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DE LIBRIS 
 
 PROSE AND VERSE 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • . SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
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DE LIBRIS 
 
 PROSE & VERSE 
 
 BY 
 
 AUSTIN DOBSON 
 
 Vt Mel Os, sic Cor Melos afficit, & reficit. 
 
 Deuterotnelia. 
 
 A mixture of a Song doth ever adde Pleasure. 
 
 Bacon (adapted). 
 
 ff ^ OF THE 
 
 f UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 &tto gotfc 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1908 
 
 411 rights reserved 
 
GENERAL 
 
 Copyright, 1908 
 By THE MACMIL.LAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908 
 
 THE MASON-HENRY PRESS 
 SYRACUSE. N. Y. 
 
PROLOGUE 
 
 LECTOR BENEVOLE!— FOR SO 
 
 THEY USED TO CALL YOU, YEARS AGO,— 
 
 I CAN'T PRETEND TO MAKE YOU READ 
 
 THE PAGES THAT TO THIS SUCCEED ; 
 
 NOR COULD I— IF I WOULD^-EXCUSE 
 
 THE WAYWARD PROMPTINGS OF THE MUSE 
 
 AT WHOSE COMMAND I WROTE THEM DOWN. 
 
 I HAVE NO HOPE TO "PLEASE THE TOWN." 
 I DID BUT THINK SOME FRIENDLY SOUL 
 (NOT ILL-ADVISED, UPON THE WHOLE!) 
 MIGHT LIKE THEM; AND "TO INTERPOSE 
 A LITTLE EASE," BETWEEN THE PROSE, 
 SLIPPED IN THE SCRAPS OF VERSE, THAT THUS 
 THINGS MIGHT BE LESS MONOTONOUS. 
 
 THEN, LECTOR, BE BENEVOLUS! 
 
 175609 
 
[The Author desires to express his thanks to Lord North- 
 cliff e, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., Messrs. Smith, Elder and 
 Co., Mr. William Heinemann, and Messrs. Virtue and Co., 
 for kind permission to reprint those pieces in this volume 
 concerning (which no specific arrangements <were made on 
 their first appearance in type.] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Prologue 
 
 On Some Books and their Associations 
 
 An Epistle to an Editor 
 
 Bramston's "Man of Taste" 
 
 The Passionate Printer to his Love 
 
 m. rouquet on the arts . 
 
 The Friend of Humanity and the Rhymer 
 
 The Parent's Assistant 
 
 A Pleasant Invective against Printing 
 
 Two Modern Book Illustrators — I. Kate Greenaway 
 
 A Song of the Greenaway Child . 
 
 Two Modern Book Illustrators — II. Mr 
 
 Horatian Ode on the Tercentenary of ■ 
 
 The Books of Samuel Rogers 
 
 Pepys' "Diary" .... 
 
 A French Critic on Bath . 
 
 A Welcome from the "Johnson Club" 
 
 Thackeray's "Esmond" . . 
 
 A Miltonic Exercise 
 
 Fresh Facts about Fielding . 
 
 The Happy Printer . . 
 
 Cross Readings — and Caleb Whitefoord 
 
 The Last Proof .... 
 
 Index 
 
 Hugh Thomson 
 Don Quixote" 
 
 PAGE 
 V 
 
 z 
 
 17 
 23 
 
 39 
 
 43 
 
 6S 
 
 69 
 
 87 
 
 9i 
 
 105 
 
 109 
 
 125 
 
 129 
 
 147 
 
 151 
 
 163 
 
 167 
 
 189 
 
 193 
 
 205 
 
 209 
 
 221 
 
 225 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 * The Otter Hunt in the "Compleat Angler." 
 
 From an unpublished pen-drawing by Mr, 
 Hugh Thomson .... 
 
 * Group of Children. From the original pen 
 
 drawing by Kate Greenaway for The Library 
 1881 
 
 ♦Pencil-Sketches, by the same (No. x) 
 
 ♦Pencil-Sketch, by the same (No. 2) 
 
 ♦Pencil-Sketches, by the same (No. 3) 
 
 ♦Pencil-Sketch, by the same (No. 4) 
 
 The Brown Book-Plate. From the original design 
 by Mr. Hugh Thomson in the possession o 
 Mr. Ernest Brown .... 
 
 * Sir Roger de Coverley at the Assizes. From a first 
 
 rough pencil-sketch, by the same, for Days with 
 Roger de Coverley, 1886 
 
 Pen-Sketches, by the same, on the Half-Title of 
 the Ballad of Beau Brocade, 1892. From the 
 originals in the possession of Mr. A. T. A. 
 Dobson ....... 
 
 ♦Pen-Sketch (Triplet), by the same, on a Fly-leaf 
 of Peg Woffington, 1899 
 
 Evelina and the Branghtons, by the same. From 
 the Cranford Evelina, 1903 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 To face p. 93 
 
 96 
 
 98 
 
 100 
 
 102 
 
 114 
 
 116 
 
 118 
 
xii DE LIBRIS 
 
 Lady Castlewood and her Son, by the same. From 
 
 the Cranford Esmond, 1905 . . .To face p. 120 
 
 Mercery Lane, Canterbury, by the same. From 
 the original pencil-drawing for Highways and 
 Byways in Kent, 1907 " 122 
 
 * The originals of the illustrations preceded by an asterisk 
 are in the possession of the Author. 
 
ON SOME BOOKS AND THEIR 
 ASSOCIATIONS 
 
UNIVERSn 
 
 OF 
 
 ON SOME BOOKS AND THEIR 
 ASSOCIATIONS 
 
 New books can have few associations. They may 
 reach us on the best deckle-edged Whatman 
 paper, in the newest types of famous presses, with 
 backs of embossed vellum, with tasteful tasselled 
 strings, — and yet be no more to us than the con- 
 strained and uneasy acquaintances of yesterday. 
 Friends they may become to-morrow, the day after, 
 — perhaps "hunc in annum et plures." But for the 
 time being they have neither part nor lot in our past 
 of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were, of 
 what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we — if 
 that be possible — know even less of them. Whether 
 familiarity will breed contempt, or whether they 
 will come home to our business and bosom, — these 
 are things that lie on the lap of the Fates. 
 
 But it is to be observed that the associations 
 of old books, as of new books, are not always 
 
 3 
 
4 DE LIBRIS 
 
 exclusively connected with their text or format, — are 
 sometimes, as a matter of fact, independent of both. 
 Often they are memorable to us by length of tenure, 
 by propinquity, — even by their patience under 
 neglect. We may never read them; and yet by 
 reason of some wholly external and accidental 
 characteristic, it would be a wrench to part with 
 them if the moment of separation — the inevitable 
 hour — should arrive at last. Here, to give an 
 instance in point, is a stained and battered French 
 folio, with patched corners, — Mons. N. Renouard's 
 translation of the Metamorphoses d'Ovide, 1637, 
 "enrichies de figures a chacune Fable" (very odd figures 
 some of them are!) and to be bought "chez Pierre 
 Billaine, rue Sainct Iacques, a la Bonne-Foy, deuant 
 S. Yues." It has held no honoured place upon the 
 shelves ; it has even resided au rez-de-ehaussee, — that 
 is to say, upon the floor; but it is not less dear, — 
 not less desirable. For at the back of the "Dedica- 
 tion to the King" (Lewis XIII. to wit), is scrawled 
 in a slanting, irregular hand: "Pour mademoiselle 
 de mons Son tres humble et tres obeissant Serviteur St. 
 Andre. 11 Between the fourth and fifth word, some 
 one, in a smaller writing of later date, has added 
 "par" and after "St. Andre," the signature 
 "V andeuvre." In these irrelevant (and unsolicited) 
 interpolations, I take no interest. But who was 
 Mile, de Mons? As Frederick Locker sings: 
 
BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS 5 
 
 Did She live yesterday or ages back? 
 
 What colour were the eyes when bright and waking? 
 And were your ringlets fair, or brown, or black, 
 
 Poor little Head ! that long has done with aching ! ' 
 
 "Ages back" she certainly did not live, for the book 
 is dated "1637," and "yesterday" is absurd. But 
 that her eyes were bright, — nay, that they were 
 particularly lively and vivacious, even as they are in 
 the sanguine sketches of Antoine Watteau a hundred 
 years afterwards, I am "confidous" — as Mrs. 
 Slipslop would say. For my theory (in reality a 
 foregone conclusion which I shrink from dis- 
 persing by any practical resolvent) is, that Mile, de 
 Mons was some delightful seventeenth-century 
 French child, to whom the big volume had been 
 presented as a picture-book. I can imagine the alert, 
 straight-corsetted little figure, with ribboned hair, 
 eagerly craning across the tall folio; and follow- 
 ing curiously with her finger the legends under the 
 copper "figures," — "Narcisse en fleur," "Ascalaphe 
 en hibou," "Jason endormant le dragon," — and 
 so forth, with much the same wonder that the 
 Sinne-Beelden of Jacob Cats must have stirred 
 
 1 This quatrain has the distinction of having been touched upon by 
 Thackeray. When Mr. Locker's manuscript went to the Cornhill Magazine 
 in i860, it ran thus: 
 
 Did she live yesterday, or ages sped? 
 
 What colour were the eyes when bright and waking? 
 And were your ringlets fair? Poor little head! 
 
 — Poor little heart! that long has done with aching. 
 
6 DE LIBRIS 
 
 in the little Dutchwomen of Middleburgh. There 
 can be no Mile, de Mons but this, — and for me she 
 can never grow old! 
 
 Sometimes it comes to pass that the association is 
 of a more far-fetched and fanciful kind. In the 
 great Ovid it lies in an inscription : in my next case 
 it is "another-guess" matter. The folio this time is 
 the Sylva Sylvarum of the "Right Hon. Francis Lo. 
 Verulam, Viscount St. Alban," of whom some people 
 still" prefer to speak as Lord Bacon. 'Tis only the 
 "sixt Edition"; but it was to be bought at the Great 
 Turk's Head, "next to the Mytre Tauerne" (not 
 the modern pretender, be it observed!), which is in 
 itself a feature of interest. A former possessor, from 
 his notes, appears to have been largely preoccupied 
 with that ignoble clinging to life which so exercised 
 Matthew Arnold, for they relate chiefly to laxative 
 simples for medicine; and he comforts himself, in 
 April, 1695, D Y transcribing Bacon's reflection that 
 "a Life led in Religion and in Holy Exercises" con- 
 duces to longevity, — an aphorism which, however 
 useful as an argument for length of days, is a rather 
 remote reason for religion. But what to me is 
 always most seductive in the book is, that to this 
 edition (not copy, of course) of 1651 Master Izaak 
 Walton, when he came, in his Compleat Angler 
 of 1653, to discuss such abstract questions as the 
 transmission of sound under water, and the ages of 
 
BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS 7 
 
 carp and pike, must probably have referred. He 
 often mentions "Sir Francis Bacon's" History of Life 
 and Death, which is included in the volume. No 
 doubt it would be more reasonable and more "con- 
 gruous" that Bacon's book should suggest Bacon. 
 But there it is. That illogical "succession of ideas" 
 which puzzled my Uncle Toby, invariably recalls to 
 me, not the imposing folio to be purchased "next to 
 the Mytre Tauerne" in Fleet Street, but the un- 
 pretentious eighteenpenny octavo which, two years 
 later, was on sale at Richard Marriot's in St. 
 Dunstan's churchyard hard by, and did no more than 
 borrow its erudition from the riches of the Baconian 
 storehouse. 
 
 Life, and its prolongation, is again the theme 
 of the next book (also mentioned, by the way, in 
 Walton) which I take up, though unhappily it has no 
 inscription. It is a little old calf-clad copy of Lewis 
 Cornaro's Sure and Certain Methods of attaining a 
 Long and Healthful Life, 4th ed., 241110, 1727; and 
 was bought at the Bewick sale of February, 1884, as 
 having once belonged to Robert Elliot Bewick, only 
 son of the famous old Newcastle wood-engraver. 
 As will be shown later, it is easy to be misled in these 
 matters, but I cannot help believing that this volume, 
 which looks as if it had been re-bound, is the one 
 Thomas Bewick mentions in his Memoir as having 
 been his companion in those speculative wanderings 
 
8 DE LIBRIS 
 
 over the Town Moor or the Elswick Fields, when, 
 as an apprentice, he planned his future a la Franklin 
 and devised schemes for his conduct in life. In 
 attaining Cornaro's tale of years he did not succeed; 
 though he seems to have faithfully practised the 
 periods of abstinence enjoined (but probably not 
 observed) by another of the "noble Venetian's" 
 professed admirers, Mr. Addison of the Spectator. 
 
 If I have admitted a momentary misgiving as to 
 the authenticity of the foregoing relic of the "father 
 of white line," there can be none about the next 
 item to which I now come. Once, on a Westminster 
 bookstall, long since disappeared, I found a copy of 
 a seventh edition of the Pursuits of Literature of 
 T. J. Mathias, Queen Charlotte's Treasurer's Clerk. 
 Brutally cut down by the binder, that durus 
 arator had unexpectedly spared a solitary page for 
 its manuscript comment, which was thoughtfully 
 turned up and folded in. It was a note to this 
 couplet in Mathias, his Dialogue II. : — 
 
 From Bewick's magick wood throw borrow'd rays 
 O'er many a page in gorgeous Bulmer's blaze, — 
 
 "gorgeous Bulmer" (the epithet is over-colored!) 
 being the William Bulmer who, in 1795, issued the 
 Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell. "I" (says the writer 
 of the note) "was chiefly instrumental to this ingeni- 
 ous artist's [Bewick's] excellence in this art. I first 
 
BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS 9 
 
 initiated his master, Mr. Ra. Beilby (of Newcastle) 
 into the art, and his first essay was the execution of 
 the cuts in my Treatise on Mensuration, printed in 
 4to, 1770. Soon after I recommended the same 
 artist to execute the cuts to Dr. Horsley's edition 
 of the works of Newton. Accordingly Mr. B. 
 had the job, who put them into the hands of his 
 assistant, Mr. Bewick, who executed them as his first 
 work in wood, and that in a most elegant manner, 
 tho' spoiled in the printing by John Nichols, the 
 Black-letter printer. C. H. 1798." 
 
 "C. H." is Dr. Charles Hutton, the Woolwich 
 mathematician. His note is a little in the vaunting 
 vein of that "founder of fortunes," the excellent 
 Uncle Pumblechook of Great Expectations, for his 
 services scarcely amounted to "initiating" Bewick 
 or his master into the art of engraving on wood. 
 Moreover, his memory must have failed him, for 
 Bewick, and not Beilby, did the majority of the 
 cuts to the Mensuration, including a much-praised 
 diagram of the tower of St. Nicholas Church at 
 Newcastle, afterwards a familiar object in the younger 
 man's designs and tail-pieces. Be this as it may, 
 Dr. Hutton's note was surely worth rescuing from 
 the ruthless binder's plough. 
 
 Between the work of Thomas Bewick and the 
 work of Samuel Pepys, it is idle to attempt any 
 ingenious connecting link, save the fact that they 
 
io DE LIBRIS 
 
 both wrote autobiographically. The "Pepys" in 
 question here, however, is not the famous Diary, 
 but the Secretary to the Admiralty's "only other 
 acknowledged work," namely, the privately printed 
 Mcmo'ires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of 
 England, for Ten Years, 1690; and this copy may 
 undoubtedly lay claim to exceptional interest. 
 For not only does it comprise those manuscript 
 corrections in the author's handwriting, which 
 Dr. Tanner reproduced in his excellent Clarendon 
 Press reprint of last year, but it includes the two 
 portrait plates by Robert White after Kneller. The 
 larger is bound in as a frontispiece; the smaller (the 
 ex-libris) is inserted at the beginning. The main 
 attraction of the book to me, however, is its previous 
 owners — one especially. My immediate predecessor 
 was a well-known collector, Professor Edward Solly, 
 at whose sale in 1886 I bought it; and he in his 
 turn had acquired it in 1877, at Dr. Rimbault's sale. 
 Probably what drew us all to the little volume was 
 not so much its disclosure of the lamentable state of 
 the Caroline navy, and of the monstrous toadstools 
 that flourished so freely in the ill-ventilated holds of 
 His Majesty's ships-of-war, as the fact that it had 
 once belonged to that brave old philanthropist, 
 Captain Thomas Coram of the Foundling Hospital. 
 To him it was presented in March, 1724, by one 
 C. Jackson; and he afterwards handed it on to a 
 
BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS n 
 
 Mr. Mills. Pasted at the end is Coram's autograph 
 letter, dated "June ioth, 1746." "To Mr. Mills 
 These. Worthy Sir I happend to find among my 
 few Books, Mr. Pepys his memoires, w ch I thought 
 might be acceptable to you & therefore pray you 
 to accept of it. I am w th much Respect Sir your 
 most humble Ser** Thomas Coram." 
 
 At the Foundling Hospital is a magnificent full- 
 length of Coram, with curling white locks and kindly, 
 weather-beaten face, from the brush of his friend 
 and admirer, William Hogarth. . It is to Hogarth 
 and his fellow-Governor at the Foundling, John 
 Wilkes, that my next jotting relates. These strange 
 colleagues in charity afterwards — as is well known — 
 quarrelled bitterly over politics. Hogarth caricatured 
 Wilkes in the Times: Wilkes replied by a North 
 Briton article (No. 17) so scurrilous and malignant 
 that Hogarth was stung into rejoining with that 
 famous squint-eyed semblance of his former crony, 
 which has handed him down to posterity more 
 securely than the portraits of Zoffany and Earlom. 
 Wilkes's action upon this was to reprint his article 
 with the addition of a bulbous-nosed woodcut of 
 Hogarth "from the Life." These facts lent interest 
 to an entry which for years had been familiar to me 
 in the Sale Catalogue of Mr. H. P. Standly, and 
 which ran thus: "The North Briton, No. 17, with 
 a Portrait of Hogarth in wood; and a severe 
 
12 DE LIBRIS 
 
 critique on some of his works : in Ireland! 's handwriting 
 is the following — 'This paper was given to me by Mrs. 
 Hogarth, Aug. 1782, and is the identical North Briton 
 purchased by Hogarth, and carried in his pocket many 
 days to show his friends.'' " The Ireland referred to 
 (as will presently appear) was Samuel Ireland of 
 the Graphic Illustrations. When, in 1892, dispersed 
 items of the famous Joly collection began to 
 appear sporadically in the second-hand catalogues, 
 I found in that of a well-known London bookseller 
 an entry plainly describing this one, and proclaiming 
 that it came "from the celebrated collection of Mr. 
 Standly, of St. Neots." Unfortunately, the scrap 
 of paper connecting it with Mrs. Hogarth's present 
 to Ireland had been destroyed. Nevertheless, I 
 secured my prize, had it fittingly bound up with 
 the original number which accompanied it; and 
 here and there, in writing about Hogarth, bragged 
 consequentially about my fortunate acquisition. 
 Then came a day — a day to be marked with a black 
 stone! — when in the British Museum Print Room, 
 
 and looking through the " Collection," for the 
 
 moment deposited there, I came upon another copy 
 of the North Briton, bearing in Samuel Ireland's 
 writing a notification to the effect that it was the 
 identical No. 17, etc., etc. Now which is the right 
 one? Is either the right one? I inspect mine 
 distrustfully. It is soiled, and has evidently been 
 
BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS 13 
 
 folded; it is scribbled with calculations; it has all 
 the aspect of a venerable vetuste. That it came from 
 the Standly collection, I am convinced. But that 
 other pretender in the (now dispersed) " Collec- 
 tion"? And was not Samuel Ireland (nomen invisum!) 
 the, if not fraudulent, at least too-credulous father 
 of one William Henry Ireland, who, at eighteen, 
 wrote V or tiger n and Rowena, and palmed it off as 
 genuine Shakespeare ? I fear me — I much fear me — 
 that, in the words of the American showman, I have 
 been "weeping over the wrong grave." 
 
 To prolong these vagrant adversaria would not 
 be difficult. Here, for example, dated 1779, are 
 the Coplas of the poet Don Jorge Manrique, which, 
 having no Spanish, I am constrained to study in 
 the renderings of Longfellow. Don Jorge was 
 a Spaniard of the Spaniards, Commendador of 
 Montizon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Captain 
 of a company in the Guards of Castile, and withal 
 a valiant soldado, who died of a wound received in 
 battle. But the attraction of my volume is, that, 
 at the foot of the title-page, in beautiful neat script, 
 appear the words, "Robert Southey. Paris. 17 May 
 18 17," — being the year in which Southey stayed 
 at Como with Walter Savage Landor. Here are 
 the Works of mock-heroic John Philips, 1720, 
 whose Blenheim the Tories pitted against Addison's 
 Campaign, and whose Splendid Shilling still shines 
 
i 4 DE LIBRIS 
 
 lucidly among eighteenth-century parodies. This 
 copy bears — also on the title-page — the autograph of 
 James Thomson, not yet the author of The Seasons ; 
 and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange, 
 — that "Lord Advocate Grant" of whom you may 
 read in the Kidnapped of "R. L. S." Here again is 
 an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's Lectures on the 
 English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. 
 by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an 
 admirer; and upon whom W. H.'s cockneyisms, 
 Gallicisms, egotisms, and "f/fe-isms" generally, seem 
 to have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately 
 insular bull. "A very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, 
 and Prejudiced Writer" is his uncomplimentary 
 addition to the author's name. Then here is 
 Cunningham's Goldsmith of 1854, vol. i., castigated 
 with equal energy by that Alaric Alexander Watts, 1 
 of whose egregious strictures upon Wordsworth we 
 read not long since in the Cornhill Magazine, and 
 who will not allow Goldsmith to say, in the Haunch 
 of Venison, "the porter and eatables followed behind." 
 "They could scarcely have followed before,"- — he 
 objects, in the very accents of Boeotia. Nor will 
 he pass "the hollow-sounding bittern" of the 
 Deserted Village. A barrel may sound hollow, but 
 
 1 So he was christened. But Lockhart chose to insist that his second 
 prename should properly be "Attila," and thenceforth he was spoken of in 
 this way. 
 
BOOKS AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS 15 
 
 not a bird — this wiseacre acquaints us. Had the 
 gifted author of Lyrics of the Heart never heard of 
 rhetorical figures? But he is not Goldsmith's only 
 hyper-critic. Charles Fox, who admired The Traveller, 
 thought Olivia's famous song in the Vicar "foolish," 
 and added that "folly" was a bad rhyme to "melan- 
 choly." 1 He must have forgotten Milton's : — 
 
 Bird that shunn'st the noise of folly, 
 Most rausicall, most melancholy! 
 
 Or he might have gone to the other camp, and 
 remembered Pope on Mrs. Howard: — 
 
 Not warp'd by Passion, aw'd by Rumour, 
 Not grave thro' Pride, or gay thro' Folly, 
 
 An equal Mixture of good Humour, 
 And sensible soft Melancholy. 
 
 1 Recollections, by Samuel Rogers, and ed. 1859, 43. 
 
AN EPISTLE TO AN EDITOR 
 
 »7 
 
AN EPISTLE TO AN EDITOR 
 
 'Jamais les arbres verts n'ont essaye d'etre bleus." — 
 
 Theophile Gautier 
 
 "A new Review I" You make me tremble 
 (Though as to that, I can dissemble 
 Till I hear more) . But is it "new" ? 
 And will it be a real Review? — 
 I mean, a Court wherein the scales 
 Weigh equally both him that fails, 
 And him that hits the mark ? — a place 
 Where the accus'd can plead his case, 
 If wrong' d? All this I need to know 
 Before I (arrogant!) say "Go." 
 
 "We, that are very old" (the phrase 
 Is Steele's, not mine!), in former days, 
 Have seen so many "new Reviews" 
 Arise, arraign, absolve, abuse; — 
 Proclaim their mission to the top 
 
 (Where there's still room!), then slowly drop, 
 19 
 
20 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Shrink down, fade out, and sans preferment, 
 Depart to their obscure interment; — 
 We should be pardon'd if we doubt 
 That a new venture can hold out. 
 
 It will, you say. Then don't be "new" ; 
 Be "old." The Old is still the True. 
 Nature (said Gautier) never tries 
 To alter her accustom'd dyes; 
 And all your novelties at best 
 Are ancient puppets, newly drest. 
 What you must do, is not to shrink 
 From speaking out the thing you think ; 
 And blaming where 'tis right to blame, 
 Despite tradition and a Name. 
 Yet don't expand a trifling blot, 
 Or ban the book for what it's not 
 (That is the poor device of those 
 Who cavil where they can't oppose!) ; 
 Moreover (this is very old!), 
 Be courteous — even when you scold ! 
 
 Blame I put first, but not at heart. 
 You must give Praise the foremost part; — 
 Praise that to those who write is breath 
 Of Life, if just; if unjust, Death. 
 Praise then the things that men revere; 
 Praise what they love, not what they fear ; 
 
AN EPISTLE TO AN EDITOR 21 
 
 Praise too the young ; praise those who try ; 
 
 Praise those who fail, but by and by 
 
 May do good work. Those who succeed, 
 
 You'll praise perforce, — so there's no need 
 
 To speak of that. And as to each, 
 
 See you keep measure in your speech ; — 
 
 See that your praise be so exprest 
 
 That the best man shall get the best ; 
 
 Nor fail of the fit word you meant 
 
 Because your epithets are spent. 
 
 Remember that our language gives 
 
 No limitless superlatives ; 
 
 And Shakespeare, Homer, should have more 
 
 Than the last knocker at the door ! 
 
 "We, that are very old I" — May this 
 
 Excuse the hint you find amiss. 
 
 My thoughts, I feel, are what to-day 
 
 Men call vieux jeu. Well! — "let them say." 
 
 The Old, at least, we know : the New 
 
 (A changing Shape that all pursue!) 
 
 Has been, — may be, a fraud. 
 
 — But there ! 
 Wind to your sail ! Vogue la galere! 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 
 
 23 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 
 
 Were you to inquire respectfully of the infallible 
 critic (if such indeed there be!) for the source of 
 the aphorism, "Music has charms to soothe a savage 
 beast," he would probably "down" you contempt- 
 uously in the Johnsonian fashion by replying that 
 you had "just enough of learning to misquote"; — 
 that the last word was notoriously "breast" and not 
 "beast"; — and that the line, as Macaulay's, and 
 every Board School-boy besides must be abundantly 
 aware, is to be found in Congreve's tragedy of The 
 Mourning Bride. But he would be wrong; and, in 
 fact, would only be confirming the real author's 
 contention that "Sure, of all blockheads, Scholars 
 are the worst." For, whether connected with 
 Congreve or not, the words are correctly given; 
 and they occur in the Rev. James Bramston's satire, 
 The Man of Taste, 1733, running in a couplet as 
 follows : — 
 
 Musick has charms to sooth a savage beast, 
 And therefore proper at a Sheriff's feast. 
 25 
 
26 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Moreover, according to the handbooks, this is not 
 the only passage from a rather obscure original 
 which has held its own. "Without black-velvet- 
 britches, what is man?" — is another (a speculation 
 which might have commended itself to Don 
 Quixote) j 1 while The Art of Politicks, also by 
 Bramston, contains a third: — 
 
 What's not destroyed by Time's devouring Hand? 
 Where's Troy, and where's the May-Pole in the Strand? 
 
 Polonius would perhaps object against a "devouring 
 hand." But the survival of — at least — three fairly 
 current citations from a practically forgotten minor 
 Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a 
 few words upon the writer himself, and his chief 
 performance in verse. 
 
 The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 
 or 1695 at Skreens, near Chelmsford, in Essex, his 
 father, Francis Bramston, being the fourth son of Sir 
 Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose 
 father again was Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief 
 Justice of the King's Bench, generally known as 
 "the elder." 2 James Bramston was admitted to 
 Westminster School in 1708. In 17 13 he became a 
 
 1 Whose grande tenue or holiday wear — Cervantes tells us — was "a doublet 
 of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match" (ch. i). 
 
 2 Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the "watery 
 incoherent Autobiography" — as Carlyle calls it — published by the Camden 
 Society in 1845. 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 27 
 
 scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, proceeding B.A. 
 in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was 
 made Vicar of Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, 
 both of which Sussex livings he held until his death 
 in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope. 
 His first published verses ( 1715) were on Dr. 
 Radcliffe. In 1729 he printed the Art of Politicks, 
 one of the many contemporary imitations of the Ars 
 Poetica; and in 1733 The Man of Taste. He also 
 wrote a mediocre variation on the Splendid Shilling of 
 John Philips, entitled the Crooked Sixpence, 1743. 
 Beyond a statement in Dallaway's Sussex that u he 
 [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame 
 and proofs of whose colloquial wit are still remem- 
 bered"; and the supplementary information that, as 
 incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual modus 
 of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring 
 Park of Petworth, nothing more seems to have been 
 recorded of him. 
 
 The Crooked Sixpence is, at best, an imitation of an 
 imitation; and as a Miltonic pastiche does not excel 
 that of Philips, or rival the more serious Lewesdon 
 Hill di Crowe. The Art of Politicks, in its turn, 
 would need a fairly long commentary to make 
 what is only moderately interesting moderately 
 intelligible, while eighteenth-century copies of 
 Horace's letter to the Pisos are "plentiful as 
 blackberries." But The Man of Taste, based, as 
 
28 DE LIBRIS 
 
 it is, on the presentment of a never extinct type, 
 the connoisseur against Nature invitissima Minerva, 
 is still worthy of passing notice. 
 
 In the sub-title of the poem, it is declared to be 
 "Occasioned by an Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that 
 Subject [i.e. "Taste"]. This was what is now 
 known as No. 4 of the Moral Essays, "On the 
 Use of Riches." But its first title in 1731 was 
 "Of Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to 
 "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's 
 friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under 
 the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief 
 illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the 
 ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of 
 Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The 
 story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. 
 But in the print of The Man of Taste, William 
 Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal anti- 
 pathy, promptly attacked Pope, Burlington, and 
 his own bete noire, Burlington's architect, William 
 Kent. Pope, to whom Burlington acts as hodman, 
 is depicted whitewashing Burlington Gate, Piccadilly, 
 which is labelled "Taste," and over which rises 
 Kent's statue, subserviently supported at the angles 
 of the pediment by Raphael and Michelangelo. In 
 his task, the poet, a deformed figure in a tye-wig, 
 bountifully bespatters the passers-by, particularly the 
 chariot of the Duke of Chandos. The satire was 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 29 
 
 not very brilliant or ingenious; but its meaning was 
 clear. Pope was prudent enough to make no reply; 
 though, as Mr. G. S. Layard shows in his Suppressed 
 Plates, it seems that the print was, or was sought to 
 be, called in by those concerned. Bramston's poem, 
 which succeeded in 1733, does not enter into the 
 quarrel, it may be because of the anger aroused by the 
 pictorial reply. But if — as announced on its title- 
 page, — it was suggested by Pope's epistle, it would 
 also seem to have borrowed its name from Hogarth's 
 caricature. 
 
 It was first issued in folio by Pope's publisher, 
 Lawton Gilliver of Fleet Street, and has a frontispiece 
 engraved by Gerard Vandergucht. This depicts a 
 wide-skirted, effeminate-looking personage, carrying 
 a long cane with a head fantastically carved, and 
 surrounded by various objects of art. In the back- 
 ground rises what is apparently intended for the 
 temple of a formal garden; and behind this again, a 
 winged ass capers skittishly upon the summit of 
 Mount Helicon. As might be anticipated, the poem 
 is in the heroic measure of Pope. But though many 
 of its couplets are compact and pointed, Bramston has 
 not yet learned from his model the art of varying his 
 pausation, and the period closes his second line with 
 the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect, 
 noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is 
 made to profess the errors satirised, and to be the 
 
3 o DE LIBRIS 
 
 unabashed mouth-piece of his own fatuity. "Mine," 
 say the concluding lines, — 
 
 Mine are the gallant Schemes of Politesse, 
 For books, and buildings, politicks, and dress. 
 This is True Taste, and whoso likes it not, 
 Is blockhead, coxcomb, puppy, fool, and sot. 
 
 One is insensibly reminded of a quotation from P. L. 
 Courier, made in the Cornhill many years since by 
 the once famous "Jacob Omnium" when replying 
 controversially to the author of Ionica. "Je vois" — 
 says Courier, after recapitulating a string of abusive 
 epithets hurled at him by his opponent — "je vois ce 
 qu'il veut dire: il entend que lui et mol sont d! avis 
 different; et c f est la sa maniere de s y exprimer." It was 
 also the manner of our Man of Taste. 
 
 The second line of the above quotation from 
 Bramston gives us four of the things upon which his 
 hero lays down the law. Let us see what he says 
 about literature. As a professing critic he prefers 
 books with notes : — 
 
 Tho' Blackmore's works my soul with raptures fill, 
 With notes by Bently they'd be better still. 
 
 Swift he detests — not of course for detestable qualities, 
 but because he is so universally admired. In poetry 
 he holds by rhyme as opposed to blank verse : — 
 
 Verse without rhyme I never could endure, 
 Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure. 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 31 
 
 To him as Nature, when he ceas'd to see, 
 
 Milton's an universal Blank to me. . . 
 
 Thompson [jzV] write blank, but know that for that reason 
 
 These lines shall live, when thine are out of season. 
 
 Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet's lays 
 
 As London Ladies owe their shape to stays. 
 
 In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the 
 reigning fashion. But if we may assume Bramston 
 himself to approve what his hero condemns, he must 
 have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had 
 but sparse advocates at this time, or for some time 
 to come. Neither Gray, nor Johnson, nor Goldsmith 
 were ever reconciled to what the last of them styles 
 "this unharmonious measure." Goldsmith, in parti- 
 cular, would probably have been in exact agreement 
 with the couplet as to the controlling powers of rhyme, 
 "If rhymes, therefore," he writes, in the Enquiry into 
 Polite Learning, 1 "be more difficult [than blank verse] , 
 for that very reason, I would have our poets write in 
 rhyme. Such a restriction upon the thought of a 
 good poet, often lifts and encreases the vehemence 
 of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain, plays 
 highest by diminishing the aperture." 2 
 
 The Man of Taste's idol, in matters dramatic, is 
 
 *Ed. 1759, p. 151. 
 
 2 Montaigne has a somewhat similar illustration : "As Cleanthes said, 
 that as the voice being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, 
 at last issueth forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sen- 
 tence cunningly and closely couched in measure-keeping Posie, darts it 
 selfe forth more furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke" (Essayes, 
 bk. i. ch. xxv. (Florio's translation). 
 
32 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Colley Cibber, who, however, deserves the laurel he 
 wears, not for The Careless Husband, his best comedy, 
 but for his Epilogues and other Play6. 
 
 It pleases me, that Pope unlaurell'd goes, 
 
 While Cibber wears the Bays for Play-house Prose. 
 
 So Britain's Monarch once uncover'd sate, 
 
 While Bradshaw bully'd in a broad-brimmed hat, — 
 
 a reminiscence of King Charles's trial which might 
 have been added to Bramston stock quotations. The 
 productions of "CurlPs chaste press" are also this 
 connoisseur's favourite reading, — the lives of players 
 in particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds 
 set forth in Carlyle's essay on Scott. 1 Among these 
 the memoirs of Cibber's "Lady Betty Modish," 
 Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in 
 Westminster Abbey, are not obscurely indicated. 
 
 In morals our friend — as might be expected circa 
 1730 — is a Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his 
 text-book : his breviary the Fable of the Bees : — 
 
 T' improve in Morals Mandevil I read, 
 And Tyndal's Scruples are my settled Creed. 
 I travelPd early, and I soon saw through 
 Religion all, e'er I was twenty-two. 
 Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure, 
 When ropes or opium can my ease procure? 
 When money's gone, and I no debts can pay, 
 Self-murder is an honourable way. 
 
 1 "It has been said, 'There are no English lives worth reading except 
 those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability 
 good-day.' " 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 33 
 
 As Pasaran directs I'd end my life, 
 
 And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife. 
 
 He would, of course, have done nothing of the kind; 
 nor, for the matter of that, did his Piedmontese 
 preceptor. 1 
 
 Nil admtrari is the motto of the Man of Taste 
 in Building, where he is naturally at home. He can 
 see no symmetry in the Banqueting House, or in 
 St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even* in St. Paul's itself. 
 
 Sure wretched Wren was taught by bungling Jones, 
 To murder mortar, and disfigure stones! 
 
 "Substantial" Vanbrugh he likes — chiefly because 
 his work would make "such noble ruins." Cost is 
 his sole criterion, and here he, too, seems to glance 
 obliquely at Canons : — 
 
 Dorick, Ionick, shall not there be found, 
 
 But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound. 
 
 But this was moderate, as the Edgware "folly" 
 reached £250,000. In Gardening he follows the 
 latest whim for landscape. Here is his burlesque of 
 the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley: — 
 
 Does it not merit the beholder's praise, 
 
 What's high to sink? and what is low to raise? 
 
 1 Count Passeran was a freethinking nobleman who wrote A Philo- 
 sophical Discourse on Death, in which he defended suicide, though he 
 refrained from resorting to it himself. Pope refers to him in the Epilogue 
 to the Satires, Dialogue i. 124: — 
 
 If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man, 
 And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran 1 
 
 D 
 
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 Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood, 
 And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood. 
 Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste, 
 Expence and alteration show a Taste. 
 
 As a connoisseur of Painting this enlightened 
 virtuoso is given over to Hogarth's hated dealers 
 in the Black Masters: — 
 
 In curious paintings I'm exceeding nice, 
 
 And know their several beauties by their Price. 
 
 Auctions and Sales I constantly attend, 
 
 But chuse my pictures by a skilful Friend. 
 
 Originals and copies much the same, 
 
 The Picture's value is the painter's name} 
 
 Of Sculpture he says — 
 
 In spite of Addison and ancient Rome, 
 
 Sir Cloudesly Shovel's is my fav'rite tomb. 2 
 
 How oft have I with admiration stood, 
 
 To view some City-magistrate in wood? 
 
 I gaze with pleasure on a Lord May'r's head 
 
 Cast with propriety in gilded lead, — 
 
 the allusion being obviously to Cheere's manufactory 
 of such popular garden decorations at Hyde Park 
 Corner. 
 
 In Coins and Medals, true to his instinct for liking 
 
 1 See post, "M. Rouquet on the Arts," p. 51. 
 
 2 "Sir Cloudesly Shovel's Monument has very often given me great 
 Offence: Instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the 
 distinguishing Character of that plain, gallant Man, he is represented on 
 his Tomb [in Westminster Abbey] by the Figure of a Beau, dressed in a 
 long Perriwig, and reposing himself upon Velvet Cushions under a Canopy 
 of State" {Spectator, March 30, 171 1). 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 35 
 
 the worst the best, he prefers the modern to the 
 antique. In Music, with Hogarth's Rake two years 
 later, he is all for that "Dagon of the nobility and 
 gentry," imported song: — 
 
 Without Italian, or without an ear, 
 To Bononcini's musick I adhere; — 
 
 though he confesses to a partiality for the bagpipe on 
 the ground that your true Briton "loves a grumbling 
 noise," and he favours organs and the popular 
 oratorios. But his "top talent is a bill of fare" : — 
 
 Sir Loins and rumps of beef offend my eyes, 1 
 
 Pleas'd with frogs fricass[e]ed, and coxcomb-pies. 
 
 Dishes I chuse though little, yet genteel, 
 
 Snails 2 the first course, and Peepers* crown the meal. 
 
 Pigs heads with hair on, much my fancy please, 
 
 I love young colly-flowers if stew'd in cheese, 
 
 And give ten guineas for a pint of peas! 
 
 No tailing servants to my table come, 
 
 My Grace is Silence, and my waiter Dumb. 
 
 He is not without his aspirations. 
 
 Could I the privilege of Peer procure, 
 The rich I'd bully, and oppress the poor. 
 To give is wrong, but it is wronger still, 
 On any terms to pay a tradesman's bill. 
 
 1 As they did those of Goldsmith's "Beau Tibbs." "I hate your 
 immense loads of meat . . . extreme disgusting to those who are in the 
 least acquainted with high life" {Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 241). 
 
 2 The edible or Roman snail (Helix pomatia) is still known to con- 
 tinental cuisines — and gipsy camps. It was introduced into England as 
 an epicure's dish in the seventeenth century. 
 
 •Young chickens. 
 
36 DE LIBRIS 
 
 I'd make the insolent Mechanicks stay, 
 And keep my ready-money all for play. 
 I'd try if any pleasure could be found 
 In tossing-up for twenty thousand pound. 
 Had I whole Counties, I to White's would go, 
 And set lands, woods, and rivers at a throw. 
 But should I meet with an unlucky run, 
 And at a throw be gloriously undone; 
 My debts of honour I'd discharge the first, 
 Let all my lawful creditors be curst. 
 
 Here he perfectly exemplifies that connexion 
 between connoisseurship and play which Fielding 
 discovers in Book xiii. of Tom Jones. 1 An anecdote 
 of C. J. Fox aptly exhibits the final couplet in 
 action, and proves that fifty years later, at least, 
 the same convenient code was in operation. Fox 
 once won about eight thousand pounds at cards. 
 Thereupon an eager creditor promptly presented 
 himself, and pressed for payment. "Impossible, Sir," 
 replied Fox, "I must first discharge my debts of 
 honour." The creditor expostulated. "Well, Sir, 
 give me your bond." The bond was delivered to 
 Fox, who tore it up and flung the pieces into the 
 fire. "Now, Sir," said he, "my debt to you is a 
 debt of honour," and immediately paid him. 2 
 
 1 "But the science of gaming is that which above all others employs 
 their thoughts [i.e. the thoughts of the 'young gentlemen of our times']. 
 These are the studies of their graver hours, while for their amusements 
 they have the vast circle of connoisseurship, painting, music, statuary, and 
 natural philosophy, or rather unnatural, which deals in the wonderful, and 
 knows nothing of nature, except her monsters and imperfections" (ch. v.). 
 
 2 Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers [by Dyce], 1856, p. 7$. 
 
BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" 37 
 
 But we must abridge our levies on Pope's imitator. 
 In Dress the Man of Taste's aim seems to have 
 been to emulate his own footman, and at this point 
 comes in the already quoted reference to velvet 
 "inexpressibles" — (a word which, the reader may 
 be interested to learn, is as old as 1793). His 
 "pleasures," as might be expected, like those of 
 Goldsmith's Switzers, "are but low" — 
 
 To boon companions I my time would give, 
 With players, pimps, and parasites I'd live. 
 I would with Jockeys from Newmarket dine, 
 And to Rough-riders give my choicest wine. . . 
 My ev'nings all I would with sharpers spend, 
 And make the Thief-catcher my bosom friend. 
 In Fig, the Prize-fighter, by day delight, 
 And sup with Colly Gibber ev'ry night. 
 
 At which point — and probably in his cups — we 
 leave our misguided fine gentleman of 1733, doubt- 
 less a fair sample of many of his class under the 
 second George, and not wholly unknown under that 
 monarch's successors — even to this hour, he jour va 
 passer; mats la folie ne pass era pas! 
 
 A parting quotation may serve to illustrate one 
 of those changes of pronunciation which have taken 
 place in so many English words. Speaking of his 
 villa, or country-box, the Man of Taste says — 
 
 Pots o'er the door I'll place like Cits balconies, 
 Which Bently calls the Gardens of Adonis. 
 
 ^ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
38 DE LIBRIS 
 
 To make this a peg for a dissertation on the jars 
 of lettuce and fennel grown by the Greeks for the 
 annual Adonis festivals, is needless. But it may be 
 noted that Bramston, with those of his day, — Swift 
 excepted, — scans the "o" in balcony long, a practice 
 which continued far into the nineteenth century. 
 "Contemplate," said Rogers, "is bad enough; but 
 balcony makes me sick." 1 And even in 1857, two 
 years after Rogers's death, the late Frederick Locker, 
 writing of Piccadilly, speaks of "Old Q's" well- 
 known window in that thoroughfare as "Primrose 
 balcony." 
 
 Table-Talk, 1856, p. 248. 
 
THE PASSIONATE PRINTER TO 
 HIS LOVE 
 
 39 
 
THE PASSIONATE PRINTER TO 
 HIS LOVE 
 
 {Whose name is Amanda) 
 
 With Apologies to the Shade of Christopher Marlowe 
 
 Come live with me and be my Dear; 
 
 And till that happy bond shall lapse, 
 I'll set your Pourings in Brevier, 1 
 
 Your Praises in the largest CAPS. 
 
 There's Diamond — 'tis for your Eyes; 
 
 There's Ruby — that will match your Lips; 
 Pearl, for your Teeth ; and Minion-size 
 
 To suit your dainty Finger-tips. 
 
 In Nonpareil I'll put your Face ; 
 
 In Rubric shall your Blushes rise; 
 There is no Bourgeois in your Case; 
 
 Your Form can never need "Revise" 
 
 Your Cheek seems "Ready for the Press" ; 
 
 Your Laugh as Clarendon is clear; 
 There's more distinction in your Dress 
 
 Than in the oldest Elzevir. 
 
 1 "Pronounced Bre-veer" (Printers' Vocabulary). 
 41 
 
42 DE LIBRIS 
 
 So with me live, and with me die ; 
 
 And may no "Finis" e'er intrude 
 To break into mere "Printers' Pie" 
 
 The Type of our Beatitude ! 
 
 (Erratum. — If my suit you flout, 
 And choose some happier Youth to wed, 
 
 'Tis but to cross Amanda out, 
 And read another name instead.) 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 
 
 43 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 
 
 M. Rouquet's book is a rare duodecimo of some 
 two hundred pages, bound in sheep, which, in the 
 copy before us, has reached that particular stage 
 of disintegration when the scarfskin, without much 
 persuasion, peels away in long strips. Its title is — 
 L'Etat des Arts, en Angleterre. Par M. Rouquet, de 
 V Academie Roy ale de Peinture 6f de Sculpture; and 
 it is "imprime a Paris " though it was to be obtained 
 from John Nourse, "Libraire dans le Strand, proche 
 Temple-barr" — a well-known importer of foreign 
 books, and one of Henry Fielding's publishers. The 
 date is 1755, being the twenty-eighth year of the 
 reign of His Majesty King George the Second — a 
 reign not generally regarded as favourable to art 
 of any kind. In what month of 1755 the little 
 volume was first put forth does not appear; but it 
 must have been before October, when Nourse issued 
 an English version. There is a dedication, in the 
 approved French fashion, to the Marquis de Marigny, 
 u Direct eur £sf Ordonnateur General de ses Bdtimens, 
 Jardins, Arts, Academies £sf Manufactures" to Lewis 
 
 45 
 
46 DE LIBRIS 
 
 the Fifteenth, above which is a delicate headpiece 
 by M. Charles-Nicolas Cochin (the greatest of the 
 family) , where a couple of that artist's well-nourished 
 amorini, insecurely attached to festoons, distribute 
 palms and laurels in vacuity under a coroneted 
 oval displaying fishes. For Monsieur Abel-Frangois 
 Poisson, Marquis de Marigny at de Menars, was 
 the younger brother of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, 
 the celebrated Marquise de Pompadour. Cochin's 
 etching is dated "1754"; and the "Approbation" 
 at the end of the volume bears his signature in his 
 capacity of Censeur. 
 
 Of the "M. Rouquet" of the title-page biography 
 tells us little; but it may be well, before speaking 
 of his book, to bring that little together. He was 
 a Swiss Protestant of French extraction, born at 
 Geneva in 1702. His Christian names were Jean- 
 Andre; and he had come to England from his 
 native land towards the close of the reign of George 
 the First. Many of his restless compatriots also 
 sought these favoured shores. Labelye, who rose 
 from a barber's shop to be the architect of London 
 Bridge; Liotard, once regarded as a rival of 
 Reynolds; Michael Moser, eventually Keeper of 
 the Royal Academy, had all migrated from the 
 "stormy mansions" where, in the words of Gold- 
 smith's philosophic Wanderer — 
 
 Winter ling'ring chills the lap of May. 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 47 
 
 Like Moser, Rouquet was a chaser and an enameller. 
 He lodged on the south side of Leicester Fields, 
 in a house afterwards the residence of another 
 Switzer of the same craft, that miserable Theodore 
 Gardelle, who in 1761 murdered his landlady, Mrs. 
 King. Of Rouquet's activities as an artist in 
 England there are scant particulars. The ordinary 
 authorities affirm that he imitated and rivalled the 
 popular miniaturist and enameller, Christian Zincke, 
 who retired from practice in 1746; and he is loosely 
 described as u the companion of Hogarth, Garrick, 
 Foote, and the wits of the day." Of his relations 
 with Foote and Garrick there is scant record; but 
 with Hogarth, his near neighbour in the Fields, 
 he was certainly well acquainted, since in 1746 he 
 prepared explanations in French for a number of 
 Hogarth's prints. These took the form of letters 
 to a friend in Paris, and are supposed to have been, 
 if not actually inspired, at least approved by the 
 painter. They usually accompanied all the sets of 
 Hogarth's engravings which went abroad; and, 
 according to George Steevens, it was Hogarth's 
 intention ultimately to have them translated and 
 enlarged. Rouquet followed these a little later by 
 a separate description of "The March to Finchley," 
 designed specially for the edification of Marshal 
 Foucquet de Belle-Isle, who, when the former letters 
 had been written, was a prisoner of war at Windsor. 
 
48 DE LIBRIS 
 
 In a brief introduction to this last, the author, 
 hitherto unnamed, is spoken of as "Mr. Rouquet, 
 connu par ses Ouvrages d y Email." 
 
 After thirty years' sojourn in this country, 
 Rouquet transferred himself to Paris. At what 
 precise date he did this is not stated, but by a letter 
 to Hogarth from the French capital, printed by 
 John Ireland, the original of which is in the British 
 Museum, he was there, and had been there several 
 months, in March 1753. The letter gives a highly 
 favourable account of its writer's fortunes. Business 
 is "coming in very smartly," he says. He has been 
 excellently received, and is "perpetualy imploy'd." 
 There is far more encouragement for modern enter- 
 prise in Paris than there is in London; and some 
 of his utterances must have rejoiced the soul of his 
 correspondent. As this, for instance — "The hum- 
 bug virtu is much more out of fashon here than in 
 England, free thinking upon that & other topicks 
 is more common here than amongst you if 
 possible, old pictures & old stories fare's alike, 
 a dark picture is become a damn'd picture." On 
 this account, he inquires anxiously as to the publica- 
 tion of his friend's forthcoming Analysis; he has 
 been raising expectations about it, and he wishes 
 to be the first to introduce it into France. From 
 other sources we learn that (perhaps owing to his 
 relations with Belle-Isle, who had been released in 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 49 
 
 1745) he had been taken up by Marigny, and 
 also by Cochin, then keeper of the King's Drawings, 
 and soon to be Secretary to the Academy, of which 
 Rouquet himself, by express order of Lewis the 
 Fifteenth, was made a member. Finally, as in the 
 case of Cochin, apartments were assigned to him in 
 the Louvre. Whether he ever returned to this 
 country is doubtful; but, as we have seen, the 
 fitat des Arts was printed at Paris in 1755. That it 
 was suggested — or "commanded" — by Mme. de 
 Pompadour's connoisseur brother, to whom it was 
 inscribed, is a not unreasonable supposition. 
 
 In any case, M. Rouquet's definition of the 
 "Arts" is a generous one, almost as wide as 
 Marigny's powers, already sufficiently set forth 
 at the outset of this paper. For not only — as 
 in duty bound — does he treat of Architecture, 
 Sculpture, Painting and Engraving, but he also 
 has chapters on Printing, Porcelain, Gold- and 
 Silver-smiths' Work, Jewelry, Music, Declamation, 
 Auctions, Shop-fronts, Cooking, and even on 
 Medicine and Surgery. Oddly enough, he says 
 nothing of one notable art with which Marigny 
 was especially identified, that "art of creating 
 landscape" — as Walpole happily calls Gardening — 
 which, in this not very "shining period," entered 
 upon a fresh development under Bridgeman and 
 William Kent. Although primarily a Londoner, 
 
50 DE LIBRIS 
 
 one would think that M. Rouquet must certainly 
 have had some experience, if not of the efforts 
 of the innovators, at least of the very Batavian 
 preformances of Messrs. London and Wise of 
 Brompton ; or that he should have found at Nonsuch 
 or Theobalds — at Moor Park or Hampton Court 
 — the pretext for some of his pages — if only to 
 ridicule those "verdant sculptures" at which Pope, 
 who played no small part in the new movement, 
 had laughed in the Guardian; or those fantastic 
 "coats of arms and mottoes in yew, box and holly" 
 over which Walpole also made merry long after 
 in the famous essay so neatly done into French by 
 his friend the Due de Nivernais. M. Rouquet's 
 curious reticence in this matter cannot have been 
 owing to any consideration for Hogarth's old enemy, 
 William Kent, for Kent had been dead seven years 
 when the Etat des Arts made its appearance. 
 
 If, for lack of space, we elect to pass by certain 
 preliminary reflections which the Monthly Review 
 rather unkindly dismisses as a "tedious jumble," 
 M. Rouquet's first subject is History Painting, a 
 branch of the art which, under George the Second, 
 attained to no great excellence. For this M. Rouquet 
 gives three main reasons, the first being that 
 afterwards advanced by Hogarth and Reynolds, 
 namely, — the practical exclusion, in Protestant 
 countries, of pictures from churches. A second 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 51 
 
 cause was the restriction of chamber decorations 
 to portraits and engravings; and a third, the craze 
 of the connoisseur for Hogarth's hated "Black 
 Masters," the productions of defunct foreigners. 
 And this naturally brings about the following 
 digression, quite in Hogarth's own way, against 
 that contemporary charlatan, the picture-dealer: — 
 "English painters have an obstacle to overcome, 
 which equally impedes the progress of their talents 
 and of their fortune. They have to contend with 
 a class of men whose business it is to sell pictures; 
 and as, for these persons, traffic in the works of 
 living, and above all of native artists, would be 
 impossible, they make a point of decrying them, 
 and, as far as they can, of confirming amateurs with 
 whom they have to deal in the ridiculous idea that 
 the older a picture is the more valuable it becomes. 
 See, say they (speaking of some modern effort), it 
 still shines with that ignoble freshness which is to 
 be found in nature; Time will have to indue it 
 with his learned smoke — with that sacred cloud 
 which must some day hide it from the profane eyes 
 of the vulgar in order to reveal to the initiated 
 alone the mysterious beauties of a venerable 
 antiquity." 
 
 These words are quite in the spirit of Hogarth's 
 later "Time smoking a Picture." As a matter of fact, 
 they are reproduced almost textually from the writer's 
 
52 DE LIBRIS 
 
 letter of five years earlier on the "March to Finchley." 
 To return, however, to History Painting. Accord- 
 ing to Rouquet, its leading exponent 1 under George 
 the Second was Francis Hayman of the "large noses 
 and shambling legs," now known chiefly as a crony 
 of Hogarth, and a facile but ineffectual illustrator of 
 Shakespeare and Cervantes. In 1754, however, his 
 pictures of See-Saw, Hot Cockles, Blind Man's Buff, 
 and the like, for the supper-boxes at Vauxhall 
 Gardens, with Sayer's prints therefrom, had made his 
 name familiar, although he had not yet painted those 
 more elaborate compositions in the large room next 
 the Rotunda, over which Fanny Burney's "Holborn 
 Beau," Mr. Smith, comes to such terrible grief in 
 ch. xlvi. of Evelina. But he had contributed a 
 "Finding of Moses" to the New Foundling Hospital, 
 which is still to be seen in the Court Room there, 
 in company with three other pictures executed con- 
 currently for the remaining compartments, Joseph 
 Highmore's "Hagar and Ishmael," James WihVs 
 "Suffer little Children," and Hogarth's "Moses 
 brought to Pharaoh's Daughter" — the best of the 
 four, as well as the most successful of Hogarth's 
 historical pieces. All these, then recently installed, 
 are mentioned by Rouquet. 
 
 1 This is confirmed by Arthur Murphy: "Every Thing is put out of 
 Hand by this excellent Artist with the utmost Grace and Delicacy, and his 
 History-Pieces have, besides their beautiful Colouring, the most lively 
 Expression of Character" (Gray's Inn Journal, February 9, 1754)- 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 53 
 
 It will be observed that he says nothing about 
 Hogarth's earlier and more ambitious efforts in the 
 "Grand Style," the "Pool of Bethesda" and the 
 "Good Samaritan" at St. Bartholomew's, nor of the 
 "Paul before Felix," also lately added to Lincoln's Inn 
 Hall — omissions which must have sadly exercised the 
 "author" of those monumental works when he came 
 to read his Swiss friend's little treatise. Nor, for the 
 matter of that, does M. Rouquet, when he treats of 
 portrait, refer to Hogarth's masterpiece in this kind, 
 the full-length of Captain Coram at the Foundling. 
 On the other hand, he says a great deal about 
 Hogarth which has no very obvious connection with 
 History Painting. He discusses the Analysis and 
 the serpentine Line of Beauty with far more insight 
 than many of its author's contemporaries; refers 
 feelingly to the Act by which in 1735 the painter 
 had so effectively cornered the pirates; and finally 
 defines his satirical pictures succinctly as follows: — 
 "M. Hogarth has given to England a new class of 
 pictures. They contain a great number of figures, 
 usually seven or eight inches high. These remark- 
 able performances are, strictly speaking, the history 
 of certain vices, to a foreign eye often a little over- 
 charged, but always full of wit and novelty. He 
 understands in his compositions how to make 
 pleasant pretext for satirising the ridiculous and 
 the vicious, by firm and significant strokes, all of 
 
54 DE LTBRIS 
 
 which are prompted by a lively, fertile and judicious 
 imagination." 
 
 From History Painting to Portrait in Oil, the 
 title given by M. Rouquet to his next chapter, 
 transition is easy. Some of the artists mentioned 
 above were also portrait painters. Besides Captain 
 Coram, for example, Hogarth had already executed 
 that admirable likeness of himself which is now at 
 Trafalgar Square, and which Rouquet must often 
 have seen in its home at Leicester Fields. Highmore 
 too had certainly at this date painted more than 
 one successful portrait of Samuel Richardson, the 
 novelist; and even Hayman had made essay in this 
 direction with the picture of Lord Orford, now in 
 the National Portrait Gallery. A good many of the 
 painters of the last reign must also, during Rouquet's 
 residence in England, have been alive and active, e.g. 
 Jervas, Dahl, Aikman, Thornhill and Richardson. 
 But M. Rouquet devotes most of his pages in this 
 respect to Kneller, whose not altogether beneficent 
 influence long survived him. Strangely enough, 
 Rouquet does not mention that egregious and 
 fashionable face-painter, Sir Joshua's master, Thomas 
 Hudson, whose "fair tied-wigs, blue velvet coats, 
 and white satin waistcoats" (all executed by his 
 assistants) reigned undisputed until he was eclipsed 
 by his greater pupil. The two artists in portraiture 
 selected by Rouquet for special notice are Allan 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 55 
 
 Ramsay and the younger Vanloo (Jean Baptiste). 
 Both were no doubt far above their predecessors; 
 but Ramsay would specially appeal to Rouquet by 
 his continental training, and Vanloo by his French 
 manner and the superior variety of his attitudes. 1 
 The only other name Rouquet recalls is that of 
 the drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaken; and we 
 suspect it is to Rouquet that we owe the pleasant 
 anecdote of the two painters who, for the sum of 
 £800 a year, pre-empted his exclusive and inestimable 
 services, to the wholesale discomfiture of their brethren 
 of the brush. The rest shall be told in Rouquet's 
 words: — "The best [artists] were no longer able to 
 paint a hand, a coat, a background; they were forced 
 to learn, which meant additional labour — what a 
 misfortune! Henceforth there arrived no more to 
 Vanhaken from different quarters of London, nor by 
 coach from the most remote towns of England, 
 canvases of all sizes, where one or more heads were 
 painted, under which the painter who forwarded 
 them had been careful to add, pleasantly enough, the 
 
 1 Another French writer, the Abbe le Blanc, gives a depressing account 
 of English portraits before Vanloo came to England: "At some distance 
 one might easily mistake a dozen of them for twelve copies of the same 
 original. Some have the head turned to the left, others to the right; and 
 this is the most sensible difference to be observed between them. More- 
 over, excepting the face, you find in all the same neck, the same arms^ 
 the same flesh, the same attitude; and to say all, you observe no more life 
 than design in those pretended portraits. Properly speaking, they [the 
 artists] are not painters, they know how to lay colours on the canvas; but 
 they know not how to animate it" (Letters on the English and French 
 Nations, 1747, i. 160), 
 
S6 DE LIBRIS 
 
 description of the figures, stout or slim, great or 
 small, which were to be appended. Nothing could 
 be more absurd than this arrangement; but it would 
 exist still — if Vanhaken existed." 1 
 
 La peinture a I'huile, O est bien difficile; Mais 
 c'est beaucoup plus beau Que la peinture a Veau" 
 About la peinture a Veau, M. Rouquet says very little, 
 in all probability because the English Water Colour 
 School, which, with the advance of topographic art, 
 grew so rapidly in the second half of the century, 
 was yet to come. He refers, however, with approval 
 to the gouaches of Joseph Goupy, Lady Burlington's 
 drawing-master, perhaps better known to posterity 
 by his (or her ladyship's) caricature of Handel as the 
 "Charming Brute." (Caricature, by the way, is a 
 branch of Georgian Art which M. Rouquet neglects.) 
 As regards landscape and animal painting, he "abides 
 in generalities" ; but he must have been acquainted 
 with the sea pieces of Monamy, and Hogarth's and 
 Walpole's friend Samuel Scott; and should, one 
 would think, have known of the horses and dogs of 
 Wootton and Seymour. Upon Enamel he might be 
 expected to enlarge, although he mentions but one 
 master, his own model, Zincke, who carried the art 
 of portrait in this way much farther than any 
 predecessor. Moreover, like Petitot, he made dis- 
 coveries which he was wise enough to keep to himself. 
 
 1 He died in 1749. 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 57 
 
 "It is most humiliating," says Rouquet, "for the 
 genius of painting that it can sometimes exist alone. 
 M. Zincke left no pupil." Seeing that Rouquet is 
 also accused of jealously guarding his own contribu- 
 tions to the perfection of his art, the words are — as 
 Diderot says — remarkable. 
 
 With Sculpture, chiefly employed at this date 
 for mortuary purposes, he has less opportunity of 
 being indefinite, since there were but three notabilities, 
 Scheemakers, Rysbraek,and Roubillac, — all foreigners. 
 Of these Scheemakers, whom Chesterfield regarded 
 as a mere stone-cutter, and who did the Shakespeare 
 in Westminster Abbey, is certainly the least con- 
 siderable. Next comes Rysbraek, whom Walpole 
 and Rouquet would put highest, the latter apparently 
 because Rysbraek had been spoken of contemptuously 
 by the Abbe le Blanc. But the first is assuredly 
 Roubillac, whose monument to Mrs. Nightingale, 
 however, belongs to a later date than the Etat des 
 Arts, though he had already achieved the masterly 
 figure of Eloquence on the Argyll monument. The 
 only other sculptor referred to by Rouquet is Gabriel 
 Cibber, whose statues of Madness and Melancholy, 
 long at Bedlam, and now at South Kensington, 
 certainly deserve his praise. But Cibber died in 
 1700, and belongs to the Caroline epoch. He 
 no doubt owes his place in the £tat des Arts to 
 the fact that he had been abused in the already- 
 
58 DE LIBRIS 
 
 mentioned Letters on the English and French 
 Nations. 
 
 At this point we may turn M. Rouquet's pages 
 more rapidly. It is not necessary to linger over his 
 account of Silk Stuffs, more excellent in his opinion 
 by their material than their make up. Under 
 Medallists he commends the clever medals of great 
 men by his compatriot, Anthony Dassier; under 
 Printing he refers to that liberty of the Press which, 
 in England, amounted to impunity. "A few too 
 thinly disguised blasphemies; a few too rash reflec- 
 tions upon the Government, a few defamatory libels 
 — are the sole things which, at the present time, are 
 not allowed." And this brings about the following 
 lively and very accurate description of the eighteenth- 
 century newspaper : — "One of the most notable peculi- 
 arities which liberty of the Press produces in England, 
 is the swarm of fugitive sheets and half-sheets which 
 one sees break forth every morning, except Sunday, 
 covering all the coffee-house tables. Twenty of these 
 different papers, under different titles, appear each 
 day; some contain a moral or philosophical discourse; 
 the majority of the rest offer political, and frequently 
 seditious, comments on some party question. In 
 them is to be found the news of Europe, England, 
 London, and the day before. Their authors profess 
 to be familiar with the most secret deliberations of 
 the Cabinet, which they make public. If a fire 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 59 
 
 occurs in a chimney or elsewhere; if a theft or a 
 murder has taken place; if any one commits suicide 
 from ennui or despair, the public is informed thereof 
 on the morning after with the utmost amount of detail. 
 After these articles come advertisements of all sorts, 
 and in very great numbers. In addition to those of 
 different things which it is desired to let, sell or pur- 
 chase, there are some that are amusing. If a man's 
 wife runs away he declares that he will not be liable 
 for any debts she may contract; and as a matter of 
 fact, this precaution, according to the custom of the 
 country, is essential if he desires to secure himself 
 from doing so. He threatens with all the rigour of 
 the law those who dare to give his wife an asylum. 
 Another publishes the particulars of his fortune, his 
 age and his position, and adds that he is prepared to 
 unite himself to any woman whose circumstances are 
 such as he requires and describes; he further gives the 
 address where communications must be sent for the 
 negotiation and conclusion of the business. There 
 are other notices which describe a woman who has 
 been seen at the play or elsewhere, and announces that 
 some one has determined to marry her. If any one has 
 a dream which seems to him to predict that a certain 
 number will be lucky in the lottery, he proclaims 
 that fact, and offers a consideration to the possessor 
 of the number if he cares to dispose of it." 
 
 After these come the advertisements of the Quack 
 
60 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Doctors. Of the account of belles-lettres in 1754, 
 two years after Amelia and in the actual year of Sir 
 Charles Grandison, M. Rouquet's report is not flat- 
 tering : — "The presses of England, made celebrated by 
 so many masterpieces of wit and science, now scarcely 
 print anything but miserable and insipid romances, 
 repulsive volumes, frigid and tedious letters, where 
 the most tasteless puerility passes for wit and genius, 
 and an inflamed imagination exerts itself under the 
 pretext of forming manners." It is possible that 
 the last lines are aimed at Richardson; certainly they 
 describe the post-Richardsonian novel. But that the 
 passage does not in any part refer to Fielding is clear 
 from the fact that the writer presently praises Joseph 
 Andrews, coupling it with Gil Bias. 
 
 Mezzotint, Gem-cutting, Chasing (which serves to 
 bring in M. Rouquet's countryman, Moser), Jewelry, 
 China, (i.e. Chelsea ware) are all successfully treated 
 with more or less minuteness, while, under Archi- 
 tecture, are described the eighteenth-century house, 
 and the new bridge at Westminster of another Swiss, 
 Labelye, who is not named. "The architect is a 
 foreigner," says Rouquet, who considered he had 
 been inadequately rewarded. "It must be confessed 
 (he adds drily) that in England this is a life- 
 long disqualification." From Architecture the writer 
 passes to the oratory of the Senate, the Pulpit and 
 the Stage. In the last case exception is made for 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 61 
 
 "le celebre M. Garic" whose only teacher is declared 
 to be Nature. As regards the rest, M. Rouquet thus 
 describes the prevailing style : — "The declamation of 
 the English stage is turgid, full of affectation, and 
 perpetually pompous. Among other peculiarities, it 
 frequently admits a sort of dolorous exclamation, — 
 a certain long-drawn tone of voice, so woeful and so 
 lugubrious that it is impossible not to be depressed 
 by it." This reads like a recollection of Quin in the 
 Horatio of Rowe's Fair Penitent, 
 
 Upon Cookery M. Rouquet is edifying; and con- 
 cerning the eighteenth-century physician, with his tye- 
 wig and gilt-head cane, sprightly and not unmalicious. 
 But we must now confine ourselves to quoting a 
 few detached passages from this discursive chronicle. 
 The description of Ranelagh ( in the chapter on Music) 
 is too lengthy to reproduce. Here is that of the 
 older Vauxhall: — "The Vauxhall concert takes place 
 in a garden singularly decorated. The Director of 
 Amusements in this garden [Jonathan Tyers] gains 
 and spends successively considerable annual sums. 
 He was born for such enterprises. At once spirited 
 and tasteful, he shrinks from no expense where the 
 amusement of the public is concerned, and the public, 
 in its turn, repays him liberally. Every year he adds 
 some fresh decoration, some new and exceptional 
 scene. Sculpture, Painting, Music, bestir themselves 
 periodically to render this resort more agreeable by 
 
62 DE LIBRIS 
 
 the variety of their different productions: in this way 
 opportunities of relaxation are infinite in England, 
 above all at London; and thus Music plays a 
 prominent part. The English take their pleasure 
 without amusing themselves, or amuse themselves 
 without enjoyment, except at table, and there only 
 up to the point when sleep supervenes to the fumes 
 of wine and tobacco." 
 
 Elsewhere M. Rouquet, like M. le Blanc before 
 him, is loud in his denunciation of the pitiful 
 practices of Vails-giving, which blocks the vestibule 
 of every English house with an army of servants 
 "ranged in line, according to their rank," and ready 
 "to receive, or rather exact, the contribution of 
 every guest." The excellent Jonas Hanway wrote 
 a pamphlet reprehending this objectionable custom. 
 Hogarth steadily set his face against it; but 
 Reynolds is reported to have given his man £100 a 
 year for the door. Here, from another place, is a 
 description of one of those popular auctions, at 
 which, in the Marriage A-la-Mode, my Lady 
 Squanderfield purchases the bric-a-brac of Sir 
 Timothy Babyhouse. The scene is probably Cock's 
 in the Piazza at Covent Garden: — "Nothing is so 
 diverting as this kind of sale — the number of those 
 assembled, the diverse passions which animate them, 
 the pictures, the auctioneer himself, his very rostrum, 
 all contribute to the variety of the spectacle. There 
 
M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS 63 
 
 you see the faithless broker purchasing in secret what 
 he openly depreciates; or — to spread a dangerous 
 snare — pretending to secure with avidity a picture 
 which already belongs to him. There, some are 
 tempted to buy; and some repent of having bought. 
 There, out of pique and bravado, another shall pay 
 fifty louis for an article which he would not have 
 thought worth five and twenty, had he not been 
 ashamed to draw back when the eyes of a crowded 
 company were upon him. There, you may see a 
 woman of condition turn pale at the mere thought 
 of losing a paltry pagoda which she does not want, 
 and, in any other circumstances, would never have 
 desired." 
 
 A closing word as to M. Rouquet himself. The 
 jfrtat des Arts was duly noticed by the critics — con- 
 temptuously by the Monthly Review, and sympathetic- 
 ally by the Gentleman' s and the Scots Magazine. In 
 1755, the year to which it belongs, its author put 
 forth another work — V Art Nouveau de la Peinture 
 en Fromage ou en Ramequin [toasted cheese], invente 
 pour suivre le louable projet de trouver graduellement 
 des f aeons de peindre inferieures a celles qui existent. 
 This, as its title imports, is a skit, levelled at the 
 recent His wire et Secret de la Peinture en Cire of 
 Diderot, who nevertheless refers to Rouquet under 
 Email, in the Dictionnaire Ency elope dique, as "un 
 homme habile" He seems, however (like "la 
 
64 DE LIBRIS 
 
 peinture a I'huile)", to have been somewhat 
 "difficile"-, and as we have said, his discoveries 
 (for he had that useful element in enamel-work, 
 considerable chemical knowledge), like Zincke's, 
 perished with him. Several of his portraits, notably 
 those of Cochin and Marigny, were exhibited at the 
 Paris Salons. Whether he was overparted, or over- 
 worked, in the Pompadour atmosphere; or whether 
 he succumbed to the "continual headache" of which 
 he speaks in his letter to Hogarth, his health gradually 
 declined. In the last year of his life, his reason gave 
 way; and when he died in 1759, it was as an inmate 
 of Charenton. 
 
THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND 
 THE RHYMER 
 
 H 
 
THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE 
 RHYMER 
 
 "Emam tua carmina sanus?" — Martial 
 
 F. OF H. I want a verse. It gives you little pains ; — 
 You just sit down, and draw upon your 
 
 brains. 
 Come, now, be amiable. 
 
 R. To hear you talk, 
 
 You'd make it easier to fly than walk. 
 You seem to think that rhyming is a thing 
 You can produce if you but touch a 
 
 spring; 
 That fancy, fervour, passion — and what 
 
 not, 
 Are just a case of "penny in the slot." 
 You should reflect that no evasive bird 
 Is half so shy as is your fittest word ; 
 And even similes, however wrought, 
 Like hares, before you cook them, must be 
 
 caught ; — 
 Impromptus, too, require elaboration, 
 67 
 
68 DE LIBRIS 
 
 And (unlike eggs) grow fresh by incuba- 
 tion; 
 Then, — as to epigrams . . . 
 
 F. of H. Nay, nay, I've done. 
 
 I did but make petition. You make fun. 
 
 R. Stay. I am grave. Forgive me if I 
 
 ramble : 
 But, then, a negative needs some preamble 
 To break the blow. I feel with you, in 
 
 truth, 
 These complex miseries of Age and Youth; 
 I feel with you — and none can feel it more 
 Than I — this burning Problem of the 
 
 Poor; 
 The Want that grinds, the Mystery of Pain, 
 The Hearts that sink, and never rise 
 
 again; — 
 How shall I set this to some careless screed, 
 Or jigging stave, when Help is what you 
 
 need, 
 Help, Help, — more Help? 
 
 F. OF H. I fancied that with ease 
 
 You'd scribble off some verses that might 
 
 please, 
 And so give help to us. 
 
 R. Why then — take these ! 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 
 
 «9 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 
 
 One of the things that perplexes the dreamer — for 
 in spite of the realists, there are dreamers still — is the 
 almost complete extinction of the early editions of 
 certain popular works. The pompous, respectable, 
 full-wigged folios, with their long lists of subscrib- 
 ers, and their magniloquent dedications, find their 
 permanent abiding-places in noblemen's collections, 
 where, unless — with the Chrysostom in Pope's verses — 
 they are used for the smoothing of bands or the press- 
 ing of flowers, no one ever disturbs their drowsy 
 diuturnity. Their bulk makes them sacred: like the 
 regimental big drum, they are too large to be mis- 
 laid. But where are all the first copies of that little 
 octavo of 246 pages, price eighteenpence, "Printed 
 by T. Maxey for Rich. Marriot, in S. Dunstans 
 Church-yard, Fleetstreet" in 1653, which constitutes 
 the editio princeps of Walton's Angler? Probably 
 they were worn out in the pockets of Honest Izaak's 
 "brothers of the Angle," or left to bake and cockle 
 in the sunny corners of wasp-haunted alehouse windows, 
 
 71 
 
72 DE LIBRIS 
 
 or dropped in the deep grass by some casual owner, 
 more careful for flies and caddis-worms, or possibly 
 for the contents of a leathern bottle, than all the 
 "choicely-good" madrigals of Maudlin the milkmaid. 
 In any case, there are very few of the little tomes, 
 with their quaint "coppers" of fishes, in existence 
 now, nor is it silver that pays for them. And that 
 other eighteenpenny book, put forth by "Nath. 
 Ponder at the Peacock in the Poultrey near Cornhil " 
 five and twenty years later, — The Pilgrim* s Progress 
 from This World, to That which is to come, — why is 
 it that there are only five known copies, none quite 
 perfect, now extant, of which the best sold not long 
 since for more than £1400? Of these five, the first 
 that came to light had been preserved owing to its 
 having taken sanctuary, almost upon publication, in 
 a great library, where it was forgotten. But the 
 others that passed over Mr. Ponder's counter in the 
 Poultry, — were they all lost, thumbed and dog's-eared 
 out of being? They are gone, — that is all you can 
 say; and gone apparently beyond reach of recovery. 
 These remarks, — which scarcely rise to the dignity 
 of reflections — have been suggested by the diffi- 
 culty which the writer has experienced in obtaining 
 particulars as to the earliest form of The Parentis 
 Assistant. As a matter of course, children's books 
 are more liable to disappear than any others. They 
 are sooner torn, soiled, dismembered, disintegrated — 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 73 
 
 sooner find their way to that mysterious unlocated 
 limbo of lost things, which engulfs so much. Yet 
 one scarcely expected that even the British Museum 
 would not have possessed a copy of the first issue of 
 Miss Edgeworth's book. Such, however, seems to 
 be the case. According to the catalogue, there is 
 nothing earlier at Bloomsbury than a portion of the 
 second edition; and from the inexplicit and conjectural 
 manner in which most of the author's biographers 
 speak of the work, it can scarcely — outside private 
 collections — be very easily accessible. Fortunately 
 the old Monthly Review for September, 1796, with 
 most exemplary forethought for posterity, gives, as a 
 heading to its notice, a precise and very categorical 
 account of the first impression. The Parent's Assist- 
 ant; or, Stories for Children was, it appears, published 
 in two parts, making three small duodecimo volumes. 
 The price, bound, was six shillings. There was no 
 author's name; but it was said to be "by E. M." (i.e. 
 Edgeworth, Maria) , and the publisher was Cowper's 
 Dissenter publisher, Joseph Johnson of No. 72, St. 
 Paul's Churchyard. Part I. contained "The Little 
 Dog Trusty; or, The Liar and the Boy of Truth"; 
 "The Orange Man; or, the Honest Boy and the 
 Thief"; "Lazy Lawrence"; "Tarleton"; and "The 
 False Key"; Part II., "The Purple Jar," "The 
 Bracelets," "Mademoiselle Panache," "The Birthday 
 Present," "Old Poz," and "The Mimic." In the 
 
74 DE LIBRIS 
 
 same year, 1796, a second edition apeared, appar- 
 ently with some supplementary stories, e.g. : "Barring 
 Out," and in 1800 came a third edition in six volumes. 
 In this the text was increased by "Simple Susan," 
 "The Little Merchants," "The Basket Woman," 
 "The White Pigeon," "The Orphans," "Waste 
 Not, Want Not," "Forgive and Forget," and 
 "Eton Montem." One story, "The Purple Jar" 
 at the beginning of Part II. of the first edition, 
 was withdrawn, and afterwards included in another 
 series, while the stories entitled respectively "Little 
 Dog Trusty" and "The Orange Man" have dis- 
 appeared from the collection, probably for the 
 reason given in one of the first prefaces, namely, that 
 they "were written for a much earlier age than any 
 of the others, and with such a perfect simplicity of 
 expression as, to many, may appear insipid and 
 ridiculous." The six volumes of the third edition 
 came out successively on the first day of the first six 
 months of 1800. The Monthly Reviewer of the 
 first edition, it may be added, was highly laudatory ; 
 and his commendations show that the early critics of 
 the author were fully alive to her distinctive qualities. 
 "The moral and prudential lessons of these volumes," 
 says the writer, "are judiciously chosen; and the 
 stories are invented with great ingenuity, and are 
 happily contrived to excite curiosity and awaken 
 feeling without the aid of improbable fiction or 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 75 
 
 extravagant adventure. The language is varied in 
 its degree of simplicity, to suit the pieces to different 
 ages, but is throughout neat and correct; and, with- 
 out the least approach towards vulgarity or meanness, 
 it is adapted with peculiar felicity to the understand- 
 ings of children. The author's taste, in this class of 
 writing, appears to have been formed on the best 
 models; and the work will not discredit a place on 
 the same shelf with Berquin's Child* s Friend, Mrs. 
 Barbauld's Lessons for Children, and Dr. Aikin's 
 Evenings at Home. The story of 'Lazy Lawrence' " 
 — the notice goes on — "is one of the best lectures on 
 industry which we have ever read." The Critical Re- 
 view, which also gave a short account of the Parent's 
 Assistant in its number for January 1797, does not 
 rehearse the contents. But it confirms the title, etc., 
 adding that the price, in boards, was 4s. 6d. ; and its 
 praise, though brief, is very much to the point. 
 "The present production is particularly sensible and 
 judicious; the stories are well written, simple, and 
 affecting; calculated, not only for moral improve- 
 ment, but to exercise the best affections of the human 
 heart. ,, 
 
 With one of the books mentioned by the Monthly 
 Review — Evenings at Home — Miss Edgeworth was 
 fully prepared, at all events as regards format, to 
 associate herself. "The stories," she says in a letter 
 to her cousin, Miss Sophy Ruxton, "are printed and 
 
fj6 DE LIBRIS 
 
 bound the same size as Evenings at Home, and I am 
 afraid you will dislike the title." Her father had sent 
 the book to press as the Parent's Friend, a name no 
 doubt suggested by the Ami des Enfants of Berquin; 
 but "Mr. Johnson [the publisher]," continues Miss 
 Edgeworth, "has degraded it into The Parent's 
 Assistant, which I dislike particularly, from association 
 with an old book of arithmetic called The Tutor's 
 Assistant." The ground of objection is not very 
 formidable ; but the Parent's Assistant is certainly an 
 infelicitous name. From some other of the author's 
 letters we are able to trace the gradual growth of the 
 work. Mr. Edgeworth, her father, an utilitarian of 
 much restless energy, and many projects, was greatly 
 interested in education, — or,as he would have termed 
 it, practical education, — and long before this date, 
 as early, indeed, as May 1780, he had desired his 
 daughter, while she was still a girl at a London school, 
 to write him a tale about the length of a Spectator, 
 upon the topic of "Generosity," to be taken from 
 history or romance. This was her first essay in 
 fiction ; and it was pronounced by the judge to whom 
 it was submitted, — in competition with a rival pro- 
 duction by a young gentleman from Oxford, — to 
 be an excellent story, and extremely well-written, 
 although with this commendation was coupled the 
 somewhat damaging inquiry, — "But where's the 
 Generosity?" The question cannot be answered 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 77 
 
 now, as the manuscript has not been preserved, 
 though the inconvenient query, we are told, became 
 a kind of personal proverb with the young author, 
 who was wont to add that this first effort contained "a 
 sentence of inextricable confusion between a saddle, a 
 man, and his horse. 1 ' This was a defect from which 
 she must have speedily freed herself, since her style, 
 as her first reviewer allowed, is conspicuously direct 
 and clear. Accuracy in speaking and writing had, 
 indeed, been early impressed upon her. Her father's 
 doctrinaire ally and co-disciplinarian, Mr. Thomas 
 Day, later the author of Sandford and Merton, and 
 apparently the first person of whom it is affirmed that 
 "he talked like a book," had been indefatigable in 
 bringing this home to his young friend, when she 
 visited him in her London school-days. Not content 
 alone to dose her copiously with Bishop Berkeley's 
 Tar Water — the chosen beverage of Young and 
 Richardson — he was unwearied in ministering to her 
 understanding. "His severe reasoning and uncom- 
 promising love of truth awakened her powers, and 
 the questions he put to her, the necessity of perfect 
 accuracy in her answers, suited the bent of her mind. 
 Though such strictness was not always agreeable, she 
 even then perceived its advantages, and in after life 
 was deeply grateful to Mr. Day." 1 
 
 The training she underwent from the inexorable 
 
 1 Maria Edgeworth, by Helen Zimmern, 1888, p. 13. 
 
78 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Mr. Day was continued by her father when she 
 quitted school, and moved with her family to the 
 parental seat at Edge worth stown in Ireland. Mr. 
 Edgeworth, whose principles were as rigorous as 
 those of his friend, devoted himself early to initiating 
 her into business habits. He taught her to copy 
 letters, to keep accounts, to receive rents, and, in short, 
 to act as his agent and factotum. She frequently 
 accompanied him in the many disputes and diffi- 
 culties which arose with his Irish tenantry; and 
 apart from the insight which this must have afforded 
 her into the character and idiosyncrasies of the 
 people, she no doubt very early acquired that exact 
 knowledge of leases and legacies and dishonest 
 factors which is a noticeable feature even of her 
 children's books. 1 It is some time, however, before 
 we hear of any successor to "Generosity"; but, 
 in 1782, her father, with a view to provide her 
 with an occupation for her leisure, proposed to her 
 to prepare a translation of the Adele et Theodore of 
 Madame de Genlis, those letters upon education 
 by which that gentle and multifarious moralist 
 acquired — to use her own words — at once "the 
 suffrages of the public, and the irreconcilable hatred 
 of all the so-called philosophers and their partisans." 
 At first there had been no definite thought of 
 print in Mr. Edgeworth's mind. But as the work 
 
 1 Cf. "Attorney Case" in the story of "Simple Susan." 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 79 
 
 progressed, the idea gathered strength; and he 
 began to prepare his daughter's manuscript for the 
 press. Then, unhappily, when the first volume was 
 finished, HolcrofVs complete translation appeared, 
 and made the labour needless. Yet it was not 
 without profit. It had been excellent practice in 
 aiding Miss Edgeworth's faculty of expression, 
 and increasing her vocabulary — to say nothing of 
 the influence which the portraiture of individuals 
 and the satire of reigning follies which are the 
 secondary characteristics of Madame de Genlis's most 
 well-known work, may have had on her own subse- 
 quent efforts as a novelist. Meanwhile her mentor, 
 Mr. Day, was delighted at the interruption of her 
 task. He possessed, to the full, that rooted antipathy 
 to feminine authorship of which we find so many 
 traces in Miss Burney's novels and elsewhere; 
 and he wrote to congratulate Mr. Edgeworth on 
 having escaped the disgrace of having a translating 
 daughter. At this time, as already stated, he him- 
 self had not become the author of Sand ford and 
 Merton, which, as a matter of fact, owed its inception 
 to the Edgeworths, being at first simply intended 
 as a short story to be inserted in the Harry and 
 Lucy Mr. Edgeworth wrote in conjunction with 
 his second wife, Honora Sneyd. As regards the 
 question of publication, both Maria and her father, 
 although sensible of Mr. Day's prejudices, appear 
 
80 DE LIBRIS 
 
 to have deferred to his arguments. Nor were these 
 even lost to the public, for we are informed that, 
 in Miss Edgeworth's first book, ten years later, 
 the Letters to Literary Ladies, she employed and 
 embodied much that he had advanced. But for the 
 present, she continued to write — though solely for 
 her private amusement — essays, little stories, and 
 dramatic sketches. One 'of these last must have 
 been "Old Poz," a pleasant study of a country 
 justice and a gazza ladra, which appeared in Par f II. 
 of the first issue of the Parent's Assistant, and which, 
 we are told, was acted by the Edgeworth children in 
 a little theatre erected in the dining-room for the 
 purpose. According to her sisters, it was Miss Edge- 
 worth's practice first to write her stories on a slate, and 
 then to read them out. If they were approved, she 
 transcribed them fairly. "Her writing for children" 
 — says one of her biographers — "was a natural out- 
 growth of a practical study of their wants and 
 fancies; and her constant care of the younger 
 children gave her exactly the opportunity required 
 to observe the development of mind incident to the 
 age and capacity of several little brothers and sisters." 
 According to her own account, her first critic was 
 her father. "Whenever I thought of writing any- 
 thing, I always told him [my father] my first rough 
 plans; and always, with the instinct of a good critic, 
 he used to fix immediately upon that which would 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 81 
 
 best answer the purpose. — 'Sketch that, and shew it 
 to me* — These words, from the experience of his 
 sagacity, never failed to inspire me with hope of 
 success. It was then sketched. Sometimes, when 
 I was fond of a particular part, I used to dilate on 
 it in the sketch; but to this he always objected — 'I 
 don't want any of your painting — none of your 
 drapery! — I can imagine all that — let me see the 
 bare skeleton.' " 
 
 Of the first issue of the Parent's Assistant in 1796, 
 a sufficient account has already been given. In the 
 "Preface" the practical intention of several of the 
 stories is explicitly set forth. "Lazy Lawrence," we 
 are told, illustrates the advantages of industry, and 
 demonstrates that people feel cheerful and happy 
 whilst they are employed; while "Tarleton" repre- 
 sents "the danger and the folly of that weakness of 
 mind, and that easiness to be led, which too often 
 pass for good nature"; "The False Key" points 
 out some of the evils to which a well-educated 
 boy, on first going to service, is exposed from the 
 profligacy of his fellow-servants; "The Mimic," 
 me drawback of vulgar acquaintances; "Barring 
 Out," the errors to which a high spirit and the love 
 of party are apt to lead, and so forth. In the final 
 paragraph stress is laid upon what every fresh reader 
 must at once recognise as the supreme merit of the 
 stories, namely, their dramatic faculty, or (in the 
 
82 DE LIBRIS 
 
 actual words of the "Preface"), their art of "keeping 
 alive hope and fear and curiosity, by some degree 
 of intricacy." 1 The plausibility of invention, the 
 amount of ingenious contrivance and of clever 
 expedient in these professedly nursery stories, is 
 indeed extraordinary; and nothing can exceed the 
 dexterity with which — to use Dr. Johnson's words 
 concerning She Stoops to Conquer — "the incidents 
 are so prepared as not to seem improbable." There 
 is no better example of this than the admirable 
 tale of "The Mimic," in which the most unlooked- 
 for occurrences succeed each other in the most 
 natural way, while the disappearance at the end of 
 the little sweep, who has levanted up the chimney 
 in Frederick's new blue coat and buff waistcoat, is 
 a master-stroke. Everybody has forgotten every- 
 thing about him until the precise moment when he 
 is needed to supply the fitting surprise of the finish, 
 — a surprise which is only to be compared to that 
 other revelation in The Rose and the Ring of 
 Thackeray, where the long-lost and obnoxious porter 
 at Valoroso's palace, having been turned by the Fairy 
 Blackstick into a door knocker for his insolence, 
 is restored to the sorrowing Servants' Hall exactly 
 when his services are again required in the capacity 
 of Mrs. Gruffanuff's husband. But in Miss Edge- 
 
 J The "Preface to Parents" — Miss Emily Lawless suggests to me — was 
 probably by Mr. Edgeworth. 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 83 
 
 worth's little fable there is no fairy agency. "Fairies 
 were not much in her line," says Lady Ritchie, 
 Thackeray's daughter, u but philanthropic manu- 
 facturers, liberal noblemen, and benevolent ladies 
 in travelling carriages, do as well and appear in 
 the nick of time to distribute rewards or to point 
 a moral." 
 
 Although, by their sub-title, these stories are 
 avowedly composed for children, they are almost 
 as attractive to grown-up readers. This is partly 
 owing to their narrative skill, partly also to the 
 clear characterisation, which already betrays the 
 coming author of Castle Rackrent and Belinda and 
 Patronage — the last, under its first name of The Free- 
 man Family, being already partly written, although 
 many years were still to pass before it saw the light 
 in 1 8 14. Readers, wise after the event, might fairly 
 claim to have foreseen from some of the personages 
 in the Parent's Assistant that the author, however 
 sedulous to describe "such situations only . . as 
 children can easily imagine," was not able entirely to 
 resist tempting specimens of human nature like the 
 bibulous Mr. Corkscrew, the burglar butler in "The 
 False Key," or Mrs. Pomfret, the housekeeper of the 
 same story, whose prejudices against the Villaintropic 
 Society, and its unholy dealing with the "drugs and 
 refuges" of humanity, are quite in the style of the 
 Mrs. Slipslop of a great artist whose works one would 
 
84 DE LIBRIS 
 
 scarcely have expected to encounter among the 
 paper-backed and grey-boarded volumes which lined 
 the shelves at Edgeworthstown. Mrs. Theresa 
 Tattle, again, in "The Mimic," is a type which 
 requires but little to fit it for a subordinate part in 
 a novel, as is also Lady Diana Sweepstakes in "Waste 
 not, Want not." In more than one case, we seem 
 to detect an actual portrait. Mr. Somerville of 
 Somerville ("The White Pigeon"), to whom that 
 "little town" belonged, — who had done so much 
 "to inspire his tenantry with a taste for order and 
 domestic happiness, and took every means in his 
 power to encourage industrious, well-behaved people 
 to settle in his neighbourhood," — can certainly be 
 none other than the father of the writer of the 
 Parent's Assistant, the busy and beneficent, but 
 surely eccentric, Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown. 
 When, in 1849, tne & rst tw0 volumes of 
 Macaulay's History were issued, Miss Edgeworth, 
 then in her eighty-third winter, was greatly delighted 
 to find her name, coupled with a compliment to one 
 of her characters, enshrined in a note to chap. vi. 
 But her gratification was qualified by the fact that 
 she could discover no similar reference to her friend, 
 Sir Walter Scott. The generous "twinge of pain," 
 to which she confesses, was intelligible. Scott had 
 always admired her genius, and she admired his. In 
 the "General Preface" to the Waverley Novels, 
 
THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT 85 
 
 twenty years before, he had gone so far as to say 
 that, without hoping to emulate "the rich humour, 
 pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact" of Miss 
 Edgeworth, he had attempted to do for his own 
 country what she had done for hers; and it is clear, 
 from other sources, that this was no mere form of 
 words. And he never wavered in his admiration. 
 In his last years, not many months before his death, 
 when he had almost forgotten her name, he was still 
 talking kindly of her work. Speaking to Mrs. John 
 Davy of Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier, he said: 
 "And there's that Irish lady, too — but I forget 
 everybody's name now" . . . "she's very clever, 
 ''lid best in the little touches too. I'm sure in that 
 children's story, where the little girl parts with her 
 lamb, and the little boy brings it back to her again, 
 there's nothing for it but just to put down the book 
 and cry." 1 The reference is to "Simple Susan," 
 the longest and prettiest tale in the Parents 
 Assistant. 
 
 Another anecdote pleasantly connects the same 
 book with a popular work of a later writer. 
 Readers of Cranford will recall the feud between the 
 Johnson-loving Miss Jenkyns of that story and its 
 Pickwick-loving Captain Brown. The Captain — as 
 is well-known — met his death by a railway accident, 
 just after he had been studying the last monthly 
 
 1 Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, ch. lxxxi. ad finem. 
 
86 DE LIBRIS 
 
 "green covers" of Dickens. Years later, the 
 assumed narrator of Cranford visits Miss Jenkyns, 
 then falling into senility. She still vaunts The 
 Rambler; still maunders vaguely of the "strange 
 old book, with the queer name, poor Captain Brown 
 was killed for reading — that book by Mr. Boz, you 
 know — Old Poz; when I was a girl — but that's a 
 long time ago — I acted Lucy in Old Poz." There 
 can be no mistake. Lucy is the justice's daughter 
 ^ in Miss Edgeworth's little chamber-drama. 
 
A PLEASANT INVECTIVE AGAINST 
 PRINTING 
 
 87 
 
A PLEASANT INVECTIVE AGAINST 
 PRINTING 
 
 "Flee fro the Prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse." — 
 
 Chaucer, Balade de Bon Conseil 
 
 The Press is too much with us, small and great : 
 
 We are undone of chatter and on dit, 
 
 Report, retort, rejoinder, repartee, 
 
 Mole-hill and mare's nest, fiction up-to-date, 
 
 Babble of booklets, bicker of debate, 
 
 Aspect of A., and attitude of B. — 
 
 A waste of words that drive us like a sea, 
 
 Mere derelict of Ourselves, and helpless freight ! 
 
 "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness !" 
 Some region unapproachable of Print, 
 Where never cablegram could gain access, 
 And telephones were not, nor any hint 
 Of tidings new or old, but Man might pipe 
 His soul to Nature, — careless of the Type ! 
 
 89 
 
TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 
 

 5 4/ - 
 
 GROUP OF CHILDREN, FOR "THE LIBRARY." 
 (From the original pen-drawingj 
 
TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 
 
 I. Kate Greenaway 
 
 In the world of pictorial recollection there are many 
 territories, the natives of which you may recognise 
 by their characteristics as surely as Ophelia recognises 
 her true-love by his cockle-hat and sandal shoon. 
 There is the land of grave gestures and courteous 
 inclinations, of dignified leave-takings and decorous 
 greetings; where the ladies (like Richardson's 
 Pamela) don the most charming round-eared caps 
 and frilled negliges; where the gentlemen sport 
 ruffles and bag-wigs and spotless silk stockings, and 
 invariably exhibit shapely calves above their silver 
 shoe-buckles; where you may come in St. James's 
 Park upon a portly personage with a star, taking an 
 alfresco pinch of snuff after that leisurely style in 
 which a pinch of snuff should be taken, so as not to 
 endanger a lace cravat or a canary-coloured vest; 
 where you may seat yourself on a bench by 
 Rosamond's Pond in company with a tremulous 
 mask who is evidently expecting the arrival of a 
 
 93 
 
94 DE LIBRIS 
 
 "pretty fellow"; or happen suddenly, in a secluded 
 side-walk, upon a damsel in muslin and a dark hat, 
 who is hurriedly scrawling a poulet, not without 
 obvious signs of perturbation. But whatever the 
 denizens of this country are doing, they are always 
 elegant and always graceful, always appropriately 
 grouped against their fitting background of high- 
 ceiled rooms and striped hangings, or among the 
 urns and fish-tanks of their sombre-shrubbed gardens. 
 This is the land of Stothard. 
 
 In the adjoining country there is a larger sense 
 of colour — a fuller pulse of life. This is the 
 region of delightful dogs and horses and domestic 
 animals of all sorts; of crimson-faced hosts and 
 buxom ale-wives; of the most winsome and black- 
 eyed milkmaids and the most devoted lovers and 
 their lasses; of the most headlong and horn-blowing 
 huntsmen — a land where Madam Blaize forgathers 
 with the impeccable worthy who caused the death 
 of the Mad Dog; where John Gilpin takes the 
 Babes in the Wood en croupe \ and the bewitchingest 
 Queen of Hearts coquets the Great Panjandrum 
 himself "with the little round button at top" — a 
 land, in short, of the most kindly and light-hearted 
 fancies, of the freshest and breeziest and healthiest 
 types — which is the land of Caldecott. 
 
 Finally, there is a third country, a country 
 inhabited almost exclusively by the sweetest little 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 95 
 
 child-figures that have ever been invented, in the 
 quaintest and prettiest costumes, always happy, 
 always gravely playful, — and nearly always playing; 
 always set in the most attractive framework of 
 flower-knots, or blossoming orchards, or red-roofed 
 cottages with dormer windows. Everywhere there 
 are green fields, and daisies, and daffodils, and pearly 
 skies of spring, in which a kite is often flying. No 
 children are quite like the dwellers in this land; 
 they are so gentle, so unaffected in their affectation, 
 so easily pleased, so trustful and so confiding. And 
 this is GREENAWAY-land. 
 
 It is sixty years since Thomas Stothard died, and 
 only fifteen since Randolph Caldecott closed his too 
 brief career. 1 And now Kate Greenaway, who loved 
 the art of both, and in her own gentle way possessed 
 something of the qualities of each, has herself passed 
 away. It will rest with other pens to record her 
 personal characteristics, and to relate the story of 
 her life. I who write this was privileged to know 
 her a little, and to receive from her frequent presents 
 of her books; but I should shrink from anything 
 approaching a description of the quiet, unpretentious, 
 almost homely little lady, whom it was always a 
 pleasure to meet and to talk with. If I here permit 
 myself to recall one or two incidents of our inter- 
 course, it is solely because they bear either upon 
 
 , ' This was written in 1902. 
 
96 DE LIBRIS 
 
 her amiable dispositon or her art. I remember that 
 once, during a country walk in Sussex, she gave me 
 a long account of her childhood, which I wish I 
 could repeat in detail. But I know that she told me 
 that she had been brought up in just such a neigh- 
 bourhood of thatched roofs and "grey old gardens" 
 as she depicts in her drawings; and that in some of 
 the houses, it was her particular and unfailing delight 
 to turn over ancient chests and wardrobes filled with 
 the flowered frocks and capes of the Jane Austen 
 period. As is well known, she corresponded fre- 
 quently with Ruskin, and possessed numbers of his 
 letters. In his latter years, it had been her practice 
 to write to him periodically — I believe she said once 
 a week. He had long ceased, probably from ill- 
 health, to answer her letters; but she continued to 
 write punctually lest he should miss the little budget 
 of chit-chat to which he had grown accustomed. At 
 another time — in a pleasant country-house which 
 contained many examples of her art — and where she 
 was putting the last touches to a delicately tinted 
 child-angel in the margin of a Bible — I ventured to 
 say, "Why do your children always . . .?" But 
 it is needless to complete the query; the answer 
 alone is important. She looked at me reflectively, 
 and said, after a pause, "Because I see it so." 
 
 Answers not dissimilar have been given before 
 by other artists in like case. But it was this rigid 
 
PENCIL-SKETCHES BY MISS GREEN AWAY (NO. i) 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 97 
 
 fidelity to her individual vision and personal con- 
 viction which constituted her strength. There are 
 always stupid, well-meaning busybodies in the world, 
 who go about making question of the sonneteer why 
 he does not attempt something epic and homicidal, 
 or worrying the carver of cherry-stones to try his 
 hand at a Colossus; but though they disturb and 
 discompose, they luckily do no material harm. They 
 did no material harm to Kate Greenaway. She 
 yielded, no doubt, to pressure put upon her to try 
 figures on a larger scale; to illustrate books, which 
 was not her strong point, as it only put fetters upon 
 her fancy; but, in the main, she courageously pre- 
 served the even tenor of her way, which was to 
 people the artistic demesne she administered with 
 the tiny figures which no one else could make more 
 captivating, or clothe more adroitly. It may be 
 doubted whether the collector will set much store 
 by Bret Harte's Queen of the Pirate Isle or the Pied 
 Piper of Hamelin, suitable at first sight as is the 
 latter, with its child-element, to her inventive 
 idiosyncrasy. But he will revel in the dainty scenes 
 of "Almanacks" (1883 to 1895, anc * 1897) ; in the 
 charming Birthday Book of 1880; in Mother Goose, 
 A Day in a Child's Life, Little Ann, Marigold Garden 
 and the rest, of which the grace is perennial, though 
 the popularity for the moment may have waned. 
 
98 DE LIBRIS 
 
 I have an idea that Mother Goose; or, the Old 
 Nursery Rhymes, 1881, was one of Miss Greenaway's 
 favourites, although it may have been displaced in 
 her own mind by subsequent successes. Nothing 
 can certainly be more deftly-tinted than the design of 
 the "old woman who lived under a Hill," and peeled 
 apples; nothing more seductive, in infantile attitude, 
 than the little boy and girl, who, with their arms 
 around each other, stand watching the black-cat in 
 the plum-tree. Then there is Daffy-down-dilly, who 
 has come up to town, with u a yellow petticoat and a 
 green gown," in which attire, aided by a straw hat 
 tied under her chin, she manages to look exceedingly 
 attractive, as she passes in front of the white house 
 with the pink roof and the red shutters and the green 
 palings. One of the most beautiful pictures in this 
 gallery is the dear little "Ten-o'-clock Scholar" in 
 his worked smock, as, trailing his blue-and-white 
 school-bag behind him, he creeps unwillingly to his 
 lessons at the most picturesque timbered cottage you 
 can imagine. Another absolutely delightful portrait 
 is that of "Little Tom Tucker," in sky-blue suit and 
 frilled collar, singing, with his hands behind him, as 
 if he never could grow old. And there is not one of 
 these little compositions that is without its charm of 
 colour and accessory — blue plates on the dresser in 
 the background, the parterres of a formal garden 
 with old-fashioned flowers, quaint dwellings with 
 
U 6 ArVY*<" 
 
 1 ■* 1 ilr^ 
 
 PENCIL-SKETCH BY MISS GREENAWAY ( NO. 2). 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 99 
 
 their gates and grass-work, odd corners of country- 
 side and village street, and all, generally, in the clear 
 air or sunlight. For in this favoured Greenaway- 
 realm, as in the island-valley of Avilion, there 
 
 falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
 Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns. 
 
 To Mother Goose followed A Day in a Child! s 
 Life, also 1881, and Little Ann, 1883. The former 
 of these contained various songs set to music by 
 Mr. Myles B. Foster, the organist of the Foundling 
 Hospital, and accompanied by designs on rather a 
 larger scale than those in Mother Goose. It also 
 included a larger proportion of the floral decorations 
 which were among the artist's chief gifts. Foxgloves 
 and buttercups, tulips and roses, are flung about the 
 pages of the book; and there are many pictures, 
 notably one of a little green-coated figure perched 
 upon a five-barred gate, which repeat the triumphs 
 of its predecessor. In Little Ann and other Poems, 
 which is dedicated to the four children of the artist's 
 friend, the late Frederick Locker Lampson, she 
 illustrated a selection from the verses for "Infant 
 Minds" of Jane and Ann Taylor, daughters of that 
 Isaac Taylor of Ongar, who was first a line engraver 
 and afterwards an Independent Minister. 1 The 
 
 1 Since this paper was written, the Original Poems and Others, of Ann 
 and Jane Taylor, with illustrations by F. D. Bedford, and a most interesting 
 "Introduction" by Mr. E. V. Lucas, have been issued by Messrs. Wells, 
 Gardner, Darton and Co. 
 
ioo DE LIBRIS 
 
 dedication contains a charming row of tiny portraits 
 of the Locker Lampson family. These illustrations 
 may seem to contradict what has been said as to Miss 
 Greenaway's ability to interpret the conceptions of 
 others. But this particular task left her perfectly 
 free to "go her own gait," and to embroider the text 
 which, in this case, was little more than a pretext for 
 her pencil. 
 
 In Marigold Garden, 1885, Miss Greenaway 
 became her own poet; and next to Mother Goose, 
 this is probably her most important effort. The 
 flowers are as entrancing as ever; and the verse 
 makes one wish that the writer had written more. 
 The "Genteel Family" and "Little Phillis" are 
 excellent nursery pieces; and there is almost a Blake- 
 like note about "The Sun Door." 
 
 They saw it rise in the morning, 
 They saw it set at night, 
 
 And they longed to go and see it, 
 Ah ! if they only might. 
 
 The little soft white clouds heard them, 
 And stepped from out of the blue; 
 
 And each laid a little child softly 
 Upon its bosom of dew. 
 
 And they carried them higher and higher, 
 And they nothing knew any more, 
 
 Until they were standing waiting, 
 In front of the round gold door. 
 

 jWfJ/i./ SKIS* 
 Hi. ■ ■ - ■ =sf$szS$ j K 
 
 til ^ 
 
 "-y, ! Aii^~~^— -■-/ \'x .1 -' 
 
 
 ^%^S^ 
 
 PENCIL-SKETCHES BY MISS GREENAWAY ( NO. 3). 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 101 
 
 And they knocked, and called, and entreated 
 
 Whoever should be within; 
 But all to no purpose, for no one 
 
 Would hearken to let them in. 
 
 "La rime n'est pas riche," nor is the technique 
 thoroughly assured; but the thought is poetical. 
 Here is another, "In an Apple-Tree," which reads 
 like a child variation of that haunting "Mimnermus 
 in Church" of the author of Ionica : — 
 
 In September, when the apples are red, 
 
 To Belinda I said, 
 
 "Would you like to go away 
 
 To Heaven, or stay 
 
 Here in this orchard full of trees 
 
 All your life?" And she said, "If you please 
 
 I'll stay here — where I know, 
 
 And the flowers grow." 
 
 In another vein is the bright little "Child's 
 Song" :— 
 
 The King and the Queen were riding 
 
 Upon a Summer's day, 
 And a Blackbird flew above them, 
 
 To hear what they did say. 
 
 The King said he liked apples, 
 
 The Queen said she liked pears; 
 And what shall we do to the Blackbird 
 
 Who listens unawares? 
 
 But, as a rule, it must be admitted of her poetry 
 that, while nearly always poetic in its impulse, it is 
 often halting and inarticulate in its expression. 
 
102 DE LIBRIS 
 
 A few words may be added in regard to the mere 
 facts of Miss Greenaway's career. She was born at 
 i Cavendish Street, Hoxton, on the 17th March, 1 846, 
 her father being Mr. John Greenaway, a draughts- 
 man on wood, who contributed much to the earlier 
 issues of the Illustrated London News and Punch. 
 Annual visits to a farm-house at Rolleston in 
 Nottinghamshire — the country residence already re- 
 ferred to — nourished and confirmed her love of 
 nature. Very early she showed a distinct bias towards 
 colour and design of an original kind. She studied 
 at different places, and at South Kensington. Here 
 both she and Lady Butler "would bribe the porter 
 to lock them in when the day's work was done, so 
 that they might labour on for some while more." 
 Her master at Kensington was Richard Burchett, 
 who, forty years ago, was a prominent figure in the 
 art-schools, a well instructed painter, and a teacher 
 exceptionally equipped with all the learning of his 
 craft. Mr. Burchett thought highly of Miss Green- 
 away's abilities; and she worked under him for sev- 
 eral years with exemplary perseverance and industry. 
 She subsequently studied in the Slade School under 
 Professor Legros. 
 
 Her first essays in the way of design took the 
 form of Christmas cards, then beginning their now 
 somewhat flagging career, and she exhibited pictures 
 at the Dudley Gallery for some years in succession, 
 

 ft )-L 
 
 --x^^ci/^^rr^ ^ 
 
 d* 
 
 PENCIL-SKETCH BY MISS GREENAWAY (NO. 4), 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 103 
 
 beginning with 1868. In 1877 she contributed 
 to the Royal Academy a water colour entitled 
 "Musing," and in 1889 was elected a member of 
 the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. 
 
 By this date, as will be gathered from what has 
 preceded, Miss Greenaway had made her mark as a 
 producer of children's books, since, in addition to 
 the volumes already specially mentioned, she had 
 issued Under the Window (her earliest success), The 
 Language of Flowers, Kate Greenaway' s Painting 
 Book, The Book of Games, King Pepito and other 
 works. Her last "Almanack," which was published 
 by Messrs. Dent and Co., appeared in 1897. In 
 1 89 1, the Fine Arts Society exhibited some 150 
 of her original drawings — an exhibition which was 
 deservedly successful, and was followed by others. 1 
 As Slade Professor at Oxford, Ruskin, always her 
 fervent admirer, gave her unstinted eulogium; 
 and in France her designs aroused the greatest 
 admiration. The Debats had a leading article on 
 her death; and the clever author of U Art du 
 Rire, M. Arsene Alexandre, who had already written 
 appreciatively of her gifts as a pays agist e," and as 
 a "maitresse en Vart du sourire, du joli sourire 
 
 1 Among other things these exhibitions revealed the great superiority of 
 the original designs to the reproductions with which the public are familiar 
 — excellent as these are in their way. Probably, if Miss Greenaway's 
 work were now repeated by the latest form of three-colour process, she 
 would be less an "inheritor" — in this respect — "of unfulfilled renown." 
 
io 4 DE LIBRIS 
 
 d'enfant ingenu et gaiement candide" devoted a 
 column in the Figaro to her merits. 
 
 It has been noted that, in her later years, Miss 
 Greenaway's popularity was scarcely maintained. It 
 would perhaps be more exact to say that it some- 
 what fell off with the fickle crowd who follow a 
 reigning fashion, and who unfortunately help to 
 swell the units of a paying community. To the 
 last she gave of her best; but it is the misfortune 
 of distinctive and original work, that, while the 
 public resents versatility in its favourites, it wearies 
 unreasonably of what had pleased it at first — 
 especially if the note be made tedious by imitation. 
 Miss Greenaway's old vogue was in some measure 
 revived by her too-early death on the 6th November, 
 1 901; but, in any case, she is sure of attention 
 from the connoisseur of the future. Those who 
 collect Stothard and Caldecott (and they are many!) 
 cannot afford to neglect either Marigold Garden or 
 Mother Goose. 1 
 
 1 Since the above article appeared in the Art Journal, from which it is 
 here substantially reproduced, Messrs. M. H. Spielmann and G. S. Layard 
 have (1905) devoted a sumptuous and exhaustive volume to Miss Green- 
 away and her art. To this truly beautiful and sympathetic book I can but 
 refer those of her admirers who are not yet acquainted with it. 
 
A SONG OF THE GREENAWAY CHILD 
 
 ios 
 
A SONG OF THE GREENAWAY CHILD 
 
 As I went a-walking on Lavender Hill, 
 
 O, I met a Darling in frock and frill ; 
 
 And she looked at me shyly, with eyes of blue, 
 
 "Are you going a-walking? Then take me too!" 
 
 So we strolled to the field where the cowslips grow, 
 And we played — and we played, for an hour or so; 
 Then we climbed to the top of the old park wall, 
 And the Darling she threaded a cowslip ball. 
 
 Then we played again, till I said — "My Dear, 
 This pain in my side, it has grown severe; 
 I ought to have mentioned I'm past three-score, 
 And I fear that I scarcely can play any more !" 
 
 But the Darling she answered, — "O no ! O no ! 
 You must play — you must play. — 1 shaVt let you 
 
 go! 
 — And I woke with a start and a sigh of despair, 
 And I found myself safe in my Grandfather's-chair ! 
 
 107 
 
TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 
 
 109 
 
THE BROWN BOOK-PLATE. 
 ("From the original design.) 
 
TWO MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 
 
 II. Mr. Hugh Thomson 
 
 In virtue of certain gentle and caressing qualities of 
 style, Douglas Jerrold conferred on one of his con- 
 tributors — Miss Eliza Meteyard — the pseudonym 
 of "Silverpen." It is in the silver-pensive key 
 that one would wish to write of Mr. Hugh 
 Thomson. There is nothing in his work of 
 elemental strife, — of social problem, — of passion 
 torn to tatters. He leads you by no terribile via, 
 — over no "burning Marie." You cannot conceive 
 him as the illustrator of Paradise Lost, of Dante's 
 Inferno — even of Dore's Wandering Jew. But 
 when, after turning over some dozens of his 
 designs, you take stock of your impressions, you 
 discover that your memory is packed with pleasant 
 fancies. You have been among "blown fields" and 
 "flowerful closes"; you have passed quaint road- 
 side-inns and picturesque cottages; you are familiar 
 
 with the cheery, ever-changing idyll of the highway 
 
 zxz 
 
U2 DE LIBRIS 
 
 and the bustle of animal life; with horses that 
 really gallop, and dogs that really bark; with 
 charming male and female figures in the most 
 attractive old-world attire; with happy laughter 
 and artless waggeries; with a hundred intimate 
 details of English domesticity that are pushed just 
 far enough back to lose the hardness of their 
 outline in a softening haze of retrospect. There 
 has been nothing more tragic in your travels than 
 a sprained ankle or an interrupted affair of honour; 
 nothing more blood-curdling than a dream of a 
 dragoon officer knocked out of his saddle by a 
 brickbat. Your flesh has never been made to creep : 
 but the cockles of your heart have been warmed. 
 Mechanically, you raise your hand to lift away 
 your optimistic spectacles. But they are not there. 
 The optimism is in the pictures. 
 
 It must be more than a quarter of a century since 
 Mr. Hugh Thomson, arriving from Coleraine in all 
 the ardour of one-and-twenty, invaded the strong- 
 holds of English illustration. He came at a fortunate 
 moment. After a few hesitating and tentative 
 attempts upon the newspapers, he obtained an 
 introduction to Mr. Comyns Carr, then engaged in 
 establishing the English Illustrated Magazine for 
 Messrs. Macmillan. His recommendation was a 
 scrap-book of minutely elaborated designs for Vanity 
 Fair, which he had done (like Reynolds) "out of 
 
h 
 
 It 
 
 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 113 
 
 pure idleness." Mr. Carr, then, as always, a dis- 
 criminating critic, with a keen eye to possibilities, 
 was not slow to detect, among much artistic recollec- 
 tion, something more than uncertain promise; and 
 although he had already Randolph Caldecott and 
 Mr. Harry Furniss on his staff, he at once gave 
 Mr. Thomson a commission for the magazine. The 
 earliest picture from his hand which appeared was 
 a fancy representation of the Parade at Bath for a 
 paper in June, 1884, by the late H. D. Traill; and 
 he also illustrated (in part) papers on Drawing Room 
 Dances, on Cricket (by Mr. Andrew Lang), and on 
 Covent Garden. But graphic and vividly naturalistic 
 as were his pictures of modern life, his native bias 
 towards imaginary eighteenth-century subjects (per- 
 haps prompted by boyish studies of Hogarth in the 
 old Dublin Penny Magazine) , was already abundantly 
 manifest. He promptly drifted into what was 
 eventually to become his first illustrated book, a 
 series of compositions from the Spectator. These 
 were published in 1886 as a little quarto, entitled 
 Days with Sir Roger de Cover ley. 
 
 It was a "temerarious" task to attempt to revive 
 the types which, from the days of Harrison's Essay- 
 ists, had occupied so many of the earlier illustrators. 
 But the attempt was fully justified by its success. 
 One has but to glance at the head-piece to the first 
 paper, where Sir Roger and "Mr. Spectator" have 
 
U4 E>E LIBRIS 
 
 alighted from the jolting, springless, heavy-wheeled 
 old coach as the tired horses toil uphill, to recognise 
 at once that here is an artist en pays de connaissance, 
 who may fairly be trusted, in the best sense, to 
 "illustrate" his subject. Whatever one's predilections 
 for previous presentments, it is impossible to resist 
 Sir Roger (young, slim, and handsome), carving the 
 perverse widow's name upon a tree-trunk; or Sir 
 Roger at bowls, or riding to hounds, or listening — 
 with grave courtesy — to Will Wimble's long-winded 
 and circumstantial account of the taking of the 
 historic jack. Nor is the conception less happy 
 of that amorous fine-gentleman ancestor of the 
 Coverleys who first made love by squeezing the 
 hand; or of that other Knight of the Shire who so 
 narrowly escaped being killed in the Civil Wars 
 because he was sent out of the field upon a private 
 message, the day before Cromwell's "crowning 
 mercy," — the battle of Worcester. But the varied 
 embodiments of these, and of Mrs. Betty Arable 
 ("the great fortune"), of Ephraim the Quaker, and 
 the rest, are not all. The figures are set in their 
 fitting environment; they ride their own horses, 
 hallo to their own dogs, and eat and drink in their 
 own dark-panelled rooms that look out on the 
 pleached alleys of their ancient gardens. They live 
 and move in their own passed-away atmosphere of 
 association; and a faithful effort has moreover been 
 
THE 'BALLAD OF BEAU BROCADE 
 <AND OTHER POEMS 
 
 
 
 PEN-SKETCHES ON THE HALF-TITLE OF "THE BALLAD OF 
 BEAU BROCADE." 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 115 
 
 made to realise each separate scene with strict relation 
 to its text. 
 
 All of the "Coverley" series came out in the 
 English Illustrated. So also did the designs for the 
 next book, the Coaching Days and Coaching Ways of 
 Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson 
 had a topographical collaborator, Mr. Herbert 
 Railton, who did the major part of the very effective 
 drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson's con- 
 tributions may fairly be said to have exhausted the 
 "romance" of the road. Inns and inn-yards, hosts 
 and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen, toll- 
 keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, 
 mail-coaches held up by highwaymen, overturns, 
 elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles, lost linch-pins, 
 — all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone 
 travel on the high road have abundant illustration, 
 till the pages seem almost to reek of the stableyard, 
 or ring with the horn. 1 And here it may be noted, 
 as a peculiarity of Mr. Thomson's conscientious 
 horse-drawing, that he depicts, not the ideal, but 
 the actual animal. His steeds are not "faultless 
 monsters" like the Dauphin's palfrey in Henry the 
 
 1 Sometimes a literary or historical picture creeps into the text. Such 
 are "Swift and Bolingbroke at Bucklebury" (p. 30) ; "Charles II. recog- 
 nised by the Ostler" (p. 144), and "Barry Lyndon cracks a Bottle" 
 (p. 116). Barry Lyndon with its picaresque note and Irish background, 
 would seem an excellent contribution to the "Cranford" series. Why does 
 not Mr. Thomson try his hand at it? He has illustrated Esmond, and the 
 Great Hoggarty Diamond. 
 
n6 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Fifth. They are "all sorts and conditions" of 
 horses; and — if truth required it — would disclose 
 as many sand-cracks as Rocinante, or as many equine 
 defects ( from wind-gall to the botts) as those imputed 
 to that unhappy "Blackberry" sold by the Vicar 
 of Wakefield at Welbridge Fair to Mr. Ephraim 
 Jenkinson. 
 
 The Vicar of Wakefield — as it happens — was Mr. 
 Thomson's next enterprise; and it is, in many 
 respects, a most memorable one. It came out in 
 December, 1890, having occupied him for nearly 
 two years. He took exceptional pains to study and 
 realise the several types for himself, and to ensure 
 correctness of costume. From the first introductory 
 procession of the Primrose family at the head of 
 chapter i. to the awkward merriment of the two 
 Miss Flamboroughs at the close, there is scarcely a 
 page which has not some stroke of quiet fun, some 
 graceful attitude, or some ingenious contrivance in 
 composition. Considering that from Wenham's 
 edition of 1780, nearly every illustrator of repute 
 had tried his hand at Goldsmith's masterpiece in 
 fiction, — that he had been attempted without humour 
 by Stothard, without lightness by Mulready, 1 — 
 that he had been made comic by Cruikshank, and 
 vulgarised by Rowlandson, — it was certainly to Mr. 
 Thomson's credit that he had approached his task 
 
 1 Mulready's illustrations of 1843 are here referred to, not his pictures. 
 

 J&;2)^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 ^^2 
 
 ^ 
 
 PEN-SKETCH (TRIPLET) ON A FLY-LEAF OF "PEG WOFFINGTON. 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 117 
 
 with so much refinement, reverence and originality. 
 If the book has a blemish, it is to be mentioned only 
 because the artist, by his later practice, seems to have 
 recognised it himself. For the purposes of process 
 reproduction, the drawings were somewhat loaded 
 and overworked. 
 
 This was not chargeable against the next volumes 
 to be chronicled. Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, 1891, 
 and Miss Mitford's Our Village, 1893, are still 
 regarded by many as the artist's happiest efforts. I 
 say "still," because Mr. Thomson is only now in 
 what Victor Hugo called the youth of old age (as 
 opposed to the old age of youth) ; and it would be 
 premature to assume that a talent so alert to multiply 
 and diversify its efforts, had already attained the 
 summit of its achievement. But in these two books 
 he had certain unquestionable advantages. One 
 obviously would be, that his audience were not 
 already preoccupied by former illustrations; and he 
 was consequently free to invent his own personages 
 and follow his own fertile fancy, without recalling to 
 that implacable and Gorgonising organ, the "Public 
 Eye," any earlier pictorial conceptions. Another 
 thing in his favour was, that in either case, the very 
 definite, and not very complex types surrendered 
 themselves readily to artistic embodiment. "It 
 almost illustrated itself," — he told an interviewer 
 concerning Cranford; "the characters were so 
 
n8 DE LIBRIS 
 
 exquisitely and distinctly realised." Every one has 
 known some like them; and the delightful Knutsford 
 ladies ( for "Cranford" was "Knutsford" ) , the "Boz"- 
 loving Captain Brown and Mr. Holbrook, Peter and 
 his father, and even Martha the maid, with their mise 
 en scene of card-tables and crackle-china, and pattens 
 and reticules, are part of the memories of our child- 
 hood. The same may be said of Our Village, except 
 that the breath of Nature blows more freely through 
 it than through the quiet Cheshire market-town; 
 and there is a larger preponderance of those "charm- 
 ing glimpses of rural life" of which Lady Ritchie 
 speaks admiringly in her sympathetic preface. And 
 with regard to the "bits of scenery" — as Mr. 
 Thomson himself calls them — it may be noted that 
 one of the Manchester papers, speaking of Cranford, 
 praised the artist's intimate knowledge of the locality, 
 — a locality he had never seen. Most of his back- 
 grounds were from sketches made on Wimbledon 
 Common, near which — until he moved for a space 
 to the ancient Cinque Port of Seaford in Sussex — he 
 lived for the first years of his London life. 
 
 In strict order of time, Mr. Thomson's next 
 important effort should have preceded the books of 
 Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell. The novels of 
 Jane Austen — to which we now come — if not the 
 artist's high-water mark, are certainly remarkable as 
 a tour de force. To contrive some forty page 
 
EVELINA AND THE BRANGHTONS. 
 (From Miss Burney's Evelina.) 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 119 
 
 illustrations for each of Miss Austen's admirable, but 
 — from an illustrator's standpoint — not very palpitat- 
 ing productions, — with a scene usually confined to 
 the dining-room or parlour, — with next to no animals, 
 and with rare opportunities for landscape accessory, — 
 was an "adventure" — in Cervantic phrase — which 
 might well have given pause to a designer of less 
 fertility and resource. But besides the figures there 
 was the furniture; and acute admirers have pointed 
 out that a nice discretion is exhibited in graduating 
 the appointments of Longbourn and Netherfield 
 Park, — of Rosings and Hunsford. But what is per- 
 haps more worthy of remark is the artist's persistent 
 attempt to give individuality, as well as grace, to his 
 dramatis persona. The unspeakable Mr. Collins, 
 Mr. Bennet, the horsy Mr. John Thorpe, Mrs. 
 Jennings and Mrs. Norris, the Eltons — are all care- 
 fully discriminated. Nothing can well be better 
 than Mr. Woodhouse, with his "almost immaterial 
 legs" drawn securely out of the range of a too-fierce 
 fire, chatting placidly to Miss Bates upon the merits 
 of water-gruel; nothing more in keeping than the 
 Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, "in 
 the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind" of her 
 indignation, superciliously pausing to patronise the 
 capabilities of the Longbourn reception rooms. 
 Not less happy is the dumbfounded astonishment of 
 Mrs. Bennet at her toilet, when she hears — to her 
 
120 DE LIBRIS 
 
 stupefaction — that her daughter Elizabeth is to be 
 mistress of Pemberley and ten thousand a year. 
 This last is a head-piece ; and it may be observed, as 
 an additional difficulty in this group of novels, that, 
 owing to the circumstances of publication, only in 
 one of the books, Pride and Prejudice, was Mr. 
 Thomson free to decorate the chapters with those 
 ingenious entetes and culs-de-lampe of which he so 
 eminently possesses the secret. 1 
 
 By this time his reputation had long been firmly 
 established. To the Jane Austen volumes succeeded 
 other numbers of the so-called "Cranford" series, to 
 which, in 1894, Mr. Thomson had already added, 
 under the title of Condon* s Song and other Verses, a 
 fresh ingathering of old-time minstrelsy from the 
 pages of the English Illustrated. Many of the 
 drawings for these, though of necessity reduced for 
 publication in book form, are in his most delightful 
 and winning manner, — notably perhaps (if one must 
 choose!) the martial ballad of that "Captain of 
 Militia, Sir Dilberry Diddle," who 
 
 — dreamt, Fame reports, that he cut all the throats 
 Of the French as they landed in flat-bottomed boats 
 
 — or rather were going to land any time during the 
 
 1 That eloquence of subsidiary detail, which has had so many exponents 
 in English art from Hogarth onwards, is one of Mr. Thomson's most 
 striking characteristics. The reader will find it exemplified in the beautiful 
 book-plate at page ill, which, by the courtesy of its owner, Mr. Ernest 
 Brown, I am permitted to reproduce. 
 
•tt-JV?. 
 
 j5Vt-c^zrv? (?a$* 
 
 LADY CASTLEWOOD AND HER SON. 
 (From Thackeray's Esmond.) 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 121 
 
 Seven Years 1 War. Excellent, too, are John Gay's 
 ambling Journey to Exeter, the Angler's Song from 
 Walton (which gives its name to the collection), and 
 Fielding's rollicking u A-hunting we will go." Other 
 "Cranford" books, which now followed, were James 
 Lane Allen's Kentucky Cardinal, 1901; Fanny 
 Burney's Evelina, 1903 ; Thackeray's Esmond, 1905 ; 
 and two of George Eliot's novels — Scenes of Clerical 
 Life, 1906, and Silas Marner, 1907. In 1899 Mr. 
 Thomson had also undertaken another book for 
 George Allen, an edition of Reade's Peg Woffington, 
 — a task in which he took the keenest delight, 
 particularly in the burlesque character of Triplet. 
 These were all in the old pen-work; but some of 
 the designs for Silas Marner were lightly and taste- 
 fully coloured. This was a plan the author had 
 adopted, with good effect, not only in a special 
 edition of Cranford (1898), but for some of his 
 original drawings which came into the market after 
 exhibition. Nothing can be more seductive than a 
 Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted 
 in sky-blue, rose-Du Barry, and apple-green (the 
 vert-pomme dear — as Gautier says — to the soft 
 moderns) — a treatment which lends them a subdued 
 but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a 
 pedigree, and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm 
 of the phrase-maker who described their inventor 
 as the "Charles Lamb of illustration." 
 
122 DE LIBRIS 
 
 From the above enumeration certain omissions 
 have of necessity been made. Besides the books 
 mentioned, Mr. Thomson has contrived to prepare 
 for newspapers and magazines many closely-studied 
 sketches of contemporary manners. Some of the 
 best of his work in this way is to be found in the 
 late Mrs. E. T. Cook's Highways and Byways of 
 London Life, 1902. For the Highways and Byways 
 series, he has also illustrated, wholly or in part, 
 volumes on Ireland, North Wales, Devon, Cornwall 
 and Yorkshire. The last volume, Kent, 1907, is 
 entirely decorated by himself. In this instance, his 
 drawings throughout are in pencil, and he is his own 
 topographer. It is a remarkable departure, both in 
 manner and theme, though Mr. Thomson's liking 
 for landscape has always been pronounced. "I 
 would desire above all things," he told an inter- 
 viewer, "to pass my time in painting landscape. 
 Landscape pictures always attract me, and the grand 
 examples, Gainsboroughs, Claudes, Cromes, and 
 Turners, to be seen any day in our National Gallery, 
 are a source of never-failing yearning and delight." 
 The original drawings for the Kent book are of 
 great beauty; and singularly dexterous in the varied 
 methods by which the effect is produced. The artist 
 is now at work on the county of Surrey. It is 
 earnest of his versatility that, in 1904, he illustrated 
 for Messrs. Wells, Darton and Co., with conspicuous 
 
jM^erc^-v t-Z. 
 
 4-4 ? 
 
 MERCERY LAKE, CANTERBURY. 
 (From a pencil-drawing for Highways and Byways in Kent.) 
 
MODERN BOOK ILLUSTRATORS 123 
 
 success, a modernised prose version of certain of 
 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, as well as Tales from 
 Maria Edgeworth, 1903; and he also executed, in 
 1892 and 1895, 1 some charming designs to selec- 
 tions from the verses of the present writer, who has 
 long enjoyed the privilege of his friendship. 
 
 Personal traits do not come within the province 
 of this paper, or it would be pleasant to dwell upon 
 Mr. Thomson's modesty, his untiring industry, and 
 his devotion to his art. But in regard to that art, 
 it may be observed that to characterise it solely as 
 ''packing the memory with pleasant fancies" may 
 suffice for an exordium, but is inadequate as a final 
 appreciation. Let me therefore note down, as they 
 occur to me, some of his more prominent pictorial 
 characteristics. With three of the artists mentioned 
 in this and the preceding paper, he has obvious 
 affinities, while, in a sense, he includes them all. 
 If he does not excel Stothard in the gift of grace, 
 he does in range and variety; and he more than 
 rivals him in composition. He has not, like Miss 
 Greenaway, endowed the art-world with a special 
 type of childhood; but his children are always life- 
 like and engaging. (Compare, at a venture, the 
 boy soldiers whom Frank Castlewood is drilling in 
 chapter xi. of Esmond, or the delightful little fellow 
 who is throwing up his arms in chapter ix. of 
 
 1 The Ballad of Beau Brocade, and The Story of Rosina. 
 
124 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Emma) . As regards dogs and horses and the rest, 
 his colleague, Mr. Joseph Pennell, an expert critic, 
 and a most accomplished artist, holds that he has 
 "long since surpassed" Randolph Caldecott. 1 I 
 doubt whether Mr. Thomson himself would concur 
 with his eulogist in this. But he has assuredly 
 followed Caldecott close; and in opulence of pro- 
 duction which — as Macaulay insisted — should always 
 count, has naturally exceeded that gifted, but short- 
 lived, designer. If, pursuing an ancient practice, 
 one were to attempt to label Mr. Thomson with a 
 special distinction apart from, and in addition to, his 
 other merits, I should be inclined to designate him 
 the "Master of the Vignette," — taking that word in 
 its primary sense as including head-pieces, tail-pieces 
 and initial letters. In this department, no draughts- 
 man I can call to mind has ever shown greater 
 fertility of invention, so much playful fancy, so 
 much grace, so much kindly humour, and such a 
 sane and wholesome spirit of fun. 
 
 1 Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen, 2nd ed. 1894, P- 358. 
 
HORATIAN ODE 
 
 ON THE TERCENTENARY OF 
 
 "DON QUIXOTE" 
 
 125 
 
HORATIAN ODE 
 
 ON THE TERCENTENARY OF 
 
 "DON QUIXOTE" 
 
 {Published at Madrid, by Francisco de Robles, January 1605) 
 "Para mi sola nacio don Quixote, y yo para el." — Cervantes 
 
 Advents we greet of great and small; 
 Much we extol that may not live ; 
 Yet to the new-born Type we give 
 No care at all ! 
 
 This year, 1 — three centuries past, — by age 
 
 More maimed than by Lepanto's fight,— 
 This year Cervantes gave to light 
 His matchless page, 
 
 Whence first outrode th' immortal Pair, — 
 The half-crazed Hero and his hind, — 
 To make sad laughter for mankind; 
 And whence they fare 
 
 1 I.e. January 1905. 
 X2 7 
 
128 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Throughout all Fiction still, where chance 
 Allies Life's dulness with its dreams — 
 Allies what is, with what but seems, — 
 Fact and Romance: — 
 
 O Knight of fire and Squire of earth! — 
 O changing give-and-take between 
 The aim too high, the aim too mean, 
 I hail your birth, — 
 
 Three centuries past, — in sunburned Spain, 
 And hang, on Time's Pantheon wall, 
 My votive tablet to recall 
 That lasting gain ! 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 
 
 129 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 
 
 One common grave, according to Garrick, covers the 
 actor and his art. The same may be said of the 
 raconteur. Oral tradition, or even his own writings, 
 may preserve his precise words; but his peculiarities 
 of voice or action, his tricks of utterance and in- 
 tonation, — all the collateral details which serve to 
 lend distinction or piquancy to the performance — 
 perish irrevocably. The glorified gramophone of 
 the future may perhaps rectify this for a new genera- 
 tion; and give us, without mechanical drawback, the 
 authentic accents of speakers dead and gone; but 
 it can never perpetuate the dramatic accompaniment 
 of gesture and expression. If, as always, there are 
 exceptions to this rule, they are necessarily evanescent. 
 Now and then, it may be, some clever mimic will 
 recall the manner of a passed-away predecessor; and 
 he may even contrive to hand it on, more or less 
 effectually, to a disciple. But the reproduction 
 is of brief duration; and it is speedily effaced or 
 transformed. 
 
 131 
 
132 DE LIBRIS 
 
 In this way it is, however, that we get our 
 most satisfactory idea of the once famous table- 
 talker, Samuel Rogers. Charles Dickens, who sent 
 Rogers several of his books; who dedicated Master 
 Humphrey's Clock to him ; and who frequently assisted 
 at the famous breakfasts in St. James's Place, was 
 accustomed — rather cruelly, it may be thought — to 
 take off his host's very characteristic way of telling a 
 story; and it is, moreover, affirmed by Mr. Percy 
 Fitzgerald 1 that, in the famous Readings, "the 
 strangely obtuse and owl-like expression, and the 
 slow, husky croak" of Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the 
 "Trial from Pickwick" were carefully copied from 
 the author of the Pleasures of Memory. That 
 Dickens used thus to amuse his friends is confirmed 
 by the autobiography of the late Frederick Locker, 2 
 who perfectly remembered the old man, to see whom 
 he had been carried, as a boy, by his father. He had 
 also heard Dickens repeat one of Rogers's stock 
 anecdotes (it was that of the duel in a dark room, 
 where the more considerate combatant, firing up 
 the chimney, brings down his adversary) ; 3 — and he 
 speaks of Dickens as mimicking Rogers's "calm, low- 
 pitched, drawling voice and dry biting manner very 
 
 1 Recreations of a Literary Man, 1882, p. 137. 
 
 2 My Confidences, by Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1896, pp. 98 and 325. 
 8 The duellists were an Englishman and a Frenchman; and Rogers was 
 
 in the habit of adding as a postscript: "When I tell that in Paris, I always 
 put the Englishman up the chimney!" 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 133 
 
 comically." 1 At the same time, it must be remembered 
 that these reminiscences relate to Rogers in his old 
 age. He was over seventy when Dickens published 
 his first book, Sketches by Boz; and, though it is 
 possible that Rogers's voice was always rather 
 sepulchral, and his enunciation unusually deliberate 
 and monotonous, he had nevertheless, as Locker says, 
 "made story-telling a fine art." Continued practice 
 had given him the utmost economy of words; and 
 as far as brevity and point are concerned, his method 
 left nothing to be desired. Many of his best efforts 
 are still to be found in the volume of Table-Talk 
 edited for Moxon in 1856 by the Rev. Alexander 
 Dyce; or preferably, as actually written down by 
 Rogers himself in the delightful Recollections issued 
 three years later by his nephew and executor, William 
 Sharpe. 
 
 But although the two things are often intimately 
 connected, the "books," and not the "stories" of 
 Rogers, are the subject of the present paper. After 
 this, it sounds paradoxical to have to admit that his 
 reputation as a connoisseur far overshadowed his re- 
 putation as a bilbliophile. When, in December 1855, 
 he died, his pictures and curios, — his "articles of vir- 
 tue and bigotry" as a modern Malaprop would have 
 styled them, — attracted far more attention than the not 
 
 1 It may be added that Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, himself no mean mime, 
 may be sometimes persuaded to imitate Dickens imitating Rogers. 
 
134 DE LIBRIS 
 
 very numerous volumes forming his library. 1 What 
 people flocked to see at the tiny treasure-house over- 
 looking the Green Park, 2 which its nonegenarian 
 owner had occupied for more than fifty years, were 
 the ''Puck" and "Strawberry Girl" of Sir Joshua, 
 the Titians, Giorgiones, and Guidos, 3 the Poussins 
 and Claudes, the drawings of Raphael and Durer and 
 Lucas van Leyden, the cabinet decorated by Stothard, 
 the chimney-piece carved by Flaxman ; the miniatures 
 and bronzes and Etruscan vases, — all the "infinite 
 riches in a little room," which crowded No. 22 from 
 garret to basement. These were the rarities that 
 filled the columns of the papers and the voices of the 
 quidnuncs when in 1856 they came to the hammer. 
 But although the Press of that day takes careful 
 count of these things, it makes little reference to the 
 sale of the "books" of the banker-bard who spent 
 some £15,000 on the embellishments of his Italy 
 and his Poems; and although Dr. Burney says that 
 Rogers's library included "the best editions of the 
 best authors in most languages," he had clearly no 
 widespread reputation as a book-collector pure and 
 simple. Nevertheless he loved his books, — that is, 
 
 1 The prices obtained confirm this. The total sum realised was 
 £45,188:14:3. Of this the books represented no more than £1415:5. 
 
 2 This — with its triple range of bow-windows, from one of which Rogers 
 used to watch his favourite sunsets — is now the residence of Lord 
 Northcliffe. 
 
 3 Three of these — the "Noli me tangere" of Titian, Giorgione's "Knight 
 in Armour," and Guido's "Ecce Homo" — are now in the National Gallery, 
 to which they were bequeathed by Rogers. 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 135 
 
 he loved the books he read. And, as far as can be 
 ascertained, he anticipated the late Master of Balliol, 
 since he read only the books he liked. Nor was he 
 ever diverted from his predilections by mere fashion 
 or novelty. "He followed Bacon's maxim" — says 
 one who knew him — "to read much, not many 
 things: multum legere, non multa. He used to say, 
 When a new book comes out, I read an old one.' ni 
 The general Rogers-sale at Christie's took place 
 in the spring of 1856, and twelve days had been 
 absorbed before the books were reached. Their 
 sale took six days more — i.e. from May 12 to 
 May 19. As might be expected from Rogers's 
 traditional position in the literary world, the 
 catalogue contains many presentation copies. What, 
 at first sight, would seem the earliest, is the Works 
 of Edward Moore, 1796, 2 vols. But if this be 
 the fabulist and editor of the World, it can scarcely 
 have been received from the writer, since, in 1796, 
 Moore had been dead for nearly forty years. With 
 BloomfiekTs poems of 1802, 1. p., we are on surer 
 ground, for Rogers, like Capel Lofft, had been kind 
 to the author of The Farmer's Boy, and had done 
 his best to obtain him a pension. Another early 
 tribute, subsequently followed by the Tales of the 
 Hall, was Crabbe's Borough, which he sent to 
 Rogers in 18 10, in response to polite overtures 
 
 1 Edinburgh Review, vol. civ. p. 105, by Abraham Hayward. 
 
136 DE LIBRIS 
 
 made to him by the poet. This was the beginning 
 of a lasting friendship, of no small import to Crabbe, 
 as it at once admitted him to Rogers's circle, an 
 advantage of which there are many traces in Crabbe's 
 journal. Next comes Madame de StaeTs much pro- 
 scribed De V Allemagne (the Paris edition) ; and 
 from its date, 1813, it must have been presented 
 to Rogers when its irrepressible author was in 
 England. She often dined or breakfasted at St. 
 James's Place, where (according to Byron), she out- 
 talked Whitbread, confounded Sir Humphry Davy, 
 and was herself well "ironed" 1 by Sheridan. Rogers 
 considered Corinne to be her best novel, and 
 Delphine a terrible falling-off. The Germany he 
 found "very fatiguing." "She writes her works 
 four or five times over, correcting them only in 
 that way" — he says. "The end of a chapter [is] 
 always the most obscure, as she ends with an 
 epigram." 2 Another early presentation copy is 
 the second edition of Bowles's Missionary } 18 15. 
 According to Rogers, who claims to have suggested 
 the poem, it was to have been inscribed to him. 
 But somehow or other, the book got dedicated to 
 
 1 Perhaps a remembrance of Mrs. Slipslop's "ironing" 
 
 2 Clayden's Rogers and his Contemporaries, 1889, i. 225. As an epi- 
 grammatist himself, Rogers might have been more indulgent to a consoeur. 
 Here is one of Madame de StaeTs "ends of chapters": — La monotonie, 
 dans la retraite, tranquillise Vame; la monotonie, dans le grand monde, 
 fatigue I'esprit" (ch. viii.). But he evidently found her rather over- 
 powering. 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 137 
 
 a noble lord who — Rogers adds drily — never, either 
 by word or letter, made any acknowledgment 
 of the homage. 1 It is not impossible that there is 
 some confusion of recollection here, or Rogers is 
 misreported by Dyce. The first anonymous edition 
 of the Missionary, 18 13, had no dedication; and 
 the second was inscribed to the Marquess of 
 Lansdowne because he had been prominent among 
 those who recognised the merit of its predecessor. 
 
 Several of Scott's poems, with Rogers's autograph, 
 and Scott's card, appear in the catalogue; and, in 
 1 8 12, Byron, who a year after inscribed the Giaour 
 to Rogers, sent him the first two cantos of Childe 
 Harold. In 1838, Moore presents Lalla Rookh, 
 with Heath's plates, a work which, upon its first 
 appearance, twenty years earlier, had been dedicated 
 to Rogers. In 1839 Charles Dickens followed with 
 Nicholas Nickleby, succeeded a year later by Master 
 Humphrey's Clock ( 1 840- 1 ) , also dedicated to Rogers 
 in recognition, not only of his poetical merit, but of 
 his "active sympathy with the poorest and humblest 
 of his kind." Rogers was fond of "Little Nell"; 
 and in the Preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens 
 gracefully acknowledged that "for a beautiful 
 thought" in the seventy-second chapter of the Old 
 Curiosity Shop, he was indebted to Rogers's Ginevra 
 in the Italy : — 
 
 1 Table-Talk, 1856, p. 258. 
 
138 DE LIBRIS 
 
 And long might'st thou have seen 
 An old man wandering as in quest of something, 
 Something he could not find — he knew not what. 
 
 The American Notes, 1842, was a further offering 
 from Dickens. Among other gifts may be noted 
 Wordsworth's Poems, 1827-35; Campbell's Pilgrim 
 of Glencoe, 1842; Longfellow's Ballads and Voices 
 of the Night, 1840-2; Macaulay's Lays and 
 Tennyson's Poems, 1842; and lastly, Hazlitt's 
 Criticisms on Art, 1844, and Carlyle's Letters and 
 Speeches of Cromwell, 1846. Brougham's philo- 
 sophical novel of Albert Lunel; or, the Chateau of 
 Languedoc, 3 vols. 1844, figures in the catalogue 
 as "withdrawn." It had been suppressed "for 
 private reasons" upon the eve of publication; and 
 this particular copy being annotated by Rogers (to 
 whom it was inscribed) those concerned were no 
 doubt all the more anxious that it should not get 
 abroad. Inspection of the reprint of 1872 shows, 
 however, that want of interest was its chief error. 
 A reviewer of 1858 roundly calls it "feeble" and 
 "commonplace"; and it could hardly have increased 
 its writer's reputation. Indeed, by some, it was not 
 supposed to be from his Lordship's pen at all. 
 Rogers, it may be added, frequently annotated his 
 books. His copies of Pope, Gray and Scott had many 
 marginalia. Clarke's and Fox's histories of James II. 
 were also works which he decorated in this way. 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 139 
 
 As already hinted, not very many biblio- 
 graphical curiosities are included in the St. James's 
 Place collection; and to look for Shakespeare 
 quartos or folios, for example, would be idle. 
 Ordinary editions of Shakespeare, such as Johnson's 
 and Theobald's; Shakespeariana, such as Mrs. 
 Montagu's Essay and Ayscough's Index, — these are 
 there of course. If the list also takes in Thomas 
 Caldecott's Hamlet, and As you like it (1832), that 
 is, first, because the volume is a presentation copy; 
 and secondly, because Caldecott's colleague in his 
 frustrate enterprise was Crowe, Rogers's Miltonic 
 friend, hereafter mentioned. Rogers's own feeling 
 for Shakespeare was cold and hypercritical; and 
 he was in the habit of endorsing with emphasis 
 Ben Jonson's aspiration that the master had blotted 
 a good many of his too-facile lines. Nevertheless, 
 it is possible to pick out a few exceptional volumes 
 from Mr. Christie's record. Among the earliest 
 comes a copy of Garth's Dispensary, 1703, which 
 certainly boasts an illustrious pedigree. Pope, who 
 received it from the author, had carefully corrected 
 it in several places; and in 1744 bequeathed it to 
 Warburton. Warburton, in his turn, handed it on 
 to Mason, from whom it descended to Lord St. 
 Helens, by whom, again, shortly before his death 
 (1815), it was presented to Rogers. To Pope's 
 corrections, which Garth adopted, Mason had added 
 
 f OFTHf 
 
140 DE LIBRIS 
 
 a comment. What made the volume of further 
 interest was, that it contained Lord Dorchester's 
 receipt for his subscription to Pope's Homer] and, 
 inserted at the end, a full-length portrait of Pope; 
 viz., that engraved in Warton's edition of 1797, as 
 sketched in pen-and-ink by William Hoare of Bath. 
 Another interesting item is the quarto first edition 
 (the first three books) of Spenser's Faerie Queene, 
 Ponsonbie, 1590: and a third, the Paradise Lost 
 of Milton in ten books, the original text of 1667 
 (with the 1669 title-page and the Argument and 
 Address to the Reader) — both bequeathed to Rogers 
 by W. Jackson of Edinburgh. (One of the stock 
 exhibits at "Memory Hall" — as 22 St. James's 
 Place was playfully called by some of the owner's 
 friends — was Milton's receipt to Symmons the 
 printer for the five pounds he received for his 
 epic. This, framed and glazed, hung, according to 
 Lady Eastlake, on one of the doors). 1 A fourth 
 rare book was William Bonham's black-letter Chaucer, 
 a folio which had been copiously annotated in MS. 
 by Home Tooke, who gave it to Rogers. It more- 
 over contained, at folio 221, the record of Tooke's 
 
 1 It was, no doubt, identical with the "Original Articles of Agreement" 
 (Add. MSS. 18,861) between Milton and Samuel Symmons, printer, 
 dated 27th April, 1667, presented by Rogers in 1852 to the British Museum. 
 Besides the above-mentioned £5 down, there were to be three further 
 payments of £5 each on the sale of three editions, each of 1300 copies. 
 ^The second edition appeared in 1674, the year of the author's death. 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 141 
 
 arrest at Wimbledon on 16th May, 1794, and 
 subsequent committal on the 19th to the Tower, 
 for alleged high treason. 1 Further notabilia in this 
 category were the Duke of Marlborough's Hypnero- 
 tomachie of Poliphilus, Paris, 1554, and also the 
 Aldine edition of 1499; the very rare 1572 issue 
 of Camoens's Lusiads; Holbein's Dance of Death, 
 the Lyons issues of 1538 and 1547; first editions 
 of Bewick's Birds and Quadrupeds; Le Sueur's 
 Life of St. Bruno, with the autograph of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, and a rare quarto (15 16) of Boccaccio's 
 Decameron. 
 
 But the mere recapitulation of titles readily grows 
 tedious, even to the elect; and I turn to some of 
 the volumes with which, from references in the Table- 
 Talk and Recollections, their owner might seem 
 to be more intimately connected. Foremost among 
 these — one would think — should come his own 
 productions. Most of these, no doubt, are included 
 under the auctioneers' heading of "Works and Illus- 
 trations." In the "Library" proper, however, there 
 
 1 He was acquitted. His notes, in pencil, and relating chiefly to his 
 Diversions of Purley, were actually written in the Tower. Rogers, who 
 was present at the trial in November, mentioned, according to Dyce, a 
 curious incident bearing upon a now obsolete custom referred to by 
 Goldsmith and others. As usual, the prisoner's dock, in view of possible 
 jail-fever, was strewn with sweet-smelling herbs — fennel, rosemary and 
 the like. Tooke indignantly swept them away. Another of several char- 
 acteristic anecdotes told by Rogers of Tooke is as follows: — Being asked 
 once at college what his father was, he replied, "A Turkey Merchant." 
 Tooke pere was a poulterer in Clare Market. 
 
142 DE LIBRIS 
 
 are few traces of them. There is a quarto copy of 
 the unfortunate Columbus, with Stothard's sketches; 
 and there is the choice little Pleasures of Memory 
 of 1810, with Luke Clennell's admirable cuts in 
 facsimile from the same artist's pen-and-ink, — a 
 volume which, come what may, will always hold its 
 own in the annals of book-illustration. That there 
 were more than one of these latter may be an 
 accident. Rogers, nevertheless, like many book- 
 lovers, must have indulged in duplicates. According 
 to Hayward, once at breakfast, when some one quoted 
 Gray's irresponsible outburst concerning the novels 
 of Marivaux and Crebillon le fils, Rogers asked his 
 guests, three in number, whether they were familiar 
 with Marivaux's Vie de Marianne, a book which he 
 himself confesses to have read through six times, 
 and which French critics still hold, on inconclusive 
 evidence, to have been the ''only begetter" of 
 Richardson's Pamela and the sentimental novel. 
 None of the trio knew anything about it. "Then 
 I will lend you each a copy," rejoined Rogers; and 
 the volumes were immediately produced, doubtless 
 by that faithful and indefatigable factotum, Edmund 
 Paine, of whom his master was wont to affirm that 
 he would not only find any book in the house, 
 but out of it as well. What is more (unless it be 
 assumed that the poet's stock was larger still), one, 
 at least, of the three copies must have been returned, 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 143 
 
 since there is a copy in the catalogue. As might 
 be expected in the admirer of Marivaux's heroine, 
 the list is also rich in Jean-Jacques, whose "gout vif 
 pour les dejeuners" this Amphitryon often extolled, 
 quoting with approval Rousseau's opinion that "C'est 
 le temps de la journee ou nous sommes le plus tran- 
 quilles, oil nous causons le plus a notre aise" Another 
 of his favourite authors was Manzoni, whose Promessi 
 Sposi he was inclined to think he would rather have 
 written than all Scott's novels; and he never tired 
 of reading Louis Racine's Memoires of his father, 
 1747, — that "filon de Vor pur du dix-septieme siecle" 
 — as Villemain calls it — "qui se prolonge dans V age 
 suivant" Some of Rogers's likings sound strange 
 enough nowadays. With Campbell, he delighted 
 in Cowper's Homer, which he assiduously studied, 
 and infinitely preferred to that of Pope. Into 
 Chapman's it must be assumed that he had not 
 looked — certainly he has left no sonnet on the 
 subject. Milton was perhaps his best-loved bard. 
 "When I was travelling in Italy (he says), I made 
 two authors my constant study for versification, — 
 Milton and Crowe." (The italics are ours.) It is 
 an odd collocation; but not unintelligible. William 
 Crowe, the now forgotten Public Orator of Oxford, 
 and author of Lewesdon Hill, was an intimate friend; 
 a writer on versification; and, last but not least, 
 a very respectable echo of the Miltonic note, as 
 
144 DE LIBRIS 
 
 the following, from a passage dealing with the loss 
 in 1786 of the Halsewell East Indiaman off the 
 coast of Dorset, sufficiently testifies: — 
 
 The richliest-laden ship 
 Of spicy Ternate, or that annual sent 
 To the Philippines o'er the southern main 
 From Acapulco, carrying massy gold, 
 Were poor to this; — freighted with hopeful Youth 
 And Beauty, and high Courage undismay'd 
 By mortal terrors, and paternal Love, etc., etc. 
 
 It is not improbable that Rogers caught the mould 
 of his blank verse from the copy rather than from 
 the model. In the matter of style — as Flaubert has 
 said — the second-bests are often the better teachers. 
 More is to be learned from La Fontaine and Gautier 
 than from Moliere and Victor Hugo. 
 
 Many art-books, many books addressed specially 
 to the connoisseur, as well as most of those invalu- 
 able volumes no gentleman's library should be with- 
 out, found their places on Rogers's hospitable shelves. 
 Of such, it is needless to speak; nor, in this place, 
 is it necessary to deal with his finished and amiable, 
 but not very vigorous or vital poetry. A parting 
 word may, however, be devoted to the poet himself. 
 Although, during his lifetime, and particularly 
 towards its close, his weak voice and singularly 
 blanched appearance exposed him perpetually to a 
 kind of brutal personality now happily tabooed, 
 
THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS 145 
 
 it cannot be pretended that, either in age or youth, 
 he was an attractive-looking man. In these cases, 
 as in that of Goldsmith, a measure of burlesque 
 sometimes provides a surer criterion than academic 
 portraiture. The bust of the sculptor-caricaturist, 
 Danton, is of course what even Hogarth would have 
 classed as outre x ; but there is reason for believing 
 that Maclise's sketch in Fraser of the obtrusively 
 bald, cadaverous and wizened figure in its arm-chair, 
 which gave such a shudder of premonition to Goethe, 
 and which Maginn, reflecting the popular voice, de- 
 clared to be a mortal likeness — "painted to the very 
 death" — was more like the original than his pictures 
 by Lawrence and Hoppner. One can comprehend, 
 too, that the person whom nature had so ungenerously 
 endowed, might be perfectly capable of retorting to 
 rudeness, or the still-smarting recollection of rude- 
 ness, with those weapons of mordant wit and acrid 
 epigram which are not unfrequently the protective 
 compensation of physical shortcomings. But this 
 conceded, there are numberless anecdotes which 
 testify to Rogers's cultivated taste and real good 
 breeding, to his genuine benevolence, to his almost 
 sentimental craving for appreciation and affection. 
 In a paper on his books, it is permissible to end with 
 
 1 Rogers's own copy of this, which (it may be added), he held in horror, 
 now belongs to Mr. Edmund Gosse. Lord Londonderry has a number of 
 Danton's busts. 
 
i 4 6 DE LIBRIS 
 
 a bookish anecdote. One of his favourite memories, 
 much repeated in his latter days, was that of Cowley's 
 laconic Will, — "I give my body to the earth, and 
 my soul to my Maker." Lady Eastlake shall tell 
 the rest: — "This .... proved on one occasion too 
 much for one of the party, and in an incautious 
 moment a flippant young lady exclaimed, 'But, Mr. 
 Rogers, what of Cowley's property? An ominous 
 silence ensued, broken only by a sotto voce from the 
 late Mrs. Procter: 'Well, my dear, you have put 
 your foot in it; no more invitations for you in a 
 hurry.' But she did the kind old man, then above 
 ninety, wrong. The culprit continued to receive the 
 same invitations and the same welcome." 1 
 
 1 Quarterly Review, vol. 167, p. 512. 
 
PEPYS' "DIARY" 
 
 H7 
 
PEPYS' "DIARY" 
 
 To One who asked why he wrote it 
 
 You ask me what was his intent ? 
 
 In truth, I'm not a German; 
 Tis plain though that he neither meant 
 
 A Lecture nor a Sermon. 
 
 But there it is, — the thing's a Fact. 
 
 I find no other reason 
 But that some scribbling itch attacked 
 
 Him in and out of season, 
 
 To write what no one else should read, 
 With this for second meaning, 
 
 To "cleanse his bosom" (and indeed 
 It sometimes wanted cleaning) ; 
 
 To speak, as 'twere, his private mind, 
 
 Unhindered by repression, 
 
 To make his motley life a kind 
 
 Of Midas' 'ears confession; 
 149 
 
150 DE LIBRIS 
 
 And thus outgrew this work per se, — 
 This queer, kaleidoscopic, 
 
 Delightful, blabbing, vivid, free 
 Hotch-pot of daily topic, 
 
 So artless in its vanity, 
 
 So fleeting, so eternal, 
 
 So packed with "poor Humanity'' — 
 We know as Pepys' his journal. 1 
 
 1 Written for the Pepys* Dinner at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 
 February 23rd, 1905. 
 
A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH 
 
 «5t 
 
A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH 
 
 Among other pleasant premonitions of the present 
 entente cordiale between France and England is the 
 increased attention which, for some time past, our 
 friends of Outre Manche have been devoting to our 
 literature. That this is wholly of recent growth, is 
 not, of course, to be inferred. It must be nearly 
 five-and- forty years since M. Hippolyte Taine issued 
 his logical and orderly Histoire de la Litterature 
 Anglaise; while other isolated efforts of insight and 
 importance — such as the Laurence Sterne of M. Paul 
 Stapfer, and the excellent he Public et les Hommes de 
 Lettres en Angleterre au XVIII e Steele of the late 
 M. Alexandre Beljame of the Sorbonne — are already 
 of distant date. But during the last two decades the 
 appearance of similar productions has been more 
 recurrent and more marked. From one eminent 
 writer alone — M. J.- J. Jusserand — we have received 
 an entire series of studies of exceptional charm, 
 variety, and accomplishment. M. Felix Rabbe has 
 given us a sympathetic analysis of Shelley; M. 
 Auguste Angellier, — himself a poet of individuality 
 
 153 
 
154 DE LIBRIS 
 
 and distinction, — what has been rightly described 
 as a "splendid work" on Burns; 1 while M. Emile 
 Legouis, in a minute examination of "The Prelude," 
 has contrasted and compared the orthodox Words- 
 worth of maturity with the juvenile semi-atheist of 
 Coleridge. Travelling farther afield, M. W. Thomas 
 has devoted an exhaustive volume to Young of 
 the Night Thoughts-, M. Leon Morel, another to 
 Thomson; and, incidentally, a flood of fresh light 
 has been thrown upon the birth and growth of 
 the English Novel by the admirable Jean-Jacques 
 Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolltisme Litteraire 
 of the late Joseph Texte — an investigation un- 
 questionably of the ripest scholarship, and the most 
 extended research. And now once more there are 
 signs that French lucidity and French precision 
 are about to enter upon other conquests; and 
 we have M. Barbeau's study of a famous old 
 English watering-place 2 — appropriately dedicated, 
 as is another of the books already mentioned, to 
 M. Beljame. 3 
 
 1 A volume of Pages Choisies de August e Angellier, Prose et Vers, 
 with an Introduction by M. Legouis, has recently (1908) been issued by 
 the Clarendon Press. It contains lengthy extracts from M. Angellier's 
 study of Burns. 
 
 2 Une Ville d'Eaux Anglaise ou XVIII* Steele. La Societe Elegante 
 et Litteraire a Bath sous la Reine Anne et sous les Georges. Par A. 
 Barbeau. Paris, Picard, 1904. 
 
 3 The list grows apace. To the above, among others, must now be 
 added M. Rene Huchon's brilliant little essay on Mrs. Montagu, and his 
 elaborate study of Crabbe, to say nothing of M. Jules Derocquigny's 
 Lamb, M. Jules Douady's Hazlitt, and M. Joseph Aynard's Coleridge. 
 
A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH 155 
 
 At first sight, topography, even when combined 
 with social sketches, may seem less suited to a 
 foreigner and an outsider than it would be to a 
 resident and a native. In the attitude of the latter 
 to the land in which he lives or has been born, there 
 is always an inherent something of the soil for which 
 even trained powers of comparison, and a special 
 perceptive faculty, are but imperfect substitutes. 
 On the other hand, the visitor from over-sea is, in 
 many respects, better placed for observation than the 
 inhabitant. He enjoys not a little — it has been often 
 said — of the position of posterity. He takes in more 
 at a glance; he leaves out less; he is disturbed by 
 no apprehensions of explaining what is obvious, or 
 discovering what is known. As a consequence, he 
 sets down much which, from long familiarity, an 
 indigenous critic would be disposed to discard, 
 although it might not be, in itself, either uninterest- 
 ing or superfluous. And if, instead of dealing with 
 the present and actual, his concern is with history 
 and the past, his external standpoint becomes a 
 strength rather than a weakness. He can survey his 
 subject with a detachment which is wholly favourable 
 to his project; and he can give it, with less difficulty 
 than another, the advantages of scientific treatment 
 and an artistic setting. Finally, if his theme have 
 definite limits — as for instance an appreciable begin- 
 ning, middle, and end — he must be held to be 
 
156 DE LIBRIS 
 
 exceptionally fortunate. And this, either from happy 
 guessing, or sheer good luck, is M. Barbeau's case. 
 All these conditions are present in the annals of the 
 once popular pleasure-resort of which he has elected 
 to tell the story. It arose gradually ; it grew through 
 a century of unexampled prosperity; it sank again 
 to the level of a country-town. If it should ever 
 arise again, — and it is by no means a ville morte, — 
 it will be in an entirely different way. The particu- 
 lar Bath of the eighteenth century — the Bath of 
 Queen Anne and the Georges, of Nash and Fielding 
 and Sheridan, of Anstey and Mrs. Siddons, of Wesley 
 and Lady Huntingdon, of Quin and Gainsborough 
 and Lawrence and a hundred others — is no more. 
 It is a case of Fuit Ilium. It has gone for ever ; and 
 can never be revived in the old circumstances. To 
 borrow an apposite expression from M. Texte, it is 
 an organism whose evolution has accomplished its 
 course. 
 
 M. Barbeau's task, then, is very definitely 
 mapped-out and circumscribed. But he is far too 
 good a craftsman to do no more than give a mere 
 panorama of that daily Bath programme which 
 King Nash and his dynasty ordained and established. 
 He goes back to the origins; to the legend of King 
 Lear's leper- father; to the Diary of the too-much- 
 neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys 1 and Grammont's 
 
 1 Oddly enough — if M. Barbesu's index is to be trusted, and it is an 
 
A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH 157 
 
 Memoirs; to the days when hapless Catherine of 
 Braganza, with the baleful "belle Stewart" in her 
 train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud's spring as 
 a remedy against sterility. He sketches, with due 
 acknowledgments to Goldsmith's unique little book, 
 the biography of that archquack, poseur, and very 
 clever organiser, Mr. Richard Nash, the first real 
 Master of the Ceremonies; and he gives a full 
 account of his followers and successors. He also 
 minutely relates the story of Sheridan's marriage to 
 his beautiful "St. Cecilia," Elizabeth Ann Linley. 
 A separate and very interesting chapter is allotted to 
 Lady Huntingdon and the Methodists, not without 
 levies from the remarkable Spiritual Quixote of that 
 Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton, of whom an 
 excellent account was given not long since in Mr. 
 W. H. Hutton's suggestive Burford Papers. Other 
 chapters are occupied with Bath and its belles lettres ; 
 with "Squire Airworthy" of Prior Park and his 
 literary guests, Pope, Warburton, Fielding and his 
 sister, etc.; with the historic Frascati vase of Lady 
 Miller at Batheaston, which stirred the ridicule of 
 Horace Walpole, and is still, it is said, to be seen in 
 
 unusually good one, — he makes no reference to Evelyn's visit to Bath. 
 But Evelyn went there in June, 1654, bathed in the Cross Bath, criticised 
 the "facciata" of the Abbey Church, complained of the "narrow, uneven 
 and unpleasant streets," and inter-visited with the company frequenting 
 the place for health. "Among the rest of the idle diversions of the town," 
 he says, "one musician was famous for acting a changeling [idiot or 
 half-wit], which indeed he personated strangely." (Diary, Globe edn., 
 1908, p. 1 74-) 
 
158 DE LIBRIS 
 
 a local park. The closing pages treat of Bath — 
 musical, artistic, scientific — of its gradual transforma- 
 tion as a health resort — of its eventual and fore- 
 doomed decline and fall as the one fashionable 
 watering-place, supreme and single, for Great Britain 
 and Ireland. 
 
 But it is needless to prolong analysis. One's 
 only wonder — as usual after the event — is that what 
 has been done so well had never been thought of 
 before. For, while M. Barbeau is to be congratu- 
 lated upon the happy task he has undertaken, we 
 may also congratulate ourselves that he has per- 
 formed it so effectively. His material is admirably 
 arranged. He has supported it by copious notes; 
 and he has backed it up by an impressive bibliography 
 of authorities ancient and modern. This is some- 
 thing; but it is not all. 1 He has done much more 
 than this. He has contrived that, in his picturesque 
 and learned pages, the old "Queen of the West" shall 
 live again, with its circling terraces, its grey stone 
 houses and ill-paved streets, its crush of chairs and 
 chariots, its throng of smirking, self-satisfied prom- 
 enaders. One seems to see the clumsy stage-coaches 
 depositing their touzled and tumbled inmates, in 
 their rough rocklows and quaint travelling headgear, 
 at the "Bear" or the "White Hart," after a jolting 
 
 *To the English version (Heinemann, 1904) an eighteenth-century 
 map of Bath, and a number of interesting views and portraits have been 
 added. 
 
A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH 159 
 
 two or three days' journey from Oxford or London, 
 not without the usual experiences, real and imaginary, 
 of suspicious-looking horsemen at Hounslow, or 
 masked "gentlemen of the pad" on Claverton 
 Down. One hears the peal of five-and-twenty bells 
 which greets the arrival of visitors of importance; 
 and notes the obsequious and venal town-waits who 
 follow them to their lodgings in Gay Street or 
 Milsom Street or the Parades, — where they will, no 
 doubt, be promptly attended by the Master of the 
 Ceremonies, "as fine as fivepence," and a very 
 pretty, sweet-smelling gentleman, to be sure, whether 
 his name be Wade or Derrick. Next day will 
 probably discover them in chip hats and flannel, 
 duly equipped with wooden bowls and bouquets, at 
 the King's Bath, where, through a steaming atmos- 
 phere, you may survey their artless manoeuvres (as 
 does Lydia Melford in Humphry Clinker) from the 
 windows of the Pump Room, to which rallying-place 
 they will presently repair to drink the waters, in a 
 medley of notables and notorieties, members of 
 Parliament, chaplains and led-captains, Noblemen 
 with ribbons and stars, dove-coloured Quakers, 
 Duchesses, quacks, fortune-hunters, lackeys, lank- 
 haired Methodists, Bishops, and boarding-school 
 misses. Ferdinand Count Fathom will be there, as 
 well as my Lord Ogleby; Lady Bellaston (and Mr. 
 Thomas Jones) ; Geoff ry Wildgoose and Tugwell the 
 
160 DE LIBRIS 
 
 cobbler; Lismahago and Tabitha Bramble; the caustic 
 Mrs. Selwyn and the blushing Miss Anville. Be cer- 
 tain, too, that, sooner or later, you will encounter Mrs. 
 Candour and Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite 
 and his uncle, Mr. Crabtree, for this is their main 
 haunt and region — in fact, they were born here. 
 You may follow this worshipful and piebald proces- 
 sion to the Public Breakfasts in the Spring Gardens, to 
 the Toy-shops behind the Church, to the Coffee-houses 
 in Westgate Street, to the Reading Rooms on the 
 Walks, where, in Mr. James Leake's parlour at the 
 back — if you are lucky — you may behold the cele- 
 brated Mr. Ralph Allen of Prior Park, talking either 
 to Mr. Henry Fielding or to Mr. Leake's brother- 
 in-law, Mr. Samuel Richardson, but never — if we are 
 correctly informed — to both of them together. Or 
 you may run against Mr. Christopher Anstey of the 
 over-praised Guide, walking arm-in-arm with another 
 Bathonian, Mr. Melmoth, whose version of Pliny 
 was once held to surpass its original. At the Abbey 
 — where there are daily morning services — you shall 
 listen to the silver periods of Bishop Hurd, whom 
 his admirers call fondly "the Beauty of Holiness"; 
 at St. James's you can attend the full-blown lectures, 
 "more unctuous than ever he preached," of Bishop 
 Beilby Porteus; or you may succeed in procuring a 
 card for a select hearing, at Edgar Buildings, of Lady 
 Huntingdon's eloquent chaplain, Mr. Whitefield. 
 
A FRENCH CRITIC ON BATH 161 
 
 With the gathering shades of even, you may pass, if 
 so minded, to Palmer's Theatre in Orchard Street, 
 and follow Mrs. Siddons acting Belvidera in Otway's 
 Venice Preserv'd to the Pierre of that forgotten Mr. 
 Lee whom Fanny Burney put next to Garrick; or 
 you may join the enraptured audience whom Mrs. 
 Jordan is delighting with her favourite part of 
 Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp. You may assist at 
 the concerts of Signor Venanzio Rauzzini and 
 Monsieur La Motte; you may take part in a long 
 minuet or country dance at the Upper or Lower 
 Assembly Rooms, which Bunbury will caricature; 
 you may even lose a few pieces at the green tables; 
 and, should you return home late enough, may 
 watch a couple of stout chairmen at the door 
 of the "Three Tuns" in Stall Street, hoisting 
 that seasoned toper, Mr. James Quin, into a sedan 
 after his evening's quantum of claret. What you 
 do to-day, you will do to-morrow, if the bad air 
 of the Pump Room has not given you a headache, 
 or the waters a touch of vertigo; and you will 
 continue to do it for a month or six weeks, when 
 the lumbering vehicle with the leathern straps and 
 crane-necked springs will carry you back again over 
 the deplorable roads ("so sidelum and jumblum" one 
 traveller calls them) to your town-house, or your 
 country-box, or your city-shop or chambers, as the 
 case may be. Here, in due course, you will begin 
 
i62 DE LIBRIS 
 
 to meditate upon your next excursion to The Bath, 
 provided always that you have not dipped your estate 
 at "E.O.", or been ruined by milliners' bills; — that 
 your son has not gone northwards with a sham Scotch 
 heiress, or your daughter been married at Charlcombe, 
 by private license, to a pinchbeck Irish peer. For all 
 these things — however painful the admission — were, 
 according to the most credible chroniclers, the by-no- 
 means infrequent accompaniment or sequel of an 
 unguarded sojourn at the old jigging, card-playing, 
 scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of 
 "the soft-flowing Avon." 
 
 It is an inordinate paragraph, outraging all known 
 rules of composition! But then — How seductive a 
 subject is eighteenth-century Bath ! — and how rich in 
 memories is M. Barbeau's book! 
 
A WELCOME FROM THE 
 "JOHNSON CLUB" 
 
 »«3 
 
A WELCOME FROM THE 
 "JOHNSON CLUB" 
 
 To William John Courthope, March 12, 1903 
 
 When Pope came back from Trojan wars once more, 
 He found a Bard, to meet him on the shore, 
 And hail his advent with a strain as clear 
 As e'er was sung by Byron or by Frere. 1 
 
 You, Sir, have travelled from no distant clime, 
 
 Yet would John Gay could welcome you in rhyme; 
 
 And by some fable not too coldly penned, 
 
 Teach how with judgment one may praise a Friend. 
 
 There is no need that I should tell in words 
 Your prowess from The Paradise of Birds f 
 No need to show how surely you have traced 
 The Life in Poetry, the Law in Taste; 3 
 
 1 Alexander Pope: his Safe Return from Troy. A Congratulatory Poem 
 on his Completing his Translation of Homer's Iliad. (In ottava rima.) 
 By Mr. Gay, i72o(?). Frere's burlesque, Monks and Giants — it will be 
 remembered — set the tune to Byron's Beppo. 
 
 2 The Paradise of Birds, 1870. 
 
 8 Life in Poetry, Law in Taste, two series of Lectures delivered in 
 Oxford, 1895-1900, 1901. 
 
 165 
 
166 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Or mark with what unwearied strength you wear 
 The weight that Warton found too great to bear. 1 
 There is no need for this or that. My plan 
 Is less to laud the Matter than the Man. 
 
 This is my brief. We recognise in you 
 The mind judicial, the untroubled view; 
 The critic who, without pedantic pose, 
 Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows ; 
 Who, free alike from passion or pretence, 
 Holds the good rule of calm and common sense; 
 And be the subject or perplexed or plain, — 
 Clear or confusing, — is throughout urbane, 
 Patient, persuasive, logical, precise, 
 And only hard to vanity and vice. 
 
 More I could add, but brevity is best; — 
 These are our claims to honour you as Guest. 
 
 1 A History of English Poetry, 1895 (in progress). 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 
 
 167 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 
 
 At this date, Thackeray's Esmond has passed from 
 the domain of criticism into that securer region 
 where the classics, if they do not actually "slumber 
 out their immortality," are at least preserved from 
 profane intrusion. This "noble story" 1 — as it was 
 called by one of its earliest admirers — is no longer, 
 in any sense, a book "under review." The painful 
 student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and 
 compass, question its details and proportions; or 
 the quick-fingered professor of paradox, jauntily 
 turning it upside-down, rejoice in the results of his 
 perverse dexterity; but certain things are now 
 established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, 
 even by those who assume the superfluous office of 
 anatomising the accepted. In the first place, if 
 Esmond be not the author's greatest work (and there 
 are those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, 
 would willingly give it that rank) , it is unquestionably 
 
 1 "Never could I have believed that Thackeray, great as his abilities 
 are, could have written so noble a story as Esmond." — Walter Savage 
 Landor, August 1856. 
 
 169 
 
170 DE LIBRIS 
 
 his greatest work in its particular kind, for its sequel, 
 The Virginians, however admirable in detached 
 passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while Denis 
 Duval, of which the promise was great, remains 
 unfinished. With Vanity Fair, the author's master- 
 piece in another manner, Esmond cannot properly 
 be compared, because an imitation of the past can 
 never compete in verisimilitude or on any satisfactory 
 terms with a contemporary picture. Nevertheless, 
 in its successful reproduction of the tone of a bygone 
 epoch, lies Esmond's second and incontestable claim 
 to length of days. Although fifty years and more 
 have passed since it was published, it is still unrivalled 
 as the typical example of that class of historical 
 fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters 
 real and feigned, develops them both with equal 
 familiarity, treating them each from within, and 
 investing them impartially with a common atmosphere 
 of illusion. No modern novel has done this in the 
 same way, nor with the same good fortune, as 
 Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said on 
 this score. Even if — as always — later researches 
 should have revised our conception of certain of 
 the real personages, the value of the book as an 
 imaginative tour de force is unimpaired. Little 
 remains therefore for the gleaner of to-day save 
 bibliographical jottings, and neglected notes on its 
 first appearance. 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 171 
 
 In Thackeray's work, the place of The History of 
 Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her 
 Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself — lies midway 
 between his four other principal books, Vanity Fair, 
 Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The Virginians ; and 
 its position serves, in a measure, to explain its origin. 
 In 1848, after much tentative and miscellaneous 
 production, of which the value had been but im- 
 perfectly appreciated, the author found his fame 
 with the yellow numbers of Vanity Fair. Two 
 years later, adopting the same serial form, came 
 Pendennis. Vanity Fair had been the condensation 
 of a life's experience; and excellent as Pendennis 
 would have seemed from any inferior hand, its 
 readers could not disguise from themselves that, 
 though showing no falling off in other respects, it 
 drew to some extent upon the old material. No 
 one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a 
 whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe 
 that — as he afterwards told his friend Elwin concern- 
 ing The Newcomes — "he had exhausted all the types 
 of character with which he was familiar." Accord- 
 ingly he began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in 
 fresh directions; and in the year that followed the 
 publication of Pendennis, prepared and delivered 
 in England and Scotland a series of Lectures upon 
 the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. 
 With the success of these came the prompting for 
 
1 72 DE LIBRIS 
 
 a new work of fiction, — not to be contemporary, 
 and not to be issued in parts. His studies for the 
 Humourists had saturated him with the spirit of a 
 time to which — witness his novelette of Barry 
 Lyndon — he had always been attracted; and when 
 Mr. George Smith called on him with a proposal 
 that he should write a new story for £1,000, he was 
 already well in hand with Esmond, — an effort in 
 which, if it were not possible to invent new puppets, 
 it was at least possible to provide fresh costumes 
 and a change of background. Begun in 185 1, 
 Esmond progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 
 1852 it was completed. Owing to the limited 
 stock of old-cut type in which it was set up, its 
 three volumes passed but slowly through the press; 
 and it was eventually issued at the end of the follow- 
 ing October, upon the eve of the author's departure 
 to lecture in America. In fact, he was waiting on 
 the pier for the tender which was to convey him to 
 the steamer, when he received his bound copies from 
 the publisher. 
 
 Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A., who accompanied 
 Thackeray to the United States, and had for some 
 time previously been acting as his "factotum and 
 amanuensis," has recorded several interesting details 
 with regard to the writing of Esmond. To most 
 readers it will be matter of surprise, and it is 
 certainly a noteworthy testimony to the author's 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 173 
 
 powers, that this attempt to revive the language 
 and atmosphere of a vanished era was in great 
 part dictated. It has even been said that, like 
 Pendennis, it was all dictated; but this it seems 
 is a mistake, for, as we shall see presently, part of 
 the manuscript was prepared by the author himself. 
 As he warmed to his work, however, he often 
 reverted to the method of oral composition which 
 had always been most congenial to him, and which 
 explains the easy colloquialism of his style. Much 
 of the "copy" was taken down by Mr. Crowe in 
 a first-floor bedroom of No. 16 Young Street, 
 Kensington, the still-existent house where Vanity 
 Fair had been written; at the Bedford Hotel in 
 Covent Garden ; at the round table in the Athenaeum 
 library, and elsewhere. "I write better anywhere 
 than at home," — Thackeray told Elwin, — "and I 
 write less at home than anywhere." Sometimes 
 author and scribe would betake themselves to the 
 British Museum, to look up points in connection 
 with Marlborough's battles, or to rummage Jacob 
 Tonson's Gazettes for the official accounts of 
 Wynendael and Oudenarde. The British Museum, 
 indeed, was another of Esmond's birthplaces. By 
 favour of Sir Antonio Panizzi, Thackeray and his 
 assistant, surrounded by their authorities, were 
 accommodated in one of the secluded galleries. "I 
 sat down," — says Mr. Crowe — "and wrote to 
 
174 DE LIBRIS 
 
 dictation the scathing sentences about the great 
 Marlborough, the denouncing of Cadogan, etc., etc. 
 As a curious instance of literary contagion, it may 
 be here stated that I got quite bitten with the ex- 
 pressed anger at their misdeeds against General 
 Webb, Thackeray's kinsman and ancestor; and 
 that I then looked upon Secretary Cardonnel's 
 conduct with perfect loathing. I was quite delighted 
 to find his meannesses justly pilloried in Esmond's 
 pages." What rendered the situation more piquant, 
 — Mr. Crowe adds, — all this took place on the site 
 of old Montague House, where, as Steele's "Prue" 
 says to St. John in the novel, "you wretches go and 
 fight duels." 1 
 
 Those who are willing to make a pilgrimage to 
 Cambridge, may, if they please, inspect the very 
 passages which aroused the enthusiasm of Thackeray's 
 secretary. In a special case in the Library of Trinity 
 College, not far from those which enclose the manu- 
 scripts of Tennyson and Milton, is the original and 
 only manuscript of Esmond, being in fact the identical 
 "copy" which was despatched to the press of Messrs. 
 Bradbury and Evans at Whitefriars. It makes two 
 large quarto volumes, and was presented to the 
 College (Esmond's College!) in 1888 by the author's 
 son-in-law, the late Sir Leslie Stephen. It still bears 
 
 1 With Thackeray in America, 1893, p. 4. 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 175 
 
 in pencil the names of the different compositors who 
 set up the type. Much of it is in Thackeray's own 
 small, slightly-slanted, but oftener upright hand, and 
 many pages have hardly any corrections. 1 His 
 custom was to write on half-sheets of a rather large 
 notepaper, and some idea may be gathered of the 
 neat, minute, and regular script, when it is added that 
 the lines usually contain twelve to fifteen words, and 
 that there are frequently as many as thirty-three of 
 these lines to a page. Some of the rest of the "copy" 
 is in the handwriting of the author's daughter, now 
 Lady Ritchie ; but a considerable portion was penned 
 by Mr. Eyre Crowe. The oft-quoted passage in 
 book ii. chap. vi. about "bringing your sheaves with 
 you," was written by Thackeray himself almost as it 
 stands; so was the sham Spectator, hereafter men- 
 tioned, and most of the chapter headed "General 
 Webb wins the Battle of Wynendael." But the 
 splendid closing scene, — "August 1st, 17 14," — is 
 almost wholly in the hand of Mr. Crowe. It is 
 certainly a remarkable fact that work at this level 
 should have been thus improvised, and that nothing, 
 
 1 One is reminded of the accounts of Scott's "copy." "Page after page 
 the writing runs on exactly as you read it in print" — says Mr. Mowbray 
 Morris. "I was looking not long ago at the manuscript of Kenilworth in 
 the British Museum, and examined the end with particular care, thinking 
 that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart's death must surely have cost 
 him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in the volume: I do not 
 think there was a sentence altered or added in the whole chapter" 
 (Lecture at Eton, Macmillan's Magazine (1889), lx. pp. 158-9). 
 
176 DE LIBRIS 
 
 as we are credibly informed, should have been before 
 committed to paper. 1 
 
 When Esmond first made its appearance in October 
 1852, it was not without distinguished and even 
 formidable competitors. Bleak House had reached 
 its eighth number; and Bulwer was running My 
 Novel in Blackwood. In Eraser, Kingsley was bring- 
 ing out Hypatia ; and Whyte Melville was preluding 
 with Digby Grand. Charlotte Bronte must have 
 been getting ready Villette for the press; and 
 Tennyson — undeterred by the fact that his hero had 
 already been "dirged" by the indefatigable Tupper — 
 was busy with his Ode on the Death of the Duke of 
 Wellington. 2 The critics of the time were possibly 
 embarrassed with this wealth of talent, for they were 
 not, at the outset, immoderately enthusiastic over 
 the new arrival. The Athenaum was by no means 
 laudatory. Esmond "harped upon the same string"; 
 "wanted vital heat"; "touched no fresh fount of 
 thought"; "introduced no novel forms of life"; 
 
 1 "The sentences" — Mr. Crowe told a member of the Athenaeum, when 
 speaking of his task — "came out glibly as he [Thackeray] paced the room." 
 This is the more singular when contrasted with the slow elaboration of the 
 Balzac and Flaubert school. No doubt Thackeray must often have arranged 
 in his mind precisely much that he meant to say. Such seems indeed to 
 have been his habit. The late Mr. Locker Lampson informed the writer 
 of this paper that once, when he met the author of Esmond in the Green 
 Park, Thackeray gently begged to be allowed to walk alone, as he had 
 some verses in his head which he was finishing. They were those which 
 afterwards appeared in the Cornhill for January 1867, under the title of 
 Mrs. Katherine's Lantern. 
 
 a The Duke died 14th Sept 1852. 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 177 
 
 and so forth. But the Spectator, in a charming 
 greeting from George Brimley (since included in his 
 Essays) , placed the book, as a work of art, even above 
 Vanity Fair and Pendennis; the "serious and 
 orthodox" Examiner, then under John Forster, was 
 politely judicial; the Daily News friendly; and the 
 Morning Advertiser enraptured. The book, this last 
 declared, was the "beau-ideal of historical romance." 
 On December 4 a second edition was announced. 
 Then, on the 22nd, came the Times. Whether the 
 Times remembered and resented a certain delightfully 
 contemptuous "Essay on Thunder and Small Beer," 
 with which Thackeray retorted to its notice of The 
 Kickleburys on the Rhine (a thing hard to believe !) or 
 whether it did not, — its report of Esmond was dis- 
 tinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended 
 little but the character of Marlborough, and the 
 writer's "incomparably easy and unforced style." 
 Thackeray thought that it had "absolutely stopped" 
 the sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact 
 that the publisher sent him a supplementary cheque 
 for £250 on account of Esmond's success. 
 
 Another reason which may have tended to slacken 
 — not to stop — the sale, is also suggested by the author 
 himself. This was the growing popularity of My 
 Novel and Villette. And Miss Bronte's book calls to 
 mind the fact that she was among the earliest readers 
 of Esmond, the first two volumes of which were sent 
 
178 DE LIBRIS 
 
 to her in manuscript by George Smith. She read it, 
 she tells him, with "as much ire and sorrow as grati- 
 tude and admiration," marvelling at its mastery of 
 reconstruction, — hating its satire, — its injustice to 
 women. How could Lady Castlewood peep through 
 a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy 
 and a milkmaid ! There was too much political and 
 religious intrigue — she thought. Nevertheless she 
 said (this was in February 1852, speaking of vol. i.) 
 the author might "yet make it the best he had ever 
 written." In March she had seen the second volume. 
 The character of Marlborough (here she anticipated 
 the Times) was a "masterly piece of writing." But 
 there was "too little story." The final volume, by 
 her own request, she received in print. It possessed, 
 in her opinion, the "most sparkle, impetus, and 
 interest." "I hold," she wrote to Mr. Smith, "that 
 a work of fiction ought to be a work of creation: 
 that the real should be sparingly introduced in pages 
 dedicated to the ideal" In a later letter she gives 
 high praise to the complex conception of Beatrix, 
 traversing incidentally the absurd accusation of one of 
 the papers that she resembled Blanche Amory [the 
 Aihenaum and Examiner, it may be noted, regarded 
 her as "another Becky"]. "To me," Miss Bronte 
 exclaims, "they are about as identical as a weasel and 
 a royal tigress of Bengal; both the latter are quad- 
 rupeds, both the former women." These frank 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 179 
 
 comments of a fervent but thoroughly honest admirer, 
 are of genuine interest. When the book was 
 published, Thackeray himself sent her a copy with 
 his "grateful regards," and it must have been of this 
 that she wrote to Mr. Smith on November 3, — 
 "Colonel Henry Esmond is just arrived. He looks 
 very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne's 
 garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very 
 well represented by the old Spectator type." 1 
 
 One of the points on which Miss Bronte does not 
 touch, — at all events does not touch in those 
 portions of her correspondence which have been 
 printed, — is the marriage with which Esmond closes. 
 Upon this event it would have been highly instructive 
 to have had her views, especially as it appears to 
 have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first 
 reviewers. It was the gravamen of the Times indict- 
 ment; to the critic of Fraser it was highly objection- 
 able; and the Examiner regarded it as "incredible." 
 Why it was "incredible" that a man should marry 
 a woman seven years older than himself, to whom he 
 had already proposed once in vol. ii., and of whose 
 youthful appearance we are continually reminded 
 ("she looks the sister of her daughter" says the 
 old Dowager at Chelsea) , is certainly not superficially 
 obvious. Nor was it obvious to Lady Castlewood's 
 
 1 Mr. Clement Snorter's Charlotte Bronte and her Circle, 1896, p. 403 5 
 and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte", 1900, pp. 561 et seq. 
 
180 DE LIBRIS 
 
 children. "Mother's in love with you, — yes, I think 
 mother's in love with you," says downright Frank 
 Esmond; the only impediment in his eyes being the 
 bar sinister, as yet unremoved. And Miss Beatrix 
 herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit. 
 "As for you," she tells Esmond, "you want a 
 woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at 
 your feet, and cry 'O caro! O bravo!' whilst you 
 read your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff" 
 [which shows that she herself had read Swift's Grand 
 Question Debated']. "Mamma would have been the 
 wife for you, had you been a little older, though you 
 look ten years older than she does." "You do, you 
 glum-faced, blue-bearded, little old man!" adds this 
 very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The 
 situation is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, 
 and naturally requires consummate skill in the 
 treatment. But if these things and others signify 
 anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that 
 the author, if he had not his end steadily in view, 
 knew perfectly well that his story was tending in one 
 direction. There will probably always be some 
 diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority 
 of us have accepted Thackeray's solution, and have 
 dropped out of sight that hint of undesirable rivalry, 
 which so troubled the precisians of the early Victorian 
 age. To those who read Esmond now, noting care- 
 fully the almost imperceptible transformation of the 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 181 
 
 motives on either side, as developed by the evolution 
 of the story, the union of the hero and heroine at 
 the end must appear not only credible but pre- 
 ordained. And that the gradual progress towards 
 this foregone conclusion is handled with unfailing 
 tact and skill, there can surely be no question. 1 
 
 Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest 
 has, perhaps, at this date, a little paled. Not that 
 they are one whit less vigorously alive than when the- 
 author first put them in motion; but they have 
 suffered from the very attention which Esmond and 
 The Humourists have directed to the study of the 
 originals. The picture of Marlborough is still as 
 effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good 
 enough for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray 
 himself confessed to a family prejudice against the 
 hero of Blenheim, and later artists have considerably 
 readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would 
 the latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse that pre- 
 sentment. In the purely literary figures, Thackeray 
 naturally followed the Lectures, and is consequently 
 open to the same criticisms as have been offered on 
 those performances. The Swift of The Humourists, 
 modelled on Macaulay, was never accepted from the 
 
 1 Thackeray's own explanation was more characteristic than convincing. 
 "Why did you" — said once to him impetuous Mrs. John Brown of Edin- 
 burgh — "Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?" "My dear 
 lady," he replied, "it was not I who married them. They married them- 
 selves." {Dr. John Brown, by the late John Taylor Brown, 1903, 
 pp. 96-7.) 
 
182 DE LIBRIS 
 
 first; and it has not been accepted in the novel, 
 or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards. 1 
 Addison has been less studied; and his likeness has 
 consequently been less questioned. Concerning 
 Steele there has been rather more discussion. That 
 Thackeray's sketch is very vivid, very human, and 
 in most essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. 
 But it is obviously conceived under the domination 
 of the "poor Dick" of Addison, and dwells far too 
 persistently upon Steele's frailer and more fallible 
 aspect. No one would believe that the flushed 
 personage in the full-bottomed periwig, who hic- 
 cups Addison's Campaign in the Haymarket garret, 
 or the fuddled victim of "Prue's" curtain lecture at 
 Hampton, ranked, at the date of the story, far higher 
 than Addison as a writer, and that he was, in spite 
 of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and scholar, 
 but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a con- 
 sistent politician. Probably the author of Esmond 
 considered that, in a mixed character, to be intro- 
 duced incidentally, and exhibited naturally "in the 
 quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind" (as 
 
 1 Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. "As for Swift, you 
 haven't made me alter my opinion" — he replied to Hannay's remonstrances. 
 This feeling was intensified by the belief that Swift, as a clergyman, was 
 insincere. "Of course," — he wrote in September, 1851, in a letter now in 
 the British Museum, — "any man is welcome to believe as he likes for me 
 except a parson: and I can't help looking upon Swift and Sterne as a 
 couple of traitors and renegades . . . with a scornful pity for them in 
 spite of all their genius and greatness." 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 183 
 
 Lamb says), anything like biographical big drum 
 should be deprecated. This is, at least, the im- 
 pression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. 
 He says that Thackeray, talking to him once about 
 The Virginians, which was then appearing, announced 
 that he meant, among other people, to bring in 
 Goldsmith, "representing him as he really was, a 
 little, shabby, mean, shuffling Irishman." These 
 are given as Thackeray's actual words. If so, they 
 do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown 
 in the last lecture of The Humourists. 1 
 
 But although, with our rectified information, we 
 may except against the picture of Steele as a man, we 
 can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of his manner 
 as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at 
 Charterhouse, his imitative faculty had been excep- 
 tional; and he displayed it triumphantly in his 
 maturity by those Novels by Eminent Hands in which 
 the authors chosen are at once caricatured and 
 criticised. The thing is more than the gift of 
 parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has 
 rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all 
 his works, in stray letters and detached passages. In 
 
 1 Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters, 1902, i. 187. The intention 
 was never carried out. In The King over the Water, 1908, Miss A. 
 Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another portrait 
 in Esmond, — that of the Chevalier de St. George, — not without injury to 
 its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang — like Rob Roy — is on 
 his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the reader to this 
 highly interesting study. 
 
1 84 DE LIBRIS 
 
 its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circum- 
 stantial report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in 
 Denis Duval ; and in the missive in barbarous French 
 of the Dowager Viscountess Castlewood 1 — a letter 
 which only requires the sprawling, childish script to 
 make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary 
 efforts of that "baby-faced" Caroline beauty who 
 was accustomed to sign herself "L duchesse de 
 Portsmouth" It is better still in the letter from 
 Walpole to General Conway in chap. xl. of The 
 Virginians, which is perfect, even to the indifferent 
 pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But 
 the crown and top of these pastiches is certainly the 
 delightful paper, which pretends to be No. 341 
 of the Spectator for All Fools' Day, 17 12, in which 
 Colonel Esmond treats "Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix," 
 to what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a 
 "bite." 2 Here Thackeray has borrowed not only 
 Steele's voice, but his very trick of speech. It is, 
 however, a fresh instance of the "tangled web we 
 weave, When first we practise to deceive," that 
 although this pseudo-Spectator is stated to have been 
 printed "exactly as those famous journals were 
 printed" for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables, it 
 could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have 
 deceived the contemporary elect. For Mr. Esmond, 
 to his very apposite Latin epigraph, unluckily appended 
 
 1 Esmond, Book ii. chap. ii. 2 lb. Book Hi. chap. Hi. 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 185 
 
 an English translation, — a concession to the country 
 gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele 
 deliberately abstained, holding that their distinctive 
 mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase) "words to 
 the wise," of no concern to unlearned persons. 1 
 
 This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of 
 would-be perfect imitation. But it also serves to 
 bring us finally to the vocabulary of Esmond. As to 
 this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been 
 advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a 
 high journalistic authority, that "no man, woman, 
 or child in Esmond, ever says anything that he or she 
 might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne." 
 This is one of those extreme utterances in which 
 enthusiasm, losing its head, invites contradiction. 
 Thackeray professedly "copied the language of 
 Queen Anne," — he says so in his dedication to Lord 
 Ashburton; but he himself would certainly never 
 have put forward so comprehensive a claim as the 
 above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged 
 Mr. Lowell (who was his fellow-passenger to America 
 on the Canada) to point out in Esmond a word which 
 had not been used in the early eighteenth century; 
 and that the author of The Biglow Papers promptly 
 discovered such a word. But even if the anecdote 
 be not well-invented, the invitation must have been 
 more jest than earnest. For none knew better than 
 
 1 Spectator, No. 221, November 13, 1711. 
 
1 86 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording be- 
 long to ingenuity rather than genius, being exercises 
 altogether in the taste of the Persian poet who left 
 out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in his verses, 
 or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in 
 honour of Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a 
 mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross, a lozenge, — every- 
 thing, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray 
 endeavoured after when "copying the language of 
 Queen Anne," and succeeded in attaining, was the 
 spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic 
 philology at which he aimed, though he did not 
 disdain occasional picturesque archaisms, such as 
 "yatches" for "yachts," or despise the artful aid 
 of terminal k's, long s's, and old-cut type. Con- 
 sequently, as was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward 
 Hall (whose manifest prejudice against Thackeray as 
 a writer should not blind us in a matter of fact), 
 it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the 
 memoirs of Queen Anne's Colonel which could never 
 have been employed until Her Majesty had long 
 been "quietly inurned." What is more, — if we 
 mistake not, — the author of Esmond sometimes re- 
 frained from using an actual eighteenth-century word, 
 even in a quotation, when his instinct told him it 
 was not expedient to do so. In the original of that 
 well-known anecdote of Steele beside his father's 
 coffin, in Tatler No. 181, reproduced in book i. 
 
THACKERAY'S "ESMOND" 187 
 
 chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, "My mother 
 catched me in her arms." "Catched" is good 
 enough eighteenth-century for Johnson and Walpole. 
 But Thackeray made it "caught," and "caught" 
 it remains to this day both in Esmond and The 
 Humourists. 
 
A MILTONIC EXERCISE 
 
 .s 9 
 
A MILTONIC EXERCISE 
 (tercentenary, i 608-1 908) 
 
 "Stops of various Quills." — Lycidas 
 
 What need of votive Verse 
 
 To strew thy Laureat Herse 
 With that mix'd Flora of th' Aonian Hilll 
 
 Or Mincian vocall Reed, 
 
 That Cam and his breed, 
 When thine own Words are burning in us still ? 
 
 Bard, Prophet, Archimage! 
 
 In this cash-cradled Age, 
 We grate our scrannel Musick, and we dote : 
 
 Where is the Strain unknown, 
 
 Through Bronze or Silver blown, 
 That thrilPd the Welkin with thy woven Note? 
 
 Yes, — we are "selfish Men" : 
 
 Yet would we once again 
 
 Might see Sabrina braid her amber Tire ; 
 
 191 
 
i 9 2 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Or watch the Comus Crew 
 Sweep down the Glade; or view 
 Strange-streamer'd Craft from Javan or Gadire \ 
 
 Or could we catch once more, 
 
 High up, the Clang and Roar 
 Of Angel conflict, — Angel overthrow: 
 
 Or, with a World begun, 
 
 Behold the young-ray' d Sun 
 Flame through the Groves where the Four Rivers flow ! 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 Ay me, I fondly dream ! 
 
 Only the storm-bird's scream 
 Foretells of Tempest in the days to come; 
 
 Nowhere is heard up-climb 
 
 The lofty lyric Rhyme, 
 And the "God-gifted Organ- voice" is dumb. 1 
 
 1 Written by request for the celebration at Christ's College, Cambridge, 
 July 10, 1908. 
 
FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING 
 
 193 
 
FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING 
 
 The general reader, as a rule, is but moderately 
 interested in minor rectifications. Secure in a conven- 
 tional preference of the spirit to the letter, he pro- 
 fesses to be indifferent whether the grandmother of 
 an exalted personage was a "Hugginson" or a 
 "Blenkinsop" ; and he is equally careless as to the 
 correct Christian names of his cousins and his aunts. 
 In the main, the general reader is wise in his genera- 
 tion. But with the painful biographer, toiling in 
 the immeasurable sand of thankless research, often 
 foot-sore and dry of throat, these trivialities assume 
 exaggerated proportions; and to those who remind 
 him — as in a cynical age he is sure to be reminded — 
 of the infinitesimal value of his hard-gotten grains of 
 information, he can only reply mournfully, if uncon- 
 vincingly, that fact is fact — even in matters of 
 mustard-seed. With this prelude, I propose to set 
 down one or two minute points concerning Henry 
 Fielding, not yet comprised in any existing records of 
 his career. 1 
 
 1 Since this v-as published in April 1907, they have been embodied in 
 an Appendix to my "Men of Letters" Fielding; and used, to some extent, 
 for a fresh edition of the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon ("World's 
 Classics"). 
 
 195 
 
196 DE LIBRIS 
 
 The first relates to the exact period of his 
 residence at Leyden University. His earliest 
 biographer, Arthur Murphy, writing in 1762, is 
 more explicit than usual on this topic. "He 
 [Fielding]," says Murphy, "went from Eton to 
 Leyden, and there continued to show an eager thirst 
 for knowledge, and to study the civilians with a 
 remarkable application for about two years, when, 
 remittances failing, he was obliged to return to 
 London, not then quite twenty years old" [i.e. before 
 22nd April, 1727]. In 1883, like my predecessors, 
 I adopted this statement, for the sufficient reason 
 that I had nothing better to put in its place. And 
 Murphy should have been well-informed. He had 
 known Fielding personally; he was employed by 
 Fielding's publisher; and he could, one would 
 imagine, have readily obtained accurate data from 
 Fielding's surviving sister, Sarah, who was only three 
 years younger than her brother, of whose short life 
 (he died at forty-eight) she could scarcely have 
 forgotten the particulars. Murphy's story, more- 
 over, exactly fitted in with the fact, only definitely 
 made known in June 1883, that Fielding, as a youth 
 of eighteen, had endeavoured, in November 1725 to 
 abduct or carry off his first love, Miss Sarah Andrew 
 of Lyme Regis. Although the lady was promptly 
 married to a son of one of her fluttered guardians, 
 nothing seemed more reasonable than to assume that 
 
FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING 197 
 
 the disappointed lover (one is sure he was never 
 an heiress-hunter!) was despatched to the Dutch 
 University to keep him out of mischief. 1 But in 
 once more examining Mr. Keightley's posthumous 
 papers, kindly placed at my disposal by his nephew, 
 Mr. Alfred C. Lyster, I found a reference to an 
 un-noted article in the Cornhill Magazine for 
 November, 1863 (from internal evidence I believe it 
 to have been written by James Hannay), entitled 
 "A Scotchman in Holland." Visiting Leyden, the 
 writer was permitted to inspect the University 
 Album; and he found, under 1728, the following: — 
 "Henricus Fielding, Anglus, Ann. 20. Stud. Lit." , 
 coupled with the further detail that he "was living 
 at the 'Hotel of Antwerp.' " Except in the item of 
 "Stud. Lit.", this did not seem to conflict materially 
 with Murphy's account, as Fielding was nominally 
 twenty from 1727 to 1728, and small discrepancies 
 must be allowed for. 
 
 Twenty years later, a fresh version of the record 
 came to light. At their tercentenary festival in 
 1875, tne Leyden University printed a list of their 
 students from their foundation to that year. From 
 this Mr. Edward Peacock, F.S.A., compiled in 1883, 
 for the Index Society, an Index to English-Speaking 
 Students who have graduated at Leyden University; 
 and at p. 35 appears Fielding, Henricus, Anglus, 16 
 
 1 "Men of Letters" Fielding, 1907, Appendix I. 
 
198 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Mart. 1728, 915 (the last being the column number 
 of the list). This added a month-date, and made 
 Fielding a graduate. Then, two years ago, came yet 
 a third rendering. Mr. A. E. H. Swaen, writing in 
 The Modern Language Review for July 1906, printed 
 the inscription in the Album as follows: "Febr. 16. 
 1728 : Rectore Johanne Wesselio, Henricus Fielding, 
 Anglus. 20, L." Mr. Swaen construed this to mean 
 that, on the date named (which, it may be observed, 
 is not Mr. Peacock's date), Fielding, u aged twenty, 
 was entered as litterarum studiosus at Leyden." In 
 this case it would follow that his residence in Holland 
 should have come after February 16th, 1728; and 
 Mr. Swaen went on to conjecture that, "as his 
 [Fielding's] first play, Love in Several Masques, was 
 staged at Drury Lane in February, 1728, and his next 
 play, The Temple Beau, was produced in January, 
 1730, it is not improbable that his residence in 
 Holland filled up the interval or part of it. Did the 
 profits of the play [he proceeded] perhaps cover part 
 of his travelling expenses?" 
 
 The new complications imported into the question 
 by this fresh aspect of it, will be at once apparent. 
 Up to 1875 there had been but one Fielding on the 
 Leyden books; so that all these differing accounts 
 were variations from a single source. In this 
 difficulty, I was fortunate enough to enlist the 
 sympathy of Mr. Frederic Harrison, who most 
 
FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING 199 
 
 kindly undertook to make inquiries on my behalf 
 at Leyden University itself. In reply to certain 
 definite queries drawn up by me, he obtained from 
 the distinguished scholar and Professor of History, 
 Dr. Pieter Blok, the following authoritative 
 particulars. The exact words in the original Album 
 Academicum are: — "16 Martii 1728 Henricus 
 Fielding, Anglus, annor. 20 Litt. Stud." He was 
 then staying at the u Casteel van Antwerpen" — as 
 related by "A Scotchman in Holland." His name 
 only occurs again in the yearly recensiones under 
 February 22nd, 1729, as "Henricus Fieldingh," 
 when he was domiciled with one Jan Oson. He 
 must consequently have left Leyden before February 
 8th, 1730, February 8th being the birthday of the 
 University, after which all students have to be 
 annually registered. The entry in the Album (as 
 Mr. Swaen affirmed) is an admission entry; there 
 are no leaving entries. As regards "studying the 
 civilians," Fielding might, in those days, Dr. Blok 
 explains, have had private lessons from the pro- 
 fessors; but he could not have studied in the 
 University without being on the books. To sum 
 up: After producing Love in Several Masques at 
 Drury Lane, probably on February 12th, 1728, 1 
 Fielding was admitted a "Litt. Stud." at Leyden 
 University on March 16th; was still there in 
 
 1 Genest, iii. 209. 
 
200 DE LIBRIS 
 
 February 1729; and left before February 8th, 1730. 
 Murphy is therefore at fault in almost every 
 particular. Fielding did not go from Eton to 
 Leyden; he did not make any recognised study of 
 the civilians, "with remarkable application" or 
 otherwise; and he did not return to London before 
 he was twenty. But it is by no means improbable 
 that the causa causans or main reason for his 
 coming home was the failure of remittances. 
 
 Another recently established fact is also more or 
 less connected with "Mur. — " as Johnson called him. 
 In his "Essay" of 1762, he gave a highly-coloured 
 account of Fielding's first marriage, and of the 
 promptitude with which, assisted by yellow liveries 
 and a pack of hounds, he managed to make duck 
 and drake of his wife's little fortune. This account 
 has now been "simply riddled in its details" (as Mr. 
 Saintsbury puts it) by successive biographers, the 
 last destructive critic being the late Sir Leslie 
 Stephen, who plausibly suggested that the "yellow 
 liveries" (not the family liveries, be it noted!) were 
 simply a confused recollection of the fantastic pranks 
 of that other and earlier Beau Fielding (Steele's 
 "Orlando the Fair"), who married the Duchess of 
 Cleveland in 1705, and was also a Justice of the 
 Peace for Westminster. One thing was wanting to 
 the readjustment of the narrative, and that was the 
 precise date of Fielding's marriage to the beautiful 
 
FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING 201 
 
 Miss Cradock of Salisbury, the original both of 
 Sophia Western and Amelia Booth. By good 
 fortune this has now been ascertained. Lawrence 
 gave the date as 1735; and Keightley suggested the 
 spring of that year. This, as Swift would say, was 
 near the mark, although confirmation has been slow 
 in coming. In June 1906, Mr. Thomas S. Bush, of 
 Bath, announced in The Bath Chronicle that the 
 desired information was to be found (not in the 
 Salisbury registers which had been fruitlessly con- 
 sulted, but) at the tiny church of St. Mary, Charl- 
 combe, a secluded parish about one and a half miles 
 north of Bath. Here is the record: — "November 
 y e 28, 1734. Henry Fielding of y e Parish of St. 
 James in Bath, Esq., and Charlotte Cradock, of y e 
 same Parish, spinster, were married by virtue of a 
 licence from y e Court of Wells." All lovers of 
 Fielding owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Bush, whose 
 researches, in addition, disclosed the fact that Sarah 
 Fielding, the novelist's third sister (as we shall see 
 presently), was buried, not in Bath Abbey, where 
 Dr. John Hoadly raised a memorial to her, but "in 
 y* entrance of the Chancel [of Charlcombe Church] 
 close to y e Rector's seat," April 14th, 1768. 1 Mr. 
 Bush's revelation, it may be added, was made in 
 
 1 Sarah Fielding's epitaph in Bath Abbey is often said to have been 
 written by Bishop Benjamin Hoadly. In this case, it must have been 
 anticipatory (like Dr. Primrose's on his Deborah) for the Bishop died in 
 1761. 
 
202 DE LIBRIS 
 
 connection with another record of the visits of the 
 novelist to the old Queen of the West, a tablet 
 erected in June 1906 to Fielding and his sister on the 
 wall of Yew Cottage, now renovated as Widcombe 
 Lodge, Widcombe, Bath, where they once resided. 
 
 In the last case I have to mention, it is but fair 
 to Murphy to admit that he seems to have been 
 better informed than those who have succeeded him. 
 Richardson writes of being u well acquainted" with 
 four of Fielding's sisters, and both Lawrence and 
 Keightley refer to a Catherine and an Ursula, of 
 whom Keightley, after prolonged enquiries, could 
 obtain no tidings. With the help of Colonel W. F. 
 Prideaux, and the kind offices of Mr. Samuel Martin 
 of the Hammersmith Free Library, this matter has 
 now been set at rest. In 1887 Sir Leslie Stephen 
 had suggested to me that Catherine and Ursula were 
 most probably born at Sharpham Park, before the 
 Fieldings moved to East Stour. This must have 
 been the case, though Keightley had failed to establish 
 it. At all events, Catherine and Ursula must have 
 existed, for they both died in 1750. The Hammer- 
 smith Registers at Fulham record the following 
 burials : — 
 
 1750 July 9th, Mrs. Catherine Fielding (sic) 
 1750 Nov. 1 2th, Mrs. Ursula Fielding 
 1750 [-1] Feb y . 24th, Mrs. Beatrice Fielding 
 1753 May 10th, Louisa, d. of Henry Fielding, Esq. 
 
FRESH FACTS ABOUT FIELDING 203 
 
 The first three, with Sarah, make up the "Four 
 Worthy Sisters" of the reprehensible author of that 
 "truly coarse-titled Tom Jones" concerning which 
 Richardson wrote shudderingly in August 1749 to 
 his young friends, Astraea and Minerva Hill. The 
 final entry relating to Fielding's little daughter, 
 Louisa, born December 3rd, 1752, makes it probable 
 that, in May, 1753, he was staying in the house at 
 Hammersmith, then occupied by his sole surviving 
 sister, Sarah. In the following year (October 8th) 
 he himself died at Lisbon. There is no better short 
 appreciation of his work than Lowell's lapidary 
 lines for the Shire Hall at Taunton, — the epigraph 
 to the bust by Miss Margaret Thomas : 
 
 He looked on naked nature unashamed, 
 
 And saw the Sphinx, now bestial, now divine, 
 In change and re-change; he nor praised nor blamed, 
 
 But drew her as he saw with fearless line. 
 Did he good service? God must judge, not we! 
 
 Manly he was, and generous and sincere; 
 English in all, of genius blithely free: 
 
 Who loves a Man may see his image here. 
 
THE HAPPY PRINTER 
 
 205 
 
THE HAPPY PRINTER 
 
 "Hoc est vivere." — Martial 
 
 The Printer's is a happy lot: 
 
 Alone of all professions, 
 No fateful smudges ever blot 
 
 His earliest "impressions." 
 
 The outgrowth of his youthful ken 
 No cold obstruction fetters; 
 
 He quickly learns the "types" of men, 
 And all the world of "letters." 
 
 With "forms" he scorns to compromise; 
 
 For him no "rule" has terrors; 
 The "slips" he makes he can "revise" — 
 
 They are but "printers' errors." 
 
 From doubtful questions of the "Press" 
 
 He wisely holds aloof; 
 
 In all polemics, more or less, 
 
 His argument is "proof." 
 207 
 
2o8 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Save in their "case," with High and Low 
 Small need has he to grapple ! 
 
 Without dissent he still can go 
 
 To his accustomed "Chapel." 1 
 
 From ills that others scape or shirk, 
 
 He rarely fails to rally; 
 For him, his most "composing" work 
 
 Is labour of the "galley." 
 
 Though ways be foul, and days are dim, 
 He makes no lamentation; 
 
 The primal "fount" of woe to him 
 Is — want of occupation: 
 
 And when, at last, Time finds him grey 
 With over-close attention, 
 
 He solves the problem of the day, 
 And gets an Old Age pension. 
 
 1 This, derived, it is said, from Caxton's connection with Westminster 
 Abbey, is the name given to the meetings held by printers to consider trade 
 affairs, appeals, etc. (Printers' Vocabulary). 
 
CROSS READINGS— AND CALEB 
 WHITEFOORD 
 
 209 
 
CROSS READINGS— AND CALEB 
 WHITEFOORD 
 
 Towards the close of the year 1766 — not many 
 months after the publication of the Vicar of Wakefield 
 — there appeared in Mr. Henry Sampson WoodfalPs 
 Public Advertiser, and other newspapers, a letter 
 addressed "To the Printer," and signed "Papyrius 
 Cursor." The name was a real Roman name; but 
 in its burlesque applicability to the theme of the 
 communication, it was as felicitous as Thackeray's 
 "Manlius Pennialinus," or that "Apollonius 
 Curius" from whom Hood fabled to have borrowed 
 the legend of "Lycus the Centaur." The writer 
 of the letter lamented — as others have done 
 before and since — the barren fertility of the news 
 sheets of his day. There was, he contended, some 
 diversion and diversity in card-playing. But as 
 for the papers, the unconnected occurrences and 
 miscellaneous advertisements, the abrupt transitions 
 from article to article, without the slightest con- 
 nection between one paragraph and another — so 
 
 2X1 
 
212 DE LIBRIS 
 
 overburdened and confused the memory that when 
 one was questioned, it was impossible to give 
 even a tolerable account of what one had read. 
 The mind became a jumble of "politics, religion, 
 picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages, 
 bankruptcies, preferments, resignations, executions, 
 lottery tickets, India bonds, Scotch pebbles, Canada 
 bills, French chicken gloves, auctioneers, and quack 
 doctors/' of all of which, particularly as the pages 
 contained three columns, the bewildered reader 
 could retain little or nothing. (One may perhaps 
 pause for a moment to wonder, seeing that Papyrius 
 could contrive to extract so much mental perplexity 
 from Cowper's "folio of four pages" — he speaks 
 specifically of this form, — what he would have done 
 with Lloyd's, or a modern American Sunday paper!) 
 Coming later to the point of his epistle, he goes on 
 to explain that he has hit upon a method (as to 
 which, be it added, he was not, as he thought, the 
 originator 1 ) of making this heterogeneous mass afford, 
 like cards, a "variety of entertainment." By reading 
 the afore-mentioned three columns horizontally and 
 onwards, instead of vertically and downwards "in 
 the old trite vulgar way," it was contended that much 
 mirth might observingly be distilled from the most 
 
 1 As a matter of fact, he had been anticipated by a paper, No. 40 of 
 "little Harrison's" spurious Tatler, vol. v., where the writer reads a news- 
 paper "in a direct Line" . . . "without Regard to the Distinction of 
 Columns," — which is precisely the proposal of Papyrius. 
 
CROSS READINGS 213 
 
 unhopeful material, as "blind Chance" frequently 
 brought about the oddest conjunctions, and not 
 seldom compelled sub juga aenea persons and things 
 the most dissimilar and discordant. He then went 
 on to give a number of examples in point, of 
 which we select a few. This was the artless humour 
 of it: — 
 
 "Yesterday Dr. Jones preached at St. James's, 
 and performed it with ease in less than 16 Minutes." 
 
 "Their R.H. the Dukes of York and Gloucester 
 were bound over to their good behaviour." 
 
 "At noon her R.H. the Princess Dowager was 
 married to Mr. Jenkins, an eminent Taylor." 
 
 "Friday a poor blind man fell into a saw-pit, 
 to which he was conducted by Sir Clement Cottrell." 1 
 
 "A certain Commoner will be created a Peer. 
 N.B. — No greater reward will be offered." 
 
 "John Wilkes, Esq., set out for France, 
 being charged with returning from transportation." 
 
 "Last night a most terrible fire broke out, 
 and the evening concluded with the utmost Festivity." 
 
 "Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in, 
 and afterwards toss'd and gored several Persons." 
 
 "On Tuesday an address was presented ; 
 it happily miss'd fire, and the villain made off, 
 when the honour of knighthood was conferred on him 
 to the great joy of that noble family." 
 
 "Escaped from the New Gaol, Terence M'Dermot. 
 If he will return, he will be kindly received." 
 
 "Colds caught at this season are 
 The Companion to the Playhouse." 
 
 1 Master of the Ceremonies. 
 
2i 4 DE LIBRIS 
 
 "Ready to sail to the West Indies, 
 the Canterbury Flying Machine in one day." 
 
 "To be sold to the best Bidder, 
 My Seat in Parliament being vacated." 
 
 "I have long laboured under a complaint 
 For ready money only." 
 
 "Notice is hereby given, 
 and no Notice taken." 
 
 And so forth, fully justifying the writer's motto 
 from Cicero, De Finibus: "Fortnitu Concur su hoc 
 fieri, mirum est." It may seem that the mirthful 
 element is not overpowering. But "gentle Dulness 
 ever loves a joke"; and in 1766 this one, in 
 modern parlance, "caught on." "Cross readings" 
 had, moreover, one popular advantage: like the 
 Limericks of Edward Lear, they were easily imitated. 
 What is not so intelligible is, that they seem to have 
 fascinated many people who were assuredly not dull. 
 Even Johnson condescended to commend the aptness 
 of the pseudonym, and to speak of the performance 
 as "ingenious and diverting." Horace Walpole, 
 writing to Montagu in December 1766, professes to 
 have laughed over them till he cried. It was "the 
 newest piece of humour," he declared, "except the 
 Bath Guide [Anstey's], that he had seen of many 
 years" ; and Goldsmith — Goldsmith, who has been 
 charged with want of sympathy for rival humourists 
 — is reported by Northcote to have even gone so 
 far as to say, in a transport of enthusiasm, that "it 
 
CROSS READINGS 215 
 
 would have given him more pleasure to have 
 been the author of them than of all the works he 
 had ever published of his own," — which, of course, 
 must be classed with "Dr. Minor's" unconsidered 
 speeches. 
 
 "Bien heureux" — to use Voltaire's phrase — is 
 he who can laugh much at these things now. As 
 Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests of 
 one age are not the jests of another. But it is a 
 little curious that, by one of those freaks of circum- 
 stance, or "fortuitous concourses," there is to-day 
 generally included among the very works of Gold- 
 smith above referred to something which, in the 
 opinion of many, is conjectured to have been really 
 the production of the ingenious compiler of the 
 "Cross Readings." That compiler was one Caleb 
 Whitefoord, a well-educated Scotch wine-merchant 
 and picture-buyer, whose portrait figures in Wilkie's 
 "Letter of Introduction." The friend of Benjamin 
 Franklin, who had been his next-door neighbour 
 at Craven Street, he became, in later years, some- 
 thing of a diplomatist, since in 1782-83 he was 
 employed by the Shelburne administration in the 
 Paris negotiation for the Treaty of Versailles. But 
 at the date of the "Cross Readings" he was mainly 
 what Burke, speaking contemptuously of his status 
 as a plenipotentiary, styled a "diseur de bons mots"; 
 and he was for this reason included among those 
 
216 DE LIBRIS 
 
 "most distinguished Wits of the Metropolis," who, 
 following Garrick's lead in 1774, diverted them- 
 selves at the St. James's Coffee-house by composing 
 the epitaphs on Goldsmith which gave rise to the 
 incomparable gallery entitled Retaliation. In the 
 first four editions of that posthumous poem there is 
 no mention of Whitefoord, who, either at, or soon 
 after the first meeting above referred to, had written 
 an epitaph on Goldsmith, two-thirds of which are 
 declared to be "unfit for publication. m But when 
 the fourth edition of Retaliation had been printed, an 
 epitaph on Whitefoord was forwarded to the pub- 
 lisher, George Kearsly, by "a friend of the late 
 Doctor Goldsmith, with an intimation that it was 
 a transcript of an original in "the Doctor's own. 
 handwriting." "It is a striking proof of Doctor 
 Goldsmith's good-nature," said the sender, glancing, 
 we may suppose, at Whitefoord's performance. "I 
 saw this sheet of paper in the Doctor's room, five 
 or six days before he died; and, as I had got all the 
 other Epitaphs, I asked if I might take it. "In 
 truth you may, my Boy, (replied he) for it will be of 
 no use to me where I am going" 
 
 1 Hewins's Whitefoord Papers, 1898, p. xxvii. n., where the first four 
 lines of twelve are given. They run — 
 
 Noll Goldsmith lies here, as famous for writing 
 
 As his namesake old Noll was for praying and fighting. 
 
 In friends he was rich, tho' not loaded with Pelf; 
 
 He spoke well of them, and thought well of himself. 
 
CROSS READINGS 217 
 
 The lines — there are twenty-eight of them — 
 speak of Whitefoord as, among other things, a 
 
 Rare compound of oddity, frolic and fun! 
 Who relish'd a joke, and rejoic'd in a pun; 1 
 Whose temper was generous, open, sincere; 
 A stranger to flatt'ry, a stranger to fear; 
 Who scatter'd around wit and humour at will, 
 Whose daily bons mots half a column would fill; 
 A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free, 
 A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he. 
 
 What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind 
 
 Should so long be to news-paper-essays confin'd! 
 
 Who perhaps to the summit of science could soar, 
 
 Yet content "if the table he set on a roar"; 
 
 Whose talents to fill any station were fit, 
 
 Yet happy if Woodfall confess'd him a wit. 
 
 The "servile herd" of "tame imitators' 1 — the 
 "news-paper witlings" and "pert scribbling folks 1 ' — 
 were further requested to visit his tomb — 
 
 To deck it, bring with you festoons of the vine, 
 And copious libations bestow on his shrine; 
 Then strew all around it (you can do no less) 
 Cross-readings, Ship-news, and Mistakes of the Press. 
 
 It is not recorded that Kearsly ever saw this in 
 Goldsmith's "own hand-writing"; the sender's name 
 has never been made known ; and — as above observed 
 
 1 "Mr. W." — says a note to the fifth edition — "is so notorious a punster, 
 that Doctor Goldsmith used to say, it was impossible to keep him company, 
 without being infected with the itch of punning." Yet Johnson endured 
 him, and apparently liked him, though he had the additional disqualification 
 of being a North Briton. 
 
218 DE LIBRIS 
 
 — it has been more than suspected that Whitefoord 
 concocted it himself, or procured its concoction. As 
 J. T. Smith points out in Nollekens and his Times, 
 1828, i. 337-8, Whitefoord was scarcely important 
 enough to deserve a far longer epitaph than those 
 bestowed on Burke and Reynolds; and Goldsmith, 
 it may be added — as we know in the case of Beattie 
 and Voltaire — was not in the habit of confusing 
 small men with great. Moreover, the lines would 
 (as intimated by the person who sent them to 
 Kearsly) be an extraordinary generous return for 
 an epitaph "unfit for publication," by which, it is 
 stated, Goldsmith had been greatly disturbed. Prior 
 had his misgivings, particularly in respect to the 
 words attributed to Goldsmith on his death-bed; 
 and Forster allows that to him the story of the 
 so-called "Postscript" has "a somewhat doubtful 
 look." To which we unhesitatingly say — ditto. 
 
 Whitefoord, it seems, was in the habit of printing 
 his "Cross Readings" on small single sheets, and 
 circulating them among his friends. "Rainy-day 
 Smith" had a specimen of these. In one of White- 
 foord's letters he professes to claim that his jeux 
 d f esprit contained more than met the eye. "I have 
 always," he wrote, "endeavour'd to make such 
 changes [of Ministry] a matter of Laughter [rather] 
 than of serious concern to the People, by turning 
 them into horse Races, Ship News, &c, and these 
 
CROSS READINGS 219 
 
 Pieces have generally succeeded beyond my most 
 sanguine Expectations, altW they were not seasoned 
 with private Scandal or personal Abuse, of which 
 our good neighbours of South Britain are realy 
 too fond." In Debrett's New Foundling Hospital 
 for Wit, new edition, 1784, there are several of his 
 productions, including a letter to Woodfall "On 
 the Errors of the Press," of which the following 
 may serve as a sample: "I have known you turn a 
 matter of hearsay, into a matter of heresy; Damon 
 into a daemon; a delicious girl, into a delirious girl; 
 the comic muse, into a comic mouse; a Jewish 
 Rabbi, into a Jewish Rabbit; and when a corre- 
 spondent, lamenting the corruption of the times, 
 exclaimed 'O Mores!' you made him cry, 'O 
 Moses!'" And here is an extract from another 
 paper which explains the aforegoing reference to 
 "horse Races": "1763 — Spring Meeting. . . Mr. 
 Wilkes's horse, Liberty, rode by himself, took the 
 lead at starting; but being pushed hard by Mr. 
 Bishop's black gelding, Privilege, fell down at the 
 Devil's Ditch, and was no where." The "Ship 
 News" is on the same pattern. "August 25 [1765] 
 We hear that his Majesty's Ship Newcastle will soon 
 have a new figure-head, the old one being almost 
 worn out." 
 
THE LAST PROOF 
 
 221 
 
THE LAST PROOF 
 
 AN EPILOGUE TO ANY BOOK 
 "Hie Finis chartaeque viaeque" 
 
 "Finis at last — the end, the End, the End! 
 
 No more of paragraphs to prune or mend ; 
 
 No more blue pencil, with its ruthless line, 
 
 To blot the phrase 'particularly fine 1 ; 
 
 No more of 'slips,' and 'galleys,' and 'revises,' 
 
 Of words 'transmogrified,' and 'wild surmises'; 
 
 No more of «'s that masquerade as w's, 
 
 No nice perplexities of />'s and #'s; 
 
 No more mishaps of ante and of post, 
 
 That most mislead when they should help the most; 
 
 No more of 'friend' as 'fiend,' and 'warm' as 
 
 worm ; 
 
 No more negations where we would affirm; 
 
 No more of those mysterious freaks of fate 
 
 That make us bless when we should execrate ; 
 
 No more of those last blunders that remain 
 
 Where we no more can set them right again ; 
 
 223 
 
224 DE LIBRIS 
 
 No more apologies for doubtful data ; 
 No more fresh facts that figure as Errata; 
 No more, in short, O Type, of wayward lore 
 From thy most z/«-Pierian fount — NO more !" 
 
 So spoke Papyrius. Yet his hand meanwhile 
 Went vaguely seeking for the vacant file, 
 Late stored with long array of notes, but now 
 Bare-wired and barren as a leafless bough; — . 
 And even as he spoke, his mind began 
 Again to scheme, to purpose and to plan. 
 
 There is no end to Labour 'neath the sun ; 
 
 There is no end of labouring — but One ; 
 
 And though we "twitch (or not) our Mantle blue," 
 
 "To-morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new." 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 235 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 [N.B. — The titles of articles are in capitals 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 8, 34 
 Adele et Theodore, 78, 79 
 Alexandre, Arsene, 103 
 Allemagne, De I', Mme. de Stael's, 
 
 136 
 Allen, Ralph, 157, 160 
 Almanacks, Miss Greenaway's, 97, 
 
 103 
 American Notes, Dickens's, 138 
 Ami des Enfants, Berquin's, 76 
 A Miltonic Exercise, 191-92 
 Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth's, 48, 
 
 53 
 Andrew, Sarah, 196 
 Ak Epistle to an Editor, 19-21 
 Angellier, M. Auguste, 153, 154 n. 
 Anstey, Christopher, 160, 214 
 A Pleasant Invective against 
 
 Printing, 89 
 Arable, Mrs. Betty, 114 
 Art of Politicks, Bramston's, 26, 
 
 27 
 Arts, M. Rouquet on the, 45-64 
 As you like it, Caldecott's edition 
 
 of, 139 
 Auction of Pictures, 34, 62-63 
 Austen, Jane, 85, 118-20 
 A Welcome from the "Johnson 
 
 Club," 165-66 
 Aynard, M. Joseph, 154*1. 
 Ayscough's Index to Shakespeare, 
 
 139 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 135 
 
 Balcony, or Balcony, 37-38 
 
 Ballad of Beau Brocade, Thomson's, 
 
 «3 
 Bar beau, M. A, 154 
 Barnaby Rudge, Dickens's, 137 
 Barry Lyndon, Thackeray's, 1 1 5 n. 
 
 Bath, A French Critic on, 153-62 
 Bath, A Picture of, 158-62 
 Batheaston Vase, The, 157 
 Beljame, Alexandre, 153, 154 
 Belle-Isle, Marshal Foucquet de, 47, 
 
 48 
 Belles-lettres in 1750, 60 
 Bentley, Richard, 30, 37 
 Bewick, Robert Elliot, 7 
 Bewick, Thomas, 7, 8, 9 
 Bewick's Birds and Quadrupeds, 141 
 Birthday Book, Miss Greenaway's, 
 
 97 
 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 30 
 Bleak House, Dickens's, 176 
 Blenheim, Philips's, 13 
 Blok, Dr. Pieter, 199 
 Bloomfield, Robert, 135 
 Bononcini, C. B., 35 
 Book Illustrators, Two Modern, 
 
 93-104, 1 1 1-24 
 Book of Games, The, Miss Green- 
 away's, 103 
 Borough, Crabbe's, 135 
 Boyle, Richard, Earl of Burlington, 
 
 28 
 Bradshaw, John, 32 
 Bramston, Francis, 26 
 Bramston, Rev. James, 25, 26, 29 
 Bramston, Sir John, the Elder, 26 
 Bramston, Sir John, the Younger, 
 
 26 n. 
 Bramston, Sir Moundeford, 26 
 Bramston's Man of Taste, 25-38 
 Bridgeman, Charles, 33, 49 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 177-79 
 Brougham's Albert Lunel, 138 
 Brown, Mr. Ernest, his Thomson 
 
 book-plate, 120 n. 
 Brown, Mrs. John, 181 n. 
 
 227 
 
228 
 
 DE LIBRIS 
 
 Brydges, James, Duke of Chandos, I 
 
 28 
 Bulmer, William, 8 
 Bunbury's, H. W., 161 
 Burchett, Richard, 102 
 Burford Papers, Hutton's, 157 
 "Burlington Gate," Hogarth's, 28 
 Burlington, Lady, 56 
 Burlington, Richard Boyle, Earl of, 
 
 28 
 Burney, Dr., 134 
 Burney, Fanny, 79, 121 
 Bush, Mr. T. S., 201 
 Butler, Lady, 102 
 Byron, Lord," 137 
 
 Canterbury Tales, Thomson's, 123 
 Careless Husband, Cibber's, 32 
 Carlyle's Cromwell, 138 
 Carr, Mr. Comyns, 112, 113 
 Cervantes, Miguel de, 127 
 Chandos, James Brydges, Duke of, 
 
 28 
 Chaucer, Bonham's, 140 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 123 
 Cheere, Sir Henry, 34 
 Childe Harold, Byron's, 137 
 Child's Friend, Berquin's, 75 
 "Child's Song," 101 
 Cibber, Colley, 32, 37 
 Cibber, Gabriel, 57 
 Clennell, Luke, 142 
 Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, 
 
 Outram Tristram's, 115 
 Cochin, Charles Nicolas, 46, 49, 64 
 Columbus, Rogers's, 142 
 Comic Writers, Lectures on The, 
 
 Hazlitt's, 15 
 Compleat Angler, The, 6, 71 
 Coplas, Manrique's, 13 
 Coram, Captain Thomas, 10 
 Coridon's Song, etc., Thomson's, 
 
 120, 121 
 Corinne, Mme. de Stael's, 136 
 Courier, P. L., 30 
 Courthope, Mr. W. J., 165 
 Coverley, Sir Roger de, 113, 114 
 Cowley, Abraham, 146 
 Crabbe, George, 135 
 Cradock, Charlotte, 201 
 Cranford, 'Mrs. Gaskell'a, 85, 117, 
 
 118 
 Cranford Series, 120, 121 
 Cranford, Thomson's, 117, 11S, 12: 
 Crooked Sixpence, The, Bramston's, 
 
 27 
 Cross Readikgs — and Caleb White- 
 foord, 211-19 
 
 Crowe, Mr. Eyre, 172, 173, 174, 
 
 175, 176 n. 
 Crowe, William, 139, 143 
 
 Dance of Death, Holbein's, 141 
 
 Danton, the caricaturist, 145 
 
 Dassier, Anthony, 58 
 
 Davy, Sir Humphry, 136 
 
 Day in a Child's Life, A, Miss 
 
 Greenaway's, 97, 99 
 Day, Thomas, 77, 79 
 Days with Sir Roger de Coverley, 
 
 Thomson's, 113 
 Decameron, Boccaccio's, 141 
 Delphine, Mme. de Stael's, 136 
 Derocquigny, M. Jules, 154 n. 
 Dickens, Charles, 132, 133, 137, 
 
 138 
 Diderot, Denis, 57 
 Digbv Grand, Whyte Melville's, 
 
 176 
 Dispensary, Pope's copy of Garth's, 
 
 139 
 Diversions of Purley, Home 
 
 Tooke's, 141 
 "Don Quixote," Horatian Ode 
 
 on the Tercentenary of, 127- 
 
 28 
 Douady, M. Jules, 154**. 
 
 Eastlake, Lady, 146 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria, 71-86, 123 
 
 Edgeworth, Mr., 76, 78, 82 n. 
 
 Editor, An Epistle to an, 19-21 
 
 Eliot, George, 121 
 
 Elwin, Rev. Whitwell, 171, i73» 
 183 
 
 English Illustrated Magazine, 112, 
 114 
 
 Enquiry into Polite Learning, Gold- 
 smith's, 31 
 
 Ephraim the Quaker, 114 
 
 Esmond, Thackeray's, 169-87 
 
 Esmond, Thomson's, 121, 123 
 
 ttat des Arts, Rouquet's, 45-64 
 
 Evelina, Thomson's, 121 
 
 Evelyn, John, 156*. 
 
 Evenings at Home, Dr. Aikin's, 75 
 
 Fairie Queene, Spenser's, 140 
 Farmer's Boy, Bloomfield's, 135 
 Fexrier, Miss Susan, 8s 
 Fielding, "Beau," 200 
 Fielding, Fresh Facts about, 19S- 
 
 203 
 Fielding, Henry, 160: his stay at 
 
 Leyden, 196-200; his marriage, 
 
 200-1; his sisters, 202-3 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 229 
 
 Fielding, Sarah, 196, 201, 203 
 Fielding, The Misses, 202 
 Fiennes, Celia, her Diary, 156 
 Figg, the prize-fighter, 37 
 "Finding of Moses," Hogarth's, 52 
 Fitzgerald, Mr. Percy, 132, 133 n. 
 Flaxman, John, 134. 
 Foote, Samuel, 47 
 Fox, Charles James, 15, 36 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 215 
 French Critic on Bath, A, 153 
 Fresh Facts about Fielding, 195- 
 
 203 
 Friend of Humanity and the 
 
 Rhymer, The, 67-68 
 Furniss, Mr. Harry, 113 
 
 Gardelle, Theodore, 47 
 Gardening, Landscape, 33, 49 
 Gardens of Adonis, 37 
 Garrick, David, 47, 61, 131 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 117 
 Gay, John, 165 
 "Ginevra" (Italy), 137 
 Goldsmith, Cunningham's, 14, 15 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 31, 35 n., 37, 
 
 157, 183, 214 
 "Good Samaritan," Hogarth's, 53 
 Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 145 n. 
 Goupy, Joseph, 56 
 Grammont's Memoirs, 157 
 Gray, Thomas, 31 
 Greenaway Child, A Song of the, 
 
 107 
 Greenaway, John, 102 
 Greenaway, Kate, 93-104, 123 
 
 "Hagar and Ishmael," Highmore's, 
 
 52 
 Hall, Fitzedward, 186 
 Halsewell, Loss of the, 144 
 Hamlet, Caldecott's edition of, 139 
 Handel, 56 
 Hannay, James, 197 
 Hanway, Jonas, 62 
 Harrison, Mr. Frederic, 183, 198 
 Harrison's Tatler, 212 n. 
 Harry and Lucy, Edgeworth's, 79 
 Hayman, Francis, 52, 54 
 Hazlitt, W., 15, 138 
 Hazlitt's Criticisms on Art, 138 
 Highmore, Joseph, 52, 54 
 Highways and Byways series, 122 
 Highways and Byways of London 
 
 Life, Cook's, 122 
 History of Life and Death, Bacon's, 
 
 7 
 History Painting, 50-54 
 Hoadly, Dr. John, 201 
 
 Hoare of Bath, William, 140 
 
 Hogarth, Mrs., 12 
 
 Hogarth's "Man of Taste," 28 
 
 Hogarth, William, 11, 28, 34, 35, 
 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 64, 113 
 
 Holcroft, Thomas, 79 
 
 Homer, Cowper's, 143 
 
 Horatian Ode on the Tercen- 
 tenary of "Don Quixote," 
 127-8 
 
 Huchon, M. Rene, 154 n. 
 
 Hudson, Thomas, 54 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 117 
 
 Huntingdon, Lady, 157, 160 
 
 Hurd, Bishop, 160 
 
 Hutton, Dr. Charles, 9 
 
 Hypatia, Kingsley's, 176 
 
 Hypnerotomichie of Poliphilus, 141 
 
 "In an Apple-Tree," 101 
 Ireland, John, 48 
 Ireland, Samuel, 12, 13 
 Ireland, William Henry, 12 
 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 1 1 1 
 
 "Johnson Club," A Welcome 
 
 FROM THE, 165-6 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 31, 82, 214 
 Johnson, Joseph, the publisher, 73- 
 
 76 
 Jones, Inigo, 33 
 Jordan, Mrs., 161 
 Jusserand, M. J.-J., 153 
 
 Kate Greenaway's Painting Book, 
 
 103 
 Kearsly, George, 216, 217, 218 
 Keightley, Thomas, 197, 201, 202 
 Kent, William, 28, 49, 50 
 Kentucky Cardinal, Allen's, 121 
 Kickleburys on the Rhine, Thack- 
 eray's, 177 
 King over the Water, Shield's and 
 
 Lang's, 183 n. 
 King Pepito, Miss Greenaway's, 103 
 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 54 
 
 Labelye, Charles, 46, 60 
 
 Lalla Rookh, Moore's, 137 
 
 La Motte, M., 161 
 
 Lampson, F. Locker, 38, 99, 132, 
 176 
 
 Landor, W. S., 13, 169 n. 
 
 Lang, Mr. Andrew, 113, 183 ft. 
 
 Langley, Batty, 33 
 
 Language of Flowers, Miss Green- 
 away's, 103 
 
 Lansdowne, Marquess of, 137 
 
 Layard, Mr. G. S., 29, 104 
 
23° 
 
 DE LIBRIS 
 
 "Lazy Lawrence," Miss Edge- 
 worth's, 8 1 
 Leake, James, 160 
 Le Blanc, Abbe, 55 ft., 57 
 Lee, Mr., 161 
 Legouis, M. fimile, 154 
 Legros, Prof., 102 
 Lessons for Children, Mrs. Bar- 
 
 bauld's, 75 
 Letters to Literary Ladies, Miss 
 
 Edgeworth's, 80 
 Lewesdon Hill, Crowe's, 143 
 Leyden University, Fielding at, 196- 
 
 200 
 Linley, Elizabeth, 157 
 Liotard, J. S., 46 
 Little Ann, Miss Greenaway's, 97, 
 
 99 
 "Little Nell," Dickens's, 137 
 Locker, Frederick, see Lampson 
 Locker, Lampson portraits, 100 
 Lofft, Capel, 135 
 London and Wise, Messrs., 50 
 Longfellow's Ballads, 138 
 Longfellow's Voices of the Night, 
 
 138 
 Lowell, James Russell, 185, 203 
 Lusiads, Camoens's, 141 
 Lyrics of the Heart, A. A. Watts' s, 
 
 15 
 Lyster, Mr. Alfred C, 197 
 
 Macaulay's Lays, 138 
 
 Maclise, Daniel ("Alfred Croquis"), 
 
 143 
 Maginn, William, 145 
 Mandeville, Bernard de, 32 
 Man of Taste, Bramston's, 25-38 
 Man of Taste, Hogarth's, 28 
 Manzoni's Promessi Sposi, 143 
 Marianne, Marivaux's, 142 
 Marigny, Abel-Francois Poisson, 
 
 Marquis de, 45, 46, 49, 64 
 Marigold Garden, Miss Green- 
 away's, 97, 100, 104 
 Martin, Mr. Samuel, 202 
 Master Humphrey's Clock, 132, 137 
 Melmoth, William, 160 
 Memoirs Relating to the Royal 
 
 Navy, Pepys', 10 
 Mensuration, Hutton's, 9 
 Metamorphoses d' Ovide, Ren- 
 
 ouard's, 4 
 Meteyard, Miss Eliza, 111 
 Miller, Lady, 157 
 Milton, John, 31, 140, 143 
 Milton Tercentenary, 1608-1908, 191 
 Miutonic Exercise, A, 191-2 
 Missionary, Bowles's, 136-7 
 
 Mistakes of the Press, 217, 219 
 
 Mitford, Miss, 117 
 
 Monamy, Peter, 56 
 
 Montagu, Mrs., on Shakespeare, 139 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, 31 n. 
 
 Moore, Edward, 135 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 137 
 
 Moral Essay, No. 4, Pope's, 28 
 
 Morel, M. Leon, 154 
 
 Morris, Mr. Mowbray, 175 n. 
 
 Moser, Michael, 46, 47, 64 
 
 "Moses brought to Pharaoh's 
 
 Daughter," Hogarth's, 52 
 Mourning Bride, Congreve's, 25 
 
 M. ROUQUET ON THE ARTS, 45-64 
 
 Murphy, Arthur, 52 n., 196, 200 
 
 "Musing," 103 
 
 My Novel, Bulwer's, 176, 177 
 
 Nash, Richard, 157 
 
 Newspaper, The Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury, 58-60 
 
 Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens's, 137 
 
 Nivernais, Due de, 50 
 
 Nollekens and his Times, Smith's, 
 218 
 
 North Briton, The, 11, 12 
 
 Northcliffe, Lord, 134 n. 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens's, 137 
 Oldfield, Mrs., 32 
 "Old Poz," 80, 86 
 "Omnium, Jacob," 30 
 On Some Books and their Asso- 
 ciations, 3-15 
 
 Paine, Edmund (Rogers's servant), 
 
 142 
 Pamela, Richardson's, 142 
 Panizzi, Sir Antonio, 173 
 "Papyrius Cursor," 211 
 Paradise Lost, Milton's, 140 
 Parent's Assistant, The, 71-86 
 Passeran, Count, 33 
 Passionate Printer to his Love, 
 
 The, 41-42 
 "Paul before Felix," Hogarth's, 53 
 Peacock, Mr. Edward, 197 
 Peg WoMngton, Thomson's, 121 
 Peinture en Cire, Diderot's, 63 
 Peinture en Fromage, V Art 
 
 nouveau de la, Rouquet's, 63 
 Pennell, Mr. Joseph, 124 
 Pepys* "Diary," 149-50 
 Pepys, Samuel, 9, 156 
 Philips, John, 13 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin, 97 
 Pilgrim of Glencoe, Campbell's, 
 
 138 
 
GENERAL INDEX 
 
 231 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's, 72 
 
 Pleasant Invective against Print- 
 ing, A, 89 
 
 Pleasures of Memory, Rogers's, 132, 
 142 
 
 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette 
 Poisson, Marquise de, 46 
 
 "Pool of Bethesda," Hogarth's, 53 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 15, 28, 32, 139 
 
 Porteus, Bishop, 160 
 
 Portrait in oil, 54-56 
 
 Prestongrange, Lord, 14 
 
 Prideaux, Col. W. F., 202 
 
 Procter, Mrs., 146 
 
 Proof, The Last, 223 
 
 Pursuits of Literature, Mathias's, 8 
 
 Queen of the Pirate Isle, Bret 
 
 Harte's, 97 
 Quin, James, 161 
 
 Rabbe, M. Felix, 153 
 
 Racine, Memoires of, by his son, 
 143 
 
 Railton, Mr. Herbert, 115 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 55 
 
 Rauzzini, Venanzio, 161 
 
 Reade, Charles, 121 
 
 Retaliation, Goldsmith, 216 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 134, 141 
 
 Richardson, Samuel, 160, 203 
 
 Rimbault, Dr., 10 
 
 Ritchie, Lady, 83, 175 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 38 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, The Books of, 
 131-46 
 
 Rose and the Ring, The, Thack- 
 eray's, 82 
 
 Roubillac, L. F., 57 
 
 Rouquet, Jean-Andre, 45-64 
 
 Rouquet, M., on the Arts, 45-64 
 
 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 143 
 
 Ruskin, John, 96, 103 
 
 Ruxton, Miss Sophy, 75 
 
 Rysbraek, J. M., 57 
 
 San ford and Merton, Day's, 79 
 Scenes of Clerical Life, Thomson's, 
 
 121 
 Scheemakers, Thomas, 57 
 "Scotchman in Holland, A," 197 
 Scott, Samuel, 56 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 84, 137, 175 n. 
 Seymour, James, 56 
 Sheridan, R. B., 136, 157 
 Ship News, 217, 219 
 Shorter, Mr. Clement, 179 n. 
 Shovel, Sir Cloudesly, 34 
 Siddons, Mrs., 161 
 
 Silas Marner, Thomson's, 121 
 "Simple Susan," Miss Edgeworth's, 
 
 74, 85 
 Sketches by Bos, Dickens's, 133 
 Smith, J. T„ 218 
 Smith, Mr. George, 172, 179 
 Solly, Prof. Edward, 10 
 Song of the Greenaway Child, A, 
 
 107 
 Southey, Robert, 13 
 Spielmann, Mr. Marion H., 104 n. 
 Spiritual Quixote, Graves's, 157 
 Splendid Shilling, Philips's, 13, 27 
 Stael, Mme. de, 136 
 Standly, H. P., 11, 12 
 Stapfer, M. Paul, 153 
 "Stareleigh, Mr. Justice," 132 
 St. Bruno, Le Sueur's, 141 
 Steele, Sir Richard, 183-4, 186 
 Steevens, George, 47 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 174, 202 
 Sterne, Laurence, 182 n. 
 Stevenson, R. L., 14 
 St. James's Palace, No. 22, 132, 
 
 134 
 Story of Rosina, Thomson's, 123 
 Stothard, Thomas, 93-4, 123, 134 
 "Suffer Little Children," Wills's, 
 
 52 
 "Sun Door, The," 100 
 Sure and Certain Method of Attain- 
 ing a Long and Healthy Life, 
 
 Cornaro's, 7 
 Sussex, Dallaway and Cartwright's, 
 
 27 
 Swaen, Mr. A. F. H., 198, 199 
 Swift, Jonathan, 30, 182 n. 
 Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon's, 6 
 Symmons, Samuel, the Printer, 140 
 
 Taine, Hippolyte, 153 
 Tales from Maria Edgeworth, Thom- 
 son's, 123 
 Tales of the Hall, Crabbe's, 135 
 "Tarleton," Miss Edgeworth's, 81 
 Tar Water, Bishop Berkeley's, 77 
 Taste, Of False, Pope's, 28 
 Taste, Of, Pope's, 28 
 Tatler, Harrison's, 212 n. 
 Talyor, Isaac, 99 
 Taylor, Jane and Ann, 99 
 Thackeray's Esmond, 169-87 
 Thackeray, W. M., 121, 169-87 
 The Books of Samuel Rogers, 131- 
 
 46 
 "The False Key," Miss Edge- 
 worth's, 81, 83 
 The Friend of Humanity and the 
 Rhymer, 67-68 
 
232 
 
 DE LIBRIS 
 
 "The Happy Printer," 207-8 
 
 The Last Proof, 223-4 
 
 "The Mimic," 81, 82, 84 
 
 The Parent's Assistant, 71-86 
 
 Thomas, Miss Margaret, 203 
 
 Thomas, M. W., 154 
 
 Thomson, James, 14, 31, 154 
 
 Thomson, Mr. Hugh, 1 11-24 
 
 Tennyson's Ode on the Death of 
 the Duke of Wellington, 176 
 
 Tennyson's Poems, 138 
 
 Texte, Joseph, 154, 156 
 
 "Time Smoking a Picture," Ho- 
 garth's, 51 
 
 Tindal, Matthew, 32 
 
 Tom Jones, Fielding's, 36 
 
 Tooke, Home, 140, 141 n. 
 
 Traill, H. D., 113 
 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, 174 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 169 
 
 Tutor's Assistant, The, y6 
 
 Two Modern Book Illustrators, 
 93-104, 111-24 
 
 Tyers, Jonathan, 61 
 
 Under the Window, Miss Green- 
 
 away's, 103 
 Use of Riches, On the, Pope's, 28 
 
 Vails-Giving, 62 
 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 33 
 Vandergucht, Gerard, 29 
 Vanhaken, Joseph, 55, 56 
 Vanloo, Jean-Baptiste, 55 
 Vauxhall in 1750, 61 
 Vicar of Wakefield, Thomson's, 116 
 Villette, Charlotte Bronte's, 176, 177 
 Vortigem and Rowena, W. H. Ire- 
 land's, 13 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 49, 50, 57, 214 
 Watts, Alaric A., 14 
 Whitbread, Samuel, 136 
 Whitefield, George, 160 
 Whitefoord, Caleb, 215-19 
 Whitefoord, Caleb, and Cross 
 
 Readings, 211-19 
 Whitefoord Papers, Hewins's, 216 ». 
 Wilkes, John, 11 
 Wilkie, David, 215 
 Wimble, Will, 114 
 Woodfall, Henry Sampson, 211 
 Wootton, John, 56 
 Wordsworth's Poems, 138 
 Wren, Sir Christopher, 33 
 
 Zincke, Christian, 47, 56, 57, 64 
 
 OF THE 
 
 THE END 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY AUSTIN DOBSON 
 In the "English Men of Letters" Series 
 Henry Fielding 
 
 "A new edition of this well-known biographical handbook, the one 
 most often consulted for information about its subject, was issued last 
 year with an added appendix containing particulars which have come 
 to light relating to Fielding's pedigree, his residence at Leyden as 
 student, his marriage to his first wife, his will, his library, his family, 
 etc.' '—'Boston Transcript. 
 
 40 cents net. 
 
 Samuel Richardson 
 
 "Of all the earlier biographies in the Men of Letters Series there 
 is none more fascinating than that of Fielding. Scholarly, exhaustive, 
 and, like all Mr Dobson's work, extremely entertaining, it has the 
 further merit of illuminating Fielding's character and writings by the 
 sympathetic light of genuine affection. 
 
 "But enthusiastic admirers of Fielding are not always equally just to 
 his great contemporary and rival, Samuel Richardson. It is therefore a 
 matter of congratulation to find that Mr. Dobson's biography of the 
 older writer falls very little short in unrivalled knowledge of the subject 
 and the fascination of its style." — Bookman. 
 
 75 cents net. 
 
 Fanny Burney 
 
 "A thoroughly delightful piece of work. It is something more than 
 a literary critique, and something more than a gossipy biography. 
 Taken altogether, the book is a most attractive illustration of how a 
 biography can be written that shall be at once an encyclopedia of 
 facts and a bit of literature as well." — The World To-day, 
 
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EDITED BY AUSTIN DOBSON 
 The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay 
 
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 point, and they really serve as an introductory threshold over which the 
 reader may expectantly look into the story beyond . ' ' — Boston Transcript* 
 
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By E. V. LUCAS 
 
 A Wanderer in London 
 
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 Cloth, 8vo, $1.73 **** h mail > Si. 87. 
 
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 will feel that he has suddenly become intimate." — The Nation. 
 
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Anthologies of Varied Charm Collected by E. V. LUCAS 
 
 The Gentlest Art 
 
 A Choice of Letters by Entertaining Hands 
 
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 from first to last, as almost to inspire one to attempt the restoration of 
 a lost art. "We do not believe that a more likable book has been 
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 Lucas and illustrated in black and white and with colored plates by 
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 book as this." 
 
 Cloth, 8vo, col. illus., Si. JO net. 
 
 The Ladies' Pageant 
 
 Better than any one else whose name comes to mind, Mr. Lucas has 
 mastered the difficult art of the compiler. There is more individuality 
 in The Gentlest Art, for instance, than in the so-called original works 
 of many an author. This happy knack of assembling the best things 
 in the world on a given subject is given free play in the present book, 
 the subject of which is the Eternal Feminine. Here are all the best words 
 of the poets on a theme which surely offers scope for more variety than 
 any other within the view of the reader. Like others of Mr. Lucas' 
 books, this is attractively bound and decorated. 
 
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 Character and Comedy 
 
 The Tribune: "Of all the readers of Charles Lamb who have 
 striven to emulate him, Mr. Lucas comes nearest to being worthy of him. 
 Perhaps it is because it is natural to him to look upon life and letters and 
 all things with something of Lamb's gentleness, sweetness and humor." 
 
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