Methinks in that refulgent sphere
That knows not sun or moon,
An earth-born saint might long to hear
One verse of 'Bonnie Doon'.--O. W. HOLMES.
P. 49. _Hazlitt._--'Because they both wrote essays and were fond of the
Elizabethans,' Mr. Augustine Birrell says, 'it became the fashion to
link Hazlitt's name with Lamb's. Hazlitt suffered by the comparison.'
P. 50. _Hunt._--The poet is Wordsworth and the lines 'Oh that my name'
are found in 'Personal Talk'. See page 21.
P. 52. _Carlyle._--In _The Hero as Priest_ Carlyle wrote of Luther's
written works: 'The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete
for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed
the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's merit in
literary history is of the greatest; his dialect became the language of
all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of
his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no
Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a
man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged
sterling sense and strength. He flashes-out illumination from him; his
smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the
matter. Good humour too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, and depth:
this man could have been a Poet too! He had to _work_ an Epic Poem, not
write one.'
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanter's wand!--itself a nothing.--
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless!--Take away the sword--
States can be saved without it!
LYTTON. _Richelieu_, Act II, sc. ii.
P. 53. _Macaulay._--'Macaulay is like a book in breeches.'--SYDNEY
SMITH.
P. 53. _Maurice._--The first Ptolemy founded the famous Alexandrian
Library which is supposed to have been partly destroyed by Christian
fanatics in 391 A.D., the Arabs in 641 completing the work of
destruction.
P. 57. _Fuller._--'Fuller's language!' Coleridge writes: 'Grant me
patience, Heaven! A tithe of his beauties would be sold cheap for a
whole library of our classical writers, from Addison to Johnson and
Junius inclusive. And Bishop Nicolson!--a painstaking old charwoman of
the Antiquarian and Rubbish Concern! The venerable rust and dust of the
whole firm are not worth an ounce of Fuller's earth!'
The rest of this essay will be found on page 79. The learned man
referred to in the last paragraph is Erasmus.
P. 58. _Browne._--Pineda in _Monarchica Ecclesiastica_ mentions 1,040
authors. See the note above on Maurice.
P. 60. _Addison._--'The multiplication of readers is the multiplication
of loaves. On the day when Christ created that symbol, he caught a
glimpse of printing. His miracle is this marvel. Behold a book. I will
nourish with it five thousand souls--a million souls--all humanity. In
the action of Christ bringing forth the loaves, there is Gutenberg
bringing forth books. One sower heralds the other.... Gutenberg is for
ever the auxiliary of life; he is the permanent fellow-workman in the
great work of civilization. Nothing is done without him. He has marked
the transition of the man-slave to the free man. Try and deprive
civilization of him, you become Egypt.'--VICTOR HUGO on Shakespeare.
P. 61. _De Quincey._--'The few shelves which would hold all the true
classics extant might receive as many more of the like as there is any
chance that the next two or three centuries could produce, without
burthening the select and leisurely scholar with a sense of how much he
had to read.'--C. PATMORE. _Principle in Art: William Barnes._
P. 63. _Temple._--Sir William Temple's historic dispute with Wotton and
Bentley, in which he had the assistance of Charles Boyle, afterwards
Earl of Orrery, provoked Swift's _Battle of the Books_. Compare
Boileau's _La Lutrin_.
P. 63. _Swift._--'"The Battle of the Books" is the fancy of a lover of
libraries.'--LEIGH HUNT.
The royal library at St. James's alluded to was one of the nine
privileged libraries which received copies of new books under the
Copyright Act of Anne. The privilege passed to the British Museum in
1757, when George II made over the royal collection to the nation.
P. 65. _Bacon._--Sir William Temple in his _Essay on the Ancient and
Modern Learning_ (pp. 59, 63, 110) concludes 'with a Saying of Alphonsus
Sirnamed the Wise, King of Aragon: That among so many things as are by
Men possessed or pursued in the Course of their Lives, all the rest are
Bawbles, Besides Old Wood to Burn, Old Wine to Drink, Old Friends to
Converse with, and Old Books to Read'.
P. 67. _Goldsmith._--Horace Walpole wrote to the Rev. William Cole
(Letter 2337; Oxford edition): 'There is a chapter in Voltaire that
would cure anybody of being a great man even in his own eyes. It is the
chapter in which a Chinese goes into a bookseller's shop, and marvels at
not finding any of his own country's classics.'
P. 69. _Hazlitt._--'William Hazlitt, I believe, has no books, except
mine; but he has Shakespeare and Rousseau by heart.'--LEIGH HUNT.
P. 71. _Hazlitt._--Hazlitt wrote this essay in Florence, on his
honeymoon, and it opens with a quotation from Sterne: 'And what of this
new book, that the whole world make such a rout about?' Lord Byron had
died in the previous year, 1824.
'Laws are not like women, the worse for being old.'--The Duke of
Buckingham's speech in the House of Lords in Charles the Second's time
(Hazlitt's note).
P. 72. _Dudley._--Rogers is reported to have said, 'When a new book
comes out I read an old one.'
P. 73. _Macaulay._--Pyrgopolynices (Plautus: _Miles Gloriosus_); Thraso
(Terence: _Eunuch_); Bobadil (Ben Jonson: _Every Man in his Humour_);
Bessus (Beaumont and Fletcher: _A King and no King_); Pistol (_The Merry
Wives of Windsor_); Parolles (_All's Well that Ends Well_);
Nephelococcygia (Aristophanes: _The Birds_--the cuckoos' town in the
clouds); Lilliput (Swift: _Gulliver's Travels_--the pygmies' country).
P. 77. _Ascham._--Thomas Blundeville wrote some lines in praise of Roger
Ascham's Latin grammar:--
Of English books as I could find,
I have perused many a one:
Yet so well done unto my mind,
As this is, yet have I found none.
The words of matter here do rise,
So fitly and so naturally,
As heart can wish or wit devise,
In my conceit and fantasy.
The words well chosen and well set,
Do bring such light unto the sense:
As if I lacked I would not let
To buy this book for forty pence.
This was published in 1561.
P. 78. _Wither._--Bevis of Hampton, a hero of early mediaeval romance.
The story has been published by the Early English Text Society.
Compare 'The common rabble of scribblers and blur-papers which nowadays
stuff stationers' shops.'--MONTAIGNE.
P. 79. _Fuller._--The other portion of this essay will be found on page
57. Arius Montanus was the court chaplain of Philip II of Spain, and he
personally superintended the printing of the _Biblia Polyglotta_ (8
vols., 1569-73), the most famous of the books printed by Christophe
Plantin. The printing office is one of the sights of Antwerp, whose
council bought the property from Plantin's descendants in 1876 for
£48,000.
Compare also: 'Evil books corrupt at once both our manners and our
taste.'--FIELDING.
P. 80. _Addison._--Addison 'takes off the severity of this speculation'
with an anecdote of an atheistical author who was sick unto death. A
curate, to comfort him, said he did not believe any besides the author's
particular friends or acquaintance had ever been at the pains of reading
his book, or that anybody after his death would ever inquire after it.
'The dying Man had still so much the Frailty of an Author in him, as to
be cut to the Heart with these Consolations; and without answering the
good Man, asked his Friends about him (with a Peevishness that is
natural to a sick Person) where they had picked up such a Blockhead?' It
seems that the author recovered, 'and has since written two or three
other Tracts with the same Spirit, and very luckily for his poor Soul
with the same success.'
P. 83. _Milton._--'For he [Pliny the Elder] read no book which he did
not make extracts from. He used to say that "no book was so bad but some
good might be got out of it."'--PLINY THE YOUNGER.
P. 84. _Baxter._--'Richard, Richard, dost thou think we will let thee
poison the court? Richard, thou art an old knave. Thou hast written
books enough to load a cart, and every book as full of sedition as an
egg is full of meat.'--Judge Jeffreys' address at Baxter's trial.
P. 85. _Athenian Mercury._--An 'answer to correspondents'--the question
'Whether 'tis lawful to read Romances?' being asked in _The Athenian
Mercury_. This, the first popular periodical published in this country,
was started in 1691, and written by John Dunton, R. Sault, and Samuel
(the father of John) Wesley; the last number appeared in 1697, and
Dunton collected into three volumes the most valuable questions and
answers under the title of _The Athenian Oracle_.
Gray's wish was to be always lying on sofas, reading 'eternal new novels
of Crébillon and Marivaux'.
P. 86. _Cobbett._--Cobbett attacks Dr. Johnson, because in a pamphlet he
urged war on the American colonies; Burke, because in another pamphlet
he urged war on revolutionary France. 'The first war lost us America,
the last cost us six hundred millions of money, and has loaded us with
forty millions a year of taxes.'
P. 86. _More._--Tom Hickathrift, who killed a giant at Tylney, Norfolk,
with a cartwheel. He dates from the Conquest, and was made governor of
Thanet.
P. 87. _Austen._--_Cecilia_ and _Camilla_, both by Mme. D'Arblay;
_Belinda_, by Miss Edgeworth.
'She [Diana] says of Romance: "The young who avoid that region escape
the title of Fool at the cost of a celestial crown."'-GEORGE MEREDITH.
_Diana of the Crossways._
P. 87. _Herschel._--'The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction.'--R. L. STEVENSON.
P. 89. _Burton._--'They lard their lean books with the fat of others'
works.'--BURTON.
P. 90. _Milton._--South said that _Eikon Basilike_ was 'composed with
such an unfailing majesty of diction, that it seems to have been written
with a sceptre rather than a pen'.
Milton condemns the king for having 'so little care of truth in his last
words, or honour to himself, or to his friends, or sense of his
afflictions, or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately
before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop [Juxon] who
attended him, for a special relic of his saintly exercises, a prayer
stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a
heathen god; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem
of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_'.
P. 91. _Dryden._--Hazlitt, who could not 'much relish Ben Jonson',
describes him as 'a great borrower from the works of others, and a
plagiarist even from nature; so little freedom is there in his
imitations of her, and he appears to receive her bounty like an alms'.
J. A. Symonds, stating that Jonson 'held the prose writers and poets of
antiquity in solution in his spacious memory', points out that such
looting on his part of classical treasuries of wit and wisdom was
accounted no robbery in his age.
P. 91. _Sheridan._--Churchill has the same thought in _The Apology_:
Like gypsies, lest the stolen brat be known,
Defacing first, then claiming for their own.
P. 93. _Pattison._--Matthew Arnold, in the preface to _Literature and
Dogma_ (1873), points out that 'To read to good purpose we must read a
great deal, and be content not to use a great deal of what we read. We
shall never be content not to use the whole, or nearly the whole, of
what we read, unless we read a great deal.'
P. 96. _Mitford._--'Every abridgement of a good book is a stupid
abridgement.'--MONTAIGNE.
P. 98. _Tennyson._--J. J. Jusserand, in the first annual Shakespeare
lecture before the British Academy (July 5, 1911), used eloquent
language which might be said to justify bibliographies:--'Books, like
their authors, have their biography. They live their own lives. Some
behave like honourable citizens of the world of thought, do good,
propagate sound views, strengthen heart and courage, assuage, console,
improve those men to whose hearths they have been invited. Others
corrupt or debase, or else turn minds towards empty frivolities. In
proportion to their fame, and to the degree of their perenniality, is
the good or evil that they do from century to century, eternal
benefactors of mankind or deathless malefactors. Posted on the road
followed by humanity, they help or destroy the passers-by; they deserve
gratitude eternal, or levy the toll of some of our life's blood, leaving
us weaker; highwaymen or good Samaritans. Some make themselves heard at
once and continue to be listened to for ever; others fill the ears for
one or two generations, and then begin an endless sleep; or, on the
contrary, long silent or misunderstood, they awake from their torpor,
and astonished mankind discovers with surprise long-concealed treasures
like those trodden upon by the unwary visitor of unexplored ruins.'
P. 99. _Helps._--'My desire is ... that mine adversary had written a
book.'--The Author of Job, ch. 31.
'Curll, Pope's victim and accomplice ... hit on one of those
epoch-making ideas which are so simple when once they are conceived, so
difficult, save for the loftiest genius, in their first conception. It
occurred to him that, in a world governed by the law of mortality, men
might be handsomely entertained on one another's remains. He lost no
time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity
he published some forty or fifty separate _Lives_, intimate, anecdotal,
scurrilous sometimes, of famous and notorious persons who had the
ill-fortune to die during his lifetime.... His books commanded a large
sale, and modern biography was established.'--SIR W. RALEIGH. _Six
Essays on Johnson._
It is related in _The Percy Anecdotes_ that 'A gentleman calling on
Archbishop Tillotson observed in his library one shelf of books of
various forms and sizes, all richly bound, finely gilt and lettered. He
inquired what favourite authors these were that had been so remarkably
distinguished by his Grace. "These," said the Archbishop, "are my own
personal friends; and what is more I have made them such (for they were
avowedly my enemies), by the use I have made of those hints which their
malice had suggested to me. From these I have received more profit than
from the advice of my best and most cordial friends; and therefore you
see I have rewarded them accordingly."'
P. 99. _Disraeli._--Compare Emerson: 'There is properly no history, only
biography; and Carlyle: 'History is the essence of innumerable
biographies.'
'Those that write of men's lives,' says Montaigne, 'forasmuch as they
amuse and busy themselves more about counsels than events, more about
that which cometh from within than that which appeareth outward; they
are fittest for me.'
P. 102. _Glanvill._--An original Fellow of the Royal Society, and in
many ways an interesting divine, probably best known in these days
through Matthew Arnold's 'Scholar-Gypsy', whose story is told in _The
Vanity of Dogmatizing_ (1661), from which this quotation and that on
page 118 are made.
P. 103. _Jonson._--The poem 'To the Memory of my Beloved Master William
Shakespeare, and what he hath left us' appeared in 1623.
P. 105. _Jonson._--This was printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare's
works, 1623, on the page opposite the Droeshout portrait.
P. 105. _Milton._--These lines were printed anonymously in the Second
Folio Shakespeare, 1632, and, it is believed, this was Milton's first
appearance as a poet.
P. 106. _Dryden._--This was printed under the engraving in Tonson's
folio edition of _Paradise Lost_ (1688). Mr. F. A. Mumby, in _The
Romance of Bookselling_, recalls that in Moseley's first edition of
Milton's poems there was an atrocious portrait of the poet by William
Marshall. Milton wrote four lines in Greek, which the artist, innocent
of that language, gravely cut into the plate, lines that Dr. Masson has
thus translated:
That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You'd say at once, seeing the living face;
But, finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching artist's mis-attempt.
P. 106. _Fletcher._--The subject of this poem was Giles Fletcher, the
author of _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 'equally beloved of the Muses
and Graces.'
P. 106. _Crashaw._--From _The Flaming Heart_. 'His masterpiece, one of
the most astonishing things in English or any literature, comes without
warning at the end of _The Flaming Heart_. For page after page the poet
has been playing on some trifling conceit ... and then in a moment, in
the twinkling of an eye, without warning of any sort, the metre changes,
the poet's inspiration catches fire, and then rushes up into the heaven
of poetry the marvellous rocket of song: "Live in these conquering
leaves," &c. The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the
colourlessness of the beginning and the splendid colour of the end. But
contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw's work.'--PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY.
_History of Elizabethan Literature._
As an interesting example of Crashaw's conceits it may be noted that,
when alluding to Mary Magdalene, he speaks of her eyes as 'Portable and
compendious oceans.'
P. 107. _Voltaire._--The philosopher also remarks, in the same article,
that 'there is hardly a single philosophical or theological book in
which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or
adding to, or subtracting from, the sense'.
P. 112. _Carlyle._--Abelard, born 1079, died 1142, is less known now as
a famous teacher at the University of Paris than as the lover of
Héloise.
P. 113. _Trapp and Browne._--When George I sent a present of some books,
in November 1715, to the University of Cambridge, he sent at the same
time a troop of horse to Oxford. This inspired Dr. Trapp and provoked
the rejoinder from Sir William Browne.
P. 114. _Earle._--Mr. A. S. West, in his edition of Earle's
_Microcosmographie; or a Piece of the World discovered; in Essayes and
Characters_, says: 'The critic supposed that _omneis_ was the original
form of the accusative plural of _omnis_, and that the forms _omnes_ and
_omnis_ had taken its place. In order to adhere to the older spelling
"he writes _omneis_ at length". _Quicquid_ is cited as an instance of
pedantry because the ordinary man wrote the word as _quidquid_, and
doubtless so pronounced it. The critic's gerund may be described as
"inconformable" because it resists attraction--remains a gerund and does
not become a gerundive. Or Earle may have had in view passages in which
the gerund of transitive verbs with _est_ govern an object.'
P. 115. _Goldsmith._--'When Dr. Johnson is free to confess that he does
not admire Gray's _Elegy_, and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to
praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the
courage of their opinions?' Such is the question asked by James Payn in
the _Nineteenth Century_ (March 1880), his article being entitled 'Sham
Admiration in Literature'. Mr. Payn noted that 'curiously enough, it is
women who have the most courage in the expression of their literary
opinions', instancing the authoress of _Jane Eyre_, who 'did not derive
much pleasure from the perusal of the works of the other Jane [Austen]',
and Harriet Martineau, who confessed to him that she could see no
beauties in _Tom Jones_.
'There is no ignorance more shameful than to admit as true that which
one does not understand: and there is no advantage so great as that of
being set free from error.'--XENOPHON. _Memorabilia._
P. 118. _Fielding._--'What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my
word, I think the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, _The Alchemist_, and _Tom Jones_,
the three most perfect plots ever planned.... How charming, how
wholesome, Fielding always is!'--S. T. COLERIDGE. _Table Talk._
P. 123. _Erasmus._--The translation is the work of Nathaniel Bailey,
lexicographer and schoolmaster, who died in 1742. Desiderius and Erasmus
are Latin and Greek for Gerhard 'the beloved', the name of the scholar's
father.
P. 123. _Colton._--Compare R. B. Sheridan's: 'Easy writing's curst hard
reading.'
P. 124. _Bacon._--Mr. A. S. Gaye, in the new Clarendon Press edition of
the _Essays_, points out that on almost every page the reader will find
quotations from the Bible and from the Greek and Latin classics,
especially Tacitus, Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid, besides
frequent allusions to biblical, classical, and mediaeval history. 'It is
also remarkable that the quotations are more often than not inaccurate,
not only in words but in sense.... Bacon furnished in himself an
exception to the rule which he laid down in his Essay "Of Studies"; for
though "reading" made him "a full man", "writing" did not make him "an
exact man".'
P. 128. _Boswell._--One of Mrs. Piozzi's anecdotes of Dr. Johnson is
that he asked 'Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was
wished longer by its readers excepting _Don Quixote_, _Robinson Crusoe_,
and the _Pilgrim's Progress_?' Johnson declared that the work of
Cervantes was the greatest in the world, 'speaking of it, I mean, as a
book of entertainment.'
P. 132. _Emerson._--Shakespeare's phrase: _Taming of the Shrew_, Act I,
sc. i.
P. 133. _Emerson._--O. W. Holmes applies the proverb to the Bible.
'What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you
carry to it.'
P. 135. _Calverley._--See Tupper's lines on page 12. The allusions are,
of course, to the creations of Bulwer-Lytton.
P. 138. _Gibbon._--F. W. Robertson's opinion is worth recording: 'It is
very surprising to find how little we retain of a book, how little we
have really made our own, when we come to interrogate ourselves as to
what account we can give of it, however we may seem to have mastered it
by understanding it. Hundreds of books read once have passed as
completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline
of mind got by writing down, not copying, an abstract of a book which is
worth the trouble, fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables
one to read other books with more attention and more profit.'
P. 140. _Hamilton._--'This assumes that the book to be operated on is
your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection
for most of us.'--LORD MORELY.