When the sentiments and manners please,
And all the characters are wrought with ease,
Your tale, though void of beauty, force, and art,
More strongly shall delight and warm the heart;
Than where a lifeless pomp of verse appears,
And with sonorous trifles charms our ears.--FRANCIS.
Butler, writing of 'A small poet' (_Characters_), says: 'There was one
that lined a hat-case with a paper of Benlowe's poetry: Prynne bought it
by chance, and put a new demicastor into it. The first time he wore it
he felt a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a
vertigo.' A 'demicastor' is a hat.
P. 147. _Scott._--Mr. W. J. Courthope, in his Warton Lecture on English
Poetry before the British Academy, read on October 25, 1911, observes
that 'the best illustration of historic change in "romantic" temper is
perhaps to be found in a comparison of Cervantes' account of the
character of Don Quixote [see p. 155] with Walter Scott's representation
of the romanticism of the hero of _Waverley_. Don Quixote's "fancy",
says Cervantes, "grew full of what he used to read about in his books,
enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and
all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the
whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no
history in the world had more reality in it." ... "My intention," says
Scott, "is not to follow the steps of the inimitable Cervantes in
describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the
objects actually presented to the senses, but the more common aberration
from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their
reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic
colouring."' Scott expatiates at length on Waverley's reading in the
third chapter of his novel.
P. 148. _Boswell._--Macaulay writes in his review of Southey's edition
of _The Pilgrim's Progress_: 'Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were
desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an
exception in favour of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. That work was one of
the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit
that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most
pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories.'
Boswell relates that Dr. Johnson 'had a peculiar facility in seizing at
once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of
perusing it from beginning to end.'
P. 149. _Chandos._--The authorship of _Horae Subsecivae_ is not
absolutely known, but it is attributed to James I's favourite courtier.
It was published in 1620, the year before Chandos died.
P. 149. _Waller._--'A library well chosen cannot be too extensive, but
some there are who amass a great quantity of books, which they keep for
show, and not for service. Of such persons, Louis XI of France aptly
enough observed, that "they resembled _hunch-backed_ people, who carried
a great burden, which _they never saw_".'--W. KEDDIE. _Cyclopaedia_.
P. 153. _Coleridge._--The most deadly thing that Coleridge wrote was
when he classed the patrons of the circulating libraries as lower in the
scale than that reading public nine-tenths of whose reading is confined
to periodicals and 'Beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas [Anecdotes]'.
P. 153. _Boswell._--Dr. Birkbeck Hill points out that Boswell alludes to
this opinion in one of his letters, modestly adding: 'I am afraid I have
not read books enough to be able to talk from them.' Johnson
particularized Langton as talking from books, 'and Garrick would if he
talked seriously.'
P. 154. _S. Smith._--Bettinelli, a scholar and a Jesuit (1718-1808), who
attacked the reputation of Dante and Petrarch.
Coventry Patmore wrote: 'If you want to shine as a diner-out, the best
way is to know something which others do not know, and not to know many
things which everybody knows. This takes much less reading, and is
doubly effective, inasmuch as it makes you a really good, that is, an
interested listener, as well as a talker.'--(_On Obscure Books._)
P. 154. _Colton._--'Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can
be learnt from an index and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory
of another's treasure.'--J. GLANVILL. _The Vanity of Dogmatizing._
P. 155. _Cervantes._--A whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of
Don Quixote's library. (Part i, chap, vi.) The books that, condemned by
the priest, were passed into the housekeeper's hands and thence into
the fire were:--_Adventures of Esplandian_; _Amadis of Greece_; _Don
Olivante de Laura_; _Florismarte of Hyrcania_; _The Knight Platir_; _The
Knight of the Cross_; _Bernardo del Carpio_; _Roncesvalles_; _Palmerin
de Oliva_; _Diana_, called the Second, by Salmantino; _The Shepherd of
Iberia_; _The Nymphs of Henares_; and _The Curse of Jealousy_. The
priest, however, put by for further examination or determined to save:
_Amadis de Gaul_; _The Mirror of Chivalry_, and 'all other books that
shall be found treating of French matters'; _Palmerin of England_; _Don
Belianis_; _Tirante the White_; _Diana_, of Montemayor, and its
continuation by Gil Polo; _Ten Books of the Fortune of Love_; _The
Shepherd of Filida_; _The Treasure of Divers Poems_ (de Padilla); _Book
of Songs_, by Lopez Maldonado; _Galatea_, by Cervantes; _Araucana_;
_Austriada_; _Monserrate_; and the _Tears of Angelica_. The curious
reader will find these volumes traced in the admirable notes in J.
Fitzmaurice-Kelly's edition of _Don Quixote_ in 'The World's Classics'.
Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly says, devoured in his wandering youth,
'those folios of chivalrous adventures which he, and he alone, has saved
from the iniquity of oblivion'. The early association of Barabbas and
books will be noticed.
It is the translation by Charles Jervas, first published in 1742, which
is here employed.
_The Renowned Romance of Amadis of Gaul_, by Vasco Lobeira, which was
expressly condemned by Montaigne (see p. 144), was translated from the
Spanish version of Garciodonez de Montalvo by Southey.
P. 159. _Ruskin._--As Mr. Frederic Harrison points out, 'Books are no
more education than laws are virtue; and, just as profligacy is easy
within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be
found with a narrow education.'
P. 159. _E. B. Browning._--This letter was written to 'Orion' Horne
three years before Mrs. Browning's marriage in 1843, when she was
thirty-seven. Compare Matthew Arnold in the preface to _Literature and
Dogma_ (1873): 'Nothing can be truer than what Butler says, that really,
in general, no part of our time is more idly spent than the time spent
in reading. Still, culture is indispensably necessary, and culture is
reading; but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system.'
P. 161. _Maurice._--This is better than Sydney Smith's attitude
expressed in the question, 'Who reads an American book, or goes to an
American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?'
P. 162. _Blackie._--'Reading is seeing by proxy--is learning indirectly
through another man's faculties, instead of directly through one's own
faculties; and such is the prevailing bias, that the indirect learning
is thought preferable to the direct learning, and usurps the name of
cultivation.'--HERBERT SPENCER. _The Study of Sociology._
P. 163. _Montaigne._--'Montesquieu used to say that he had never known
a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good
book.'--LORD MORLEY.