The red flag--not the red flag of the loathed and deadly pestilence that
has destroyed so many lives and disfigured so many fair and so many
manly countenances, but (in some circumstances) the scarcely less
ominous flag of the auctioneer--has been displayed from the handsome and
substantial red-brick house in Kensington-Place Gardens, London, in
which Thackeray lately lived, and in which he wrote the opening chapters
of his last and never-to-be-completed work, which we are all reading
with mingled pleasure and regret.
I rejoice to see the flags and pennants gracefully waving from the masts
of the outward or the inward bound ship; to see our beautiful national
ensign,--the ensign that is destined sooner or later, so all loyal and
patriotic men and women hope and believe, triumphantly to float over the
largest, the freest, the happiest, the most prosperous country in the
whole wide world,--to see the stars and stripes fluttering in the breeze
from the city flag-staff and the village liberty-pole; to see the
dancing banners and the fluttering pennons of a regiment of brave and
stalwart men marching in all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of war to
the defence of their country in this her hour of danger and of need. As
a child, I loved to see the colors of the holiday-soldiers flapping in
the wind and flaunting in the sun on "muster-day." Nay, was not an uncle
of mine (he is an old man now, and is fond of bragging of the brave days
of old, when he was a gay and gallant sunshine-soldier) the
standard-bearer of a once famous company of fair-weather soldiers?--dead
now, most of them, and their
"bones are dust,
And their good swords rust";
--and did not this daring and heroic uncle of mine, while bravely
upbearing his gorgeous silken banner (a gift of the beautiful and
all-accomplished ladies of Seaport) in a well-contested sham fight,
receive, from the accidental discharge of a field-piece, an honorable
and soldier-like wound, and of which he ever after boasted louder, and
took more pride in, than the bravest veteran in Grant's gallant army of
the scars and injuries received at the siege of Vicksburg? And no wonder
at that, perhaps. For you will find hundreds who have been cut by the
sword or pierced by the bullet of a Rebel, to one who has been ever so
slightly wounded upon a holiday training-field.
But I never could, and I never shall, abide the sight of the red and
ruthless flag of the vendue-master. 'Tis a signal that death is still
busy, and that to many the love of money is greater than the love of
friends and of those nearer and dearer than friends,--that fortune is
fickle and that prosperity has fled,--that humbugs and sharpers are
alive and active. 'Tis a reminder--and therefore may have its use in the
world--of our mortality, an admonisher of our pride, a represser of our
love of greed and gain. 'Tis evidently an invention of Satan's, this
selling by vendue; and perhaps the first auction was that by which Cain
sold the house and furniture of his brother Abel, then lately deceased.
If there were no such thing in the world as death and misfortune and
humbug, that bit of blood-colored bunting would be but seldom flaunting
in the wind.
Charles Lamb counsels those who would enjoy true peace and quiet to
retire into a Quaker meeting; and if our sentimental readers (and for
such only is this paper written) would find wherewithal to feed and
pamper their melancholy, let them follow the mercenary flags, and become
haunters of auctions,--let them attend the sales of the effects of their
deceased friends and acquaintances,--let them see A's favorite horse, or
B's favorite country-seat, or C's favorite books and pictures knocked
down, amid the laughter of the crowd and the smart sayings and witty
retorts of the auctioneer, to the highest bidder,--and they will be
sadder, if not wiser, men than they were before. Such scenes should have
more effect on them than all the fine sermons on the vanities and
nothings of life ever preached. Sir Richard Steele, in his beautiful
paper, in the "Tatler," on "The Death of Friends," says, in speaking of
his mother's sorrow for his father's death, there was a dignity in her
grief amidst all the wildness of her transport that made pity the
weakness of his heart ever since; and perhaps it is owing to the
impressions I received at the first auction I ever attended that I am
now an inveterate sentimentalist.
How well I remember that auction! Looking back "through the dim posterns
of the mind" into the far-off days of my childhood, I see, among other
things, the large and comfortable mansion--it was the home of plenty and
the temple of hospitality--in which I passed some of the goldenest hours
of my boyhood. But the finest play has an end, and the sweetest feasts
and the merriest pastimes do not last forever. Very suddenly, indeed,
did my visits to that happy home cease. For my good friends of the
"great house"--the dearest old lady and the kindest and merriest old
gentleman that ever patted a little boy on the head--were both seized
(oh, woe the day!) by a terrible disease, and died in spite of all that
the great doctor from Boston did to cure them. The last time I entered
the dear old house was on a beautiful balmy summer morning; the birds
were singing as I have never heard them sing since, and all Nature
seemed as glad and exultant as if death, misfortune, and auctioneers
were banished from the world. I found there, in place of the late kind
host and hostess, a crowd--so they seemed to me--of rude and
coarse-minded people; and I saw the hateful red flag of the auctioneer
hanging over the door.
An eagle in a dove-cot, a fox in a barn-yard, a wolf among sheep, is
mild, merciful, and humane, when compared with the flock of human
vultures that had invaded this once happy residence, and were greedily
stripping it of all that the taste and the wealth of its late occupants
had furnished it with. Should I live to be a thousand years old, I do
not think I should forget the unladylike proceedings of sundry old women
at that auction. With what a free and contemptuous manner they examined
the fine old furniture, and handled the fine old china, and coolly
rummaged and ransacked every nook and corner, and peeped and pried into
every box, chest, and closet that was not locked! And their tongues, you
may be sure, were not idle the while!
The auctioneer was a little dried-up mummy of a man, the ugliness of
whose countenance was, as it were, emphasized by a disagreeable leer
which would ever and anon deepen into a broad grin; this man, with his
dreary jokes and vapid small-talk, was equally repulsive to me.
Oh, the tap of his little hammer did knock against my very heart!
Of all the hammers in this busy and hammering world, from the huge
forge-hammer with which the brawny blacksmith deals telling blows upon
the glowing iron and beats it into shape, to the tiny hammer that the
watchmaker so deftly handles, the ivory-headed, ebony-handled instrument
of the auctioneer is the most potent. From the day it was first upraised
by the original auctioneer--the nameless and unknown founder of a mighty
line of auctioneers--over the chattels of some unfortunate mortal, to
the present time, when the red flag is constantly waving in all the
great cities and towns of the world, what an immense amount of property
of all kinds and descriptions has come under that little instrument! At
its fall the ancestral acres of how many spendthrift heirs have passed
away from their families forever into the hands of wealthy plebeian
parvenus! By a few strokes Dives's splendid mansion, and Croesus's
magnificent country-seat, and Phaëton's famous fast horses become the
property of others. At its tap human beings have been sold into worse
than Egyptian bondage.
Horace Walpole confidently hoped that his famous collection of _virtù_
would be the envy and admiration of the relic-mongers and the
curiosity-seekers of two or three hundred years hence; but he had not
been dead fifty years before the red flag was waving over Strawberry
Hill, and it was not taken down till the villa had been despoiled of all
the curious and costly toys and bawbles with which it was packed and
crammed. At each stroke of the hammer,--and for four-and-twenty days the
quaint Gothic mansion resounded with the "Going, going, gone" of the
auctioneer,--at every stroke of the hammer Walpole must have turned
uneasily in his grave; for at every stroke of that fatal implement some
beautiful miniature, or rare engraving, or fine painting, or precious
old coin, or beloved old vase, or bit of curious old armor, or equally
curious relic of the olden time, passed into the possession of some
unknown person or other.
And the Duke of Roxburghe's magnificent collection of rare, curious, and
valuable books, in the gathering of which he spent a goodly portion of
his life, and evinced the policy and finesse of the most wily statesman
and the shrewdness and cunning of a Jew money-lender, was soon after his
decease scattered, by the hammer of Evans, over England and the
Continent. A circumstantial history of this memorable sale was written
by Dibdin the bibliomaniac.
I do not, however, grieve much--indeed, to state the precise truth, I do
not grieve at all--at the dismantling of Strawberry Hill, or at the sale
of the Roxburghe library; but at the vendition of Samuel Johnson's dusty
and dearly loved books (they were sold by Mr. Christie, "at his Great
Room in Pall-Mall," on Wednesday, February 16, 1785) I own to being a
trifle sad and sentimental. For Walpole, with all his cleverness, is a
man one cannot love; and as for the bibliographical Duke, he evidently
thought more of a rare edition or a unique copy than of all the charms
of wit, poetry, or eloquence. I suspect that a splendid binding would
please him more than a splendid passage. Whereas Johnson (he was never
without a book in his pocket to read at by-times when he had nothing
else to do) had a scholar's love for books, and liked them for what they
contained, and not merely because they were rare and costly.
Neither can I think unmoved of the dispersion "under the hammer" of the
fine library at Greta Hall, which Southey had taken so much pains and
pleasure in collecting, and which was, as his son has observed, the
pride of his eyes and the joy of his heart,--a library which contained
many a "monarch folio," and many a fine old quarto, and thousands of
small, but precious volumes of ancient lore, and which was particularly
rich in rare old Spanish and Portuguese books. Many of the old volumes
in this library had seen such hard service, and had been so roughly
handled by former owners, that they were in a very ragged condition when
they came into Southey's possession; and as he could not afford to have
them equipped in serviceable leather, his daughters and female friends
comfortably and neatly clothed them in colored cotton prints. The twelve
or fourteen hundred volumes thus bound filled an entire room, which the
poet designated as the "Cottonian Library." I saw, a year or two ago,
among the costly and valuable works upon the shelves of a Boston
bookstore, two or three volumes of this "Cottonian Library." They are
not there now. Perhaps the lucky purchaser of them may be a reader of
this article. If so, let me congratulate him upon possessing such rare
and interesting memorials of the famous and immortal biographer of
Doctor Daniel Dove of Doncaster.
And sure I am that no gentle reader can contemplate the fate of Charles
Lamb's library without becoming a prey to
"Mild-eyed melancholy."
Elia's books,--his "midnight darlings," his "folios," his "huge
Switzer-like tomes of choice and massy divinity," his "kind-hearted
play-books," his book of "Songs and Posies," his rare old treatises, and
quaint and curious tractates,--the rich gleanings from the old London
book-stalls by one who knew a good book, as Falstaff knew the Prince, by
instinct,--books that had been the solace and delight of his life, the
inspirers and prompters of his best and noblest thoughts, the food of
his mind, and the nourishers of his fancies, ideas, and feelings,--these
books, with the exception of those retained by some of Elia's personal
friends, were, after Mary Lamb's death, purchased by an enterprising
New-York bookseller, and shipped to America, where Lamb has ever had
more readers and truer appreciators than in England. The arrival in New
York of his "shivering folios" created quite a sensation among the
Cisatlantic admirers of "the gentle Elia." The lovers of rare old books
and the lovers of Charles Lamb jostled each other in the way to Bartlett
and Welford's shop, where the treasures (having escaped the perils of
the sea) were safely housed, and where a crowd of _literati_ was
constantly engaged in examining them.
The sale was attended by a goodly company of book-collectors and
book-readers. All the works brought fair prices, and were purchased by
(or for) persons in various parts of the country. Among the bidders were
(I am told) Geoffrey Crayon,--Mr. Sparrowgrass,--Clark, of the
"Knickerbocker" magazine,--that lover of the angle and true disciple of
Izaak Walton, the late Rev. Dr. Bethune,--Burton, the comedian,--and
other well-known authors, actors, and divines. The black-letter
Chaucer--Speght's edition, folio, London, 1598,--the identical copy
spoken of by Elia in his letter to Ainsworth, the novelist--was knocked
down to Burton for twenty-five dollars. I know not who was the fortunate
purchaser of "The Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle,"--an especial favorite of Lamb's. Neither do I know the name
of the buyer of "The Works of Michael Drayton." They brought
twenty-eight dollars. A number of volumes (one of them my correspondent
opines was "The Dunciad," _variorum_ edition) were bought by an
enthusiastic lover of Elia who came all the way from St. Louis on
purpose to attend this auction. The English nation should have purchased
Lamb's library. But instead of comfortably filling an alcove or two in
the British Museum, it crossed the Atlantic and was widely scattered
over the United States of America. Will it ever be brought together
again? Ah, me! such things do not happen in the annals of books.
'Tis no wonder that the old blind scholar, Bardo de' Bardi, in George
Eliot's grand story of "Romola," knowing as he did the usual fate of
private libraries, manifested a constant fear that his noble collection
of books would be merged in some other library after his death. Every
generous soul must heartily despise Tito Melema for basely disposing of
Bardo's library for lucre. There are plenty of good people, however, who
would uphold him in that transaction. Indeed, do not most of us with
unseemly haste and unnatural greed dispose of the effects of our
deceased friends and relations? The funeral is hardly over before we
begin to get ready for the auction. "I preserve," says Montaigne, "a bit
of writing, a seal, a prayer-book, a particular sword, that has been
used by my friends and predecessors, and have _not_ thrown the long
staves my father carried in his hand out of my closet." If the essayist
lived in these days, and followed the customs that now obtain, he would
send the sword and the staves, along with the other useless and (to him)
worthless tokens and remembrancers of the dead and gone Montaignes, to
the auction-room, and cheerfully pocket the money they brought.
Thackeray had been dead but a few weeks when a scene similar to the one
he has so truthfully described in the seventeenth chapter of "Vanity
Fair" occurred at his own late residence. The voice of "Mr. Hammerdown"
was heard in the house, and the rooms were filled with a motley crowd of
auction-haunters and relic-hunters, (among whom, of course, were Mr.
Davids and Mr. Moses,)--a rabble-rout of thoughtless and unfeeling men
and women, eager to get an "inside view" of the home of the great
satirist. The wine in his cellars,--the pictures upon his walls,--the
books in his library,--the old "cane-bottomed chair" in which he sat
while writing many of his best works, and which he has immortalized in a
fine ballad,--the gifts of kind friends, liberal publishers, and
admiring readers,--yea, his house itself, and the land it stands
on,--passed under the hammer of the auctioneer. O good white head, low
lying in the dust of Kensal Green! it matters little to thee now what
becomes of the red brick mansion built so lovingly in the style of Queen
Anne's time, and filled with such admirable taste from cellar to roof;
but many a pilgrim from these shores will step aside from the roar of
London and pay a tribute of remembrance to the house where lived and
died the author of "Henry Esmond" and "Vanity Fair."
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