What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for
us! What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of
centuries between us and the heats and clamours of contemporary
literature! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of
scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those
silent crypts and Falernian _amphorae_ of the Past! No other writers
speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that
of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank
unconsciousness possible which was natural to a period when reviews were
not; and no later style breathes that country charm characteristic of
days ere the metropolis drew all literary activity to itself, and the
trampling feet of the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy from
the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as compared with the present,
these old voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the paved
thoroughfares of thought....
There are volumes which have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering
experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked colour and
ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that
have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;--these
quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson
fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this
purpling bloom, of Lamb;--in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens
of Alcinoüs and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which
can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins,
which have outlived their half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen
and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years
ago....
There is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull; we live over
again the author's lonely labours and tremulous hopes; we see him, on
his first appearance after parturition, 'as well as could be expected,'
a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord
and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the
Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the
eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the
author of the _Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique
Poetry_, or of the _Unities briefly considered by Philomusus_, of which
they have never heard and never will so much as hear the names; we see
the country-gentlemen (sole cause of its surviving to our day) who buy
it as a book no gentleman's library can be complete without; we see the
spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of
friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the
tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such
a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the
book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its
cover, its leaves enshrining memorial-flowers of some passion smothered
while the Stuarts were not yet unkinged, suggestive of the trail of
laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes from the pipe of some
dozing poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that has felt the
inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of
Lamb, doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a
question of reprinting we are more choice. The new duodecimo is bald and
bare, indeed, compared with its battered prototype that could draw us
with a single hair of association.--J. R. LOWELL. _Library of Old
Authors._