succeeding Sir John Vaughan, the friend of Selden; and Roger at once
got himself called to the Bar, and thenceforward, so far as possible,
whenever Francis was on the Bench, there was Roger pleading before him.
Indeed, it went much further than this. ‘I kept so closely to him that
I can safely say I saw him abed every night without intermission for
divers years together, which enables me to contradict the malicious
report a relation raised of him, that he kept a mistress as the mode
of that time was.’ The morals of a Chief Justice two centuries after
his death having no personal concern for this generation, I feel
free to confess that I am rather sorry for Francis with Roger ever
by his side in this unpleasantly pertinacious fashion. The younger
North, so he tells us, always drove down to Westminster with the Chief
Justice, and he frankly admits that his chief _appui_ was his brother’s
character, fame, and interest. Not being a Serjeant, Roger could not
actually practise in the Common Pleas, but on various circuits, at
the Guildhall, at the Treasury, and wherever else he could lawfully
go before the Chief Justice, there Roger went and got a business
together. He also made money, sometimes as much as £9 a day, from
court-keeping--that is, attending manor courts. This was a device of
his elder brother’s, who used to practise it before he was called to
the Bar. It savours of pettifogging. However, it seems in Roger’s case
to have led to his obtaining the patent office of Temporal Steward to
the See of Canterbury, to which he had the courage to stick after the
deprivation of Archbishop Sancroft. This dogged devotion to the Church
redeems North’s life from a commonplacedness which would otherwise be
hopeless. The Archbishop left his faithful steward £20 for a ring, but
North preferred, like a wise man, to buy books, which he had bound in
the Archbishop’s manner.
In 1682 Roger North ‘took silk,’ as the phrase now goes, and became one
of the Attorney-General’s devils, in which capacity his name is to be
found in the reports of the trial of Lord William Russell. What he says
about that trial in the Autobiography is just what might be expected
from an Attorney-General’s devil--that is, that never before was a
State trial conducted with such candour and fairness. He admits that
this is not the judgment of the world; but then, says he, ‘the world
never did nor will understand its true good, or reward, encourage, or
endure its true patriots and friends.’
At the end of 1683 Francis North came home one night with no less
remarkable a companion in his coach than the Great Seal. Roger
instantly transposed himself to the Court of Chancery, where he began
coining money. ‘My whole study,’ he says, ‘is causes and motions.’ He
found it hard work, but he buckled to, and boasts--like so many of
his brethren, alive as well as dead--that he, at all events, always
read his briefs. In the first year his fees amounted to £4,000, in
the second to nearly as much, but in the third there was a falling
off, owing to a smaller quantity of business in the Court. A new Lord
Keeper was always the occasion of the rehearing of old causes. The
defeated litigants wished to try their luck before the new man.
North was at first astonished with the size of the fees he was offered;
he even refused them, thinking them bribes: ‘but my fellow-practisers’
conversation soon cured me of that nicety.’ And yet the biggest fee he
ever got was twenty guineas. Ten guineas was the usual fee on a ‘huge’
brief, and five ‘in the better sort of causes.’ In ordinary cases Roger
North would take two or three guineas, and one guinea for motions and
defences.
In the Long Vacations Roger still stuck to his brother, who, no doubt,
found him useful. Thus when the Mayor, Aldermen, and Council of Banbury
came over to Wroxton to pay their respects to the Lord Keeper, they
were handed over to the charge of Roger, who walked them all over
the house to show the rooms, and then made them drunk at dinner ‘and
dismissed them to their lodgings in ditches homeward bound.’ But the
effort was too much for him, and no sooner were they gone than he had
to lie down, all on fire, upon the ground, from which he rose very sick
and scarce recovered in some days. As a rule he was a most temperate
man, and hated the custom and extravagance of drinking. He had not
enough understanding to obfuscate it by drink.
All went well with the brothers until the death of Charles II. Then the
horizon grew troubled--but still Roger was being talked of as a Baron
of the Exchequer, when the Lord Keeper died on September 5, 1685. With
him ended the public life of his younger brother. Roger North was only
thirty-two. He was a King’s Counsel, and in considerable practice, but
he had not the will--perhaps he had not the force--to stand alone. At
the Revolution he became a non-juror, and retired into the country. His
Autobiography also ceases with his brother’s death.
He had much private family business to transact, and in 1690 he bought
the Rougham estate in Norfolk, where he carried on building and
planting on a considerable scale. He married and had children, bought
books, restored the parish church, and finally died on March 1, 1734,
in his eighty-first year.
Dr. Jessopp tells us very little is left of Roger North--his house has
been pulled down, his trees pulled up, and his books dispersed. But his
Lives of his three brothers, and now his own Autobiography, will keep
his memory green. There is something about him one rather likes, though
were we asked what it is, we should have no answer ready.
BOOKS OLD AND NEW.
Now that our century has entered upon its last decade, and draws near
the hour which will despatch it to join its too frequently and most
unjustly despised predecessor, it is pleasing to note how well it
has learnt to play the old man’s part. One has only to compare the
_Edinburgh Review_ of, say, October, 1807, with its last number, to
appreciate the change that has come over us. Cocksureness, once the
badge of the tribe of critics, is banished to the schoolroom. The
hearty hatreds of our early days would ill befit a death-bed. A keen
critic has observed what a noisy place England used to be. Everybody
cried out loud in the market-place, in the Senate-house, in the Law
Courts, in the Reviews and Magazines. In the year 1845 the _Times_
newspaper incurred the heavy and doubtless the just censure of the
Oxford Union for its unprincipled tone as shown in its ‘violent
attempts to foment agitation as well by inflammatory articles as by
the artifices of correspondents.’ How different it now is! We all move
about as it were in list slippers. Our watchword is ‘Hush!’ Dickens
tells us how, at Hone’s funeral, Cruikshank, being annoyed at some of
the observations of the officiating minister, whispered in Dickens’
ear as they both moved to kneel at prayer, ‘If this wasn’t a funeral I
would punch his head.’ It was a commendable restraint. We are now, all
of us, exercising it.
A gloomy view is being generally taken of our literary future in the
next century. Poetry, it is pretty generally agreed, has died with
Lord Tennyson. Who, it is said, can take any pride or pleasure in the
nineties, whose memory can carry him back to the sixties? What days
those were that gave us brand-new from the press ‘Philip’ and ‘The Four
Georges,’ ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner,’ ‘Evan Harrington’
and ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ ‘Maud,’ ‘The Idylls of the King,’ and ‘Dramatis
Personæ,’ Mr. Arnold’s New Poems, the ‘Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ,’ and
‘Verses on Various Occasions,’ four volumes of ‘Frederick the Great,’
and ‘The Origin of Species’! One wonders in the retrospect how human
stupidity was proof against such an onslaught of wit, such a shower of
golden fancies. Why did not Folly’s fortress fall? We know it did not,
for it is standing yet. Nor has any particular halo gathered round the
sixties--which, indeed, were no better than the fifties or the forties.
From what source, so ask ‘the frosty pows,’ are you who call yourselves
‘jolly candidates’ for 1900, going to get your supplies? Where are
your markets? Who will crowd the theatre on your opening nights? What
well-graced actors will then cross your stage? Your boys and girls
will be well provided for, one can see that. Story-books and handbooks
will jostle for supremacy; but your men and women, all a-hungered, how
are you going to feed them and keep their tempers sweet? It is not a
question of side dishes, but of joints. Sermons and sonnets, and even
‘clergy-poets,’ may be counted upon, but they will only affront the
appetites they can never satisfy. What will be wanted are Sam Wellers,
Captain Costigans, and Jane Eyres--poetry that lives, controversy that
bites, speeches that stir the imagination.
Thus far the aged century. To argue with it would be absurd; to silence
it cruel, and perhaps impossible. Greedy Time will soon do that.
But suppose it should turn out to be the fact that we are about
to enter upon a period of well-cultivated mediocrity. What then?
Centuries cannot be expected to go on repeating the symptoms of their
predecessors. We have had no Burns. We cannot, therefore, expect to end
with the beginnings of a Wordsworth and a Coleridge; there may likely
be a lull. The lull may also be a relief. Of all odd crazes, the craze
to be for ever reading new books is one of the oddest.
Hazlitt may be found grappling with this subject, and, as usual,
‘punishing’ it severely in his own inimitable style. ‘I hate,’ says
he, in the second volume of ‘The Plain Speaker’--in the essay entitled
‘On Reading Old Books’--‘to read new books;’ and he continues, a page
further on, ‘Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two
classes--one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled
to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill,
to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly
of the merit of either. One candidate for literary fame who happens
to be of our acquaintance writes finely and like a man of genius, but
unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage;
another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents
and character, but does not come up to our expectations in print. All
these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of
our reflections.’
Hazlitt was no doubt a good hater. We are now of milder mood. It ought
not to be difficult for any of us, if we but struggle a little, to keep
a man’s nose out of his novel. But, for all that, it is certain that
true literary sway is borne but by the dead. Living authors may stir
and stimulate us, provoke our energies, and excite our sympathy, but it
is the dead who rule us from their urns.
Authority has no place in matters concerning books and reading, else it
would be well were some proportion fixed between the claims of living
and dead authors.
There is no sillier affectation than that of old-worldism. To rave
about Sir Thomas Browne and know nothing of William Cobbett is
foolish. To turn your back upon your own time is simply to provoke
living wags, with rudimentary but effective humour, to chalk
opprobrious epithets upon your person. But, on the other hand, to
depend upon your contemporaries for literary sustenance, to be reduced
to scan the lists of ‘Forthcoming Works’ with a hungry eye, to complain
of a dearth of new poems, and new novels, and new sermons, is worse
than affectation--it is stupidity.
There was a time when old books were hard to procure and difficult
to house. With the exception of a few of the greatest, it required
as much courage to explore the domains of our old authors as it
did to visit Wast Water or Loch Maree before the era of roads and
railways. The first step was to turn the folios into octavos, and to
publish complete editions; the second was to cheapen the price of
issue. The first cheap booksellers were, it is sometimes alleged,
men of questionable character in their trade. Yet their names should
be cherished. They made many young lives happy, and fostered better
taste than either or both the Universities. Hogg, Cooke, Millar,
Donaldson, Bell, even Tegg, the ‘extraneous Tegg’ of Carlyle’s famous
Parliamentary petition, did good work in their day. Somehow or another
the family libraries of the more respectable booksellers hung fire.
They did not find their way about. Perhaps their authors were selected
with too much care.
‘He wales a portion with judicious care.’
The pious Cottar did well, but the world is larger than the family;
besides which it is not always ‘Saturday Night.’ Cooke had no
scruples. He published ‘Tom Jones’ in fortnightly, and (I think)
sixpenny parts, embellished with cuts, and after the same appetising
fashion proceeded right through the ‘British Novelists.’ He did the
same with the ‘British Poets.’ It was a noble enterprise. You never see
on a stall one of Cooke’s books but it is soiled by honest usage; its
odour speaks of the thousand thumbs that have turned over its pages
with delight. Cooke made an immense fortune, and deserved to do so.
He believed both in genius and his country. He gave the people cheap
books, and they bought them gladly. He died at an advanced age in 1810.
Perhaps when he came to do so he was glad he had published a series of
‘Sacred Classics,’ as well as ‘Tom Jones.’
We are now living in an age of handsome reprints. It is possible to
publish a good-sized book on good paper and sell it at a profit for
fourpence halfpenny. But of course to do this, as the profit is too
small to bear division, you must get the Authors out of the way. Our
admirable copyright laws and their own sedentary habits do this on
the whole satisfactorily and in due course. Consequently dead authors
are amazingly cheap. Not merely Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan and
Burns, but Scott and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens. Living authors
are deadly dear. You may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of
one work by a living man. The odds are fearful. For my part, I hope
a _modus vivendi_ may be established between the publishers of the
dead and those of the living; but when you examine the contents of the
‘Camelot Classics,’ the ‘Carisbrooke Library,’ the ‘Chandos Classics,’
the ‘Canterbury Poets,’ the ‘Mermaid Series of the Old Dramatists,’
and remember, or try to remember, the publishing lists of Messrs.
Routledge, Mr. Black, Messrs Warne, and Messrs. Cassell, it is easy
for the reader to snap his fingers at Fate. It cannot touch him--he
can dine for many a day. Even were our ‘lyrical cry’ to be stifled for
half a century, what with Mr. Bullen’s ‘Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘More
Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Dramatists,’ and ‘Lyrics from
the Romances,’ and Mr. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ ‘a man,’ as Mr.
Markham observes in ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘might get on very well here,’
even though that man were, as Markham asserted himself to be, ‘hungry
all day long.’ A British poet does not cease to be a poet because he
is dead, nor is he, for that matter, any the better a poet for being
alive.
As for a scarcity of living poets proving national decadence, it would
be hard to make out that case. Who sang Chatham’s victories by sea and
land?
BOOK-BINDING.
There is a familiar anecdote of the ingenious author of ‘The Seasons,’
‘Rule, Britannia,’ and other excellent pieces, that when he sent a
well-bound copy of his poems to his father, who had always regarded
him, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘feckless loon,’ that canny Scot
handled the volume with unfeigned delight, and believing that his son
had bound it, cried out admiringly, ‘Who would have thought our Jamie
could have done the like of this?’ This particular copy has not been
preserved, and it is therefore impossible for us to determine how far
its bibliopegic merits justified the rapture of the elder Thomson,
whose standard is not likely to have been a high one. Indeed, despite
his rusticity, he was probably a better judge of poetry than of binding.
This noble craft has revived in our midst. Twenty years ago, in
ordinary circles, the book-binder was a miscreant who, by the aid of a
sharp knife, a hideous assortment of calf-skins and of marbled papers,
bound your books for you by slaughtering their margins, stripping their
sides, and returning them upon your hands cropped and in prison garb,
and so lettered as to tell no man what they were. And the worst of it
was we received them with complacency, gave them harbourage upon our
shelves, and only grumbled that the price was so high as four shillings
a volume. Those days are over. Yet it is well to be occasionally
reminded of the rock from whence we were hewn, and the pit out of which
we were digged. I have now lying before me a first edition of the
essays of Elia which, being in boards, I allowed to be treated by a
provincial called Shimmin, in the sixties. I remember its coming home,
and how I thought it was all right. Infancy was no excuse for such
ignorance.
The second-hand booksellers, a race of men for whom I have the
greatest respect, are to blame in this matter. They did not play the
part they might have been expected to do. They gave no prominence in
their catalogues, which are the true text-books of literature, to
specimens of book-binding, nor did they instil into the minds of their
young customers the rudiments of taste. Worse than this, some of the
second-hand booksellers in the country were themselves binders, and,
for the most part, infamous ones.
One did, indeed, sometimes hear of Roger Payne and of the Harleian
style, but dimly, and as a thing of no moment, nor were our eyes ever
regaled in booksellers’ catalogues with facsimiles of the exquisite
bindings of the French and English masters. Nor was it until we
went further afield, and became acquainted with the booksellers of
Paris, that this new world swam into our ken. It was a great day
when a stray copy of a ‘Bulletin Mensuel’ of Damascene Morgand, the
famous bookseller in the Passage des Panoramas, fell into the hands
of a mere country book-buyer. Then he knew how brutally he had been
deceived--then he looked with loathing on his truncated tomes and their
abominable devices. The first really bound book I ever saw was a copy
of the works of Pierre de Ronsard bearing the devices of Marguerite de
Valois. The price was so far beyond my resources that I left the shop
without a touch of envy, but the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I
walked down the Passage des Panoramas as one who had awakened from a
dream.
Nowadays it is quite different. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition did
much, and the second-hand booksellers, in quite ordinary places, are
beginning to give in their catalogues reproductions of noble specimens.
Nothing else is required. To see is enough. There was recently, as
most people know, a wonderful exhibition of bindings to be seen at
the Burlington Fine Art Club, but what is not so generally known is
that the Club has published a magnificent catalogue of the contents of
that Exhibition, with no less than 114 plates reproducing with the
greatest possible skill and delicacy some of the finest specimens. Mr.
Gordon Duff, who is credited with a profounder knowledge of pigskins
than any living man, has contributed a short preface to the volume,
whilst Miss Prideaux, herself a binder of great merit, has written a
general introduction, in which she traces the history of the craft, and
duly records the names of the most famous binders of Europe. A more
fascinating picture-book cannot be imagined, for to the charm of colour
and design is added all the feeling which only a book can impart. Such
a book as this marks an epoch, and ought to be the beginning of a time
when even sale-catalogues shall take pains to be splendid.
When the library of the Baron de Lacarelle came to be dispersed at
his death a few years ago, the auctioneer’s catalogue, as issued by
Charles Porquet, of the Quai Voltaire, made a volume which, wherever it
goes, imparts dignity to human endeavour, and consecrates a virtuoso’s
whim. It was but a small library--only 540 books--and to call it well
selected would be to abuse a term one has learnt to connect with Major
Ponto’s library in ‘The Book of Snobs.’ ‘My library’s small,’ says
Ponto, with the most amazing impudence, ‘but well selected, my boy,
well selected. I have been reading the History of England all the
morning.’ He could not have done this in the Baron’s library.
As you turn the pages of this glorified catalogue, his treasures seem
to lie before you--you can almost stroke them. A devoted friend, _de la
Société des Bibliophiles français_, contributes an ecstatic sketch of
the Baron’s character, and tells us of him how he employed in his hunt
after a book infinite artifice, and called to his aid all the resources
of learned strategy--‘poussant ses approches et manœuvrant, autour de
la place, avec la prudence et le génie d’un tacticien consommé, si
bien que le malheureux libraire, enlacé, fasciné, hypnotisé par ce
grand charmeur, finissait presque toujours par capituler et se rendre.’
This great man only believed in one modern binder: Trautz. The others
did not exist for him. ‘Cherchez-vous à le convertir? Il restait
incorruptible et répétait invariablement, avec cet esprit charmant,
mais un peu railleur, dont il avait le privilège, que s’il était jamais
damné, son enfer serait de remuer une reliure de Capé ou de Lortic!’
It is all very splendid and costly and grand, yet still from time to
time,
‘From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne,’
there comes the thought of Charles Lamb amidst ‘the ragged veterans’ he
loved so well, and then in an instant a reaction sets in, and we almost
hate this sumptuous Baron.
Thomson’s “Seasons,” again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn
and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the
sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond
Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an
old “circulating library” “Tom Jones” or the “Vicar of Wakefield”!’
Thus far, Elia.
Let us admit that the highest and noblest joys are those which are in
widest commonalty spread, and that accordingly the clay pipe of the
artisan is more truly emotional than the most marvellous meerschaum to
be seen in the shop-windows of Vienna--still, the collector has his
joys and his uses, his triumphant moments, his hours of depression,
and, if only he publishes a catalogue, may be pronounced in small type
a benefactor of the human race.
POETS LAUREATE.
About forty years ago two ingenious gentlemen, Mr. Austin, of Exeter
College, and Mr. Ralph, a member of the Bar, published a book
containing short sketches of the lives of Poets Laureate of this
realm, beginning with Ben Jonson and ending with Wordsworth, and also
an essay on the Title and Office. It has sometimes been rudely said
that Laureates came into fashion when fools and jesters went out, but
the perusal of Messrs. Austin and Ralph’s introductory essay, to say
nothing of the most cursory examination of the table of contents of
their volume, is enough to disprove the truth of this saying.
A Laureate was originally a purely University title, bestowed upon
those Masters of Arts who had exhibited skill in the manufacture of
Latin verses, and had nothing to do with the civil authority or royal
favour. Thus, the famous Skelton (1460-1529) was laureated at Oxford,
and afterwards obtained permission to wear his laurel at Cambridge; but
though tutor to King Henry VIII., and, according to Miss Strickland,
the original corrupter of that monarch, he was never a Poet Laureate in
the modern sense of the word; that is, he was never appointed to hold
the place and quality of Poet Laureate to his Majesty. I regret this,
for he was a man of original genius. Campbell, writing in 1819, admits
his ‘vehemence and vivacity,’ but pronounces his humour ‘vulgar and
flippant,’ and his style a texture of slang phrases; but Mr. Churton
Collins, in 1880, declares that Skelton reminds him more of Rabelais
than any author in our language, and pronounces him one of the most
versatile and essentially original of all our poets. We hold with Mr.
Collins.