PAMPHLETS.

Pamphlets, those leaves of the hour, and volumes of a season and even of

a week, slight and evanescent things as they appear, and scorned at by

opposite parties, while each cherishes their own, are in truth the

records of the public mind, the secret history of a people which does

not always appear in the more open narrative; the true bent and temper

of the times, the contending interests, the appeal of a party, or the

voice of the nation, are nowhere so vividly brought before us as by

these advocates of their own cause, too deeply interested to disguise

their designs, and too contracted in their space to omit their essential

points.

Of all the nations of Europe our country first offered a rapid

succession of these busy records of men's thoughts, their contending

interests, their mightier passions, their aspirations, and sometimes

even their follies. Wherever pamphlets abound there is freedom, and

therefore have we been a nation of pamphleteers. Even at the time when

the press was not yet free, an invincible pamphlet struck a terror; the

establishment of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth disturbed the

little synagogue of puritans, and provoked the fury of the Mar-Prelate

pamphlets; the pacific reign of James covered the land with a new

harvest of agricultural pamphlets; but when we entered on an age when

men thought what they listed, and wrote what they thought, pamphlets ran

through the land, and then the philosophical speculator on human affairs

read what had never before been written; the troubles of Charles the

First and the nation sounded the trumpet of civil war by the blast of

pamphlets; state-plots and state-cabals were hatched at least by the

press, under the second Charles, and popery and arbitrary government

terrified the nation by their pamphlets; the principles of English

government and toleration expanded in the pamphlets of the reign of

William the Third, even Locke's Treatises on Toleration and on

Government were at first but pamphlets; and under Anne the nation

observed the light skirmishes of Whig and Tory pamphlets.

Our neighbours in their great revolutionary agitation, if they could not

comprehend our constitution, imitated our arts of insurgency, and from

the same impulses at length rivalled us; but the very term of pamphlet

is English; and the practice seemed to them so novel, that a recent

French biographer designates an early period of the French revolution as

one when "the art of PAMPHLETS had not yet reached perfection."

The history of pamphlets would form an extraordinary history; but

whoever gathers a history from pamphlets must prepare for contradiction.

Rushworth had formed a great collection to supply the materials of his

volumes, but speaks slightly of them, while insinuating his own sagacity

in separating truth from falsehood; but he concluded "very

suspiciously," observed Oldys, that none need trouble themselves with

any further examination than what he had been pleased to make. This

suspicion was more manifest when Nalson began another collection from

pamphlets to shake the evidence of the pamphlets of Rushworth. Each had

found what he craved for; for whoever will look only into those on his

favourite side, finds enough written with his own passions, but he will

obtain little extension of knowledge, for this is much like looking at

his own face in the glass.

But we must not consider pamphlets wholly in a political view; their

circuit is boundless, holding all the world of man; they enter into

every object of human interest. The silent revolutions in manners,

language, habits, are there to be traced; the interest which was taken

on novel objects of discovery would be wholly lost were it not for these

records; and, indeed, it is the multiplicity of pamphlets on a

particular topic or object which appear at a particular period, that

offer the truest picture of public opinion.

Those who would not dare to compose a volume have fluttered in the

leaves of a pamphlet. Three or four ideas are a good stock to set up a

pamphlet, and look well in it, as picked wares in a shop-window. The

mute who cannot speak at a dinner or on the hustings, is eloquent in a

pamphlet; and he who speaks only to excite the murmurs of his auditors,

amply vindicates himself by a pamphlet. I doubt whether there is a

single important subject to which some English pamphlet may not form a

necessary supplement. Many eminent in rank, or who, from their position,

have never written anything else, have written a pamphlet; and as the

motive must he urgent which induces any such to have recourse to their

pen, so the matter is of deeper interest; and it has often happened that

the public have thence derived information which else had not reached

them. The heads of parties have sometimes issued these manifestoes; and

the tails, in the form of a pamphlet, have sometimes let out secrets for

which they have been reprimanded.

Some of the most original conceptions, whose very errors or

peculiarities even may instruct, lie hidden in pamphlets. These

effusions of a more permanent nature than those of politics, are usually

literary, scientific, or artistical, the spontaneous productions of

amateurs, the precious suggestions, and sometimes the original

discoveries of taste or enthusiasm. These are the _deliciae_ of the

amenities of literature; and such pamphlets have often escaped our

notice, since their writers were not authors, and had no works of their

own among which to shelter them.

The age of Charles the First may be characterised as the age of

pamphlets. Of that remarkable period, we possess an extraordinary

collection, which amounts to about thirty thousand pieces, uniformly

bound in two thousand volumes of various sizes, accompanied by twelve

folio volumes of the catalogue chronologically arranged, exhibiting

their full titles. Even the date of the day is noted when each pamphlet

was published. It includes a hundred in manuscript written on the king's

side, which at the time were not allowed to be printed. The formation of

this collection is a romantic incident in the annals of Bibliography.

In that critical year, 1640, a bookseller of the name of Thomason

conceived the idea of preserving, in that new age of contested

principles, an unbroken chain of men's arguments, and men's doings. We

may suppose that this collector, commencing with the year 1640, and

continuing without omission or interruption to the year 1660, could not

at first have imagined the vast career he had to run; there was,

perhaps, sagacity in the first thought, but there was far more

intrepidity in never relinquishing this favourite object during these

perilous twenty years, amid a conflict of costly expenditure, of

personal danger, and almost insurmountable difficulties.

The design was carried on in secrecy through confidential servants, who

at first buried the volumes as they collected them; but they soon became

too numerous for such a mode of concealment. The owner, dreading that

the ruling government would seize on the collection, watched the

movements of the army of the Commonwealth, and carried this itinerant

library in every opposite direction. Many were its removals, northward

or westward, but the danger became so great, and the collection so

bulky, that he had at one time an intention to pass them over into

Holland, but feared to trust his treasure to the waves. He at length

determined to place them in his warehouses, in the form of tables round

the room, covered with canvas. It is evident that the loyalty of the man

had rendered him a suspected person; for he was once dragged from his

bed, and imprisoned for seven weeks, during which time, however, the

collection suffered no interruption, nor was the secret betrayed.

The secret was, however, evidently not unknown to some faithful servants

of the king; for when, in 1647, his Majesty at Hampton Court desired to

see a particular pamphlet, it was obtained for him from this collection,

though the collector was somewhat chary of the loan, fearing the loss of

what he felt as a limb of his body, not probably recoverable. The king

had the volume with him in his flight towards the Isle of Wight; but it

was returned to the owner, with his Majesty's earnest exhortation, that

he should diligently continue the collection. A slight accident which

happened to the volume occasioned the collector to leave this

interesting incident on record.[1]

When Cromwell ruled, a place of greater security was sought for than the

owner's warehouses: a fictitious sale was made to the University of

Oxford, who would be more able to struggle for their preservation than a

private individual, if the Protector discovered and claimed these

distracted documents of the history of his own times.

Mr. Thomason lived to complete his design; he witnessed the restoration,

and died in 1666, leaving his important collection, which was still

lodged at Oxford, and which he describes in his will "as not to be

paralleled," in trust to be sold for the benefit of his children. His

will affords an evidence that he was a person of warm patriotic

feelings, with a singular turn of mind, for he left a stipend of forty

shillings for two sermons to be annually preached, one of which was to

commemorate the destruction of the Armada.

The collection continued at Oxford many years awaiting a purchaser;[2]

and at length appears to have been bought by Mearne, "the king's

stationer," at the command of the Secretary of State for Charles the

Second; but Charles, who would little value old pamphlets, and more

particularly these, which only reminded him of such mortifying

occurrences, by an order in council in 1684 munificently allowed the

widow of Mearne to dispose of them as well as she could. In 1709 we find

them offered to Lord Weymouth,[3] and in 1732 they were still undisposed

of; but in those times of loyal rebellion, either for the assumption or

the restoration of the throne, that of the Commonwealth excited so

little interest, and this extraordinary collection was so depreciated,

that Oldys then considered it would not reach the twentieth part of the

four thousand pounds which it was said that the collector had once

refused for it.[4] In 1745 a representative of the Mearne family still

held the volumes,[5] and eventually they were purchased at the small

price of three or four hundred pounds by George the Third, and by him

were presented to the national library, where they now bear the name of

the King's Pamphlets.

Thus having escaped from seizure and dispersion, this noble collection

remained in the hands of those who priced it as a valueless incumbrance,

and yet seem to have respected the object of the enterprise, for they

preserved it entire. It may be some consolation to such intrepid

collectors that their intelligence and their fervour are not in vain,

and however they may fail in the attainment of their motive, a great end

may fortunately be achieved.