Men who have had the opportunity of rummaging among old libraries in

their boyhood are the most likely to cultivate pets of this kind. There

is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold

serene classic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular

writer on the Æsthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual,"

ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly. To intellects not

far enough advanced to acknowledge the influence of such terms, or to

comprehend their application to what we should or should not like and

admire, there is a fortunate element even in their deficiencies. They

can admire the devices of the old printers from association with the

boyish days when they were first noticed, from an absolute liking for

their fantastic fancies, and possibly from an observation in some of

them of the indications of the gradual development of artistic purity

and beauty. In many of them in which the child has seen only an

attractive little picture, the man has afterwards found a touch of

poetic or religious thought.

There is the hand pouring oil into a lamp of pure Etruscan shape,

symbolical of the nutriment supplied to the intellectual flame. In

another, the gardener carefully plants the seedlings which are to bear

the fruit of knowledge to the coming generations; in another, the sun

rising bright over the eastern sea signifies the dawn of the restoration

of classical learning to the European nations.

Other interpretations of the kind, called quaint conceits, can be read

from these printers' devices. There is Gesner's Bibliotheca swarming

with frogs and tadpoles like a quagmire in honour of its printer, a

German Frog, latinised Christopherus Froshoverus. The _Quæ Extant_ of

Varro, printed at Dort, are adorned with many lively cuts of bears and

their good-humoured cubs, because the printer's name is Joannis

Berewout. So the Aulus Gellius, printed by Gryphius of Lyons, more than

a hundred years earlier, begins and ends with formidable effigies of

griffins. The device of Michael and Phillip Lenoir is a jet-black

shield, with an Ethiopian for crest, and Ethiopians for supporters; and

Apiarius has a neat little cut representing a bear robbing a bee's nest

in a hollow tree. Most instructive of them all, Ascensius has bequeathed

to posterity the lively and accurate representation, down to every nail

and screw, of the press in which the great works of the sixteenth

century were printed, with the brawny pressman pulling his proof.

Collectors there have been, not unimportant for number and zeal, whose

mission it is to purchase books marked by peculiar mistakes or errors of

the press. The celebrated Elzevir Cæsar of 1635 is known by this, that

the number of the 149th page is misprinted 153. All that want this

peculiar distinction are counterfeits. The little volume being, as

Brunet says, "une des plus jolies et plus rares de la collection des

Elsevier," gave a temptation to fraudulent imitators, who, as if by a

providential arrangement for their detection, lapsed into accuracy at

the critical figure. How common errors are in editions of the classics,

is attested by the one or two editions which claim a sort of

canonisation as immaculate--as, for instance, the Virgil of Didot, and

the Horace of Foulis. A collector, with a taste for the inaccurate,

might easily satiate it in the editions so attractive in their deceptive

beauty of the great Birmingham printer Baskerville.

The mere printers' blunders that have been committed upon editions of

the Bible are reverenced in literary history; and one edition--the

Vulgate issued under the authority of Sixtus V.--achieved immense value

from its multitude of errors. The well-known story of the German

printer's wife, who surreptitiously altered the passage importing that

her husband should be her lord (Herr) so as to make him be her fool

(Narr), needs confirmation. If such a misprint were found, it might

quite naturally be attributed to carelessness. Valarian Flavigny, who

had many controversies on his hand, brought on the most terrible of them

all with Abraham Ecchellensis by a mere dropped letter. In the rebuke

about the mote in thy brother's eye and the beam in thine own, the first

letter in the Latin for eye was carelessly dropped out, and left a word

which may be found occasionally in Martial's Epigrams, but not in books

of purer Latin and purer ideas.[29]

[Footnote 29: A traditional anecdote represents the Rev. William

Thomson, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, as having got into a

scrape by a very indecorous alteration of a word in Scripture. A young

divine, on his first public appearance, had to read the solemn passage

in 1st Corinthians, "Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all

sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an

eye, at the last trump." Thomson scratched the letter _c_ out of the

word changed. The effect of the passage so mutilated can easily be

tested. The person who could play such tricks was ill suited for his

profession, and being relieved of its restraints, he found a more

congenial sphere of life among the unsettled crew of men of letters in

London, over whom Smollett had just ceased to reign. He did a deal of

hard work, and the world owes him at least one good turn in his

translation of Cunningham's Latin History of Britain from the Revolution

to the Hanover Succession. The value of this work, in the minute light

thrown by it on one of the most memorable periods of British history, is

too little known. The following extract may give some notion of the

curious and instructive nature of this neglected book. It describes the

influences which were in favour of the French alliance, and against the

Whigs, during Marlborough's campaign. "And now I shall take this

opportunity to speak of the French wine-drinkers as truly and briefly as

I can. On the first breaking out of the Confederate war, the merchants

in England were prohibited from all commerce with France, and a heavy

duty was laid upon French wine. This caused a grievous complaint among

the topers, who have great interest in the Parliament, as if they had

been poisoned by port wines. Mr Portman Seymour, who was a jovial

companion, and indulged his appetites, but otherwise a good man; General

Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough's brother, a man of courage, but a

lover of wine; Mr Pereira, a Jew and smell-feast, and other hard

drinkers, declared, that the want of French wine was not to be endured,

and that they could hardly bear up under so great a calamity. These were

joined by Dr Aldridge, who, though nicknamed the priest of Bacchus, was

otherwise an excellent man, and adorned with all kinds of learning. Dr

Ratcliffe, a physician of great reputation, who ascribed the cause of

all diseases to the want of French wines, though he was very rich, and

much addicted to wine, yet, being extremely covetous, bought the cheaper

wines; but at the same time he imputed the badness of his wine to the

war, and the difficulty of getting better. Therefore the Duke of

Beaufort and the Earl of Scarsdale, two young noblemen of great interest

among their acquaintance, who had it in their power to live at their

ease in magnificence or luxury, merrily attributed all the doctor's

complaints to his avarice. All those were also for peace rather than

war. And all the bottle-companions, many physicians, and great numbers

of the lawyers and inferior clergy, and, in fine, the loose women too,

were united together in the faction against the Duke of

Marlborough."--ii. 200.]

Questions as to typographical blunders in editions of the classics are

mixed up with larger critical inquiries into the purity of the

ascertained text, and thus run in veins through the mighty strata of

philological and critical controversy which, from the days of Poggio

downwards, have continued to form that voluminous mass of learning which

the outer world contemplates with silent awe.

To some extent the same spirit of critical inquiry has penetrated into

our own language. What we have of it clusters almost exclusively around

the mighty name of Shakespeare. Shakespearian criticism is a branch of

knowledge by itself. To record its triumphs--from that greatest one by

which the senseless "Table of Greenfield," which interrupted the

touching close of Falstaff's days, was replaced by "'a babbled of green

fields"--would make a large book of itself. He who would undertake it,

in a perfectly candid and impartial spirit, would give us, varied no

doubt with much erudition and acuteness, a curious record of blundering

ignorance and presumptuous conceit, the one so intermingling with the

other that it would be often difficult to distinguish them.[30]

[Footnote 30: Without venturing too near to this very turbulent arena,

where hard words have lately been cast about with much reckless

ferocity, I shall just offer one amended reading, because there is

something in it quite peculiar, and characteristic of its literary

birthplace beyond the Atlantic. The passage operated upon is the wild

soliloquy, where Hamlet resolves to try the test of the play, and says--

"The devil hath power

T' assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,

Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

As he is very potent with such spirits,

Abuses me to damn me."

The amended reading stands--

"As he is very potent with such spirits,

Abuses me too--damme."]

The quantity of typographical errors exposed in those pages, where they

are least to be expected, and are least excusable, opens up some curious

considerations. It may surely be believed that, between the compositors

who put the types together and the correctors of the press, the printing

of the Bible has generally been executed with more than average care.

Yet the editions of the sacred book have been the great mine of

discovered printers' blunders. The inference from this, however, is not

that blunders abound less in other literature, but that they are not

worth finding there. The issuing of the true reading of the Scripture is

of such momentous consequence, that a mistake is sure of exposure, like

those minute incidents of evidence which come forth when a murder has

been committed, but would never have left their privacy for the

detection of a petty fraud.

The value to literature of a pure Shakespearian text, has inspired the

zeal of the detectives who work on this ground. Some casual detections

have occurred in minor literature,--as, for instance, when Akenside's

description of the Pantheon, which had been printed as "serenely great,"

was restored to "severely great." The reason, however, why such

detections are not common in common books, is the rather humiliating one

that they are not worth making. The specific weight of individual words

is in them of so little influence, that one does as well as another.

Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has

much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to

achieve--as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes

supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which the cunning of his

hand cannot accomplish. Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most

alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the

contrary, sometimes rather improved. I might refer to a signal instance

of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a

poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second

and fourth of each quatrain changed places. This transposition was

pronounced to operate a decided improvement on the spirit and

originality of the piece,--an opinion in which, unfortunately, the

author did not concur; nor could he appreciate the compliment of a

critic, who remarked that the experiment tested the soundness of the

lines, which could find their feet whatever way they were thrown

about.[31]

[Footnote 31: One curious service of printers' blunders, of a character

quite distinct from their bibliological influence, is their use in

detecting plagiarisms. It may seem strange that there should be any

difficulty in critically determining the question, when the plagiarism

is so close as to admit of this test; but there are pieces of very hard

work in science, tables of reference, and the like, where, if two people

go through the same work, they will come to the same conclusion. In such

cases, the prior worker has sometimes identified his own by a blunder,

as he would a stolen china vase by a crack. Peignot complains that some

thirty or forty pages of his Dictionnaire Bibliographique were

incorporated in the Siècles Littéraires de la France, "avec une

exactitude si admirable, qu'on y a precieusement conservé toutes les

fautes typographiques."]

There have been, no doubt, cruel instances of printers' blunders in our

own days, like the fate of the youthful poetess in the Fudge family:--

"When I talked of the dewdrops on freshly-blown roses,

The nasty things printed it--freshly-blown noses."

Suchlike was the fatality which suddenly dried up the tears of those who

read a certain pathetic ode, in which the desolate widow was printed as

"dissolute;" and the accident which destroyed a poetic reputation by

making the "pale martyr in his sheet of fire" come forward with "his

shirt on fire." So also a certain printer, whose solemn duty it was to

have announced to the world that "intoxication is folly," whether

actuated by simplicity of soul or by malignity, was unable to resist the

faint amendment which announced the more genial doctrine that

"intoxication is jolly."[32]

[Footnote 32: See this and other cases in point set forth in an amusing

article on "Literary Mishaps," in Hedderwick's Miscellany, part ii.]

A solid scholar there was, who, had he been called to his account at a

certain advanced period of his career, might have challenged all the

world to say that he had ever used a false quantity, or committed an

anomaly in syntax, or misspelt a foreign name, or blundered in a

quotation from a Greek or Latin classic--to misquote an English author

is a far lighter crime, but even to this he could have pleaded not

guilty. He never made a mistake in a date, or left out a word in copying

the title-page of a volume; nor did he ever, in affording an intelligent

analysis of its contents, mistake the number of pages devoted to one

head. As to the higher literary virtues, too, his sentences were all

carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the

most sensitive kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of ending a

sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the

same five lines, choosing always some judicious method of circumlocution

to obviate reiteration. Poor man! in the pride of his unspotted purity,

he little knew what a humiliation fate had prepared for him. It happened

to him to have to state how Theodore Beza, or some contemporary of his,

went to sea in a Candian vessel. This statement, at the last moment,

when the sheet was going through the press, caught the eye of an

intelligent and judicious corrector, more conversant with shipping-lists

than with the literature of the sixteenth century, who saw clearly what

had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all

pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting

the author. The consequence was, that people read with some surprise,

under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had

gone to sea in a _Canadian_ vessel. The victim of this calamity had

undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophical

equanimity; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, destitute of

the organ of veneration, thoughtlessly asked him about the last new

popular work, as if it were something that he had read or even heard of,

and actually went so far in their contumelious disrespect as to speak to

him about the productions of a certain Charles Dickens. The "Canadian

vessel," however, was a more serious disaster, and was treated

accordingly. A charitable friend broke his calamity to the author at a

judicious moment, to prevent him from discovering it himself at an

unsuitable time, with results the full extent of which no one could

foresee. It was an affair of much anxiety among his friends, who made

frequent inquiries as to how he bore himself in his affliction, and what

continued to be the condition of his health, and especially of his

spirits. And although he was a confirmed book-hunter, and not

unconscious of the merits of the peculiar class of books now under

consideration, it may be feared that it was no consolation to him to

reflect that, some century or so hence, his books and himself would be

known only by the curious blunder which made one of them worth the

notice of the book-fanciers. Consequences from printers' blunders of a

still more tragic character even than this, have been preserved--as for

instance, the fate of Guidi the Italian poet, whose end is said to have

been hastened by the misprints in his poetical paraphrase of the

Homilies of his patron, Clement XI.

An odd accident occurred to a well-known book lately published,

called Men of the Time. It sometimes happens in a printing-office that

some of the types, perhaps a printed line or two, fall out of "the

forme." Those in whose hands the accident occurs generally try to put

things to rights as well as they can, and may be very successful in

restoring appearances with the most deplorable results to the sense. It

happened thus in the instance referred to. A few lines dropping out of

the Life of Robert Owen, the parallelogram Communist, were hustled, as

the nearest place of refuge, into the biography of his closest

alphabetical neighbour--"Oxford, Bishop of." The consequence is that the

article begins as follows:--

"OXFORD, THE RIGHT REVEREND SAMUEL WILBERFORCE, BISHOP OF, was born in

1805. A more kind-hearted and truly benevolent man does not exist. A

sceptic, as regards religious revelation, he is nevertheless an

out-and-out believer in spirit movements."

Whenever this blunder was discovered, the leaf was cancelled; but a few

copies of the book had got into circulation, which some day or other may

be very valuable.

From errors of the press there is a natural transition to the class who

incur the guilt of perpetrating them, and whose peculiar mental

qualities impart to them their special characteristics. That mysterious

body called compositors, through whose hands all literature passes, are

reputed to be a placid and unimpressionable race of practical stoics,

who do their work dutifully, without yielding to the intellectual

influences represented by it. A clause of an Act of Parliament, with all

its whereases, and be it enacteds, and hereby repealeds, creates, it is

said, quite as much emotion in them as the most brilliant burst of the

fashionable poet of the day. They will set you up a psalm or a

blasphemous ditty with the same equanimity, not retaining in their minds

any clear distinction between them. Your writing must be something very

wonderful indeed, before they distinguish it from other "copy," except

by the goodness or badness of the hand. A State paper which all the

world is mad to know about, is quite safe in a printing-office; and, if

report speak truly, they will set up what is here set down of them,

without noting that it refers to themselves. It is said that this stoic

indifference is a wonderful provision for the preservation of the purity

of literature, and that, were compositors to think with the author under

the "stick," they might make dire havoc.

We are not to suppose, however, that they take less interest in, or are

less observant of, the work of their hands than other workmen. The point

of view, however, from which their observation is taken, is not exactly

the same as that of their co-operator, the author whose writing they set

up, nor is their notification of specialties of a kind which would

always be felt by him as complimentary. The tremendous philippic of

Junius Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age,

is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted

the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The

exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of

the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that

the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight

of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could recall, who,

with a kind of exulting indignation, thought he had discovered a

celebrated brother of the lyre appropriating his ewe lamb in a flagrant

plagiarism. There was at least one man who had the opportunity of being

acquainted with the productions of his unappreciated muse--the printer.

To him, accordingly, he appealed for confirmation of his suspicions,

demanding if he did not see in the two productions a similarity that in

some places even approached identity. The referee turned over page after

page with the scrupulous attention of one whose acuteness is on trial.

After due deliberation he admitted that there was a very striking

similarity, only it seemed to him that the other's brevier was a shade

thinner in the hair-stroke than his own, and the small caps. would go a

thought more to the pound; while as to the semicolons and marks of

interrogation, they looked as if they came out of a different font

altogether.

It is pleasant to be remembered for something, and the present author

has the assurance that these pages will be imprinted on the memory of

the "chapel" by the decorated capitals and Gothic devices with which a

better taste than his own has strewed them. The position, indeed,

conceded to him in the book-hunting field through the influence of these

becoming decorations has communicated to him something of the uneasiness

of Juvenal's

"Miserum est aliorum incubere famæ,

Ne collapsa ruant subductis tecta columnis."

And having so disburdened himself, he rejoices in the thought that

whoever compliments him again on the taste and talent displayed in the

printing and adorning of this volume, will only prove that he has not

read it.

Returning to compositors, and what they note and do not note, if the

fresh author has happened to feel it a rather damping forecast of his

reception by the public that those who have had the first and closest

contact with his efforts are not in any way aroused by their remarkable

originality, yet one who may have had opportunities of taking a wide

view of the functions of the compositor will not wonder that, like the

deaf adder, he systematically closes his ear to the voice of the

charmer.

That the uninitiated reader may form some practical conception of my

meaning, I propose to set down a few items from the weekly contents of a

compositor's "bill-book," slightly enlarging his brief entries with the

view of rendering them the more intelligible.

"1. A time job--viz., inserting, as per author's proof, 50 'hear hears'

and 20 'great cheerings' in report of speech to be delivered by Alderman

Noddles at the great meeting on the social system.

"2. Picking out all the 'hear hears' and 'great cheerings' from said

speech, in respect it was not permitted to be delivered, the meeting

having dispersed when the alderman stood up; and breaking up the same

into pages, with title, 'A plan for the immediate and total extirpation

of intemperance by prohibiting the manufacture of bottles.'

"3. A sheet of a volume of poems, titled 'Life thoughts by a Life

thinker,' beginning--

"'Far I dipt beneath the surface, through the texture of the earth,

Till my heart's triumphant musings dreamt the dream of that new birth,

When the engineer's deep science through the mighty sphere shall probe,

And the railway trains to Melbourne sweep the centre of the globe,

And the electro-motive engine renders it no more absurd

That a human being should be in two places like a bird.'

"Item--Introduction, explaining the difficulties in the way of the

poet's success, in an age devoted to forms and superficialities, by

reason of his muscular originality, impulsive grasping at the infinite,

and resolute disdain of popular and conventional models; but expressing

opinion that, as he turns round on the pivot of his own individual

idiosyncrasy, he will come out all right.

"4. Advertisement by a disinterested draper, beginning, 'awful

sacrifices,' and ending, 'early application necessary to prevent

disappointment.'

"5. Two sticks of prayer for a devotional work which has had an

unexpected run, and is largely distributed over the office for an

expeditious issue of a new edition.

"6. Part of an accountant's report, containing 45 schemes for the

ranking of the creditors on ten bankrupt estates, each of which has

drawn accommodation bills on all the others.

"7. Signature YY of 'A treatise on the form and material of the sickle

used by the Welsh Druids in cutting the mistletoe,' being a series of

quotations in Arabic, Hindoo, Greek, German, and Gaelic, cemented

together by thin lines of English. This is a stock job which keeps the

office going like a balance-wheel when there is nothing else specially

pressing, and is rather popular, as it contains a good many ethnological

and etymological tables, implying scheme-work, which the compositors who

are adepts in that department contemplate with great satisfaction as

they put it together."

It is surely pleasant to suppose that the compositor has acquired the

faculty of passing such dizzying whirls of heterogeneous elements

without absorbing them all, and that, when his day's labour is over, he

may find his own special intellectual food in his Milton or his Locke.

In this view, his apathy to the literary matter passing through his

hands may be contemplated as among the special beneficences in the

providential order of things, like the faculty of healthy vitality to

throw off morbid influences; and perhaps it has still closer analogy to

that professional coolness which separates the surgeon from a nervous

sympathy with the sufferings of those on whom he operates--a phenomenon

which, though sometimes denounced as professional callousness, is one

of the most beneficent specialties in the lot of mankind.

In the several phases of the book-hunter, he whose peculiar glory it is

to have his books illustrated--the Grangerite, as he is technically

termed--must not be omitted. "Illustrating" a volume consists in

inserting in or binding up with it portraits, landscapes, and other

works of art bearing a reference to its contents. This is materially

different from the other forms of the pursuit, in as far as the quarry

hunted down is the raw material, the finished article being a result of

domestic manufacture. The Illustrator is the very Ishmaelite of

collectors--his hand is against every man, and every man's hand is

against him. He destroys unknown quantities of books to supply portraits

or other illustrations to a single volume of his own; and as it is not

always known concerning any book that he has been at work on it, many a

common book-buyer has cursed him on inspecting his own last bargain, and

finding that it is deficient in an interesting portrait or two. Tales

there are, fitted to make the blood run cold in the veins of the most

sanguine book-hunter, about the devastations committed by those who are

given over to this special pursuit. It is generally understood that they

received the impulse which has rendered them an important sect, from the

publication of Granger's Biographical History--hence their name of

Grangerites. So it has happened that this industrious and respectable

compiler is contemplated with mysterious awe as a sort of literary

Attila or Gengis Khan, who has spread terror and ruin around him. In

truth the illustrator, whether green-eyed or not, being a monster that

doth make the meat he feeds on, is apt to become excited with his work,

and to go on ever widening the circle of his purveyances, and opening

new avenues toward the raw material on which he works. To show how

widely such a person may levy contributions, I propose to take, not a

whole volume, not even a whole page, but still a specific and

distinguished piece of English literature, and describe the way in which

a devotee of this peculiar practice would naturally proceed in

illustrating it. The piece of literature to be illustrated is as

follows:--

"How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour,

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower!"

The first thing to be done is to collect every engraved portrait of the

author, Isaac Watts. The next, to get hold of any engravings of the

house in which he was born, or houses in which he lived. Then will come

all kinds of views of Southampton--of its Gothic gate, and its older

than Gothic wall. Any scrap connected with the inauguration of the Watts

statue must of course be scrupulously gathered. To go but a step beyond

such commonplaces--there is a traditional story about the boyhood of

Isaac which has been told as follows. He took precociously to rhyming:

like Pope, he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. It happened that

this practice was very offensive to his father, a practical man, who,

finding his admonitions useless, resolved to stop it in an effectual

manner. He accordingly, after the practice of his profession--being a

schoolmaster--assailed with a leathern thong, duly prepared, the cuticle

of that portion of the body which has from time immemorial been devoted

to such inflictions. Under torture, the divine songster abjured his

propensity in the following very hopeful shape--

"Oh, father, do some pity take,

And I will no more verses make."

It is not likely that this simple domestic scene has been engraved

either for the Divine Hymns, or the Improvement of the Mind. The

illustrator will therefore require to get a picture of it for his own

special use, and will add immensely to the value of his treasure, while

he gives scope to the genius of a Cruikshank or a Doyle.

We are yet, it will be observed, only on the threshold. We have next to

illustrate the substance of the poetry. All kinds of engravings of bees

Attic and other, and of bee-hives, will be appropriate, and will be

followed by portraits of Huber and other great writers on bees, and

views of Mount Hybla and other honey districts. Some Scripture prints

illustrative of the history of Samson, who had to do with honey and

bees, will be appropriate, as well as any illustrations of the fable of

the Bear and the Bees, or of the Roman story of the _Sic vos non vobis_.

A still more appropriate form of illustration may, however, be drawn

upon by remembering that a periodical called The Bee was edited by Dr

Anderson; and it is important to observe that the name was adopted in

the very spirit which inspired Watts. In both instances the most

respected of all winged insects was brought forward as the type of

industry. Portraits, then, of Dr Anderson, and any engravings that can

be connected with himself and his pursuits, will have their place in the

collection. It will occur, perhaps, to the intelligent illustrator, that

Dr Anderson was the grandfather of Sir James Outram, and he will thus

have the satisfaction of opening his collection for all illustrations of

the career of that distinguished officer. Having been aptly called the

Bayard of the Indian service, the collector who has exhausted him and

his services will be justified by the principles of the craft in

following up the chase, and picking up any woodcuts or engravings

referring to the death of the false Bourbon, or any other scene in the

career of the knight without fear or reproach. Here, by a fortunate and

interesting coincidence, through the Bourbons the collector gets at the

swarms of bees which distinguish the insignia of royalty in France.

When the illustrator comes to the last line, which invites him to add to

what he has already collected a representation of "every opening

flower," it is easy to see that he has indeed a rich garden of delights

before him.

In a classification of book-hunters, the aspirants after large-paper

copies deserve special notice, were it only for the purpose of guarding

against a common fallacy which confounds them with the lovers of tall

copies. The difference is fundamental, large-paper copies being created

by system, while tall copies are merely the creatures of accident; and

Dibdin bestows due castigation in a celebrated instance in which a mere

tall copy had, whether from ignorance or design, been spoken of as a

large-paper copy. This high development of the desirable book is the

result of an arrangement to print so many copies of a volume on paper of

larger size than that of the bulk of the impression. The tall copy is

the result of careful cutting by the binder, or of no cutting at all. In

this primitive shape a book has separate charms for a distinct class of

collectors who esteem rough edges, and are willing, for the sake of this

excellence, to endure the martyrdom of consulting books in that

condition.[33]

[Footnote 33:

"But devious oft, from ev'ry classic muse,

The keen collector meaner paths will choose:

And first the margin's breadth his soul employs,

Pure, snowy, broad, the type of nobler joys.

In vain might Homer roll the tide of song,

Or Horace smile, or Tully charm the throng;

If, crost by Pallas' ire, the trenchant blade,

Or too oblique, or near the edge, invade,

The Bibliomane exclaims, with haggard eye,

'No margin!'--turns in haste, and scorns to buy."

--Ferriar's Bibliomania, v. 34-43.]

The historian of the private libraries of New York makes us acquainted

with a sect well known in the actually sporting world, but not

heretofore familiar in the bibliological. Here is a description of the

Waltonian library of the Reverend Dr Bethune. In the sunshine he is a

practical angler, and--

"During the darker seasons of the year, when forbidden the actual use of

his rod, our friend has occupied himself with excursions through sale

catalogues, fishing out from their dingy pages whatever tends to honour

his favourite author or favourite art, so that his spoils now number

nearly five hundred volumes, of all sizes and dates. Pains have been

taken to have not only copies of the works included in the list, but

also the several editions; and when it is of a work mentioned by Walton,

an edition which the good old man himself may have seen. Thus the

collection has all the editions of Walton, Cotton, and Venables in

existence, and, with few exceptions, all the works referred to by

Walton, or which tend to illustrate his favourite rambles by the Lea or

the Dove. Every scrap of Walton's writing, and every compliment paid to

him, have been carefully gathered and garnered up, with prints and

autographs and some precious manuscripts. Nor does the department end

here, but embraces most of the older and many of the modern writers on

ichthyology and angling."

The Prowler and the Auction-Haunter.

These incidental divisions are too numerous and complex for a proper

classification of book-hunters, and I am inclined to go back to the idea

that their most effective and comprehensive division is into the private

prowler and the auction-haunter. The difference between these is

something like, in the sporting world, that between the stalker and the

hunter proper. Each function has its merits, and calls for its special

qualities and sacrifices. The one demands placidity, patience, caution,

plausibility, and unwearied industry--such attributes as those which

have been already set forth in the words of the Antiquary. The

auction-room, on the other hand, calls forth courage, promptness, and

the spirit of adventure. There is wild work sometimes there, and men

find themselves carried off by enthusiasm and competition towards

pecuniary sacrifices which at the threshold of the temple they had

solemnly vowed to themselves to eschew. But such sacrifices are the

tribute paid to the absorbing interest of the pursuit, and are looked

upon in their own peculiar circle as tending to the immortal honour of

those who make them. This field of prowess has, it is said, undergone a

prejudicial change in these days, the biddings being nearly all by

dealers, while gentlemen-collectors are gradually moving out of the

field. In old days one might have reaped for himself, by bold and

emphatic biddings at a few auctions, a niche in that temple of fame, of

which the presiding deity is Dr Frognal Dibdin--a name familiarly

abbreviated into that of Foggy Dibdin. His descriptions of auction

contests are perhaps the best and most readable portions of his

tremendously overdone books.

Conspicuous beyond all others stands forth the sale of the Roxburghe

library, perhaps the most eminent contest of that kind on record. There

were of it some ten thousand separate "lots," as auctioneers call them,

and almost every one of them was a book of rank and mark in the eyes of

the collecting community, and had been, with special pains and care and

anxious exertion, drawn into the vortex of that collection. Although it

was created by a Duke, yet it has been rumoured that most of the books

had been bargains, and that the noble collector drew largely on the

spirit of patient perseverance and enlightened sagacity for which

Monkbarns claims credit. The great passion and pursuit of his life

having been of so peculiar a character--he was almost as zealous a

hunter of deer and wild swans, by the way, as of books, but this was not

considered in the least peculiar--it was necessary to find some strange

influencing motive for his conduct; so it has been said that it arose

from his having been crossed in love in his early youth. Such crosses,

in general, arise from the beloved one dying, or proving faithless and

becoming the wife of another. It was, however, the peculiarity of the

Duke's misfortune, that it arose out of the illustrious marriage of the

sister of his elected. She was the eldest daughter of the Duke of

Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Though purchased by a sacrifice of regal rank, yet

there would be many countervailing advantages in the position of an

affluent British Duchess which might reconcile a young lady, even of so

illustrious a descent, to the sacrifice, had it not happened that Lord

Bute and the Princess of Wales selected her younger sister to be the

wife of George III. and the Queen of Great Britain, long known as the

good Queen Charlotte. Then there arose, it seems, the necessity, as a

matter of state and political etiquette, that the elder sister should

abandon the alliance with a British subject.

So, at all events, goes the story of the origin of the Duke's

bibliomania; and it is supposed to have been in the thoughts of Sir

Walter Scott, when he said of him that "youthful misfortunes, of a kind

against which neither wealth nor rank possess a talisman, cast an early

shade of gloom over his prospects, and gave to one splendidly endowed

with the means of enjoying society that degree of reserved melancholy

which prefers retirement to the splendid scenes of gaiety." Dibdin, with

more specific precision, after rambling over the house where the great

auction sale occurred, as inquisitive people are apt to do, tells us of

the solitary room occupied by the Duke, close to his library, in which

he slept and died: "all his migrations," says the bibliographer, "were

confined to these two rooms. When Mr Nichol showed me the very bed on

which this bibliomaniacal Duke had expired, I felt--as I trust I ought

to have felt on the occasion." Scott attributed to an incidental

occurrence at his father's table the direction given to the great

pursuit of his life. "Lord Oxford and Lord Sunderland, both famous

collectors of the time, dined one day with the second Duke of Roxburghe,

when their conversation happened to turn upon the _editio princeps_ of

Boccaccio, printed in Venice in 1474, and so rare that its very

existence was doubted of." It so happened that the Duke remembered this

volume having been offered to him for £100, and he believed he could

still trace and secure it: he did so, and laid it before his admiring

friends at a subsequent sitting. "His son, then Marquess of Bowmont,

never forgot the little scene upon this occasion, and used to ascribe to

it the strong passion which he ever afterwards felt for rare books and

editions, and which rendered him one of the most assiduous and judicious

collectors that ever formed a sumptuous library."[34] And this same

Boccaccio was the point of attack which formed the climax in the great

contest of the Roxburghe roup, as the Duke's fellow-countrymen called

it. I am not aware that any of the English bibliographers have alluded

to any special cause for this volume's extreme rarity. Peignot

attributes it to a sermon preached by the Italian pulpit orator

Savonarola, on the 8th of February 1497, against indecorous books, in

consequence of which the inhabitants of Florence made a bonfire of their

Boccaccios,--an explanation which every one who pleases is at liberty to

believe.[35]

[Footnote 34: Article on Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, in the 21st vol. of

Miscellaneous Prose Works.]

[Footnote 35: Predicatoriana, p. 23]

The historian of the contest terms it "the Waterloo among book-battles,"

whereto "many a knight came far and wide from his retirement, and many

an unfledged combatant left his father's castle to partake of the glory

of such a contest." He also tells us that the honour of the first

effective shot was due to a house in the trade--Messrs Payne and

Foss--by whom "the Aldine Greek Bible was killed off the first in the

contest. It produced the sum of £4, 14s. 6d. Thus measuredly, and

guardedly, and even fearfully, did this tremendous battle begin." The

earliest brilliant affair seems to have come off when Lord Spencer

bought two Caxtons for £245, a feat of which the closing scene is

recorded, with a touching simplicity, in these terms:--"His Lordship put

each volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush

of victory and consciousness of triumph." As every one does not possess

a copy of the three costly volumes of which the Bibliographical

Decameron consists--and, further, as many a one so fortunate as to

possess them has not had patience and perseverance enough to penetrate

to the middle of the third volume, where the most readable part is to be

found--a characteristic extract, describing the heat of the contest, may

not be unwelcome:--

"For two-and-forty successive days--with the exception only of

Sundays--were the voice and hammer of Mr Evans heard with equal efficacy

in the dining-room of the late Duke, which had been appropriated to the

vendition of the books; and within that same space (some thirty-five

feet by twenty) were such deeds of valour performed, and such feats of

book-heroism achieved, as had never been previously beheld, and of which

the like will probably never be seen again. The shouts of the victors

and the groans of the vanquished stunned and appalled you as you

entered. The striving and press, both of idle spectators and determined

bidders, was unprecedented. A sprinkling of Caxtons and De Wordes marked

the first day, and these were obtained at high, but, comparatively with

the subsequent sums given, moderate prices. Theology, jurisprudence,

philosophy, and philology chiefly marked the earlier days of this

tremendous contest; and occasionally during these days, there was much

stirring up of courage, and many hard and heavy blows were interchanged;

and the combatants may be said to have completely wallowed themselves in

the conflict. At length came poetry, Latin, Italian, and French: a

steady fight yet continued to be fought; victory seemed to hang in

doubtful scales--sometimes on the one, sometimes on the other side of Mr

Evans, who preserved throughout (as it was his bounden duty to preserve)

a uniform, impartial, and steady course; and who may be said on that

occasion, if not 'to have rode the whirlwind,' at least to have

'directed the storm.'"

But the dignity and power of the historian's narrative cannot be fully

appreciated until we find him in the midst of the climax of the

contest--the battle, which gradually merged into a single combat, for

the possession of the Venetian Boccaccio. According to the established

historical practice, we have in the first place a statement of the

position taken up by the respective "forces."

"At length the moment of sale arrived. Evans prefaced the putting-up of

the article by an appropriate oration, in which he expatiated on its

extreme rarity, and concluding by informing the company of the regret,

and even anguish of heart, expressed by Mr Van Praet that such a

treasure was not to be found in the Imperial collection at Paris.

Silence followed the address of Mr Evans. On his right hand, leaning

against the wall, stood Earl Spencer; a little lower down, and standing

at right angles with his Lordship, appeared the Marquess of Bland-ford.

Lord Althorp stood a little backward, to the right of his father, Earl

Spencer."

The first movement of the forces gives the historian an opportunity of

dropping a withering sneer at an unfortunate man, so provincial in his

notions as to suppose that a hundred pounds or two would be of any avail

in such a contest.

"The honour of firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of

Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil

from the reverberation of the report himself had made. 'One hundred

guineas,' he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued; but anon the biddings rose

rapidly to five hundred guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident that

the firing was but masked and desultory. At length all random shots

ceased, and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other,

resolving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths. _A

thousand guineas_ were bid by Earl Spencer--to which the Marquess added

_ten_. You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned--all

breathing wellnigh stopped--every sword was put home within its

scabbard--and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter except

that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand."

But even this exciting sort of narrative will tire one when it goes on

page after page, so that we must take a leap to the conclusion. "Two

thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The

spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds

his usual _ten_" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell,

made a short pause--and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the

ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid

air. However, at last down dropped the hammer."

Such a result naturally created excitement beyond the book-collectors'

circle, for here was an actual stroke of trade in which a profit of more

than two thousand per cent had been netted. It is easy to believe in

Dibdin's statement of the crowds of people who imagined they were

possessors of the identical Venetian Boccaccio, and the still larger

number who wanted to do a stroke of business with some old volume,

endowed with the same rarity and the same or greater intrinsic value.

The general excitement created by the dispersal of the Roxburghe

collection proved an epoch in literary history, by the establishment of

the Roxburghe Club, followed by a series of others, the history of which

has to be told farther on.

Of the great book-sales that have been commemorated, it is curious to

observe how seldom they embrace ancestral libraries accumulated in old

houses from generation to generation, and how generally they mark the

short-lived duration of the accumulations of some collector freshly

deposited. One remarkable exception to this was in the Gordonstoun

library, sold in 1816. It was begun by Sir Robert Gordon, a Morayshire

laird of the time of the great civil wars of the seventeenth century. He

was the author of the History of the Earldom of Sutherland, and a man of

great political as well as literary account. He laid by heaps of the

pamphlets, placards, and other documents of his stormy period, and thus

many a valuable morsel, which had otherwise disappeared from the world,

left a representative in the Gordonstoun collection. It was increased by

a later Sir Robert, who had the reputation of being a wizard. He

belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to

take a victim annually; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get

off with merely the loss of his shadow; and many a Morayshire peasant

has testified to having seen him riding forth on a sunny day, the shadow

of his horse visible, with those of his spurs and his whip, but his

body offering no impediment to the rays of the sun. He enriched the

library with books on necromancy, demonology, and alchemy.

The largest book-sale probably that ever was in the world, was that of

Heber's collection in 1834. There are often rash estimates made of the

size of libraries, but those who have stated the number of his books in

six figures seem justified when one looks at the catalogue of the sale,

bound up in five thick octavo volumes. For results so magnificent,

Richard Heber's library had but a small beginning, according to the

memoir of him in the Gentleman's Magazine, where it is said, that

"having one day accidentally met with a little volume called The Vallie

of Varietie, by Henry Peacham, he took it to the late Mr Bindley of the

Stamp-office, the celebrated collector, and asked him if this was not a

curious book. Mr Bindley, after looking at it, answered, 'Yes--not

very--but rather a curious book.'" This faint morsel of encouragement

was, it seems, sufficient to start him in his terrible career, and the

trifle becomes important as a solemn illustration of the _obsta

principiis_. His labours, and even his perils, were on a par with those

of any veteran commander who has led armies and fought battles during

the great part of a long life. He would set off on a journey of several

hundred miles any day in search of a book not in his collection.

Sucking in from all around him whatever books were afloat, he of course

soon exhausted the ordinary market; and to find a book obtainable which

he did not already possess, was an event to be looked to with the

keenest anxiety, and a chance to be seized with promptitude, courage,

and decision. At last, however, he could not supply the cravings of his

appetite without recourse to duplicates, and far more than duplicates.

His friend Dibdin said of him, "He has now and then an ungovernable

passion to possess more copies of a book than there were ever parties to

a deed or stamina to a plant; and therefore I cannot call him a

duplicate or a triplicate collector." He satisfied his own conscience by

adopting a creed, which he enounced thus: "Why, you see, sir, no man can

comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for a

show copy, and he will probably keep it at his country-house; another he

will require for his own use and reference; and unless he is inclined to

part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his

best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends."

This last necessity is the key-note to Heber's popularity: he was a

liberal and kindly man, and though, like Wolsey, he was unsatisfied in

getting, yet, like him, in bestowing he was most princely. Many scholars

and authors obtained the raw material for their labours from his

transcendent stores. These, indeed, might be said less to be personal

to himself than to be a feature in the literary geography of Europe.

"Some years ago," says the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, "he built

a new library at his house at Hodnet, which is said to be full. His

residence at Pimlico, where he died, is filled, like Magliabechi's at

Florence, with books, from the top to the bottom--every chair, every

table, every passage containing piles of erudition. He had another house

in York Street, leading to Great James's Street, Westminster, laden from

the ground-floor to the garret with curious books. He had a library in

the High Street, Oxford, an immense library at Paris, another at

Antwerp, another at Brussels, another at Ghent, and at other places in

the Low Countries and in Germany."

[Illustration]

_PART II.--HIS FUNCTIONS._

The Hobby.

Having devoted the preceding pages to the diagnosis of the book-hunter's

condition, or, in other words, to the different shapes which the

phenomena peculiar to it assume, I now propose to offer some account of

his place in the dispensations of Providence, which will probably show

that he is not altogether a mischievous or a merely useless member of

the human family, but does in reality, however unconsciously to himself,

minister in his own peculiar way to the service both of himself and

others. This is to be a methodical discourse, and therefore to be

divided and subdivided, insomuch that, taking in the first place his

services to himself, this branch shall be subdivided into the advantages

which are purely material and those which are properly intellectual.

And, first, of material advantages. Holding it to be the inevitable doom

of fallen man to inherit some frailty or failing, it would be difficult,

had he a Pandora's box-ful to pick and choose among, to find one less

dangerous or offensive. As the judicious physician informs the patient

suffering under some cutaneous or other external torture, that the

poison lay deep in his constitution--that it must have worked in some

shape--and well it is that it has taken one so innocuous--so may even

the book-hunter be congratulated on having taken the innate moral malady

of all the race in a very gentle and rather a salubrious form. To pass

over gambling, tippling, and other practices which cannot be easily

spoken of in good society, let us look to the other shapes in which man

lets himself out--for instance to horse-racing, hunting, photography,

shooting, fishing, cigars, dog-fancying, dog-fighting, the ring, the

cockpit, phrenology, revivalism, socialism; which of these contains so

small a balance of evil, counting of course that the amount of pleasure

conferred is equal--for it is only on the datum that the book-hunter has

as much satisfaction from his pursuit as the fox-hunter, the

photographer, and so on, has in his, that a fair comparison can be

struck? These pursuits, one and all, leave little or nothing that is

valuable behind them, except, it may be, that some of them are conducive

to health, by giving exercise to the body and a genial excitement to the

mind; but every hobby gives the latter, and the former may be easily

obtained in some other shape. They leave little or nothing behind--even

the photographer's portfolio will bring scarcely anything under the

hammer after the death of him whose solace and pursuit it had been,

should the positives remain visible, which may be doubted. And as to the

other enumerated pursuits, some of them, as we all know, are immensely

costly, all unproductive as they are.

But the book-hunter may possibly leave a little fortune behind him. His

hobby, in fact, merges into an investment. This is the light in which a

celebrated Quaker collector of paintings put his conduct, when it was

questioned by the brethren, in virtue of that right to admonish one

another concerning the errors of their ways, which makes them so chary

in employing domestic servants of their own persuasion. "What had the

brother paid for that bauble [a picture by Wouvermans], for instance?"

"Well, £300." "Was not that then an awful wasting of his substance on

vanities?" "No. He had been offered £900 for it. If any of the Friends

was prepared to offer him a better investment of his money than one that

could be realised at a profit of 200 per cent, he was ready to alter the

existing disposal of his capital."

It is true that amateur purchasers do not, in the long-run, make a

profit, though an occasional bargain may pass through their hands. It

is not maintained that, in the general case, the libraries of collectors

would be sold for more than they cost, or even for nearly so much; but

they are always worth something, which is more than can be said of the

residue of other hobbies and pursuits. Nay, farther; the scholarly

collector of books is not like the ordinary helpless amateur; for

although, doubtless, nothing will rival the dealer's instinct for

knowing the money-value of an article, though he may know nothing else

about it, yet there is often a subtle depth in the collector's educated

knowledge which the other cannot match, and bargains may be obtained off

the counters of the most acute.

A small sprinkling of these--even the chance of them--excites him, like

the angler's bites and rises, and gives its zest to his pursuit. It is

the reward of his patience, his exertion, and his skill, after the

manner in which Monkbarns has so well spoken; and it is certain that, in

many instances, a collector's library has sold for more than it cost

him.

No doubt, a man may ruin himself by purchasing costly books, as by

indulgence in any other costly luxury, but the chances of calamity are

comparatively small in this pursuit. A thousand pounds will go a great

way in book-collecting, if the collector be true to the traditions of

his pursuit, such as they are to be hereafter expounded. There has been

one instance, doubtless, in the records of bibliomania, of two thousand

pounds having been given for one book. But how many instances far more

flagrant could be found in picture-buying? Look around upon the world

and see how many men are the victims of libraries, and compare them with

those whom the stud, the kennel, and the preserve have brought to the

Gazette. Find out, too, anywhere, if you can, the instance in which the

money scattered in these forms comes back again, and brings with it a

large profit, as the expenditure of the Duke of Roxburghe did when his

library was sold.

But it is necessary to arrest this train of argument, lest its tenor

might be misunderstood. The mercenary spirit must not be admitted to a

share in the enjoyments of the book-hunter. If, after he has taken his

last survey of his treasures, and spent his last hour in that quiet

library, where he has ever found his chief solace against the wear and

worry of the world, the book-hunter has been removed to his final place

of rest, and it is then discovered that the circumstances of the family

require his treasures to be dispersed,--if then the result should take

the unexpected shape that his pursuit has not been so ruinously costly

after all--nay, that his expenditure has actually fructified--it is

well. But if the book-hunter allow money-making--even for those he is to

leave behind--to be combined with his pursuit, it loses its fresh

relish, its exhilarating influence, and becomes the source of wretched

cares and paltry anxieties. Where money is the object, let a man

speculate or become a miser--a very enviable condition to him who has

the saving grace to achieve it, if we hold with Byron that the

accumulation of money is the only passion that never cloys.

Let not the collector, therefore, ever, unless in some urgent and

necessary circumstances, part with any of his treasures. Let him not

even have recourse to that practice called barter, which political

philosophers tell us is the universal resource of mankind preparatory to

the invention of money as a circulating medium and means of exchange.

Let him confine all his transactions in the market to purchasing only.

No good ever comes of gentlemen amateurs buying and selling. They will

either be systematic losers, or they will acquire shabby, questionable

habits, from which the professional dealers--on whom, perhaps, they look

down--are exempt. There are two trades renowned for the quackery and the

imposition with which they are habitually stained--the trade in horses

and the trade in old pictures; and these have, I verily believe, earned

their evil reputation chiefly from this, that they are trades in which

gentlemen of independent fortune and considerable position are in the

habit of embarking.

The result is not so unaccountable as it might seem. The professional

dealer, however smart he may be, takes a sounder estimate of any

individual transaction than the amateur. It is his object, not so much

to do any single stroke of trade very successfully, as to deal

acceptably with the public, and make his money in the long-run. Hence he

does not place an undue estimate on the special article he is to dispose

of, but will let it go at a loss, if that is likely to prove the most

beneficial course for his trade at large. He has no special attachment

to any of the articles in which he deals, and no blindly exaggerated

appreciation of their merits and value. They come and go in an equable

stream, and the cargo of yesterday is sent abroad to the world with the

same methodical indifference with which that of to-day is unshipped. It

is otherwise with the amateur. He feels towards the article he is to

part with all the prejudiced attachment, and all the consequent

over-estimate, of a possessor. Hence he and the market take incompatible

views as to value, and he is apt to become unscrupulous in his efforts

to do justice to himself. Let the single-minded and zealous collector

then turn the natural propensity to over-estimate one's own into its

proper and legitimate channel. Let him guard his treasures as things too

sacred for commerce, and say, _Procul, o procul este, profani_, to all

who may attempt by bribery and corruption to drag them from their

legitimate shelves. If, in any weak moment, he yield to mercenary

temptation, he will be for ever mourning after the departed unit of his

treasure--the lost sheep of his flock. If it seems to be in the decrees

of fate that all his gatherings are to be dispersed abroad after he is

gone to his rest, let him, at all events, retain the reliance that on

them, as on other things beloved, he may have his last look; there will

be many changes after that, and this will be among them. Nor, in his

final reflections on his conduct to himself and to those he is to leave,

will he be disturbed by the thought that the hobby which was his

enjoyment has been in any wise the more costly to him that he has not

made it a means of mercenary money-getting.[36]

[Footnote 36: Atticus was under the scandal of having disposed of his

books, and Cicero sometimes hints to him that he might let more of them

go his way. In truth, Atticus carried this so far, however, that he

seems to have been a sort of dealer, and the earliest instance of a

capitalist publisher. He had slaves whom he occupied in copying, and was

in fact much in the position of a rich Virginian or Carolinian, who

should find that the most profitable investment for his stock of slaves

is a printing and publishing establishment.]

The Desultory Reader or Bohemian of Literature.

Having so put in a plea for this pursuit, as about the least costly

foible to which those who can afford to indulge in foibles can devote

themselves, one might descant on certain auxiliary advantages--as, that

it is not apt to bring its votaries into low company; that it offends no

one, and is not likely to foster actions of damages for nuisance,

trespass, or assault, and the like. But rather let us turn our attention

to the intellectual advantages accompanying the pursuit, since the

proper function of books is in the general case associated with

intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that, according to a

received prejudice or opinion, there is one exception to this general

connection, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who are under a

vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps it is true

in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand the reading

of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power of

perusal--that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight

through what he has already bought--is a supposition alike preposterous

and unreasonable. "Surely you have far more books than you can read," is

sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume

by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them

all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may

be sure that he has got the value of his money.

It is true that there are some books--as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton,

Shakespeare, and Scott--which every man should read who has the

opportunity--should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. To neglect

the opportunity of becoming familiar with them is deliberately to

sacrifice the position in the social scale which an ordinary education

enables its possessor to reach. But is one next to read through the

sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, and

the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and

the Encyclopædia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and

the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in

succession? Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal

towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity.

But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in

thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be

gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower.

In fact, "a course of reading," as it is sometimes called, is a course

of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give

to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life

allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is

practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection

that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over

the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect

in the perusal straight on of any large book, is a sort of mental

slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's Decline and Fall,

luminous and comprehensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant

the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight

through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with

a little Boston's Fourfold State, or Hervey's Meditations, or Sturm's

Reflections for Every Day in the Year, or Don Juan, or Ward's History of

Stoke-upon-Trent.

Isaac D'Israeli says, "Mr Maurice, in his animated memoirs, has recently

acquainted us with a fact which may be deemed important in the life of a

literary man. He tells us, 'We have been just informed that Sir William

Jones _invariably_ read through every year the works of Cicero.'" What a

task! one would be curious to know whether he felt it less heavy in the

twelve duodecimos of Elzevir, or the nine quartos of the Geneva edition.

Did he take to it doggedly, as Dr Johnson says, and read straight

through according to the editor's arrangement, or did he pick out the

plums and take the dismal work afterwards? For the first year or two of

his task, he is not to be pitied perhaps about the Offices, or the

Dialogue on Friendship, or Scipio's Dream, or even the capital speeches

against Verres and Catiline; but those tiresome Letters, and the

Tusculan Questions, and the De Natura! It is a pity he did not live till

Angelo Maï found the De Republica. What disappointed every one else

might perhaps have commanded the admiration of the great Orientalist.

But here follows, on the same authority, a more wonderful performance

still. "The famous Bourdaloue reperused every year St Paul, St

Chrysostom, and Cicero."[37] The sacred author makes but a slight

addition to the bulk, but the works of St Chrysostom are entombed in

eleven folios. Bourdaloue died at the age of seventy-two; and if he

began his task at the age of twenty-two, he must have done it over fifty

times. It requires nerves of more than ordinary strength to contemplate

such a statement with equanimity. The tortures of the classic Hades, and

the disgusting inflictions courted by the anchorites of old, and the

Brahmins of later times, do not approach the horrors of such an act of

self-torture.

[Footnote 37: Curiosities of Literature, iii. 339.]

Of course any one ambitious of enlightening the world on either the

political or the literary history of Rome at the commencement of the

empire, must be as thoroughly acquainted with every word of Cicero as

the writer of the Times leader on a critical debate is with the

newly-delivered speeches. The more fortunate vagabond reader, too,

lounging about among the Letters, will open many little veins of curious

contemporary history and biography, which he can follow up in Tacitus,

Sallust, Cæsar, and the contemporary poets. Both are utterly different

from the stated-task reader, who has come under a vow to work so many

hours or get through so many pages in a given time. _They_ are drawn by

their occupation, whether work or play; _he_ drives himself to his. All

such work is infliction, varying from the highest point of martyrdom

down to tasteless drudgery; and it is as profitless as other

supererogatory inflictions, since the task-reader comes to look at his

words without following out what they suggest, or even absorbing their

grammatical sense, much as the stupid ascetics of old went through their

penitential readings, or as their representatives of the present day,

chiefly of the female sex, read "screeds of good books," which they have

not "the presumption" to understand. The literary Bohemian is sometimes

to be pitied when his facility of character exposes him to have a

modification of this infliction forced upon him. This will occur when he

happens to be living in a house frequented by "a good reader," who

solemnly devotes certain hours to the reading of passages from the

English or French classics for the benefit of the company, and becomes

the mortal enemy of every guest who absents himself from the torturing

performance.

As to collectors, it is quite true that they do not in general read

their books successively straight through, and the practice of desultory

reading, as it is sometimes termed, must be treated as part of their

case, and if a failing, one cognate with their habit of collecting. They

are notoriously addicted to the practice of standing arrested on some

round of a ladder, where, having mounted up for some certain book, they

have by wayward chance fallen upon another, in which, at the first

opening, has come up a passage which fascinates the finder as the eye of

the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding-guest, and compels him to

stand there poised on his uneasy perch and read. Peradventure the matter

so perused suggests another passage in some other volume which it will

be satisfactory and interesting to find, and so another and another

search is made, while the hours pass by unnoticed, and the day seems all

too short for the pursuit which is a luxury and an enjoyment, at the

same time that it fills the mind with varied knowledge and wisdom.

The fact is that the book-hunter, if he be genuine, and have his heart

in his pursuit, is also a reader and a scholar. Though he may be more or

less peculiar, and even eccentric, in his style of reading, there is a

necessary intellectual thread of connection running through the objects

of his search which predicates some acquaintance with the contents of

the accumulating volumes. Even although he profess a devotion to mere

external features--the style of binding, the cut or uncut leaves, the

presence or the absence of the gilding--yet the department in

literature holds more or less connection with this outward sign. He who

has a passion for old editions of the classics in vellum

bindings--Stephenses or Aldines--will not be put off with a copy of

Robinson Crusoe or the Ready Reckoner, bound to match and range with the

contents of his shelves. Those who so vehemently affect some external

peculiarity are the eccentric exceptions; yet even they have some

consideration for the contents of a book as well as for its coat.

The Collector and the Scholar.

Either the possession, or, in some other shape, access to a far larger

collection of books than can be read through in a lifetime, is in fact

an absolute condition of intellectual culture and expansion. The library

is the great intellectual stratification in which the literary

investigator works--examining its external features, or perhaps driving

a shaft through its various layers--passing over this stratum as not

immediate to his purpose, examining that other with the minute attention

of microscopic investigation. The geologist, the botanist, and the

zoologist, are not content to receive one specimen after another into

their homes, to be thoroughly and separately examined, each in

succession, as novel-readers go through the volumes of a circulating

library at twopence a-night--they have all the world of nature before

them, and examine as their scientific instincts or their fancies

suggest. For all inquirers, like pointers, have a sort of instinct,

sharpened by training and practice, the power and acuteness of which

astonish the unlearned. "Reading with the fingers," as Basnage said of

Bayle--turning the pages rapidly over and alighting on the exact spot

where the thing wanted is to be found--is far from a superficial

faculty, as some deem it to be,--it is the thoroughest test of active

scholarship. It was what enabled Bayle to collect so many flowers of

literature, all so interesting, and yet all found in corners so distant

and obscure.

In fact, there are subtle dexterities, acquired by sagacious experience

in searching for valuable little trinkets in great libraries, just as in

other pursuits. A great deal of that appearance of dry drudgery which

excites the pitying amazement of the bystander is nimbly evaded. People

acquire a sort of instinct, picking the valuables out of the useless

verbiage, or the passages repeated from former authors. It is soon found

what a great deal of literature has been the mere "pouring out of one

bottle into another," as the Anatomist of melancholy terms it. There are

those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the

canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into

rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations. Compared with these,

all the intellectual efforts of our recent degenerate days seem the work

of pigmies; and for any of us even to profess to read all that some of

those indomitable giants wrote, would seem an audacious undertaking.

But, in fact, they were to a great extent solemn shams, since the bulk

of their work was merely that of the clerk who copies page after page

from other people's writings.

Surely these laborious old writers exhibited in this matter the

perfection of literary modesty. Far from secretly pilfering, like the

modern plagiarist, it was their great boast that they themselves had not

suggested the great thought or struck out the brilliant metaphor, but

that it had been done by some one of old, and was found in its

legitimate place--a book. I believe that if one of these laborious

persons hatched a good idea of his own, he could experience no peace of

mind until he found it legitimated by having passed through an earlier

brain, and that the author who failed thus to establish a paternity for

his thought would sometimes audaciously set down some great name in his

crowded margin, in the hope that the imposition might pass undiscovered.

Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in

literature. First come Aristotle and Plato, with the other great

classical ancients; next the primitive fathers; then Abailard, Erigena,

Peter Lombard, Ramus, Major, and the like. If the matter be

jurisprudence, we shall have Marcianus, Papinianus, Ulpianus,

Hermogenianus, and Tryphonius to begin with; and shall then pass through

the straits of Bartolus and Baldus, on to Zuichemus, Sanchez,

Brissonius, Ritterhusius, and Gothofridus. If all these say the same

thing, each of the others copying it from the first who uttered it, so

much the more valuable to the literary world is deemed the idea that has

been so amply backed--it is like a vote by a great majority, or a

strongly-signed petition. There is only one quarter in which this

practice appears to be followed at the present day--the composition, or

the compilation, as it may better be termed, of English law-books.

Having selected a department to be expounded, the first point is to set

down all that Coke said about it two centuries and a half ago, and all

that Blackstone said about it a century ago, with passages in due

subordination from inferior authorities. To these are added the rubrics

of some later cases, and a title-page and index, and so a new

"authority" is added to the array on the shelves of the practitioner.

Whoever is well up to such repetitions has many short cuts through

literature to enable him to find the scattered originalities of which he

may be in search. Whether he be the enthusiastic investigator resolved

on exhausting any great question, or be a mere wayward potterer, picking

up curiosities by the way for his own private intellectual museum, the

larger the collection at his disposal the better--it cannot be too

great.[38] No one, therefore, can be an ardent follower of such a

pursuit without having his own library. And yet it is probably among

those whose stock is the largest that we shall find the most frequent

visitors to the British Museum and the State Paper Office; perhaps, for

what cannot be found even there, to the Imperial Library at Paris, or

the collections of some of the German universities.

[Footnote 38: I am quite aware that the authorities to the contrary are

so high as to make these sentiments partake of heresy, if not a sort of

classical profanity.

"Studiorum quoque, quæ liberalissima impensa est, tamdiu rationem habet,

quamdiu modum. Quo innumerabiles libros et bibliothecas, quarum dominus

vix tota vita indices perlegit? Onerat discentem turba, non instruit:

multoque satius est paucis te auctoribus tradere, quam errare per

multos. Quadraginta millia librorum Alexandræ arserunt: pulcherrimum

regiæ opulentiæ monumentum alius laudaverit, sicut et Livius, qui

elegantiæ regum curæque egregium id opus ait fuisse. Non fuit elegantia

illud aut cura, sed studiosa luxuria. Immo ne studiosa quidem: quoniam

non in studium, sed in spectaculum comparaverant: sicut plerisque,

ignaris etiam servilium literarum libri non studiorum instrumenta, sed

coenationum ornamenta sunt. Paretur itaque librorum quantum satis sit,

nihil in apparatum. Honestius, inquis, hoc te impensæ, quam in Corinthia

pictasque tabulas effuderint. Vitiosum est ubique, quod nimium est. Quid

habes, cur ignoscas homini armaria citro atque ebore captanti, corpora

conquirenti aut ignotorum auctorum aut improbatorum, et inter tot millia

librorum oscitanti, cui voluminum suorum frontes maxime placent

titulique? Apud desidiosissimos ergo videbis quicquid orationum

historiarumque est, tecto tenus exstructa loculamenta; jam enim inter

balnearia et thermas bibliotheca quoque ut necessarium domus ornamentum

expolitur. Ignoscerem plane, si studiorum nimia cupidine oriretur: nunc

ista conquisita, cum imaginibus suis descripta et sacrorum opera

ingeniorum in speciem et cultum parietum comparantur."--_Seneca_, De

Tranquillitate, c. ix.

There are some good hits here, which would tell at the present day.

Seneca is reported to have had a large library; it is certain that he

possessed and fully enjoyed enormous wealth; and it is amusing to find

this commendation of literary moderation following on a well-known

passage in praise of parsimonious living, and of the good example set by

Diogenes. Modern scepticism about the practical stoicism of the ancients

is surely brought to a climax by a living writer, M. Fournier, who

maintains that the so-called tub of Diogenes was in reality a commodious

little dwelling--neat but not gorgeous. It must be supposed, then, that

he spoke of his tub much as an English country gentleman does of his

"box."]

To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength,

there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings,

the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find

ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or

more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by

the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough

for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more

hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to

be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the

immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however

vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it

will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have

faded away; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it

will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get

over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space

allotted to the life of man.

That the night cometh when no man can work, haunts those who have gone

so far in their investigations, and draws their entire energies into

their pursuit with an exclusiveness which astonishes the rest of the

world. But the energies might be more unfitly directed. Look back, for

instance--no great distance back--on the great high-priest of our

national school of logic and metaphysics,--he who gathered up its divers

rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human

knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could

look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm

compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful

within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human

learning, must have sought it elsewhere. You see in him the nature that

must follow up all inquiries, not by languid solicitation but hot

pursuit. His conquests as he goes are rapid but complete. Summing up the

thousands upon thousands of volumes, upon all matters of human study and

in many languages, which he has passed through his hands, you think he

has merely dipped into them or skimmed them, or in some other shape put

them to superficial use. You are wrong: he has found his way at once to

the very heart of the living matter of each one; between it and him

there are henceforth no secrets.[39]

[Footnote 39: How a nature endowed with powerful impulses like these

might be led along with them into a totally different groove, I am

reminded by a traditionary anecdote of student life. A couple of college

chums are under the impression that their motions are watched by an

inquisitive tutor, who for the occasion may be called Dr Fusby. They

become both exceeding wroth, and the more daring of the two engages on

the first opportunity to "settle the fellow." They are occupied in

ardent colloquy, whether on the predicates or other matters it imports

not, when a sudden pause in the conversation enables them to be aware

that there is a human being breathing close on the other side of the

"oak." The light is extinguished, the door opened, and a terrific blow

from a strong and scientifically levelled fist hurls the listener

down-stairs to the next landing-place, from which resting-place he hears

thundered after him for his information, "If you come back again, you

scoundrel, I'll put you into the hands of Dr Fusby." From that source,

however, no one had much to dread for some considerable period, during

which the Doctor was confined to his bedroom by serious indisposition.

It refreshed the recollection of this anecdote, years after I had heard

it, and many years after the date attributed to it, to have seen a

dignified scholar make what appeared to me an infinitesimally narrow

escape from sharing the fate of Dr Fusby, having indeed just escaped it

by satisfactorily proving to a hasty philosopher that he was not the

party guilty of keeping a certain copy of Occam on the sentences of

Peter Lombard out of his reach.]

Descending, however, from so high a sphere, we shall find that the

collector and the scholar are so closely connected with each other that

it is difficult to draw the line of separation between them. As dynamic

philosophers say, they act and react on each other. The possession of

certain books has made men acquainted with certain pieces of knowledge

which they would not otherwise have acquired. It is, in fact, one of the

amiable weaknesses of the set, to take a luxurious glance at a new

acquisition. It is an outcropping of what remains in the man, of the

affection towards a new toy that flourished in the heart of the boy.

Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his

new-bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken

his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under

observation in the course of my own clinical inquiries into the malady;

but I am not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest

many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far

on in the night. In this incidental manner is a general notion sometimes

formed of the true object and tenor of a book, which is retained in the

mind, stored for use, and capable of being refreshed and strengthened

whenever it is wanted. In the skirmish for the Caxtons, which began the

serious work in the great conflict of the Roxburghe sale, it was

satisfactory to find, as I have already stated, on the authority of the

great historian of the war, that Earl Spencer, the victor, "put each

volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of

victory and consciousness of triumph."[40] Ere next morning he would

know a good deal more about the contents of the volumes than he did

before.

[Footnote 40: The author, from a vitiated reminiscence, at first made

the unpardonable blunder of attributing this touching trait of nature to

the noble purchaser of the Valderfaer Boccaccio. For this, as not only a

mistake, but in some measure an imputation on the tailor who could have

made for his lordship pockets of dimensions so abnormal, I received due

castigation from an eminent practical man in the book-hunting field.]

The Gleaner and his Harvest.

There are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disappointing surprises in

encountering the interiors of books. The title-page is not always a

distinct intimation of what is to follow. Whoever dips into the Novellæ

of Leo, or the Extravagantes, as edited by Gothofridus, will not find

either of them to contain matter of a light, airy, and amusing kind.

Dire have been the disappointments incurred by The Diversions of

Purley--one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade

over one of our best story-books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the

late Mrs Johnston. The great scholar, Leo Allatius, who broke his heart

when he lost the special pen with which he wrote during forty years,

published a work called Apes Urbanæ--Urban Bees. It is a biographical

work, devoted to the great men who flourished during the Pontificate of

Urban VIII., whose family carried bees on their coat-armorial. The

History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, has sorely perplexed

certain strong-minded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The

book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's

Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search

of the absolutely correct and improving; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish

Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders.

There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called

MacEwen on the Types--a theological book, in fact, treating of the types

of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me

that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an

acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The

latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might

have it and be d----d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a

word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means

rams: but the other competitor also declined the lot; he was a

compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly

devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr

Ruskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing

the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive

influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the

matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of

sheepfolds." I have been informed that this work had a considerable run

among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. I

think I could also point to a public library in England, the keeper of

which justified his high character for classification and arrangement by

binding up this production between "suggestions as to eating off turnips

with stock" and "an inquiry concerning the best materials for smeering."

Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a

department in Bibliography, "Titres de livres qui ont induit en erreur

des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits." After mentioning a

treatise De Missis Dominicis, which was not a religious book, as it

might seem, but an inquiry into the functions of certain officers sent

into the provinces by the emperors and the early kings of France, he

comes nearer to our own door in telling how "un ignorant avait placé le

_Traité des Fluxions de Maclaurin_ avec les livres de pathologie,

prenant pour une maladie les fluxions mathématiques."[41]

[Footnote 41: Dict. de Bibliologie, i. 391.]

Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a

title-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and constitute an

infallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of

all literature it may be said that man has been continually struggling

after this achievement, and struggling in vain; and it is a humiliating

fact, that the greatest adepts, abandoning the effort in despair, have

taken refuge in some fortuitous word, which has served their purpose

better than the best results of their logical analysis. The book which

has been the supreme ruler of the intellect in this kind of work, stands

forth as an illustrious example of failure. To those writings of

Aristotle which dealt with mind, his editing pupils could give no

name,--therefore they called them the things after the physics--the

_metaphysics_; and that fortuitous title the great arena of thought to

which they refer still bears, despite of efforts to supply an apter

designation in such words as Psychology, Pneumatology, and

Transcendentalism.

Writhing under this nightmare kind of difficulty, men in later times

tried to achieve completeness by lengthening the title-page; but they

found that the longer they made it, the more it wriggled itself into

devious tracks, and the farther did it depart from a comprehensive name.

Some title-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.[42]

One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy titles--they

afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their

malignity towards each other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the

face of the adversary. It will thus often happen that the

controversialist states his case first in the title-page; he then gives

it at greater length in the introduction; again, perhaps, in a preface;

a third time in an analytical form, through means of a table of

contents; after all this skirmishing, he brings up his heavy columns in

the body of the book; and if he be very skilful, he may let fly a few

Parthian arrows from the index.

[Footnote 42: A good modern specimen of a lengthy title-page may be

found in one of the books appropriate to the matter in hand, by the

diligent French bibliographer Peignot:--

"DICTIONNAIRE RAISONNÉ DE BIBLIOLOGIE: contenant--1mo, L'explication des

principaux termes relatifs à la bibliographie, à l'art typographique, à

la diplomatique, aux langues, aux archives, aux manuscrits, aux

médailles, aux antiquités, &c.; 2do, Des notices historiques détaillées

sur les principales bibliothèques anciennes et modernes; sur les

différentes sectes philosophiques; sur les plus célèbres imprimeurs,

avec une indication des meilleures éditions sorties de leurs presses, et

sur les bibliographes, avec la liste de leurs ouvrages; 3tio, enfin,

L'exposition des différentes systèmes bibliographiques, &c.,--ouvrage

utile aux bibliothécaires, archivistes, imprimeurs, libraires, &c. Par

G. Peignot, Bibliothécaire de la Haute-Saône, membre-correspondant de la

Société libre d'emulation du Haut-Rhin. _Indocti discant, et ament

meminisse periti._ Paris, An x. 1802."

Here follows a rival specimen selected from the same department of

literature:--

"BIBLIOGRAPHIE INSTRUCTIVE; OU, TRAITÉ DE LA CONNAISSANCE DES LIVRES

RARES ET SINGULIERS; contenant un catalogue raisonné de la plus grande

partie de ces livres précieux, qui ont paru successivement dans la

république des lettres, depuis l'invention de l'imprimerie jusqu'à nos

jours; avec des notes sur la différence et la rareté de leurs éditions,

et des remarques sur l'origine de cette rareté actuelle, et son dégré

plus ou moins considerable; la manière de distinguer les éditions

originales, d'avec les contrefaites; avec une description typographique

particulière, du composé de ces rares volumes, au moyen de laquelle il

sera aisé de reconnoître facilement les exemplaires, ou mutilés en

partie, ou absolument imparfaits, qui s'en rencontrent journellement

dans le commerce, et de les distinguer sûrement de ceux qui seront

exactement complets dans toutes leurs parties. Disposé par ordre de

matières et de facultés, suivant le système bibliographique généralement

adopté; avec une table générale des auteurs, et un système complet de

bibliographie choisie. Par Guillaume-François de Bûre le jeune, Libraire

de Paris."]

It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and had

his ears cut off, and become one of the chief causes of our great civil

wars, all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book

containing more than a thousand. It was as far down in his very index as

W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio-Mastix was found, under the

head "Women actors." The words which follow are rather unquotable in

this nineteenth century; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen

Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her--something

like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use

the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of

the Emperor." The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a

thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by

the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little

inclination to peruse it as he had. The calamitous discovery of the

sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental

student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the

Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible.

Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing

the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger,

until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop

to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading

immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked

the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immorality of stage-plays to

exclaim that church-music is not the noise of men, but rather "a

bleating of brute beasts--choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen,

bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of

bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney

took surely a more nice distinction when he made a charge against the

author in these terms: "All stage-players he terms them rogues: in this

he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament; for _unless they go abroad_,

they are not rogues."

In the very difficulties in the way of framing a conclusive and

exhaustive title, there is a principle of compensation. It clears

literature of walls and hedgerows, and makes it a sort of free forest.

To the desultory reader, not following up any special inquiry, there are

delights in store in a devious rummage through miscellaneous volumes, as

there are to the lovers of adventure and the picturesque in any district

of country not desecrated by the tourist's guide-books. Many readers

will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edition

of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive

book-hunter, Dr Richard Farmer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty

of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by

quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the

technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of

Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind

of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No

doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which

they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native

wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they

are examples of what may be found in the place they have come from.

But there are passages worth finding in books less promising. Those who

potter in libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big

volumes, sometimes find curious things--for all gems are not collected

in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of Hatsell's Precedents

in Parliament for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to

alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to

throw light on the mysterious process called "naming a member." "A story

used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict

observance of forms were fond of repeating, that as he often, upon a

member's not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder,

threatened to name him--'Sir, sir, I must name you'--on being asked what

would be the consequence of putting that threat in execution and naming

a member, he answered, 'The Lord in heaven knows.'"

In the perusal of a very solid book on the progress of the

ecclesiastical differences of Ireland, written by a native of that

country, after a good deal of tedious and vexatious matter, the reader's

complacency is restored by an artless statement how an eminent person

"abandoned the errors of the Church of Rome, and adopted those of the

Church of England."

So also a note I have preserved of a brief passage descriptive of the

happy conclusion of a duel runs thus:--

"The one party received a slight wound in the breast; the other fired in

the air--and so the matter terminated."[43]

[Footnote 43: This passage has been quoted and read by many people quite

unconscious of the arrant bull it contains. Indeed, an eminent London

newspaper, to which the word Bull cannot be unfamiliar, tells me, in

reviewing my first edition, that it is no bull at all, but a plain

statement of fact, and boldly quotes it in confirmation of this opinion.

There could be no better testimony to its being endowed with the subtle

spirit of the genuine article. Irish bulls, as it has been said of

constitutions, "are not made--they grow," and that only in their own

native soil. Those manufactured for the stage and the anecdote-books

betray their artificial origin in their breadth and obviousness. The

real bull carries one with it at first by an imperceptible confusion and

misplacement of ideas in the mind where it has arisen, and it is not

until you reason back that you see it. Horace Walpole used to say that

the best of all bulls, from its thorough and grotesque confusion of

identity, was that of the man who complained of having been "changed at

nurse;" and perhaps he is right. An Irishman, and he only, can handle

this confusion of ideas so as to make it a more powerful instrument of

repartee than the logic of another man: take, for instance, the beggar

who, when imploring a dignified clergyman for charity, was charged not

to take the sacred name in vain, and answered, "Is it in vain, then? and

whose fault is that?" I have doubts whether the saying attributed to Sir

Boyle Roche about being in two places at once "like a bird," is the

genuine article. I happened to discover that it is of earlier date than

Sir Boyle's day, having found, when rummaging in an old house among some

Jacobite manuscripts, one from Robertson of Strowan, the warrior poet,

in which he says about two contradictory military instructions, "It

seems a difficult point for me to put both orders in execution, unless,

as the man said, I can be in two places at once, like a bird." A few

copies of these letters were printed for the use of the Abbotsford Club.

This letter of Strowan's occurs in p. 92.]

Professional law-books and reports are not generally esteemed as light

reading, yet something may be made even of them at a pinch. Menage wrote

a book upon the amenities of the civil law, which does anything but

fulfil its promise. There are many much better to be got in the most

unlikely corners; as, where a great authority on copyright begins a

narrative of a case in point by saying, "One Moore had written a book

which he called Irish Melodies;" and again, in an action of trespass on

the case, "The plaintiff stated in his declaration that he was the true

and only proprietor of the copyright of a book of poems entitled The

Seasons, by James Thomson." I cannot lay hands at this moment on the

index which refers to Mr Justice Best--he was the man, as far as memory

serves, but never mind. A searcher after something or other, running his

eye down the index through letter B, arrived at the reference "Best--Mr

Justice--his great mind." Desiring to be better acquainted with the

particulars of this assertion, he turned up the page referred to, and

there found, to his entire satisfaction, "Mr Justice Best said he had a

great mind to commit the witness for prevarication."

The following case is curiously suggestive of the state of the country

round London in the days when much business was done on the road:--A

bill in the Exchequer was brought by Everett against a certain Williams,

setting forth that the complainant was skilled in dealing in certain

commodities, "such as plate, rings, watches, &c.," and that the

defendant desired to enter into partnership with him. They entered into

partnership accordingly, and it was agreed that they should provide the

necessary plant for the business of the firm--such as horses, saddles,

bridles, &c. (pistols not mentioned)--and should participate in the

expenses of the road. The declaration then proceeds, "And your orator

and the said Joseph Williams proceeded jointly with good success in the

said business on Hounslow Heath, where they dealt with a gentleman for a

gold watch; and afterwards the said Joseph Williams told your orator

that Finchley, in the county of Middlesex, was a good and convenient

place to deal in, and that commodities were very plenty at Finchley

aforesaid, and it would be almost all clear gain to them; that they went

accordingly, and dealt with several gentlemen for divers watches, rings,

swords, canes, hats, cloaks, horses, bridles, saddles, and other

things; that about a month afterwards the said Joseph Williams informed

your orator that there was a gentleman at Blackheath who had a good

horse, saddle, bridle, watch, sword, cane, and other things to dispose

of, which, he believed, might be had for little or no money; that they

accordingly went, and met with the said gentleman, and, after some small

discourse, they dealt for the said horse, &c. That your orator and the

said Joseph Williams continued their joint dealings together in several

places--viz., at Bagshot, in Surrey; Salisbury, in Wiltshire; Hampstead,

in Middlesex; and elsewhere, to the amount of £2000 and upwards."[44]

[Footnote 44: This case has been often referred to in law-books, but I

have never met with so full a statement of the contents of the

declaration as in the Retrospective Review (vol. v. p. 81).]

Here follows a brief extract from a law-paper, for the full

understanding of which it has to be kept in view that the pleader, being

an officer of the law who has been prevented from executing his warrant

by threats, requires, as a matter of form, to swear that he was really

afraid that the threats would be carried into execution.

"Farther depones, that the said A.B. said that if deponent did not

immediately take himself off he would pitch him (the deponent) down

stairs--which the deponent verily believes he would have done.

"Farther depones, that, time and place aforesaid, the said A.B. said to

deponent, 'If you come another step nearer I'll kick you to hell'--which

the deponent verily believes he would have done."[45]

[Footnote 45: It is curious to observe how bitter a prejudice Themis has

against her own humbler ministers. Most of the bitterest legal jokes are

at the expense of the class who have to carry the law into effect. Take,

for instance, the case of the bailiff who had been compelled to swallow

a writ, and, rushing into Lord Norbury's court to proclaim the indignity

done to justice in his person, was met by the expression of a hope that

the writ was "_not returnable_ in this court."]

I know not whether "lay gents," as the English bar used to term that

portion of mankind who had not been called to itself, can feel any

pleasure in wandering over the case-books, and picking up the funny

technicalities scattered over them; but I can attest from experience

that, to a person trained in one set of technicalities, the pottering

about among those of a different parish is exceedingly exhilarating.

When one has been at work among interlocutors, suspensions, tacks,

wadsets, multiplepoindings, adjudications in implement, assignations,

infeftments, homologations, charges of horning, quadriennium utiles,

vicious intromissions, decrees of putting to silence, conjoint actions

of declarator and reduction-improbation,--the brain, being saturated

with these and their kindred, becomes refreshed by crossing the border

of legal nomenclature, and getting among common recoveries, demurrers,

Quare impedits, tails-male, tails-female, docked tails, latitats,

avowrys, nihil dicits, cestui que trusts, estopels, essoigns, darrein

presentments, emparlances, mandamuses, qui tams, capias ad faciendums or

ad withernam, and so forth. After vexatious interlocutors in which the

Lord Ordinary has refused interim interdict, but passed the bill to try

the question, reserving expenses; or has repelled the dilatory defences,

and ordered the case to the roll for debate on the peremptory defences;

or has taken to avizandum; or has ordered re-revised condescendence and

answers on the conjoint probation; or has sisted diligence till caution

be found judicio sisti; or has done nearly all these things together in

one breath,--it is like the consolation derived from meeting a companion

in adversity, to find that at Westminster Hall, "In fermedon the tenant

having demanded a view after a general imparlance, the demandant issued

a writ of petit cape--held irregular."

Also, "If, after nulla bona returned, a testatum be entered upon the

roll, quod devastavit, a writ of inquiry shall be directed to the

sheriff, and if by inquisition the devastavit be found and returned,

there shall be a scire facias quare executio non de propriis bonis, and

if upon that the sheriff returns scire feci, the executor or

administrator may appear and traverse the inquisition."

Again, "If the record of Nisi prius be a die Sancti Trinitatis in tres

Septimanas nisi a 27 June, prius venerit, which is the day after the day

in Bank, which was mistaken for a die Sancti Michaelis, it shall not be

amended."

It is interesting to observe that at one end of the island a panel means

twelve perplexed agriculturists, who, after having taken an oath to act

according to their consciences, are starved till they are of one mind on

some complicated question; while, at the other end, the same term

applies to the criminal on whose conduct they are going to give their

verdict. It would be difficult to decide which is the more happy

application; but it must be admitted that we are a great way behind the

South in our power of selecting a nomenclature immeasurably distant in

meaning from the thing signified. We speak of a bond instead of a

mortgage, and we adjudge where we ought to foreclose. We have no such

thing as chattels, either personal or real.[46] If you want to know the

English law of book-debts, you will have to look for it under the head

of Assumpsit in a treatise on Nisi Prius, while a lawyer of Scotland

would unblushingly use the word itself, and put it in his index. So,

too, our bailments are merely spoken of as bills, notes, or whatever a

merchant might call them. Our garneshee is merely a common debtor. Baron

and feme we call husband and wife, and coverture we term marriage.

[Footnote 46: A late venerable practitioner in a humble department of

the law, who wanted to write a book, and was recommended to try his hand

at a translation of Latin law-maxims as a thing much wanted, was

considerably puzzled by the maxim, "Catella realis non potest legari;"

nor was he quite relieved when he turned up his Ainsworth and found that

catella means a "little puppy." There was nothing for it, however, but

obedience, so that he had to give currency to the remarkable principle

of law, that "a genuine little whelp cannot be left in legacy." He also

translated "messis sequitur sementem," with a fine simplicity, into "the

harvest follows the seed-time;" and "actor sequitur forum rei," he made

"the agent must be in court when the case is going on." Copies of the

book containing these gems are exceedingly rare, some malicious person

having put the author up to their absurdity.]

Still, for the honour of our country, it is possible to find a few

technicalities which would do no discredit to our neighbours. Where one

of them would bring a habeas corpus--a name felicitously expressive,

according to the English method, of civil liberty--an inhabitant of the

North, in the same unfortunate position, would take to running his

letters. We have no turbary, or any other easement; but, to compensate

us, we have thirlage, outsucken multures, insucken multures, and dry

multures; as also we have a soumin and roumin, as any one who has been

so fortunate as to hear Mr Outram's pathetic lyric on that interesting

right of pasturage will remember, in conjunction with pleasing

associations. To do the duty of a duces tecum we have a diligence

against havers. We have no capias ad faciendum (abbreviated cap ad fac),

nor have we the fieri facias, familiarly termed fi fa, but we have

perhaps as good in the in meditatione fugæ warrant, familiarly

abbreviated into fugie, as poor Peter Peebles termed it, when he burst

in upon the party assembled at Justice Foxley's, exclaiming, "Is't here

they sell the fugie warrants?"[47]

[Footnote 47: There are two old methods of paying rent in Scotland--Kane

and Carriages; the one being rent in kind from the farmyard, the other

being an obligation to furnish the landlord with a certain amount of

carriage, or rather cartage. In one of the vexed cases of domicile,

which had found its way into the House of Lords, a Scotch lawyer argued

that a landed gentleman had shown his determination to abandon his

residence in Scotland by having given up his "kane and carriages." It is

said that the argument went further than he expected--the English

lawyers admitting that it was indeed very strong evidence of an intended

change of domicile when the laird not only ceased to keep a carriage,

but actually divested himself of his walking-cane.]

I am not sure but, in the very mighty heart of all legal formality and

technicality--the Statutes at large--some amusing as well as instructive

things might be found. Let me offer a guiding hint to the investigator

ambitious of entering on this arduous field. The princely collector

will, of course, put himself in possession of the magnificent edition of

the Statutes issued by the Record Commission, but let not the

unprofessional person who must look short of this imagine that he will

find satisfaction in the prim pages of a professional lawyer's modern

edition. These, indeed, are not truly the Statutes at large, but rather

their pedantic and conventional descendants, who have taken out letters

of administration to their wild ancestors. They omit all the repealed

Statutes in which these ancestors might be found really at large sowing

their wild oats, and consequently all that would give them interest and

zest for those in search of such qualities.

It is not, for instance, in the decorous quartos of Roughhead, but in

the hoary blackletter folios, looking older than they are--for

blackletter adhered to the Statutes after it had been cast off by other

literature--that one will find such specimens of ancestral legislation

as the following:--

ATTORNEYS.--(33 Henry VI. c. 7.)