HUNTING IN AN EASY CHAIR. THE DOCTOR'S BOOKS.
That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes for variety I confer
With Kings and Emperors, and weigh their counsels,
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and in my fancy
Deface their ill placed statues.
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
A certain Ludovicus Bosch, instead of having his coat of arms, or his
cypher engraved to put in his books, had a little print of himself in
his library. The room has a venerable collegiate character; there is a
crucifix on the table, and a goodly proportion of folios on the
shelves. Bosch in a clerical dress is seated in an easy chair,
cogitabund, with a manuscript open before him, a long pen in his hand,
and on his head a wig which with all proper respect for the dignity
and vocation of the wearer, I cannot but honestly denominate a caxon.
The caxon quizzifies the figure, and thereby mars the effect of what
would otherwise have been a pleasing as well as appropriate design.
Underneath in the scrolled framing is this verse
_In tali nunquam lassat venatio sylvâ._
Dr. Charles Balguy of Peterborough had for the same purpose a design
which though equally appropriate, was not so well conceived. His
escutcheon, with the words
_Jucunda oblivia vitæ_
above, and his name and place of abode below, is suspended against an
architectural pile of books. It was printed in green. I found it in
one of our own Doctor's out-of-the-way volumes, a thin foolscap
quarto, printed at Turin, 1589, being a treatise _della natura de'
cibi et del bere_, by Baldassare Pisanelli, a physician of Bologna.
Dr. Balguy's motto would not have suited our Doctor. For though books
were among the comforts and enjoyments of his life from boyhood to old
age, they never made him oblivious of its business. Like Ludovicus
Bosch,—but remember I beseech you Ladies! his wig was not a caxon; and
moreover that when he gave an early hour to his books, it was before
the wig was put on, and that when he had a leisure evening for them,
off went the wig, and a velvet or silken cap according to the season,
supplied its place:—like Bosch, I say, when he was seated in his
library,—but in no such conventual or collegiate apartment, and with
no such assemblage of folios, quartos, and all inferior sizes,
substantially bound, in venerable condition, and “in seemly order
ranged;” nor with that atmospheric odour of antiquity and books which
is more grateful to the olfactories of a student than the fumes of any
pastille; but in a little room, with a ragged regiment upon his
shelves, and an odour of the shop from below, in which rhubarb
predominated, though it was sometimes overpowered by valerian, dear to
cats, or assafœtida which sprung up, say the Turks, in Paradise, upon
the spot where the Devil first set his foot:—like Bosch I say once
more and without farther parenthesis,
_περισσοὶ Παντες ὁι ᾿ν μεσῳ λογοι_,[1]
like Bosch the Doctor never was weary with pursuing the game that
might be started in a library. And though there was no forest at hand,
there were some small preserves in the neighbourhood, over which he
was at liberty to range.
[Footnote 1: EURIPIDES.]
Perhaps the reader's memory may serve him, where mine is just now at
fault, and he may do for himself, what some future editor will do for
me, that is supply the name of a man of letters who in his second
childhood devised a new mode of book-hunting: he used to remove one of
the books in his library from its proper place, and when he had
forgotten as he soon did, where it had been put, he hunted the shelves
till he found it. There will be some who see nothing more in this
affecting anecdote than an exemplification of the vanity of human
pursuits; but it is not refining too much, if we perceive in it a
consolatory mark of a cheerful and philosophical mind, retaining its
character even when far in decay. For no one who had not acquired a
habit of happy philosophy would have extracted amusement from his
infirmities, and made the failure of his memory serve to beguile some
of those hours which could then no longer be profitably employed.
Circulating libraries, which serve for the most part to promote
useless reading, were not known when Daniel Dove set up his rest at
Doncaster. It was about that time that a dissenting minister, Samuel
Fancourt by name, opened the first in London, of course upon a very
contracted scale. Book clubs are of much later institution. There was
no bookseller in Doncaster till several years afterwards: sometimes an
itinerant dealer in such wares opened a stall there on a market day,
as Johnson's father used to do at Birmingham; and one or two of the
trade regularly kept the fair. A little of the live stock of the
London publishers found its way thither at such times, and more of
their dead stock, with a regular supply of certain works popular
enough to be printed in a cheap form for this kind of sale. And when
at the breaking up of a household such books as the deceased or
removing owner happened to possess were sold off with the furniture,
those which found no better purchaser on the spot usually came into
the hands of one of these dealers, and made the tour of the
neighbouring markets. It was from such stragglers that the Doctor's
ragged regiment had been chiefly raised. Indeed he was so frequent a
customer, that the stall-keepers generally offered to his notice any
English book which they thought likely to take his fancy, and any one
in a foreign language which had not the appearance of a school book.
And when in one book he found such references to another as made him
desirous of possessing, or at least consulting it, he employed a
person at York to make enquiry for it there.