P. 263. _Lewis._--This is a portion of an imitation of Horace. _Ep._ 20,
Bk. i.
P. 265. _Gay._--The authorship of this and the following poem cannot be
decided definitely, but it is presumed that they were written by Gay and
Pope respectively, and they have been so credited in the text.
P. 269. _Lamb._--This appeared originally in _The London Magazine_, and
was reprinted by Hone in _The Every-Day Book_. It was in Hone's _Table
Book_ that Lamb's extracts from the Elizabethan dramatists were
published.
P. 269. _Goldsmith._--See Bacon, on p. 65, and the note thereon.
P. 270. _Scott._--Sir Walter was the first President of the Bannatyne
Club, and he wrote these lines for the anniversary dinner in 1823. The
club had been founded in the previous year with the object of printing
works on the history and antiquities of Scotland. Bannatyne himself,
whose name was given to the club, achieved immortality by copying out
nearly all the ancient poetry of Scotland in 1568, at a time when the
country was ravaged by plague, and the records of Scottish literature
were also in danger of destruction. Of the other names mentioned here,
Ritson had written a vegetarian book. The 'yeditur' was the name given
by Lord Eldon to James Sibbald. 'Greysteel' was a romance that David
Herd sought in vain, and it gave him his nickname.
P. 271. _Maginn._--Sung at the Booksellers' Annual Dinner, Blackwall,
June 7, 1840. Fraser, whose name lives in his magazine, died in the
following year.
It is very tempting to give more passages about booksellers but I must
refrain as it would be foreign to the purpose of this volume, and the
subject has been recently treated with great fullness and greater
ability by Mr. Frank A. Mumby in _The Romance of Bookselling_.
P. 273. _de Bury._--'Would it not grieve a man of a good spirit to see
Hobson finde more money in the tayles of 12 jades than a scholler in 200
bookes?'--_The Pilgrimage to Parnassus._ Hobson, the carrier, celebrated
by Milton, is the hero of 'Hobson's choice'.
P. 274. _Lamb._--'The motto I proposed for the [_Edinburgh_] _Review_
was: Tenui Musam meditamur avena--"we cultivate literature upon a little
oatmeal."'--SYDNEY SMITH.
P. 274. _Ruskin._--Mark Pattison said that nobody who respected himself
could have less than 1,000 volumes, and that this number of octavo
volumes could be stacked in a bookcase 13 feet by 10 feet and 6 inches
deep. He complained that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary
middle-class family is shamefully small, and he thought it monstrous
that a man who is earning £1,000 a year should spend less than £1 a week
on books. 'A shilling in the pound to be spent on books,' is Lord
Morley's comment, 'by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a
year, or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I
think, than can be reasonably expected.'
P. 276. _Lamb._--Comberbatch was the name in which Coleridge enlisted in
the Dragoons. _The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq._, was by
Thomas Amory. Leigh Hunt describes Buncle as 'a kind of innocent Henry
VIII of private life'.
Charles Lamb, who at last grew tired of lending his books, threatened to
chain Wordsworth's poems to his shelves, adding:--'For of those who
borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some
neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of
their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say
that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in
them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it.'--SIR
T. N. TALFOURD.
P. 289. _Shakespeare._--Also in a later scene of the same play:--'Thou
hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a
grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books
but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and,
contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a
paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee
that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no
Christian ear can endure to hear.'
P. 292. _Wesley._--'Next morning he was still better: ... he desired to
be drawn into the library, and placed by the central window, that he
might look down upon the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should
read to him, and when I asked from what book, he said--"Need you ask?
There is but one."'--J. G. LOCKHART. _Life of Sir Walter Scott._
'It is our _duty_ to live among books, especially to live by ONE BOOK,
and a very old one.'--JOHN HENRY NEWMAN in _Tracts for the Times_.
P. 296. _De Vere._--Addison speaks of Horace and Pindar as showing, when
confronted with the Psalms, 'an absurdity and confusion of style,' and
'a comparative poverty of imagination'.
Coleridge has left on record his opinion that, 'after reading Isaiah or
St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly
tame to me, and Milton himself scarcely tolerable.'
Milton's own words may be recalled: 'There are no songs comparable to
the songs of Sion; no orations equal to those of the Prophets.'