fancie and Pleasant Toyes of an Idle Head, 1557, 4to ; or Workes of a Young Wyt trussed up with a Fardell of Pretty Fancies ! ! Threescore guineas shall hardly fetch these black-letter rarities from the pigeon-holes of Mr Thorpe. I lack courage to add the prices for which these copies sold." But he has some comfort reserved for the hungry collector, in the intimation that The Ravisht Soul and the Blessed Weaper, by the same author, may be had for 15.* It creates a thrilling interest to know, through the same distinguished authority, that the Heber sale must have again let loose upon the world " A merry gest and a true, howe John Flynter made his Testament," concerning which we are told with appropriate solemnity and pathos, that " Julian Notary is the printer of this inestimably precious volume, and Mr Heber is the thrice-blessed owner of the copy described in the Typographical Anti- quities." Such works as the Knightly Tale of Galogras, * Library Companion, p. 699. CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 161 The Temple of Glas, Lodge's Kettle for Nice Noses, or the Book of Fay ts of Arnies, by Christene of Pisa, or Caxton's Pylgremage of the Sowle, or his Myrrour of the Worlde, will be long inquired after before they come to the market, thoroughly contradicting that fundamental principle of politi- cal economy, that the supply is always equal to the demand. He, indeed, who sets his mind on the possession of any one of these rarities, may go to his grave a disappointed man. It will be in general the con- solation of the collector, however, that he is by no means the " homo unius libri." There is always something or other turning up for him, so long as he keeps within moderate bounds. If he be rich and ravenous, however, there is nothing for it but dupli- cating the most virulent form of book mania. We have seen that Heber, whose collection, made during his own lifetime, was on the scale of those public libraries which take generations to grow, had, with all his wealth, his liberality, and his persevering energy, to invest himself with duplicates, triplicates often many copies of the same book. It is rare that the private collector runs himself absolutely into this quagmire, and has so far ex- hausted the market that no already unpossessed volume turns up in any part of the world to court his eager embraces. The limitation constitutes, however, a serious difficulty in the way of rapidly creating great public libraries. We would obtain 162 HIS FUNCTIONS. the best testimony to this difficulty in America, were our brethren there in a condition to speak or think of so peaceful a pursuit as library-making. In the normal condition of society there something like that of Holland in the seventeenth century there are powerful elements for the promotion of art and letters, when wealth gives the means and civilisation the desire to promote them. The very absence of feudal institutions the inability to found a baronial house turns the thoughts of the rich and liberal to other foundations calculated to trans- mit their name and influence to posterity. And so we have such bequests as John Jacob Astor's, who left four hundred thousand dollars for a library, and the hundred and eighty thousand which were the nucleus of the Smithsonian Institution. Yes ! Their efforts in this direction have fully earned for them their own peculiar form of laudation as " actually equal to cash." Hence, as the book trade and book buyers know very well, "the almighty dollar" has been hard at work, trying to rear up by its sheer force duplicates of the old European libraries, containing not only all the ordinary stock books in the market, but also the rarities, and those individualities solitary remaining copies of impres- sions which the initiated call uniques. It is clear, however, that when there is but one copy, it can only be in one place ; and if it have been rooted for centuries in the Bodleian, or the University of Tubingen, it is not to be had for Harvard or the CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 163 Astorian. Dr Cogswell, the first librarian of the Astorian, spent some time in Europe with his princely endowment in his pocket, and showed him- self a judicious, active, and formidable sportsman in the book-hunting world. Whenever, from private collections, or the breaking-up of public institu- tions, rarities got abroad into the open market, the collectors of the old country found that they had a resolute competitor to deal with almost, it might be said, a desperate one since he was in a manner the representative of a nation using powerful efforts to get possession of a share of the literary treasures of the Old World. In the case of a book, for instance, of which half- a-dozen copies might be known to exist, the combat- ants before the auctioneer would be, on the one side, many an ambitious collector desiring to belong to the fortunate circle already in possession of such a treasure ; but on the other side was one on whose exertions depended the question, whether the book should henceforth be part of the intellectual wealth of a great empire, and should be accessible for con- sultation by American scholars and authors without their requiring to cross the Atlantic. Let us see how far, by a brief comparison, money has enabled them to triumph over the difficulties of their position. It is difficult to know exactly the numerical con- tents of a library, as some people count by volumes, and others by the separate works, small or great ; and even if all should consent to count by volumes, 164 HIS FUNCTIONS. the estimate would not be precise, for in some lib- raries bundles of tracts and other small works are massed in plethoric volumes for economy, while in affluent institutions every collection of leaves put under the command of a separate title-page is separ- ately bound in cloth, calf, or morocco, according to its rank. The Imperial Library at Paris is com- puted to contain above eight hundred thousand volumes ; the Astorian boasts of approaching a hun- dred thousand : the next libraries in size in America are the Harvard, with from eighty thousand to ninety thousand; the Library of Congress, which has from sixty thousand to seventy thousand ; and the Boston Athenaeum, which has about sixty thou- sand. There are many of smaller size. In fact, there is probably no country so well stocked as the States with libraries of from ten thousand to twenty thou- sand volumes; the evidence that they have bought what was to be bought, and have done all that a new people can to participate in the long-hoarded trea- sures of literature which it is the privilege of the Old World to possess. I know that, especially in the instance of the Astorian Library, the selec- tions of books have been made with great judg- ment, and that, after the boundaries of the common crowded market were passed, and individual rari- ties had to be stalked in distant hunting-grounds, innate literary value was still held an object more important than mere abstract rarity, and, as the CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 165 more worthy quality of the two, that on which the buying power available to the emissary was brought to bear. The zeal and wealth which the citizens of the States have thrown into the limited field from which a library can be rapidly reaped, are mani- fested in the size and value of their private collec- tions. A volume, called The Private Libraries of New York, by James Wynne, M.D., affords inter- esting evidence of this phenomenon. It is printed on large thick paper, after the most luxurious fashion of our book clubs, apparently for private distribu- tion. The author states, however, that " the greater part of the sketches of private libraries to be found in this volume, were prepared for and published in the Evening Post about two years since. Their origin is due to a request on the part of Mr Bige- low, one of the editors of the Post, to the writer, to examine and sketch the more prominent private col- lections of books in N"ew York." Such an undertaking reveals, to us of the old country, a very singular social condition. With us, the class who may be thus offered up to the mar- tyrdom of publicity is limited. The owners of great houses and great collections are doomed to share them with the public, and if they would frequent their own establishments, must be content to do so in the capacity of librarians or showmen, for the benefit of their numerous and uninvited visitors. They generally, with wise resignation, bow to the 166 HIS FUNCTIONS. sacrifice, and, abandoning all connection with their treasures, dedicate them to the people nor, as their affluence is generally sufficient to surround them Avith an abundance of other enjoyments, are they an object of much pity. But that the privacy of our ordinary wealthy and middle classes should be invaded in a similar shape, is an idea that could not get abroad without creat- ing sensations of the most lively horror. They manage these things diiferently across the Atlantic, and so here we have " over" fifty gentlemen's pri- vate collections ransacked and anatomised. If they like it, we have no reason to complain, but rather have occasion to rejoice in the valuable and inter- esting result. It is quite natural that their ways of esteeming a collection should not be as our ways. There is a story of a Cockney auctioneer, who had a location in the back settlements to dispose of, advertising that it was " almost entirely covered with fine old timber." To many there would appear to be an equal degree of verdant simplicity in mentioning among the specialties and distinguishing features of a collection the Biographia and Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lowndes's Manual, The Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews, Boyle, Ducange, Moreri, Dods- ley's Annual Register, Watt's Bibliotheca, and Diodorus Siculus. The statement that there is in Dr Francis's col- lection "a complete set of the Recueil des Causes CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 167 Celebres, collected by Maurice Mejan, in eighteen volumes a scarce and valuable work " would throw any of our black-letter knight-errants into convulsions of laughter. There are also some in- stances of perhaps not unnatural confusion be- tween one merely local British celebrity and another, as where it is set forth that in Mr Noyes's collec- tion "there is a fine copy of Sir Robert Walpole's works, in five large quarto volumes, embellished with plates." But under all this inexperience of the ways of the craft as it is cultivated among us, and unconsciousness of such small parochial distinctions as may hold between Sir Robert Walpole, our Prime Minister, and Horace Walpole, the man of letters and trinkets, the book contains a quantity of valu- able and substantial matter, both as a record of rich stores of learning heaped up for the use of the scholar, and marvellous varieties to dazzle the eyes of the mere Dibdinite. The prevailing feature through- out is the lavish costliness and luxury of these collections, several of which exceed ten thousand volumes. Where collections have grown so large that, on the principles already explained, their in- crease is impeded, the owner's zeal and wealth seem to have developed themselves in the lavish enshrin- ing and decorating of such things as were attain- able.* * Take as a practical commentary on what has been said (p. 71) on "illustrating" books, the following passage de- 168 HIS FUNCTIONS. The descriptions of a remorseless investigator like this have a fresh individuality not to be found here, where our habitual reserve prevents us from offering or enjoying a full, true, and particular account of scribing some of the specialties of a collection, the general features of which are described further on : "But the crowning glory is a folio copy of Shakespeare, illustrated by the collector himself, with a prodigality of labour and expense, that places it far above any similar work ever attempted. The letterpress of this great work is a choice specimen of Nicol's types, and each play occu- pies a separate portfolio. These are accompanied by costly engravings of landscapes, rare portraits, maps, elegantly coloured plates of costumes, and water-colour drawings, executed by some of the best artists of the day. Some of the plays have over 200 folio illustrations, each of which is beautifully inlaid or mounted, and many of the engravings are very valuable. Some of the landscapes, selected from the oldest cosmographies known, illustrating the various places mentioned in the pages of Shakespeare, are exceed- ingly curious as well as valuable. ' ' In the historical plays, when possible, eveiy character is portrayed from authoritative sources, as old tapestries, monumental brasses, or illuminated works of the age, in well-executed drawings or recognised engravings. There are in this work a vast number of illustrations, in addition to a very numerous collection of water-colour drawings. In addition to the thirty-seven plays, are two volumes devoted to Shakespeare's life and times, one volume of portraits, one volume devoted to distinguished Shakespearians, one to poems, and two to disputed plays, the whole embracing a series of forty-two folio volumes, and forming, perhaps, the most remarkable and costly monument, in this shape, ever attempted by a devout worshipper of the Bard of Avon. The volume devoted to Shakespeare's portraits was purchased by Mr Burton, at the sale of a gentleman's lib- CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 169 the goods of our neighbours, unless they are brought to the hammer, and then they have lost half the charm which they possessed as the household gods of some one conspicuous by position or character, rary, who had spent many years in making the collection, and includes various 'effigies' unknown to many laborious collectors. It contains upwards of one hundred plates, for the most part proofs. The value of this collection may be estimated by the fact, that a celebrated English collector recently offered its possessor 60 for this single volume. " In the reading-room directly beneath the main library, are a number of portfolios of prints illustrative of the plays of Shakespeare, of a size too large to be included in the illustrated collection just noticed. There is likewise an- other copy of Shakespeare, based upon Knight's pictorial royal octavo, copiously illustrated by the owner; but al- though the prints are numerous, they are neither as costly nor as rare as those contained in the large folio copy. "Among the curiosities of the Shakes peare collection are a number of copies of the disputed plays, printed during his lifetime, with the name of Shakespeare as their author. It is remarkable, if these plays were not at least revised by Shakespeare, that no record of a contradiction of their authorship should be found. It is not improbable that many plays written by others were given to Shakespeare to perform in his capacity as a theatrical manager, requir- ing certain alterations in order to adapt them to the use of the stage, which were arranged by his cunning and skilful hand, and these plays afterward found their way into print, with just sufficient of his emendations to allow his author- ship of them, in the carelessness in which he held his literary fame, to pass uncontradicted by him. "There is a copy of an old play of the period, with manu- script annotations, and the name of Shakespeare written on the title-page. It is either the veritable signature of the poet, or an admirably imitated forgery. Mr Burton in- 170 HIS FUNCTIONS. and are little more estimable than other common merchandise. It would be difficult to find, among the countless books about books produced by us in the old country, any in which the bent of individual tastes and propensities is so distinctly represented in tangible symbols ; and the reality of the elucida- tion is increased by the sort of innocent surprise with which the historian approaches each "lot," evidently as a first acquaintance, about whom he inquires and obtains all available particulars, good- humouredly communicating them in bold detail to his reader. Here follows a sketch and surely a tempting one of a iS r ew York interior : " Mr Burton's library contains nearly sixteen thousand volumes. Its proprietor had constructed for its accommodation and preservation a three- storey fire-proof building, about thirty feet square, which is isolated from all other buildings, and is connected with his residence in Hudson Street by a conservatory gallery. The chief library-room occu- pies the upper floor of this building, and is about twenty-five feet in height. Its ceiling presents a clined to the opinion that the work once belonged to Shake- speare, and that the signature is genuine. If so, it is probably the only scrap of his handwriting on this con- tinent. This work is not included in the list given of Ire- land's library, the contents of which were brought into disrepute by the remarkable literary forgeries of the son, but stands forth peculiar and unique, and furnishes much room for curious speculation." (148-51.) CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 171 series of groined rafters, after the old English style, in the centre of which rises a dome-skylight of stained glass. The sides of the library are fitted up with thirty-six oak book-cases of a Gothic pattern, which entirely surround it, and are nine feet in height. The space between the ceiling and the book-cases is filled with paintings, for the most part of large size, and said to be of value. Speci- mens of armour and busts of distinguished authors decorate appropriate compartments, and in a pro- minent niche, at the head of the apartment, stands a full- length statue of Shakespeare, executed by Thorn, in the same style as the Tarn o' Shanter and Old Mortality groups of this Scotch sculptor. "The great specialty of the library is its Shake- speare collection; but, although very extensive and valuable, it by no means engrosses the entire library, which contains a large number of valuable works in several departments of literature. " The number of lexicons and dictionaries is large, and among the latter may be found all the rare old English works so valuable for reference. Three book- cases are devoted to serials, which contain many of the standard reviews and magazines. One case is appropriated to voyages and travels, in which are found many valuable ones. In another are up- wards of one hundred volumes of table-talk, and numerous works on the fine arts and bibliography. One book-case is devoted to choice works on Ame- rica, among which is Sebastian Munster's Cosmo- 172 HIS FUNCTIONS. graphia Totius Orbis Regionum, published in folio at Basle in 1537, which contains full notes of Co- lumbus, Vespucci, and other early voyagers. Another department contains a curious catalogue of authori- ties relating to Crime and Punishment ; a liberal space is devoted to Facetiae, another to American Poetry, and also one to Natural and Moral Philoso- phy. The standard works of Fiction, Biography, Theology, and the Drama, are all represented. "There is a fair collection of classical authors, many of which are of Aldine and Elzevir editions. Among the rarities in this department is a folio copy of Plautus, printed at Venice in 1518, and illustrated with woodcuts." The author thus coming upon a Eonian writer of plays, named Plautus, favours us with an account of him, which it is unnecessary to pursue, since it by no means possesses the interest attached to his still- life sketches. Let us pass on and take a peep at the collection of Chancellor Kent, known in this country as the author of Kent's Commentary : "To a lawyer, the Chancellor's written remarks on his books are, perhaps, their most interesting feature. He studied pen in hand, and all of his books contain his annotations, and some are literary curiosities. His edition of Blackstone's Commen- taries is the first American edition, printed in Phil- adelphia in 1771. It is creditable to the press of that time, and is overlaid with annotations, showing how diligently the future American commentator CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 173 studied the elegant work of his English predecessor. The general reader will find still more interest in the earlier judicial reports of the State of New York, printed while he was on the bench. He will find not merely legal notes, but biographical memo- randa of many of the distinguished judges and lawyers who lived at the commencement of the century, and built up the present system of laws. " In proceeding from the legal to the miscellaneous part of the library, the visitor's attention will, per- haps, be attracted by an extensive and curious col- lection of the records of criminal law. Not merely the English state trials and the French causes celcbres are there, but the criminal trials of Scot- land and of America, and detached publications of remarkable cases, Newgate Calendars, Malefactors' Eegister, Chronicles of Crime, with ghastly prints of Newgate and Old Bailey, with their executions. The Chancellor is not responsible for this part of the library, which owes its completeness to the morbid taste of his successor, who defends the collection as best illustrating the popular morals and manners of every period, and contends that fiction yields in interest to the gloomy dramas of real life." The practice attributed to the Chancellor of anno- tating his books is looked on by collectors as in the general case a crime which should be denied benefit of clergy. What is often said, however, of other crimes may be said of this, that if the perpetrator 174 HIS FUNCTIONS. be sufficiently illustrious, it becomes a virtue. If Milton, for instance, had thought fit to leave his autograph annotations on the first folio Shakespeare, the offence would not only have been pardoned but applauded, greatly to the pecuniary benefit of any one so fortunate as to discover the treasure. But it would be highly dangerous for ordinary people to found on such an immunity. I remember being once shown by an indignant collector a set of utterly and hopelessly destroyed copies of rare tracts con- nected with the religious disputes of Queen Eliza- beth's day, each inlaid and separately bound in a thin volume in the finest morocco, with the title lengthways along the back. These had been lent to a gentleman who deemed himself a distinguished poet, and he thought proper to write on the margin the sensations caused within him by the perusal of some of the more striking passages, certifying the genuine- ness of his autograph by his signature at full length in a bold distinct hand. He, worthy man, deemed that he was adding greatly to the value of the rarities ; but had he beheld the owner's face on occasion of the discovery, he would have been undeceived. There are in Dr "Wynne's book descriptions, not only of libraries according to their kind, but accord- ing to their stage of growth, from those which, as the work of a generation or two, have reached from ten to fifteen thousand, to the collections still in their youth, such as Mr Lorimer Graham's of five CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 175 thousand volumes, rich in early editions of British poetry, and doubtless, by this time, still richer, since its owner was lately here collecting early works on the literature of Scotland, and other memorials of the land of his fathers. Certainly, however, the most interesting of the whole is the library of the Rev. Dr Magoon, " an eminent and popular divine of the Baptist Church." He entered on active life as an operative bricklayer. There are, it appears, wall-plates extant, and not a few, built by his hands, and it was only by saving the earnings these brought to him that he could obtain an education. When an English mechanic finds out that he has a call to the ministry, we can easily figure the grim ignorant fanatical ranter that comes forth as the result. If haply he is able to read, his library will be a few lean sheepskin-clad volumes, such as Boston's Crook in the Lot, Fisher's Marrow of Modern Divinity, Booth's Apples of Gold, Bolton's Saint's Enriching Examination, and Halyburton's Great Concern. The bricklayer, however, was endowed with the heavenly gift of the high aesthetic, which no birth or breed- ing can secure, and threw himself into that common ground where art and religion meet the literature of Christian medieval art. Things must, however, have greatly changed among our brethren since the days of Cotton Mather, or even of Jonathan Ed- wards, Avhen a person in Dr Magoon's position could embellish his private sanctuary in this fashion. " The chief characteristic of the collection is its 176 HIS FUNCTIONS. numerous works on the history, literature, and theory of art in general, and of Christian architec- ture in particular. There is scarcely a church, abbey, monastery, college, or cathedral ; or picture, statue, or illumination, prominent in Christian art, extant in Italy, Germany, France, or the British Islands, that is not represented either by original drawings or in some other graphic form. " In addition to these works, having especial re- ference to Christian art, are many full sets of folios depicting the leading galleries of ancient, medieval, and modern art in general. Some of these, as the six elephant folios on the Louvre, are in superb bindings ; while many others, among which are the Dresden Gallery and Eetzsch's Outlines, derive an additional value from once having formed a part of the elegant collection of William Reginald Cour- tenay. " But what renders this collection particularly valuable, is its large number of original drawings by eminent masters which accompany the written and engraved works. Amongst these are two large sepia drawings, by Aruici, of the Pantheon and St Peter's at Rome. These drawings were engraved and published with several others by Ackermann. Both the originals, and the engravings executed from them, are in the collection. The original view near the Basilica of St Marco, by Samuel Prout, the engraving of which is in Finden's Byron, and the interior of St Marco, by Luke Price, the engraving CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 177 of which, is in Price's Venice Illustrated, grace the collection. There is likewise a superb general view of Venice, by "Wyld ; a fine exterior view of Rheims Cathedral, by Buckley; an exterior view of St Peter's at Caen, by Charles Vacher ; and the interior of St Germain des Pres at Paris, by Duval." The early history of the American settlements is naturally the object around which many of these collections cluster ; but the scraps of this kind of literature which have been secured have a sadly impoverished aspect in comparison with the luxuri- ous stores which American money has attracted from the Old World.* Here one is forcibly reminded * ' ' This collection [Mr Menzies's] contains four thousand volumes, and is for the most part in the English language. Its chief specialty consists in works on American history and early American printed books. Among the latter may be mentioned a series of the earliest works issued from the press in New York. Of these, is A Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman, by R. L., printed and sold by Wil- liam Bradford, in New York, 1696. Richard Lyon, the author, came early to this country, and officiated as a private tutor to a young English student at Cambridge, to whom the letter of advice was written. It is undoubtedly the earliest work which issued from the press in New York, and is so extremely rare, that it is questionable whether another copy is to be found in the State. There is a col- lection of tracts comprised in seven volumes, written by the Rev. George Keith, and published by Bradford, at New York, 1702-4. Keith was born in Scotland, and settled in East Jersey, in the capacity of surveyor-general, in 1682. The several tracts in the collection are on religious subjects, and are controversial in their character. As early speci- 178 HIS FUNCTIONS. of those elements in the old-established libraries of Europe which no wealth or zeal can achieve else- where, because the commodity is not in the market. America had just one small old library, and the lamentation over the loss of this ewe-lamb is touch- ing evidence of her poverty in such possessions. The Harvard Library dates from the year 1638. In 1764 the college buildings were burned, and though books are not easily consumed, yet the small collection of five thousand volumes was easily overwhelmed in the general ruin. So were de- stroyed many books from the early presses of the mother country, and many of the firstlings of the transatlantic printers ; and though its bulk was but that of an ordinary country squire's collection, the loss has been always considered national and irreparable. mens of printing, and as models of the manner in which the religious controversies of the day were conducted, they are both instructive and curious. In addition to these is a work entitled The Rebuker Rebuked, by Daniel Leeds, 1703 ; A Sermon preached at Kingston in Jamaica, by William Corbin, 1703; The Great Mystery of Fox- craft, by Daniel Leeds, 1705 ; A Sermon preached at Trinity Church, in New York, by John Sharp, 1706; An Alarm Sounded to the Inhabitants of the World, by Bath Bowers, 1709; and Lex Parliamentaria, 1716. All the above works were printed by Bradford, the earliest New York publisher, and one of the earliest printers in America. They constitute, perhaps, the most complete col- lection in existence of the publications of this early typo- grapher. The whole are in an excellent state of preserva- tion, and are nearly, if not quite, unique." CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 179 It is, after all, a rather serious consideration which it never seems as yet to have occurred to any one to revolve how entirely the new states of the West and the South seem to be cut off from the literary resources which the Old World possesses in her old libraries. Whatever light lies hidden beneath the bushel in these venerable institutions, seems for ever denied to the students and inquirers of the new empire rising in the antipodes, and con- sequently to the minds of the people at large who receive impressions from students and inquirers. Books can be reprinted, it is true ; but where is the likelihood that seven hundred thousand old volumes will be reprinted to put the Astorian Library on a par with the Imperial 1 Well, perhaps some quick and cheap way will be found of righting it all when we have got a tunnel to Australia, and are shot through it by something only a shade less instan- taneous than the electric telegraph. In the mean time, what a lesson do these matters impress on us of the importance of preserving old books ! Government and legislation have done little, if anything, in Britain, towards this object, beyond the separate help that may have been extended to individual public libraries, and the Copyright Act deposits. Of general measures, it is possible to point out some which have been injurious, by lead- ing to the dispersal or destruction of books. The house and window duties have done this to a large extent. As this statement may not be quite self- 180 HIS FUNCTIONS. evident, a word in explanation may be appropriate. The practice of the department having charge of the Assessed Taxes has been, when any furniture was left in an unoccupied house, to levy the duty to exempt only houses entirely empty. It was a con- sequence of this that when, by minority, family decay, or otherwise, a mansion-house had to be shut up, there was an inducement entirely to gut it of its contents, including the library. The same cause, by the way, has been more destructive still to furni- ture, and may be said to have lost to our posterity the fashions of a generation or two. Tables, chairs, and cabinets first grow unfashionable, and then old ; in neither stage have they any friends who will comfort or support them they are still worse off than books. But then comes an after-stage, in which they revive as antiquities, and become ex- ceeding precious. As Pompeiis, however, are rare in the world, the chief repositories of antique furni- ture have been mansions shut up for a generation or two, which, after more fashions than generations have passed away, are reopened to the light of day, either in consequence of the revival of the fortunes of their old possessors, or of their total extinction and the entry of new owners. How the house and window duties disturbed this silent process by which antiques were created is easily perceived. One service our Legislature has done for the pre- servation of books, in the copies which require to be deposited under the Copyright Act at Stationers' CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 181 Hall for the privileged libraries. True, this has been effected somewhat in the shape of a burden upon authors, for the benefit of that posterity which has done no more for them specially than it has for other people of the present generation. But in its present modified shape the burden should not be grudged, in consideration of the magnitude of the benefit to the people of the future a benefit the full significance of which it probably requires a little con- sideration to estimate. The right of receiving a copy of every book from Stationers' Hall has generally been looked on as a benefit to the library receiving it. The benefit, however, was but lightly esteemed by some of these institutions, the directors of which repre- sented that they were thus pretty well supplied with the unsaleable rubbish, while the valuable publications slipped past them ; and, on the whole, they would sell their privilege for a very small annual sum, to enable them to go into the market and buy such books, old and new, as they might prefer. The view adopted by the law, however, was, that the depositing of these books created an obligation if it conferred a privilege, the institution receiving them having no right to part with them, but being bound to preserve them as a record of the literature of the a^e.* * I am not aware that in the blue-books, or any other source of public information, there is any authenticated statement of the quantity of literature which the privileged 182 HIS FUNCTIONS. If the rule come ever to be thoroughly enforced, it will then come to pass that of every book that is printed in Britain, good or bad, five copies shall be preserved in the shelves of so many public libraries, slumbering there in peace, or tossed about by im- patient readers, as the case may be. For the latter there need not perhaps be much anxiety; it is for the sake of those addicted to slumbering in peaceful obscurity that this refuge is valuable. There is thus at least a remnant saved from the relentless trunk- libraries receive through, the Copyright Act. The informa- tion would afford a measure of the fertility of the British press. It is rather curious, that for a morsel of this kind of ordinary modern statistics, one must have recourse to so scholarly a work as the quarto volume of the Prcefationes et Epi-stolce Editionibus Principibus Auctorum Veterum prce- positce, curante Beriah Bot field, A.M. The editor of that noble quarto obtained a return from Mr Winter Jones, of the number of deposits in the British Museum from 1814 to 1860. Counting the "pieces," as they are called that is, every volume, pamphlet, page of music, and other publi- cation the total number received in 1814 was 378. It increased by steady gradation until 1851, when it reached 9871. It then got an impulse, from a determination more strictly to enforce the Act, and next year the number rose to 13,934, and in 1859 it reached 28,807. In this great mass, the number of books coming forth complete in one volume or more is roundly estimated at 5000, but a quan- tity of the separate numbers and parts which go to make up the total, are elementary portions of books, giving forth a certain number of completed volumes annually. From the same authority, it appears that the total number of publications which issued from the French press in 1858 was estimated at 13,000; but this includes "sermons, CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 183 maker. If the day of rescuscitation from the long slumber should arrive, we know where to find the book in a privileged library. The recollection just now occurs to me of a man of unquestionable cha- racter and scholarship, who wrote a suitable and intelligent book on an important subject, and at his own expense had it brought into the world by a distinguished publisher, prudently intimating on the title-page that he reserved the right of transla- tion. Giving the work all due time to find its way, pamphlets, plays, pieces of music, and engravings." In the same year the issues from the German press, Austria not included, are estimated at 10,000, all apparently actual volumes, or considerable pamphlets. Austria in 1855 pub- lished 4673 volumes and parts. What a contrast to all this it must be to live in sleepy Norway, where the annual liter- ary prowess produces 146 volumes ! In Holland the annual publications approach 2000. "During the year 1854, 861 works in the Russian language, and 451 in foreign lan- guages, were printed in Russia ; besides 2940 scientific and literary treatises in the different periodicals." The number of works anywhere published is, however, no indication of the number of books put in circulation, since some will have to be multiplied by tens, others by hundreds, and others by thousands. We know that there is an immense currency of literature in the American States, yet, of the quantity of literature issued there, the Publishers' Circular for February 1859 gives the following meagre estimate : "There were 912 works published in America during 1858. Of these 177 were reprints from England, 35 were new edi- tions, and 10 were translations from the French or German. The new American works thus number only 690, and among them are included sermons, pamphlets, and letters, whereas the reprints are in most cases bond fide books." 184 HIS FUNCTIONS. he called at the Row, exactly a year after the day of publication, to ascertain the result. He was presented with a perfectly succinct account of charge and discharge, in which he was credited with three copies sold. Now, he knew that his family had bought two copies, but he never could find out who it was that had bought the third. The one mind into which his thoughts had thus passed, remained ever mysteriously undiscoverable. Whether or not he consoled himself with the reflection that what might have been diffused over many was concen- trated in one, it is consolatory to others to reflect that such a book stands on record in the privileged libraries, to come forth to the world if it be wanted. Nor is the resuscitation of a book unsuited to its own age, but suited to another, entirely unexampled. That beautiful poem called Albania was reprinted by Leyden, from a copy preserved somewhere : so utterly friendless had it been in its obscurity, that the author's history, and even his name, were un- known ; and though it at once excited the high admiration of Scott, no scrap of intelligence con- cerning it could be discovered in any quarter con- temporary with its first publication. The Discourse on Trade by Roger North, the author of the amusing Lives of Lord-Keeper Guildford and his other two brothers, was lately reprinted from a copy in the British Museum, supposed to be the only one exist- ing. Though neglected in its own day, it has been considered worthy of attention in this, as promulgate CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 185 ing some of the principles of our existing philosophy of trade. On the same principle, some rare tracts on political economy and trade were lately reprinted by a munificent nobleman, who thought the doctrines contained in them worthy of preservation and pro- mulgation. The Spirit of Despotism, by Vicesimus Knox, was reprinted, at a time when its doctrines were popular, from a single remaining copy : the book, though instructive, is violent and declamatory, and it is supposed that its author discouraged or en- deavoured to suppress its sale after it was printed.* In the public duty of creating great libraries, and generally of preserving the literature of the world from being lost to it, the collector's or book-hunter's services are great and varied. In the first place, many of the great public libraries have been absolute donations of the treasures to which some enthusiastic literary sportsman has devoted his life and fortune. Its gradual accumulation has been the great solace and enjoyment of his active days ; he has beheld it, in his old age, a splendid monument of enlightened exertion, and he resolves that, when he can no longer call it his own, it shall preserve the relics of * I once heard an odd anecdote about this book. A traveller who had it in his luggage, passing the Austrian frontier, was, much to his astonishment, allowed to retain it. To his equal astonishment, the book beside it, being Combe on the Constitution of Man, was prohibited the word "constitution" was sufficient to condemn this pro- found volume. 186 HIS FUNCTIONS. past literature for ages yet to come, and form a centre whence scholarship and intellectual refinement shall diffuse themselves around. We can see this influ- ence in its most specific and material shape, perhaps, by looking round the reading-room of the British Museum that great manufactory of intellectual produce, where so many heads are at work. The beginning of this great institution, as everybody knows, was in the fifty thousand volumes collected by Sir Hans Sloane a wonderful achievement for a priA^ate gentleman at the beginning of the last century. When George III. gave it the libraries of the kings of England, it gained, as it were, a better start still by absorbing collections which had begun before Sloane was born those of Cranrner, Prince Henry, and Casaubon. The Ambrosian Library at Milan was the private collection of Cardinal Borro- meo, bequeathed by him to the world. It reached forty thousand volumes ere he died, and these formed a library which had arisen in free, natural, and symmetrical growth, insomuch as, having fed it during his whole life, it began with the young and economic efforts of youth and poverty, and went on accumulating in bulk and in the costliness of its contents as succeeding years brought wealth and honours to the great prelate. What those merchant princes, the Medici, did for the Laurentian Library at Florence is part of history. Old Cosmo, who had his mercantile and political correspondents in all lands, made them also his literary agents, who thus CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 187 sent him goods too precious to be resold even at a profit. " He corresponded," says Gibbon, "at once with Cairo and London, and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books were often imported by the same vessel." The Bodleian started with a collection which had cost Sir Thomas Bodley 10,000, and it was augmented from time to time by the absorption of tributary influxes of the same kind.* In many instances the collectors, whose stores have thus gone to the public, have merely followed their book-hunting propensities, without having the merit of framing the ultimate destiny of their col- lections, but in others the intention of doing benefit to the world has added zest and energy to the chase. Of this class there is one memorable and beautiful instance in Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, who lived and laboured so early as the days of Edward III., and has left an autobiographical sketch infinitely valuable, as at once informing us of the social habits, and letting us into the very inner life, of the highly endowed student and the affluent col- lector of the fourteenth century. His little book, called Philobiblion, was first printed at Cologne in the fifteenth century. An English translation of it was published in 1832. It is throughout adorned * The most complete mass of information which we pro- bably possess in the English language about the history of libraries, both home and foreign, is in the two octavos called Memoirs of Libraries, including a Handbook of Library Concerns, by Edward Edwards. 188 HIS FUNCTIONS. with the gentle and elevated nature of the scholar, and derives a still nobler lustre from the beneficent purpose to which the author destined the literary relics which it was the enjoyment of his life to col- lect and study. Being endowed with power and wealth, and putting to himself the question, " What can I render to the Lord for all that he hath con- ferred on me 1" he found an answer in the determi- nation of smoothing the path of the poor and ardent student, by supplying him with the means of study. " Behold," he says, " a herd of outcasts rather than of elect scholars meets the view of our contempla- tions, in which God the artificer, and nature his handmaid, have planted the roots of the best morals and most celebrated sciences. But the penury of their private affairs so oppresses them, being opposed by adverse fortune, that the fruitful seeds of virtue, so productive in the unexhausted field of youth, unmoistened by their wonted dews, are compelled to wither. "Whence it happens, as Boetius says, that bright virtue lies hid in obscurity, and the burning lamp is not put under a bushel, but is utterly ex- tinguished for want of oil. Thus the flowery field in spring is ploughed up before harvest ; thus wheat gives way to tares, the vine degenerates to woodbine, and the olive grows wild and unproductive." Keenly alive to this want, he resolved to devote himself, not merely to supply to the hungry the necessary food, but to impart to the poor and ardent scholar the mental sustenance which might possibly enable him CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 189 to burst the bonds of circumstance, and, triumphing over his sordid lot, freely communicate to mankind the blessings which it is the function of cultivated genius to distribute. The Bishop was a great and powerful man, for he went over Europe commissioned as the spiritual adviser of the great conqueror, Edward III. Wher- ever he went on public business to Eome, France, or the other states of Europe " on tedious embas- sies and in perilous times," he carried about with him " that fondness for books which many waters could not extinguish," and gathered up all that his power, his wealth, and his vigilance brought within his reach. In Paris he becomes quite ecstatic : " Oh blessed God of Gods in Zion ! what a rush of the glow of pleasure rejoiced our heart as often as we visited Paris the Paradise of the world ! There we longed to remain, where, on account of the great- ness of our love, the days ever appeared to us to be few. There are delightful libraries in cells redolent of aromatics there nourishing greenhouses of all sorts of volumes : there academic meads trembling with the earthquake of Athenian peripatetics pacing up and down : there the promontories of Parnassus and the porticos of the stoics." The most powerful instrument in his policy was encouraging and bringing round him as dependents and followers, the members of the mendicant orders the labourers called to the vineyard in the eleventh hour, as he calls them. These he set to cater for 190 SIS FUNCTIONS. him, and lie triumphantly asks, " Among so many of the keenest hunters, what leveret could lie hid 1 What fry could evade the hook, the net, or the trawl of these men? From the body of divine law down to the latest controversial tract of the day, nothing could escape the notice of these scrutinisers." In further revelations of his method he says, " When, indeed, we happened to turn aside to the towns and places where the aforesaid paupers had convents, we were not slack in visiting their chests and other repositories of books; for there, .amidst the deepest poverty, we found the most ex- alted riches treasured up ; there, in their satchels and caskets, we discovered not only the crumbs that fell from the master's table for the little dogs, but, indeed, the shew-bread without leaven the bread of angels containing all that is delectable." He specially marks the zeal of the Dominicans as preachers ; and in exulting over his success in the field, he affords curious glimpses into the ways of the various humble assistants who were glad to lend themselves to the hobby of one of the most powerful prelates of his day.* * "Indeed, although we had obtained abundance both of old and new works, through an extensive communica- tion with all the religious orders, yet we must in justice extol the Preachers with a special commendation in this respect ; for we found them, above all other religious de- votees, ungrudging of their most acceptable communica- tions, and overflowing with a certain divine liberality ; we CREATION OF LIBRARIES. 191 The manner in which Robert of Bury dedicated his stores to the intellectual nurture of the poor scholar, was by converting them into a library for Durham College, which merged into Trinity of Ox- experienced them not to be selfish hoarders, but meet pro- fessors of enlightened knowledge. Besides all the oppor- tunities already touched upon, we easily acquired the notice of the stationers and librarians, not only within the pro- vinces of our native soil, but of those dispersed over the kingdoms of France, Germany, and Italy, by the prevailing power of money ; no distance whatever impeded, no fury of the sea deterred them ; nor was cash wanting for their expenses, when they sent or brought us the wished - for books ; for they knew to a certainty that their hopes reposed in our bosoms could not be disappointed, but ample re- demption, with interest, was secure with us. Lastly, our common captivatrix of the love of all men (money), did not neglect the rectors of country schools, nor the pedagogues of clownish boys, but rather, when we had leisure to enter their little gardens and paddocks, we culled redolent flowers upon the surface, and dug up neglected roots (not, however, useless to the studious), and such coarse digests of bar- barism, as with the gift of eloquence might be made sana- tive to the pectoral arteries. Amongst productions of this kind, we found many most worthy of renovation, which, when the foul rust was skilfully polished off, and the mask of old age removed, deserved to be once more remodelled into comely countenances, and which we, having applied a sufficiency of the needful means, resuscitated for an ex- emplar of future resurrection, having in some measure restored them to renewed soundness. Moreover, there was always about us in our halls no small assemblage of anti- quaries, scribes, bookbinders, correctors, illuminators, and, generally, of all such persons as were qualified to labour advantageously in the service of books. ' ' To conclude. All of either sex, of every degree, estate, 192 HIS FUNCTIONS. ford. It would have been a pleasant thing to look upon the actual collection of manuscripts which awakened so much recorded zeal and tenderness in the great ecclesiastic of five hundred years ago ; but in later troubles they became dispersed, and all that seems to be known of their whereabouts is, that some of them are in the library of BalioL* Another eminent English prelate made a worthy, but equally ineffectual, attempt to found a great university lib- rary. This was the Kev. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who gave what was called " the noblest library in England" to the newly-founded college of St John's. It was not a bequest. To make his gift secure, it was made over directly to the college, but as he could not part with his favourites while he lived, he borrowed the whole back for life. This is probably the most extensive book loan ever nego- tiated ; but the Reformation, and his tragic destiny, or dignity, whose pursuits were in any way connected with books, could, with a knock, most easily open the door of our heart, and find a convenient reposing place in our bosom. We so admitted all who brought books, that neither the multitude of first-comers could produce a fas- tidiousness of the last, nor the benefit conferred yester- day be prejudicial to that of to-day. Wherefore, as we were continually resorted to by all the aforesaid persons, as to a sort of adamant attractive of books, the desired acces- sion of the vessels of science, and a multifarious flight of the best volumes were made to iis. And this is what we undertook to relate at large in the present chapter." * Edwards on Libraries, vol. i. p. 586. THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 193 were coming on apace, and the books were lost both to himself and his favourite college.* 19rf0rbatt0n at Etteratur*. 1 HE benefactors whose private collec- tions have, by a generous act of en- dowment, been thus rendered at the same time permanent and public, could be counted by hundreds. It is now, how- ever, my function to describe a more subtle, but no less powerful influence, which the book-hunter exercises in the preservation and promulgation of literature, through the mere exercise of that instinct or passion which makes him what he is here called. "What has been said above must have suggested if it was not seen before how great a pull it gives to any public library, that it has had an early start ; and how hard it is, with any amount of wealth and energy, to make up for lost time, and raise a later institution to the level of its senior. The Imperial Library of Paris, which has so marvellously lived through all the storms that have swept round its walls, was founded in the fourteenth century. It began, of course, with manuscripts ; possessing, be- fore the beginning of the fifteenth century, the then * Edwards on Libraries, vol. i. p. 609. N 194 HIS FUNCTIONS. enormous number of a thousand volumes. The rea- son, however, of its present greatness, so far beyond the rivalry of later establishments, is, that it was in active operation at the birth of printing, and received the first-born of the press. There they have been sheltered and preserved, while their unprotected bre- thren, tossed about in the world outside, have long disappeared, and passed out of existence for ever. It is a common notion, which has been floated off from time to time, inflated with every variety of rhe- torical gas, that, since the age of printing, no book once put to press has ever died. The notion is quite inconsistent with fact. When we count by hundreds of thousands the books that are in the Paris Library, and not to be had for the British Museum, we see the number of books which a chance refuge has caught up from the general de- struction, and can readily see, in shadowy bulk, though we cannot estimate in numbers, the great mass which, having found no refuge, have disap- peared out of separate existence, and been mingled up with the other elements of the earth's crust. We have many accounts of the marvellous preser- vation of books, after they have become rare the snatching of them as brands from the burning; their hairbreadth-' scapes i' the imminent deadly breach. It would be interesting, also, to have some account of the progress of destruction among books. A work dedicated apparently to this object, which I have been unable to find in the body, is mentioned under THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 195 a very tantalising title. It is by a certain John Charles Conrad Oelrichs, author of several scraps of literary history, and is called a Dissertation concern- ing the Fates of Libraries and Books, and, in the first place, concerning the books that have been eaten such I take to be the meaning of Disserta- tio de Bibliothecaruni ac Librorum Fatis, imprimis libris comestis. This is nearly as tantalising as the wooden-legged Britisher's explanation to the inqui- sitive Yankee, who solemnly engaged to ask not an- other question were he told how that leg was lost, and was accordingly told that " it was bitten off." Religious and political intolerance has, as all the world knows, been a terrible enemy to literature, not only by absolute suppression but by the re- straints of the licenser. So little was literary free- dom indeed understood anywhere until recent days, that it was only by an accident after the Revolution that the licensing of books was abolished in Eng- land. The new licenser, Edmond Bohun, happened in fact to be a Jacobite, and though he professed to conform to the Revolution settlement, his sympathies with the exiled house disabled him from detecting disaffection skilfully smothered, and the House of Commons, in a rage, abolished his office by refusing to renew the licensing act. Of the extent to which literature has suffered by suppression, there are no data for a precise estimate. It might bring out some cxirious results, however, were any investigator to tell \is of the books which had been effectually 196 HIS FUNCTIONS. put down after being in existence. It would of course be found that the weak were crushed, while the strong nourished. Among the valuable biblio- graphical works of Peignot, is a dictionary of books which have been condemned to the flames, sup- pressed, or censured. We do not require to go far through his alphabet to see how futile the burnings and condemnations have been in their effect on the giants of literature. The first name of all is that of Abelard, and so going on we pick up the witty scamp Aretin, then pass on to D'Aubigne" the great warrior and historian, Bayle, Beaumarchais, Boul- anger, Catullus, Charron, Condillac, Crebillon, and so on, down to Voltaire and Wicliffe. Wars and revolutions have of course done their natural work on many libraries, yet the mischief effected by them has often been more visible than real, since they have tended rather to dispersion than destruction. The total loss to literature by the dis- persion of the libraries of the monastic establishments in England, is probably n*ot nearly so great as that which has accompanied the chronic mouldering away of the treasures preserved so obstinately by the lazy monks of the Levant, who were found by Mr Curzon at their public devotions laying down priceless volumes which they could not read to protect their dirty feet from the cold floor. In the wildest times the book repository often partakes in the good fortune of the humble student whom the storm passes over. In the hour of danger too, some friend who keeps a THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 197 quiet eye upon its safety may interpose at the critical moment. The treasures of the French libraries were certainly in terrible danger when Robespierre had be- fore him the draft of a decree, that " the books of the public libraries of Paris and the departments should no longer be permitted to offend the eyes of the re- public by shameful marks of servitude." The word would have gone forth, and a good deal beyond the mere marks of servitude would have been doubtless destroyed, had not the emergency called forth the courage and energies of Renouard and Didot.* There are probably false impressions abroad as to the susceptibility of literature to destruction by fire. Books are not good fuel, as, fortunately, many a housemaid has found, when, among other frantic efforts and failures in fire-lighting, she has reasoned from the false data of the inflammability of a piece of paper. In the days when heretical books were burned, it was necessary to place them on large wooden stages, and after all the pains taken to de- molish them, considerable readable masses were sometimes found in the embers ; whence it was sup- posed that the devil, conversant in fire and its effects, gave them his special protection. In the end it was found easier and cheaper to burn the heretics them- selves than their books. Thus books can be burned, but they don't burn, and though in great fires libraries have been wholly * See Edwards on Libraries, vol. ii. p. 272. 198 HIS FUNCTIONS. or partially destroyed, we never hear of a library making a great conflagration like a cotton mill or a tallow warehouse. Nay, a story is told of a house seeming irretrievably on fire, until the flames, coming in contact with the folio Corpus Juris and the Statutes at Large, were quite unable to get over this joint barrier, and sank defeated. When anything is said about the burning of libraries, Alexandria at once flares up in the memory ; but it is strange how little of a satisfactory kind investigators have been able to make out, either about the formation or destruc- tion of the many famous libraries collected from time to time in that city. There seems little doubt that Caesar's auxiliaries unintentionally burnt one of them ; its contents were probably written on papy- rus, a material about as inflammable as dried reeds or wood-shavings. As to that other burning in detail, when the collection was used for fuel to the baths, and lasted some six weeks surely never was there a greater victim of historical prejudice and calumny than the "ignorant and fanatical" Caliph Omar al Easchid. Over and over has his act been disproved, and yet it will continue to be re-asserted with uniform pertinacity in successive rolling sentences, all as like each other as the successive billows in a swell at sea.* * One of the latest inquirers who has gone over the ground concludes his evidence thus : "Omar ne vint pas k Alex- andrie ; et s'il y fut venu, il n'eut pas trouvg des livres k briiler. La bibliotheque n'existait plus depuis deux siecles et demi." Fournier, L' Esprit dans 1'Histoire. THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 199 Apart, however, from violence and accident, there is a constant decay of books from what might be called natural causes, keeping, like the decay of the human race, a proportion to their reproduction, which varies according to place or circumstance ; here showing a rapid increase where production outruns decay, and there a decrease where the morbid elements of annihilation are stronger than the active elements of reproduction. Indeed, volumes are in their varied external conditions very like human beings. There are some stout and others frail some healthy and others sickly; and it happens often that the least robust are the most precious. The full fresh health of some of the folio fathers and schoolmen, ranged side by side in solemn state on the oaken shelves of some venerable repository, is apt to surprise those who expect mouldy decay ; the stiff hard binding is as angular as ever, there is no abrasion of the leaves, not a single dog-ear or a spot, or even a dust-border on the mellowed white of the margin. So, too, of those quarto civilians and canonists of Leyden and Amsterdam, with their smooth white vellum coats, bearing so generic a resemblance to Dutch cheeses, that they might be supposed to re- present the experiments of some Gouda dairyman on the quadrature of the circle. An easy life and an established position in society are the secret of their excellent preservation and condition. Their repose has been little disturbed by intrusive readers or unceremonious investigators, and their repute for 200 HIS FUNCTIONS. solid learning lias given them a claim to attention and careful preservation. Though this is dwindling away, like many other conventional distinctions of rank, yet are authors of the present day not entirely divested of the oppor- tunity of taking their place on the shelf like these old dignitaries. It would be as absurd, of course, to appear in folio as to step abroad in the small- clothes and queue of our great-grandfathers' day, and even quarto is reserved for science and some depart- ments of the law. But then, on the other hand, octavos are growing as large as some of the folios of the seventeenth century, and a solid roomy-looking book is still practicable. Whoever desires to achieve a sure, though it may be but a humble, niche in the temple of fame, let him write a few solid volumes, with respectably sounding titles, and matter that will rather repel the reader than court him to such familiarity as may beget contempt. Such books are to the frequenter of a library like country gentle- men's seats to travellers, something to know the name and ownership of in passing. The stage- coachman of old used to proclaim each in succession the guide-book tells them now. So do literary guide-books, in the shape of library-catalogues and bibliographies, tell of these steady and respectable mansions of literature. No one speaks ill of them, or even proclaims his ignorance of their nature, and your " man who knows everything" will profess some familiarity with them, the more readily that THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 201 the verity of his pretensions is not likely to be tested. A man's name may have resounded for a time through all the newspapers as the gainer of a great victory or the speaker of marvellous speeches he may have been the most brilliant wit of some distinguished social circle the head of a great pro- fession even a leading statesman, yet his memory has utterly evaporated with the departure of his own generation. Had he but written one or two of these solid books, now, his name would have been perpetuated in catalogues and bibliographical dic- tionaries ; nay, biographies and encyclopaedias would contain their titles, and perhaps the day of the author's birth and death. Let those who desire pos- thumous fame, counting recollection as equivalent to fame, think of this. It is with no desire to further the annihilation or decay of the stout and long-lived class of books of which I have been speaking, that I now draw atten- tion to the book-hunter's services in the preservation of some that are of a more fragile nature, and are liable to droop and decay. We can see the process going on around us, just as we see other things tra- velling towards extinction. Look, for instance, at school-books, how rapidly and obviously they go to ruin. True, there are plenty of them, but save of those preserved in the privileged libraries, or of any that may be tossed aside among lumber in which they happen to remain until they become curiosities, what chance is there of any of them being in exist- 202 HIS FUNCTIONS. ence a century hence? Collectors know well the extreme rarity and value of ancient school-books. Nor is their value by any means fanciful. The dominie will tell us that they are old-fashioned, and the pedagogue who keeps a school, "and ca's it a acaudeniy," will sneer at them as " obsolete and in- compatible with the enlightened adjuncts of modern tuition ; " but if we are to consider that the condi- tion of the human intellect at any particular juncture is worth studying, it is certainly of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of children's play-books as well as their work-books; these are as ephemeral as their other toys. Re- taining dear recollections of some that were the favourites, and desiring to awaken from them old recollections of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try whether your own children inherit the paternal susceptibility to their beauties, you make application to the bookseller but, behold, they have disap- peared from existence as entirely as the rabbits you fed, and the terrier that followed you with his cheery clattering bark. Neither name nor descrip- tion not the announcement of the benevolent publishers, "Darton, Harvey, and Darton" can recover the faintest traces of their vestiges. Old cookery-books, almanacs, books of prognostication, directories for agricultural operations, guides to han dicrafts, and other works of a practical nature, are infinitely valuable when they refer to remote times, and also infinitely rare. THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 203 But of course the most interesting of all are tlie relics of pure literature, of poems and plays. Whence have arisen all the anxious searches and disappoint- ments, and the bitter contests, and the rare triumphs, about the early editions of Shakespeare, separately or collectively, save from this, that they passed from one impatient hand to another, and were subjected to an unceasing greedy perusal, until they were at last used up and put out of existence 1 True it was to be with him ' ' So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore, Flames in the forehead of the morning sky." But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a long age digging and searching for some fragment of intellec- tual treasure. One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the dilapidating effects of use. The Bible seems to have been ever touched with reverent gentleness, and, when the sordid effects of long handling had become inevi- tably conspicuous, to have been generally removed out of sight, and, as it were, decently interred. Hence it is that, of the old editions of the Bible, the copies are so comparatively numerous and in such 204 SIS FUNCTIONS. fine preservation. Look at those two folios from the types of Guttenburg and Fust, running so far back into the earliest stage of the art of printing, that of them is told the legend of a combination with the devil, which enabled one man to write so many copies identically the same. See how clean and spotless is the paper, and how black, glossy, and distinct the type, telling us how little progress printing has made since the days of its inventors, in anything save the greater rapidity with which, in consequence of the progress of machinery, it can now be executed. The reason of the extreme -rarity of the books printed by the early English printers is that, being very amusing, they were used up thumbed out of existence. Such were Caxton's book of the Ordre of Chyualry; his Knyght of the Toure; the My- rour of the World ; and the Golden Legende ; Cocke Lorell's Bote, by De Worde ; his Kalender of Shepeherdes, and suchlike. If any one feels an in- terest in the process of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may easily witness it in the debris of a circulating library ; and perhaps he will find the phenomenon in still more distinct operation at any book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a choice of Watts' s Hymns and Pilgrim's Progresses. Here, too, it is possible that the enlightened on- looker may catch sight of the book-hunter plying his vocation, much after the manner in which, in THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 205 some ill-regulated town, he may have "beheld the chiffonniers, at early dawn, rummaging among the cinder heaps for ejected treasures. A ragged morsel is perhaps carefully severed from the heap, wrapped in paper to keep its leaves together, and deposited in the purchaser's pocket. You would probably find it difficult to recognise the fragment, if you should see it in the brilliancy of its resuscitation. A skilled and cautious workman has applied a bitu- minous solvent to its ragged edges, and literally incorporated, by a sort of paper-making process, each mouldering page into a broad leaf of fine strong paper, in which the print, according to a simile used for such occasions, seems like a small rivulet in a wide meadow of margin. This is termed inlaying, and is a very lofty department in the art of binding. Then there is, besides, the grandeur of russia or morocco, with gilding, and tooling, and marbling, and perhaps a ribbon marker, dangling out with a decoration at its end all tending, like stars, and garters, and official robes, to stamp the outer insignia of importance on the book, and to warn all the world to respect it, and save it from the risks to which the common herd of literature is liable.* * There is something exceedingly curious, not only in its bearing on the matter of the text, but as a record of some peculiar manners and habits of the fourteenth century, in Robert of Bury's injunctions as to the proper treatment of the manuscripts which were read in his day, and the signal 206 HIS FUNCTIONS. I have recourse to our old friend Monkbarns again for a brilliant description of the bibliophile, as the French politely call him, in the performance of the function assigned to him in the dispensation contrast offered by the practice both of the clergy and laity to his decorous precepts. "We not only set before ourselves a service to God in preparing volumes of new books, but we exercise the duties of a holy piety, if we first handle so as not to injure them, then return them to their proper places and commend them to undefiling custody, that they may rejoice in their purity while held in the hand, and repose in security when laid up in their repositories. Truly, next to the vestments and vessels dedicated to the body of the Lord, holy books de- serve to be most decorously handled by the clergy, upon which injury is inflicted as often as they presume to touch them with a dirty hand. Wherefore, we hold it expedient to exhort students upon various negligencies which can always be avoided, but which are wonderfully injurious to books. ' ' In the first place, then, let there be a mature decorum in opening and closing of volumes, that they may neither be unclasped with precipitous haste, nor thrown aside after inspection without being duly closed ; for it is neces- sary that a book should be much more carefully preserved than a shoe. But school folks are in general perversely educated, and, if not restrained by the rule of their superiors, are puffed up with infinite absurdities ; they act with petulance, swell with presumption, judge of every- thing with certainty, and are unexperienced in anything. "You will perhaps see a stiff-necked youth, lounging sluggishly in his study, while the frost pinches him in winter time, oppressed with cold, his watery nose drops, nor does he take the trouble to wipe it with his handker- chief till it has moistened the book beneath it with its vile dew. For such a one I would substitute a cobbler's apron in the place of his book. He has a nail like a giant's, THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 207 of things, renewing my already recorded protest against the legitimacy of the commercial part of the transaction : " ' Snuffy Davie bought the Game of Chess, perfumed with stinking filth, with which he points out the place of any pleasant subject. He distributes innumerable straws in various places, with the ends in sight, that he may recall by the mark what his memory cannot retain. These straws, which the stomach of the book never digests, and which nobody takes out, at first distend the book from its accustomed closure, and, being carelessly left to oblivion, at last become putrid. He is not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to transfer his empty cup from side to side upon it ; and because he has not his alms-bag at hand, he leaves the rest of the frag- ments in his books. He never ceases to chatter with eternal garrulity to his companions ; and while he adduces a multitude of reasons void of physical meaning, he waters the book, spread oiit upon his lap, with the sputtering of his saliva. What is worse, he next reclines with his elbows on the book, and by a short study invites a long nap ; and by way of repairing the wrinkles, he twists back the margins of the leaves, to the no small detriment of the volume. He goes out in the rain, and now flowers make their appearance upon our soil. Then the scholar we are describing, the ueglecter rather than the inspector of books, stuffs his volume with firstling violets, roses, and quadrifoils. He will next apply his wet hands, oozing with sweat, to turning over the volumes, then beat the white parchment all over with his dusty gloves, or hunt over the page, line by line, with his forefinger covered with dirty leather. Then, as the flea bites, the holy book is thrown aside, which, however, is scarcely closed in a month, and is so swelled with the dust that has fallen into it, that it will not yield to the efforts of the closer. " But impudent boys are to be specially restrained from 208 HIS FUNCTIONS. 1474, the first book ever printed in England, from a stall in Holland, for about two groschen, or two- pence of our money. He sold it to Osborne for twenty pounds, and as many books as came to twenty pounds more. Osborne resold this inimi- table windfall to Dr Askew for sixty guineas. At Dr Askew's sale,' continued the old gentleman, kindling as he spoke, ' this inestimable treasure blazed forth in its full value, and was purchased by royalty itself for one hundred and seventy pounds ! Could a copy now occur, Lord only knows,' he ejaculated, with a deep sigh and lifted-up hands, ' Lord only knows what would be its ransom ! meddling with books, who, when they are learning to draw the forms of letters, if copies of the most beautiful books are allowed them, begin to become incongruous annotators, and wherever they perceive the broadest mar- gin about the text, they furnish it with a monstrous al- phabet, or their unchastened pen immediately presumes to draw any other frivolous thing whatever that occurs to their imagination. There the Latinist, there the so- phist, there every sort of unlearned scribe tries the good- ness of his pen, which we have frequently seen to have been most injurious to the fairest volumes, both as to utility and price. There are also certain thieves who enormously dismember books by cutting off the side mar- gins for letter-paper (leaving only the letters or text), or the fly-leaves put in for the preservation of the book, which they take away for various uses and abuses, which sort of sacrilege ought to be prohibited under a threat of ana- thema. " But it is altogether befitting the decency of a scholar that washing should without fail precede reading, as often THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 209 and yet it was originally secured, by skill and research, for the easy equivalent of twopence ster- ling. Happy, thrice happy, Snuffy Davie ! and blessed were the times when thy industry could be so rewarded ! ' " In such manner is it that books are saved from annihilation, and that their preservers become the feeders of the great collections in which, after their value is established, they find refuge ; and herein it is that the class to whom our attention is at present devoted perform an inestimable service to literature. It is, as you will observe, the general ambition of the class to find value where there seems to be none, as he returns from his meals to study, before his fingers, besmeared with grease, loosen a clasp or turn over the leaf of a book. Let not a crying child admire the drawings in the capital letters, lest he pollute the parchment with his wet fingers, for he instantly touches whatever he sees. "Furthermore, laymen, to whom it matters not whether they look at a book turned wrong side upwards or spread before them in its natural order, are altogether unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk also take order that the dirty scullion, stinking from the pots, do not touch the leaves of books unwashed ; but he who enters without spot shall give his services to the precious volumes. " The cleanliness of delicate hands, as if scabs and pos- tules could not be clerical characteristics, might also be most important, as well to books as to scholars, who, as often as they perceive defects in books, should attend to them instantly, for nothing enlarges more quickly than a rent, as a fracture neglected at the time will afterwards be repaired with increased trouble." Philobiblion, p. 101. 210 HIS FUNCTIONS. and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, en- abling the operator, in the midst of a heap of rub- bish, to put his finger on those things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and curious. The adept will at once intuitively separate from its friends the book that either is or will be- come curious. There must be something more than mere rarity to give it this value, although high authorities speak of the paucity of copies as being everything. David Clement, the illustrious French bibliographer, who seems to have anticipated the positive philosophy by an attempt to make biblio- graphy, as the Germans have named it, one of the exact sciences, lays it down with authority, that " a book which it is difficult to find in the country where it is sought ought to be called simply rare ; a book which it is difficult to find in any country may be called very rare a book of which there are only fifty or sixty copies existing, or which appears so seldom as if there never had been more at any time than that number of copies, ranks as extremely rare; and when the whole number of copies does not exceed ten, this constitutes excessive rarity, or rarity in the highest degree." This has been re- ceived as a settled doctrine in bibliography ; but it is utter pedantry. Books may be rare enough in the real or objective sense of the term, but if they are not so in the nominal or subjective sense, by being sought after, their rarity goes for nothing. A volume may be unique may stand quite alone in THE PRESERVATION OF LITERATURE. 211 the world but whether it is so, or one of a numer- ous family, is never known, for no one has ever desired to possess it, and no one ever will. But it is a curious phenomenon in the old-book trade, that rarities do not always remain rare ; volumes seeming to multiply through some crypto- gamic process, when we know perfectly that no ad- ditional copies are printed and thrown off. The fact is, that the rumour of scarcity, and value, and of a hunt after them, draws them from their hiding- places. If we may judge from the esteem in which they were once held, the Elzevirs must have been great rarities in this country; but they are now plentiful enough the heavy prices in the British market having no doubt sucked them out of dingy repositories in Germany and Holland so that, even in this department of commerce, the law of supply and demand is not entirely abrogated. He who dashes at all the books called rare, or even very rare, by Clement and his brethren, will be apt to suffer the keen disappointment of finding that there are many who participate with him in the possession of the same treasures. In fact, let a book but make its appearance in that author's Bibliotheque Curieuse, Historique, et Critique, ou Catalogue Eaisonne de Livres difficiles a trouver; or in Graesses's Tresor de Livres Hares et Pre"cieux let it be mentioned as a rarity in Eibert's Allgemeines Bibliographisches Lexicon, or in Debure, Clement, Osmond, or the Eepertorium Bibliographicuui, such proclamation 212 HIS FUNCTIONS. is immediate notice to many fortunate possessors who were no more aware of the value of their dingy- looking volumes than Monsieur Jourdain knew him- self to be in the habitual daily practice of talking prose. So are we brought again back to the conclusion that the true book-hunter must not be a follower of any abstract external rules, but must have an inward sense and literary taste. It is not abso- lutely that a book is rare, or that it is run after, that must commend it to him, but something in the book itself. Hence the relics which he snatches from ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them. They will not be of that un- happy kind which nobody has desired to possess for their own sake, and nobody ever will. Some- thing there will be of original genius, or if not that, yet of curious, odd, out of the way information, or of quaintness of imagination, or of characteristics pervading some class of men, whether a literary or a polemical, something, in short, which people desirous of information will some day or other be anxious to read such are the volumes which it is desirable to save from annihilation, that they may find their place at last in some of the great maga- zines of the world's literary treasures. LIBRARIANS. 213 T will often be fortunate for these great institutions if they obtain the services of the hunter himself, along with his spoils of the chase. The leaders in the German wars often found it an exceedingly sound policy to subsidise into their own service some captain of free lances, who might have been a curse to all around him. Your great game-pre- servers sometimes know the importance of taking the most notorious poacher in the district into pay as a keeper. 'So it is sometimes of the nature of the book-hunter, if he be of the genial sort, and free of some of the more vicious peculiarities of his kind, to make an invaluable librarian. Such an arrange- ment will sometimes be found to be like mercy twice blessed, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. The imprisoned spirit probably finds freedom at last, and those purchases and accumula- tions which, to the private purse, were profuse and culpable recklessness, may become veritable duty ; while the wary outlook and the vigilant observation, which before were only leading a poor victim into temptation, may come forth as commendable atten- tion and zealous activity. Sometimes mistakes have been made in selections on this principle, and a zeal has been embarked 214 HIS FUNCTIONS. which has been found to tend neither to profit nor edification ; for there have been known, at the head of public libraries, men of the cerberus kind who loved the books so dearly, as to be unable to endure the handling of them by the vulgar herd of readers and searchers even by those for whose special aid and service they are employed. They who have this morbid terror of the profanation of the treasures committed to their charge suffer in themselves the direst torments something like those of a cat beholding her kittens tossed b} r a dog whenever their favourites are handled ; and the excruciating extent of their agonies, when some ardent and care- less student dashes right into the heart of some editio princeps, or tall copy, or, perhaps, lays it open with its face on the table while he snatches another edition that he may collate a passage, is not to be conceived. It is then the dog worrying the kittens. Such men will only give satisfaction in great private libraries little disturbed by their proprietors, or in monastic or other corporate institutions, where it is the worthy object of the patrons to keep their col- lection in fine condition, and, at the same time, to take order that it shall be of the least possible service to education or literature. Angelo Mai, the great librarian of the Vatican, who made so many valuable discoveries himself, had the character of taking good care that no one else should make any within his own strictly-preserved hunting grounds. In the general case, hoAvever, a bibliophile at the LIBRARIANS. 215 bead of a public library is genial and communicative, and has a pleasure in belping the investigator through the labyrinth of its stores. Such men feel their strength; and the immense value of the service which they may sometimes perform by a brief hint in the right direction which the inquiry should take, or by handing down a volume, or recommending the best directory to all the learning on the matter in hand, has laid many men of letters under great obligations to them. The most eminent type of this class of men was Magliabecchi, librarian to the Grand-Duke of Tus- cany, who could direct you to any book in any part of the world, with the precision with which the metropolitan policeman directs you to St Paul's or Piccadilly. It is of him that the stories are told of answers to inquiries after books, in these terms : " There is but one copy of that book in the world. It is in the Grand Seignior's library at Constanti- nople, and is the seventh book in the second shelf on the right hand as you go in." His faculties were, like those of all great men, self-born and self- trained. So little was the impoverished soil in which he passed his infancy congenial to his pur- suits in after-life, that it was not within the pa- rental intentions to teach him to read, and his earliest labours were in the shop of a green-grocer. Had his genius run on natural science, he might have fed it here, but it was his felicity and his for- tune to be transferred to the shop of a patronising 216 HIS FUNCTIONS. bookseller. Here he drank in an education such as no academic forcing machinery could ever infuse. He devoured books, and the printed leaves became as necessary to his existence as the cabbage-leaves to the caterpillars which at times made their not welcome appearance in the abjured green-grocery. Like these verdant reptiles, too, he became assimi- lated to the food he fed on, insomuch that he was in a manner hot-pressed, bound, marble-topped, let- tered, and shelved. He could bear nothing but books around him, and would allow no space for aught else ; his furniture, according to repute, being limited to two chairs, the second of which was ad- mitted in order that the two together might serve as a bed. Another enthusiast of the same kind was Adrien Baillet, the author, or, more properly speaking, the compiler, of the " Jugemens des Savans." Some copies of this book, which has a quantity of valuable matter scattered through it, have Baillet's portrait, from which his calm scholarly countenance looks genially forth, with this appropriate motto, " Dans une douce solitude, a 1'abri du mensonge et de la vanite, j'adoptai la critique, et j'en fis mon dtude, pour d<$couvrir la veriteV' Him, struggling with poverty, aggravated with a thirst for books, did Lanioignon the elder place at the head of his library, thus at once pasturing him. in clover. When the patron told his friend, Hermant, of his desire to find a librarian possessed of certain fabulous qualifi- LIBRARIANS. 217 cations for the duty, his correspondent said, " I will bring the very man to you;" and Baillet, a poor, frail, attenuated, diseased scholar, was produced. His kind patron fed him up, so far as a man who could not tear himself from his books, unless when nature became entirely exhausted, could be fed up. The statesman and his librarian were the closest of friends ; and on the elder Lamoignon's death, the son, still more distinguished, looked up to Baillet as a father and instructor. Men of this stamp are generally endowed with deep and solid learning. For any one, indeed, to take the command of a great public library, without large accomplishments, especially in the languages, is to put himself in precisely the position where ignorance, superficiality, and quackery are subjected to the most potent test, and are certain of detection. The number of librarians who have united great learning to a love of books, is the best practical answer to all sneers about the two being incompa- tible, j^or, while we count among us such names as Pannizzi, Birch, Halket, Xaudet, Laing, Cogs- well, Jones, Pertz, and Tod, is the race of learned librarians likely to decay. It will be worth while for the patrons of public libraries, even in appointments to small offices, to have an eye on bookish men for filling them. One librarian differs greatly from another, and on this difference will often depend the entire utility of the institution, and the question whether it is worth 218 HIS FUNCTIONS. keeping it open or closing its door. Of this class of workmen it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, nascitur, non fit. The usual testimonies to qualification steadiness, sobriety, civility, intelli- gence, &c. may all be up to the mark that will constitute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of books. Such a per- son ought to go to his task with something totally different from the impulses which induce a man to sort dry goods or make up invoices, with eminent success. In short, your librarian would need to be in some way touched with the malady which has been the object of these desultory remarks. PART III. HIS CLUB. tit IN author of the last generation, pro- fessing to deal with any branch of human affairs, if he were ambitious of being considered philosophical, required to go at once to the begin- ning of all things, where, finding man alone in the world, he would describe how the biped set about his own special business, for the supply of his own wants and desires ; and then finding that the human being was, by his instincts, not a solitary but a social animal, the ambitious author would proceed in well- balanced sentences to describe how men aggregated themselves into hamlets, villages, towns, cities, coun- ties, parishes, corporations, select vestries, and so on. I find that, without the merit of entertain- ing any philosophical views, I have followed, uncon- sciously, the same routine. Having discussed the 220 HIS CLUB. book-hunter as he individually pursues his object, I now propose to look in upon him at his club, and say something about its peculiarities, as the shape in which he takes up the pursuit collectively with others who happen to be like-minded to himself. Those who are so very old as to remember the Episcopal Church of Scotland, in that brief period of stagnant depression, when the repeal of the penal laws had removed from her the lustre of martyrdom, and she had not yet attained the more secular lustre which the zeal of her wealthy votaries has since conferred on her, will be familiar with the name of Bishop Robert Jolly. To the ordinary reader, how- ever, it may be necessary to introduce him more specifically. He was a man of singular purity, de- votedness, and learning. If he had no opportunity of attesting the sincerity of his faith by undergoing stripes and bondage for the Church of his adoption, he developed in its fulness that unobtrusive self-de- votion, not inferior to martyrdom, which dedicates to obscure duties the talent and energy that, in the hands of the selfish and ambitious, would be the sure apparatus of wealth and station. He had no doubt risen to an office of dignity in his own Church he was a bishop. But to understand the position of a Scottish bishop in those days, one must figure Parson Adams, no richer than Fielding has de- scribed him, yet encumbered by a title ever asso- ciated with wealth and dignity, and only calculated, when allied with so much poverty and social humi- CLUBS IX GENERAL. 221 lity, to deepen the incongruity of his lot, and throw him more than ever on the mercy of the scorner. The office was indeed conspicuous, not by its digni- ties or emoluments, "but by the extensive opportu- nities it afforded for self-devotion. One may have noticed his successor of the present day figuring in newspaper paragraphs as "The Lord Bishop of Moray and Ross." It did not fall to the lot of him of whom I write to render his title so flagrantly in- congruous. A lordship was not necessary, but it was the principle of his Church to require a bishop, and in him she got a bishop. In reality, however, he was the parish clergyman of the small and poor remnant of the Episcopal persuasion who inhabited the odoriferous fishing-town of Fraserburgh. There he lived a long life of such simplicity and abstinence as the poverty of the poorest of his flock scarcely drove them to. He had one failing to link his life with this nether world he was a book-hunter. How with his poor income, much of which went to feed the necessities of those still poorer, he should have accomplished anything in a pursuit generally con- sidered expensive, is among other unexplained mys- teries. But somehow he managed to scrape together a curious and interesting collection, so that his name became associated with rare books, as well as with rare Christian virtues. "When it was proposed to establish an institution for reprinting the works of the fathers of the Epis- copal Church in Scotland, it was naturally deemed 222 ffis CLUB. that no more worthy or characteristic name could be attached to it than that of the venerable prelate who, by his learning and virtues, had so long adorned the episcopal chair of Moray and Ross, and who had shown a special interest in the de- partment of literature to which the institution was to be devoted. Hence it came to pass that, through a perfectly natural process, the association for the purpose of reprinting the works of certain old divines was to be ushered into the world by the style and title of THE JOLLY CLUB. There happened to be among those concerned, however, certain persons so corrupted with the wisdom of this world, as to apprehend that the miscellaneous public might fail to trace this desig- nation to its true origin, and might indeed totally mistake the nature and object of the institution, attributing to it aims neither consistent with the ascetic life of the departed prelate, nor with the pious and intellectual objects of its founders. The counsels of these worldly-minded persons prevailed. The Jolly Club was never instituted, at least as an association for the reprinting of old books of divinity, though I am not prepared to say that institutions more than one so designed may not exist for other purposes. The object, however, was not entirely abandoned. A body of gentlemen united themselves together under the name of an- other Scottish prelate, whose fate had been more distinguished, if not more fortunate ; and the Spot- CLUBS IN GENERAL. 223 tiswoode Society was established. Here, it will be observed, there was a passing to the opposite ex- treme ; and so intense seems to have been the anxiety to escape- from all excuse for indecorous jokes or taint of joviality, that the word Club, wisely adopted by other bodies of the same kind, was abandoned, and this one called itself a Society. To that abandonment of the medio tutissimus has been attributed its early death by those who con- temn the taste of those other communities, essen- tially Book Clubs, which have taken to the devious course of calling themselves " Societies." In fact, all our societies, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat not un- profitable perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or ornament, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accom- panied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, indeed, which identify themselves through their very nomenclature with misfortune and misery, seeming proudly to proclaim themselves victims to all the saddest ills that flesh is heir to as, for instance, Destitute Sick Societies, Indigent Blind Societies, Deaf and Dumb Societies, Burial Societies, and the like. The nomenclature of some of these benevolent institutions seems likely to test the etymological skill of the next generation of learned men. Perhaps some ethnological philosopher will 224 HIS CLUB. devote himself to the special investigation and de- velopment of the phenomenon ; and if such things are done then in the way in which they are now, the result will appear in something like the follow- ing shape : " Man, as we pursue his destiny from century to century, is still found inevitably to resolve himself into a connected and antithetic series of consecutive- cycles. The eighteenth century having been an age of individuative, the nineteenth necessarily became an age of associative or coinonomic development. He, the man to himself the ego, and to others the mere homo ceased to revolve around the pivot of his own individual idiosyncrasy, and, following the instincts of his nature, resolved himself into asso- ciative community. In this necessary development of their nature all partook, from the congresses of mighty monarchs down to those humbler but not less majestic types of the predominant influence, which, in the expressive language of that age, were recognised as twopenny goes. It is known only to those whose researches have led them through the intricacies of that phase of human progress, how multifarious and varied were the forms in which the inner spirit, objectively at work in mankind, had its external subjective development. Rot only did associativeness shake the monarch on his throne, and prevail over the councils of the assembled mag- nates of the realm, but it was the form in which each shape and quality of humanity, down even to CLUBS IN GENERAL. 225 penury and disease, endeavoured to express its in- stincts ; and so the blind and the lame, the deaf and dumb, the sick and poor, made common stock of their privations, and endeavoured by the force of union to convert weakness into strength," &c. When the history of clubs is fully written, let us hope that it will be in another fashion. If it suffi- ciently abound in details, such a history would be full of marvels, from the vast influences which it would describe as arising from time to time by silent obscure growth out of nothing, as it were. Just look at what clubs have been, and have done ; a mere enumeration is enough to recall the impres- sion. ]N~ot to dwell on the institutions which have made Pall Mall and its neighbourhood a conglo- merate of palaces, or 011 such lighter affairs as " the Four-in-Hand," which the railways have left be- hind, or the " Alpine," whose members they carry to the field of their enjoyment : there was the Mer- maid, counting among its members Shakespeare, Ealeigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Jonson ; then came the King's Head ; the October ; the Kit- Cat ; the Beaf-Steak ; the Terrible Calves Head ; Johnson's club, where he had Bozzy, Goldie, Burke, and Eeynolds ; the Poker, where Hume, Carlyle, Ferguson, and Adam Smith took their claret. In these, with all their varied objects literary, political, or convivial the one leading peculiarity was the powerful influence they exercised on the condition of their times. A certain club there was p 226 HIS CLUB. with a simple unassuming name, differing, by the way, only in three letters from that which would have commemorated the virtues of Bishop Jolly. The club in question, though nothing in the eye of the country but an easy knot of gentlemen who assembled for their amusement, cast defiance at a sovereign prince, and shook the throne and institu- tions of the greatest of modern states. But if we want to see the club culminating to its highest pitch of power, we must go across the water and saturate ourselves with the horrors of the Jacobin clubs, the Breton, and the Feuillans. The scenes we will there find stand forth in eternal protest against Johnson's genial definition in his Dictionary, where he calls a club " an assembly of good fellows, meet- ing under certain conditions." Structure of fyt 3B0nfc Ctufctf. JHEEE has been an addition, by no means contemptible, to the influence exercised by these institutions on the course of events, in the book clubs, or printing clubs as they are otherwise termed, of the present day. They have within a few years added a department to literature. The collector, who has been a member of several, may count their fruit by the thousand, all ranging in symmetrical and portly STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 227 volumes. Without interfering either with the author who seeks in his copyrights the reward of his genius and labour, or with the publisher who calculates on a return for his capital, skill, and industry, the book clubs have ministered to literary wants, which these legitimate sources of supply have been unable to meet. I hope no one is capable of reading so far through this book who is so grossly ignorant as not to know that the book clubs are a set of associations for the purpose of printing and distributing among their members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which has brought them together and united them into a club. An opportunity may per- haps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian effi- ciency of this arrangement on the blank in the order of terrestial things which the book club was required to fill, and the manner in which it has accomplished its function. There is a class of books of which the production has in this country always been uphill work; large solid books, more fitted for authors and students than for those termed the reading public at large books which may hence, in some measure, be termed the raw materials of literature, rather than litera- ture itself. They are eminently valuable ; but, since it is to the intellectual manufacturer who is to 228 HIS CLUB. produce an article of saleable literature that they are valuable, rather than to the general consumer, they do not secure an extensive sale. Of this kind of literature the staple materials are old state papers and letters, old chronicles, specimens of poetic, dramatic, and other literature more valuable as vestiges of the style and customs of their age than for their absolute worth as works of genius massive volumes of old divinity, disquisitions on obsolete science, and the like. It is curious, by the way, that costly books of this sort seem to succeed better with the French than with us, though we do not generally give that people credit for excelling us in the outlay of money. Perhaps it is because they enjoy the British market as well as their own that they are enabled to excel us; but they certainly do so in the publi- cation, through private enterprise, of great costly works, having a sort of national character. The efforts to rival them in this country have been con- siderable and meritorious, but in many instances signally unfortunate. Take, for instance, the noble edition of Holingshed and the other chroniclers, published in quarto volumes by the London trade; the Parliamentary History, in thirty-six volumes, each containing about as much reading as Gibbon's Decline and Fall ; The State Trials ; Sadler's and Thurlow's State Papers ; the Harleian Miscellany, and several other ponderous publications of the same kind. All of them are to be had cheap, some STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 229 at just a percentage above the price of waste paper. When an attempt was made to publish in the Eng- lish language a really thorough Biographical Dic- tionary, an improvement on the French Biographie Universelle, it stuck in letter A, after the completion of seven dense octavo volumes an abortive fragment, bearing melancholy testimony to what such a work ought to be. Publications of this kind have, in several instances, caused great losses to some, while they have brought satisfaction to no one concerned in them. A publisher has just the same distaste as any other ordinary member of the human family to the loss of five or ten thousand pounds in hard cash. Then, as touching the purchasers, no doubt the throwing of "a remnant" on the market may some- times bring the book into the possession of one who can put it to good use, and would have been unable to purchase it at the original price. But the rich deserve some consideration as well as the poor. It will be hard to find the man so liberal and benevo- lent that he will joyfully see his neighbour obtain for thirty shillings the precise article for which he has himself paid thirty pounds; nor does there exist the descendant of Adam who, whatever he may say or pretend, will take such an antithesis with perfect equanimity. Even the fortunate purchasers of por- tions of "the remnant," or " the broken book," as another pleasant technicality of the trade has it, are not always absolutely happy in their lot. They have beentempted by sheer cheapness to admit some bulky 230 HIS CLUB. and unwieldy articles into their abodes, and they look askance at the commodity as being rather a sacrifice to mammon than a monument of good taste. It has been the object of the machinery here referred to, to limit the impressions of such works to those who want and can pay for them an extremely simple object, as all great ones are. There is, how- ever, a minute nicety in the adjustment of the machinery, which was not obvious until it came forth in practice a nicety without which the whole system falls to pieces. It was to accomplish this nicety that the principle of the club was found to be so well adapted. A club is essentially a body to which more people want admission than can gain it ; if it do not manage to preserve this characteristic, it falls to pieces for want of pressure from without, like a cask divested of its hoops. To make the books retain their value, and be an object of desire, it was necessary that the impressions should be slightly Avithin the natural circulation that there should be rather a larger number desirous of obtain- ing each volume than the number that could be supplied with it. The club effected this by its own natural action. So long as there were candidates for vacancies and the ballet-box went round, so long were the books printed in demand and valuable to their possessors. If there were 110 or 120 people willing to possess and pay for a certain class of books, the secret of keeping up the pressure from STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 231 without and the value of the books was, to limit the uumber of members and participators to 100. There is nothing noble or disinterested in this. The arrangement has no pretension to either of these qualities; nor when we come to the great forces which influence the supply and demand of human wants, whether in the higher or the humbler depart- ments, will we find these qualities in force, or indeed any other motive than common selfishness. It is a sufficient vindication of the arrangement that it pro- duced its effect. If there were ten or twenty disap- pointed candidates, the hundred were possessed of the treasures which none could have obtained but for the restrictive arrangements. Scott used to say that the Banna tyne Club was the only successful joint- stock company he ever invested in and the remark is the key-note of the motives which kept alive the system that has done so much good to literature. To understand the nature and services of these valuable institutions, it is necessary to keep in view the limits within which alone they can be legiti- mately worked. They will not serve for the propa- gation of standard literature of the books of estab- lished reputation, which are always selling. These are merchandise, and must follow the law of trade like other commodities, whether they exist in the form of copyright monopolies, or are open to all specu- lators. No kind of co-operation will bring the volumes into existence so cheaply as the outlay of trade capital, which is expected to replace itself with 232 HIS CLUB. a moderate profit after a quick sale. The perfection of this process is seen in the production and sale of that book which is ever the surest of a market the Bible ; and when a printer requires the certain and instantaneous return of his outlay, that is the shape in which he is most secure of obtaining it. On the other hand, the clubs will not avail for ushering into the world the books of fresh ambitious authors. That paradise of the geniuses, in which their progeny are to be launched full sail, where they are to encounter no risks, and draw all the profits without discount or percentage, as yet exists only in the imagination. It would not work very satisfactorily to have a committee decreeing the issues, and the remuneration to be paid to each aspirant ten thousand copies of Poppleton's Epic, and a check for a thousand pounds handed over out of the common stock, to begin with half the issue, and half the remuneration for the Lyrics of Asty- agus, as a less robust and manful production, but still a pleasant, murmuring, meandering, earnest little dream-book, fresh with the solemn purpose of solitude and silence. No, it must be confessed our authors and men of letters would make sad work of it, if they had the bestowal of the honours and pecuniary rewards of literature in their hands, whether these were administered by an intellectual hierarchy or by a collective democracy. Hence the clubs have wisely confined their operations to books which are not the works of their members ; and to STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 233 keep clear of all risk of literal}'- rivalries, they have been almost exclusively devoted to the promulgation of the works of authors long since dead, whether by printing from original manuscripts or from rare printed volumes. It has been pleaded that this machinery might have been rendered influential for the encourage- ment of living authorship. It has been, for instance, observed, with some plausibility, that he who has the divine fervour of the author in him, will sacrifice all he has to sacrifice time, toil, and health so that he can but secure a hearing by the world ; and institutions of the nature of the book clubs might afford him this at all events, leaving him to find his way to wealth and honours, if the sources of these are in him. Xo doubt the history of book-publish- ing shows how small are the immediate inducements and the well-founded hopes that will set authors in motion, and, indeed, a very large percentage of value- less literature proves that the barriers between the author and the world are not very formidable, or become somehow easily removable. This, in fact, furnishes the answer to the pleading here alluded to ; and it may further be safely said, where the book demanding an introduction professes to be a work of genius, addressing itself to all mankind, that if it really be what it professes, the market will get it. No production of the kind is liable to be lost to the world. Here it is plaintively argued by Philemon, that 234 II fS CLUB. the rewards of genius are very unequally distributed. Who can deny it ? Nothing is distributed with per- fect balance like chemical equivalents in this world, at least so far as mortal faculties are capable of estimating the elements of happiness and unhappi- ness in the lot of our fellow-men; nor can one ima- gine that a world, all balanced and squared off to perfection, would be a very tolerable place to live in. Genius must take its chance, like all other qualities, and, on the whole, in a civilised country it gets on pretty well. Is it not something in itself to possess genius 1 and is it seemly, or a good example to the uninspired world, that its owner should deem it rather a misfortune than a blessing because he is not also surrounded by plush and shoulder-knots ? If all geniuses had a prerogative right to rank and wealth, and all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, could we be sure that none but genuine geniuses would claim them, and that there would be no margin for disputation with " solemn shams"? Milton's fifteen pounds are often referred to by him who finds how hard it is to climb, &c. ; but we have no "return," as the blue-books call it, of all the good opportunities aiforded to intellects ambitious of arising as meteors but only showing themselves as farthing rush-lights. On the other hand, no doubt, the wide fame and the rich rewards of the popular author are not in every instance an exact measure of his superiority to the disappointed aspirant. His thousand pounds do not furnish STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 235 incontrovertible evidence that he is a hundred times superior to the drudge who goes over as much work for ten pounds, and there may possibly be some one making nothing who is superior to both. Such aberrations are incident to all human affairs ; but in those of literature, as in many others, they are exceptional. Here, as in other spheres of exertion, merit will in the general case get its own in some shape. Indeed, there is a very remarkable economic phenomenon, never, as it occurs to me, fully examined, which renders the superfluous suc- cess of the popular author a sort of insurance fund for enabling the obscure adventurer to enter the arena of authorship, and show what he is worth. Political economy has taught us that those old bug- bears of the statute law called forestallers and regraters are eminent benefactors, in as far as their mercenary instincts enable them to see scarcity from afar, and induce them to " hold on" precisely so long as it lasts but no longer, since, if they have stock remaining on hand when abundance returns, they will be losers. Thus, through the regular course of trade, the surplus of the period of abundance is dis- tributed over the period of scarcity with a precision which the genius of a Joseph or a Turgot could not achieve. The phenomenon in the publishing world to Avhich I have alluded has some resemblance to this, and comes to pass in manner following. The confirmed 236 HIS CLUB. popular author whose books are sure to sell is an object of competition among publishers. If he is ab- solutely mercenary, he may stand forth in the public market and commit his works to that one who will take them on the best terms for the author and the worst for himself, like the contractor who gives in the lowest estimate in answer to an advertisement from a public department. Neither undertaking holds out such chances of gain as independent spe- culation may open, and thus there is an inducement to the enterprising publisher to risk his capital on the doubtful progeny of some author unknown to fame, in the hope that it may turn out "a hit." Of the number of books deserving a better fate, as also of the still greater number deserving none bet- ter than the fate they have got, which have thus been published at a dead loss to the publisher, the annals of bookselling could aiford a moving history. When an author has sold his copyright for a comparative trifle, and the book turns out a great success, it is of course matter of regret that he can- not have the cake he has eaten. This is one side of the balance-sheet, and on the other stands the debit account of the author who, through a work which proved a dead loss to its publisher, has made a repu- tation which has rendered his subsequent books successful, and made himself fashionable and rich. There have been instances where publishers who have bought for little the copyright of a successful book have allowed the author to participate in their STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 237 gains ; and I am inclined to believe that these in- stances are fully as numerous as those in which an author, owing his reputation and success to a book which did not pay its expenses, has made up the losses of his first publisher. If we go out of the hard market and look at the tendency of sympathies, they are all in the author's favour. Publishers, in fact, have, though it is not generally believed, a leaning towards good literature, and a tendency rather to over than to under esti- mate the reception it may meet with from the world. In considering whether they will take the risk of a new publication, they have nothing to judge of it by except its literary merit, for they cannot obtain the votes of the public until they are committed ; and, indeed, there have been a good many instances where a publisher, having a faith in some individual author and his star, has pushed and fought a way for him with dogged and deter- mined perseverance, sometimes with a success of which, were all known, he has more of the real merit than the author, who seems to have naturally, without any external aid, taken his position among the eminent and fortunate. There are, at the same time, special disquisi- tions on matters of science or learning intended for peculiar and limited audiences, which find their way to publicity without the aid of the publisher. For these there is an opening in certain institutions far older than the book clubs, and possessed of a 238 HIS CLUB. far higher social and intellectual position, since they have the means of conferring titles of dignity on those they adopt into their circle titles which are worn not by trinkets dangling at the button- hole, but by certain cabalistic letters strung to the name in the directory of the town where the owner lives, or in the numberless biographical dictionaries which are to immortalise the present generation. So the author of an essay, especially in scholar- ship or science, will, if it be worth anything, find a place for it in the Transactions of one or other of the learned societies. It will probably keep com- pany with, if indeed it be not itself one of, a series of papers which appear in the quarto volumes of the learned corporation's Transactions, merely be- cause they cannot get into the octavo pages of the higher class of periodicals ; but there they are, printed in the face of the world, whose inhabitants at large may worship them if they so please, and their authors cannot complain that they are sup- pressed. Whether the authors of these papers may have been ambitious of their appearance in a wider sphere, or are content with their appearance in " The Transactions," it suffices for the present purpose to explain how these volumes are a more suitable receptacle than those printed by the book clubs for essays or disquisitions by men following up their own specialties in literature or science ; and if it be the case that some of the essays which appear in the Transactions of learned bodies would STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK CLUBS. 239 have gladly entered society under the auspices of some eminent periodical, yet it is proper at the same time to admit that many of the most valu- able of these papers, concerning discoveries or in- ventions which adepts alone can appreciate, could only be satisfactorily published as they have been. And so we find our way back to the proposition, that the book clubs have been judiciously restricted to the promulgation of the works of dead authors. This has not necessarily excluded the literary contributions of living men, in the shape of editing and commenting ; and it is really difficult to esti- mate the quantity of valuable matter which is thus deposited in obscure but still accessible places. A deal of useful work, too, has been done in the way of translation ; and where the book to be dealt with is an Icelandic saga, a chronicle in Saxon, in Irish Celtic, or even in old Norman, one may confess to the weakness of letting the original remain, in some instances, unexamined, and drawing one's informa- tion with confiding gratitude from the translation furnished by the learned editor. Let me offer one instance of the important ser- vice that may be done by affording a vehicle for translations. The late Dr Francis Adams, a village surgeon by profession, was at the same time, from taste and pursuit, a profound Greek scholar. He was accustomed to read the old authors on medicine and surgery a custom too little respected by his profession, of whom it is the characteristic defect to 240 HIS CLUB. respect too absolutely the standard of the day. As a physician, who is an ornament to his profession and a great scholar, once observed to me, the writ- ings of the old physicians, even if we reject them from science, may be perused with profit to the practitioner as a record of the diagnosis of cases stated by men of acuteness, experience, and accu- racy of observation. Adams had translated from the Greek the works of Paul of ^Egina, the father of obstetric surgery, and printed the first volume. It was totally unnoticed, for in fact there were no means by which the village surgeon could get it brought under the notice of the scattered members of his profession who desired to possess such a book. The remainder of his labours would have been lost to the world had it not been taken off his hands by the Sydenham Club, established for the purpose of reprinting the works of the ancient physicians. Clufc. |E, EAT institutions and small institu- tions have each individually had a beginning, though it cannot always be discovered, distance often obscuring it before it has been thought worth looking after. There is an ingenious theory abroad, to the effect that every physical impulse, be it but a wave of THE ROXBURGHE CLUB. 241 a human hand, and that every intellectual impulse, whether it pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickniaker, goes, with whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic in- fluences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that every- thing tells on everything, and there is no one spe- cific cause, primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common appre- hensions there are specific facts which are to them emphatic as beginnings, such as the day when any man destined for leadership in great political events was born, or that whereon the Cape of Good Hope was doubled, or America was discovered. The beginning of the book clubs is marked by a like distinctness, both in date and circumstance. The institution did not spring in full maturity and equipment, like Pallas from the brain of Jove ; it was started by a casual impulse, and remained long insignificant ; but its origin and early progress are as distinctly and specifically its own, as the birth and infancy of any hero or statesman are his. It is to the garrulity of Dibdin writing before there was any prospect that this class of institutions would reach their subsequent importance and usefulness, that we owe many minute items of detail about the cradle of the new system. "VVe first slip in upon a small dinner-party, on the 4th of June in the year Q 242 HIS CLUB. 1813, at the table of " Hortensius." The day was one naturally devoted to hospitality, being the birthday of the reigning monarch, George III., but this the historian passes unnoticed, the object of all absorbing interest being the great conflict of the Roxburghe book sale, then raging through its forty- and-one days. Of Hortensius, it is needless to know more than that he was a distinguished lawyer, and had a fine library, which having described, Dibdin passes on thus to matters of more immediate im- portance. " Nor is the hospitality of the owner of these treasures of a less quality and calibre than his taste ; for Hortensius regaleth liberally and as the ' night and day champagnes' (so he is pleased hu- morously to call them) sparkle upon his Gottin- gen-manufactured table-cloth, ' the master of the revels,' or (to borrow the phraseology of Pynson) of the 'feste royalle,' discourseth lustily and loudly upon the charms not of a full-curled or full-bot- tomed ' King's Bench ' periwig but of a full- margined Bartholornseus or Barclay like his own."* After some forty pages of this sort of matter, we get another little peep at this momentous dinner-party. " On the clearance of the Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, the Eoxburghe battle formed the sub- ject of discussion, when I proposed that we should not only be all present, if possible, on the day of the sale of the Boccaccio, but that we should meet Bibliographical Decameron, vol. iii. p. 28. THE ROX BURG HE CLUB. 243 at some ' fair tavern' to commemorate the sale thereof." They met accordingly on the 17th of June, some eighteen in number, " at the St Albans Tavern, St Albans Street, now Waterloo Place." Surely the place was symbolical, since on the 18th of June, three years afterwards, the battle of Water- loo was fought ; and as the importance attributed to the contest at Roxburghe House on the 17th pro- cured for it afterwards the name of the Waterloo of book-battles, it came to pass that there were two Waterloo commemorations treading closely one on the other's heels. The pecuniary stake at issue, and the consequent excitement when the Valdarfer Boccaccio was knocked off, so far exceeded all anticipation, that at the festive board a motion was made and carried by acclamation, for meeting on the same day and in the same manner annually. And so the Eoxburghe Club, the parent of all the book clubs, came into existence. It must be admitted that its origin bears a curi- ous generic resemblance to some scenes which pro- duce less elevating results. On the day of some momentous race or cock-fight, a parcel of sporting devotees, " regular bricks," perhaps, agree to cele- brate the occasion in a tavern, and when the hilarity of the evening is at its climax, some festive orator, whose enthusiasm has raised him to the table, sug- gests, amidst loud hurrahs and tremendous table- rapping, that the casual meeting should be converted 244 HIS CLUB. into an annual festival, to celebrate the event which has brought them together. At such an assemblage, the list of toasts will probably include Eclipse, Co- therstone, Mameluke, Plenipo, the Flying Dutch- man, and other illustrious quadrupeds, along with certain bipeds, distinguished in the second degree as breeders, trainers, and riders, and may perhaps cul- minate in " the turf and the stud all over the world." With a like appropriate reference to the common bond of sympathy, the Eoxburghe toasts included the uncouth names of certain primitive printers, as Valdarfer himself, Pannartz, Fust, and Schoeif her, terminating in " The cause of Biblio- mania all over the world." * * As of other influential documents, there have been various versions of the Roxburghe list of toasts, and a cor- responding amount of critical discussion, which leaves the impression common to such disputes, that this important manifesto was altered and enlarged from time to time. The version which bears the strongest marks of completeness and authenticity, was found among the papers of Mr Hazle- wood, of whom hereafter. It is here set down as nearly in its original shape as the printer can give it : rtor of 2* immortal iHcmnrj? of 23u6c of aanjrfittrfjTje. ?aloarfer, |3rfter of the J3rramcron of 1471. , Jfttjit, antt J^djorffftpr, fyt EnbrntarS of tt)t &rt of i)9rt'nttitg. Canton, tt)t ^father of tljc 33rtttsl) THE ROXBUROHE CLUB. 245 The club thus abruptly formed, consisted of afflu- ent collectors, some of them noble, with a sprinkling of zealous practical men, who assisted them in their great purchases, while doing minor strokes of busi- ness for themselves. These who in some measure fed on the crumbs that fell from the master's table, were in a position rather too closely resembling the professionals in a hunt or cricket club. The circle was a very exclusive one, however; the number limited to thirty-one members, " one black ball ex- cluding;" and it used to be remarked, that it was easier to get into the Peerage or the Privy Council than into " The Roxburghe." Nothing has done so much to secure the potent I3ame SHtltatta 33arnc, ants tfje Jj>t to , airtr &tdjartr Jijiitgnu, tfje trtoujj ^uccrj^org of iEJHtlltam Cajrton. trme jfamtlj), at