Chapter XXVIII: Part 28

BODLEY, in the sketch of his own life, betrays that early book-love which subsequently broke out into that noble passion for "his reverend mother, the University of Oxford." Sir Thomas Bodley had ably served in some of the highest state-employments; but, at length, discovered the secret pathway to escape from "court contentions;" and this he found when busying himself with a vast ideal library--the future Bodleian! Long, indeed, it was but ideal; the labour of his day, the dream of his night, so slowly rose the reality of the fabric. It was difficult to determine on the class or the worth of authors--often rejecting, always augmenting, still consulting, now advising, or being advised; sometimes irresolute, and at others decisive; now exulting, and now despondent. However fervid was his noble enthusiasm for literature, and for his library, not less remarkable was that provident sagacity which he combined with it, and by which only he could carry on the vast design.

What were the emotions of Bodley through this long period, what his first intentions, and what his immutable decision, have fortunately been laid open to us in a close correspondence with his first librarian. Our parent-founder of a public library, with the forcible simplicity of the natural colloquial style of that day, has developed his own character. "Examining exactly for the rest of my life what course I might take, and having sought, as I thought, all the ways to the wood, to select the most proper, I concluded, at the last, to set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude and surcease from the commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose." He early discovered that the formation of his library required the co-operation of many favourable circumstances: "some kind of knowledge, some purse-ability, great store of honourable friends; else it would prove a vain attempt and inconsiderate." After many perplexities, the great resolve seemed to sanction the act, and he exclaims--"The project is cast, and whether I live or die, to such ends altogether I address my thoughts and deeds!" Such was the solemn pledge, and such the deed of gift, which Bodley, in the greatness of his mind, contracted with posterity.

But the minor cares and the minuter anxieties were to open on him; and it must be confessed that he tried the patient duties of the learned Dr. James, whom he had judiciously elected for the first librarian, but who often vents a groan on his interminable labours. Sir Thomas gently reproaches him: "I am toiled exceedingly, no less than yourself, with writing, buying, binding, disposing, &c.; but I am fed with pleasure of seeing the end." Bodley had not only to form a universal library, but to build one on the desolate ruins of that founded by Duke Humphrey, whose royal name could not save his books and manuscripts, which had all been purloined and wasted. The pledges left for their loan not being worth half the value of the books, the volumes were never returned; and those which remained in the reign of Edward the Sixth were burned as "superstitious," for their rubrics and illuminations. The history of this library might have deterred our new founder, by reminding him of the fate which may await even on public libraries. At all events, for many years it required all his fortitude to encounter a rabble of master-carpenters, joiners, carvers, glaziers, builders, claspers, and stringers, and the chain-smiths; for at that day books were chained to their shelves, with chains long enough to reach the desk. A book was tethered, and could never stray from its paddock. Then came the classification and the arrangements! discussions not easily to be adjusted with his librarian, whether a book should be classed as a work of theology or of politics? Sir Thomas found an incessant business at London in packing up "dry fats," or vats of books, barging them for Oxford; he was receiving fresh supplies from Italy, from Spain, from Turkey, and designed to send a scholar to travel in the East, to collect Arabic and Persian books, on which he sagaciously observed, that "in process of time, by the extraordinary diligence of some one student, these Eastern languages may be readily understood." Bodley anticipated our Society for Oriental Literature.

But not merely solicitous to erect a vast library, Bodley was equally anxious to consecrate the spot to study itself. He is uneasy at too public an admission, lest idlers should mix among the students, and, as he plainly tells, "be daily pestering the room with their gazing and babbling, and trampling up and down, disturbing the real studious." With what fervour he rejoices when, at length, he lived to witness the day of the opening of the library, and found that "all proceeded orderly, and with such silence!" But although he had bestowed all his cares and his fortune on this institution, it still was but an infant, and he had to look towards spirits as enlarged as his own, to protect the orphan of the public. It met with some who adopted it, and Bodley had their names inscribed in the register of this public library; but he was as cautious as he was courteous--the vain were not to be gratified for penurious gifts. Books, and not names, were wanted. At first, impatiently zealous, he murmurs of "promises received for performances." But latterly, he had occasion to exhort the university to mark by their particular acknowledgments, the donations in volumes or in money. The honourable roll on which the names are inscribed, includes not only those of the most eminent of our county, but also of several ladies, who rivalled those heroes and statesmen who had the honour of laying the foundation of the Bodleian Library.[3]

In Sir Thomas Bodley's character we view the conscious dignity of a great design, yet combined with the sedate reflection of a man practised in the world. There were certain traits of vanity, which may give a colour to the insinuations of some--who might consider they had been deprived of legacies--that it was his enormous vanity which raised this edifice of learning. It is amusing to discover, that when the Bishop of Exeter proposed to visit the library, a letter of Sir Thomas immediately precedes his visitor. "I pray you, observe his speeches, and liking or disliking, and in your next let me know it." When James the First was preparing to visit the library, he furnished hints to the librarian for his speech to the literary monarch: "It must not carry greater length than for half a quarter of an hour's utterance. It must be short and sweet, and full of stuff." The librarian was desirous to hide Buchanan when the king came down to Oxford; but Bodley, probably not approving the concealment of any of his literary stores, observed, "It will not avail to conceal him in his desk since he is in the catalogue, nor have we any reason to take any notice of the king's dislike; but," he warily adds, "should it excite his Majesty's notice, we must allege that the books were put there in the Queen's time." But nothing save the most delicate attention towards an author could have prompted his order concerning Coryat the traveller, who had presented his book to the library. On the author's coming to Oxford, Sir Thomas desired that "it should be placed in such a manner, that when the author came down, it may seem to magnify the author and the book." In his ardour for the general interests of his library, Bodley absolutely insisted that his librarian should persevere in his forlorn fellowship, for "marriage," opined the founder of the Bodleian Library, "is too full of domestic impeachments to afford him so much time from his private affairs." The doctor decided against the celibacy of a librarian, and was gravely admonished on the absurdity of such conduct in one who had the care of a public library! for "it was opening a gap to disorder hereafter." With a happier prescience, Bodley foresaw that race of generous spirits who, long after, and at distant intervals, have carried on his great views. Listen to the simplicity and force of the venerable style of our first founder of a PUBLIC LIBRARY.

"We cannot but presume that, casting (counting) what number of noble benefactors have already concurred in a FERVOUR OF AFFECTION to that PUBLIC PLACE OF STUDY, we shall be sure in TIME TO COME to find some OTHERS OF THE LIKE DISPOSITION to the advancement of learning."[4]

With such a hallowed purpose ever before him, can we conceive the agonies of the founder of a public library, on being for ever denied an entrance into it? and yet such was the fate of one of the most illustrious of this race. The mournful history of the founder of the Cottonian Library will ever excite the regrets of a grateful posterity, and its catastrophe will witness how far above life he loved and valued his collected lore! It happened that among the many rare manuscripts collected by Sir ROBERT COTTON, one reached his hands, which struck him by the singularity of the subject; it was a political theory to show the kings of England "how to bridle the impertinency of Parliaments." An unfaithful amanuensis, the son of the Dr. James whom we have just noticed, took copies and sold them to the curious. When the original was at length traced to the Cottonian collection, Sir Robert was sued in the Star-chamber, and considered as the author of a work whose tendency was to enslave the nation. It was long afterwards discovered that this manuscript had been originally written by Sir Robert Dudley, when in exile at Florence. Cotton was now denied all access to his library; his spirits sunk in the blackest melancholy; and he declared to an intimate friend, that "those who had locked up his library from him had broken his heart." Now deprived of that learned crowd who once were flowing into his house, consulting and arranging his precious manuscripts; torn away from the delightful business of his life, and in torment at the doubtful fate of that manuscript collection, which had consumed forty years at every personal sacrifice to form it for the "use and service of posterity," he sunk at the sudden stroke. In the course of a few weeks, he was so worn by injured feelings, that from a ruddy-complexioned man, "his face was wholly changed into a grim blackish paleness, near to the resemblance and hue of a dead visage." Such is the expression of one who knew him well. Before he died, Sir Robert requested the learned Spelman to acquaint the Privy Council that "their so long detaining his books from him had been the cause of his mortal malady." "On this message," says the writer of a manuscript letter of the day, "the Lord Privy Seal came to Sir Robert, when it was too late to comfort him, from the King, from whom also the Earl of Dorset came within half an hour of Sir Robert's death, to condole with Sir Thomas Cotton, his son, for his father's death; and with an assurance that as his Majesty loved his father, so he would continue his love to him: Sir Robert hath intailed his library of books as sure as he can make it upon his son and his posterity. If Sir Robert's heart could be ripped up, his library would appear in it, as Calais in Queen Mary's." Such is the affecting fate of the founder of the Cottonian Library, that great individual whose sole labour silently formed our national antiquities, and endowed his country with this wealth of manuscripts.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Sir Simonds d'Ewes feelingly describes in his will, his "precious
library." "It is my inviolable injunction that it be kept entire, and
not sold, divided, or dissipated." It was not, however, to be locked
up from the public good. Such was the feeling of an eminent
antiquary.

A later Sir Simonds d'Ewes was an extravagant man, and seems to have
sold everything about 1716, when the collection passed into the
possession of the Earl of Oxford.

[2] Tirabosohi, VI. pt. i, 131.

[3] See Gutch's edition of Wood's "Annals of the University of
Oxford," vol. I. pt. ii. p. 928.

[4] The vigilant curiosity of Tom Hearne, the antiquary, collected
the singular correspondence of the Founder of the Bodleian Library
with Dr. James, the first librarian, and published it under the title
of "Reliquiae Bodleianae, or Some Genuine Remains of Sir Thomas
Bodley," 1703, 8vo. The curious reader will find in Gutch's edition
of Wood's "Annals of the University of Oxford" many letters by
Bodley, and his liberal endowments to provide a fixed revenue after
his decease.

EARLY WRITERS, THEIR DREAD OF THE PRESS; THE TRANSITION TO AUTHORS BY PROFESSION.

At the close of the reign of Elizabeth, the public, awakening at the first dawn of knowledge, with their stirring passions and their eager curiosity, found their wants supplied by a new race of "ready writers," who now teased the groaning press--a diversified race of miscellaneous writers, who had discovered the wants of the people for books which excited their sympathies and reflected their experience, and who caught on their fugitive pages the manners and the passions of their contemporaries. No subject was too mean to be treated; and had domestic encyclopaedias been then invented, these would have been precisely the library the people required: but now, every book was to be separately worked. The indiscriminate curiosity of an uneducated people was gratified by immature knowledge; but it was essential to amuse as well as to inform: hence that multitude of fugitive subjects. The mart of literature opened, and with the book-manufactory, in the language of that primeval critic, WEBBE, of innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets, "all shops were stuffed."

It has been attempted to fix on the name of that great patriarch, the Abraham of our Israel, who first invented our own book-craft; but it would be indiscreet to assign the honour to any particular person, or even to inquire whether the cupidity of the book-vender first set to work the ingenuity of the book-weaver. Who first dipped his silver pen into his golden ink, and who first conceived the notion of this literary alchemy, which transmutes paper into gold or lead? It was, I believe, no solitary invention; the rush of "authors by profession" was simultaneous.

Former writers had fearfully courted fame; they were the children of the pleasures of the pen; these were a hardier race, who at once seized on popularity; and a new trade was opened by the arts of authorship. In the primitive age of publication, before there existed "a reading public," literary productions were often anonymous, or, which answered the same purpose, they wore the mask of a fictitious name, and were pseudonymous, or they hid themselves under naked initials, by which means the owners have sometimes lost their own property. It seems a paradox that writers should take such great pains to defraud themselves of their claims.

This coyness of publication was prevalent among our earliest writers, when writing and publishing were not yet almost synonymous terms. Before we had "authors by profession," we had authors who wrote, and seemed to avoid every sort of publicity. To the secluded writers of that day, the press was arrayed with terrors which have ceased to haunt those who are familiar with its daily labours, and our primeval writers trembled before that halo of immortality, which seemed to hang over that ponderous machinery. Writers eagerly affixed their names to polemical tracts, or to devotional effusions, during the melancholy reigns of EDWARD the Sixth and MARY, as a record of their zeal, and sometimes as an evidence of their voluntary martyrdom; but the productions of imagination and genius were yet rare and private. The noble-minded hardly ventured out of the halcyon state of manuscript to be tossed about in open sea; it would have been compromising their dignity, or disturbing their repose, to submit themselves to the cavils of the Cynics, for even at this early period of printed books we find that the ancient family of the _Malevoli_, whom Terence has noticed, had survived the fall of Rome, and here did not find their "occupation gone." With many scholars, too, it was still doubtful whether the vernacular muses in verse and prose were not trivial and homely. In the inchoate state of our literature, some who were imbued with classical studies might have felt their misgivings, in looking over their "gorgeous inventions," or their "pretty devices," as betraying undisciplined strength, bewildering fancies, and unformed tastes. They were not aware, even at that more advanced period, when a series of "poetical collections" appeared, of what they had already done; and it has been recently discovered, that when the printer of "England's Helicon" had innocently affixed the names of some writers to their pieces, to quiet their alarms, he was driven to the clumsy expedient of pasting slips of paper over their names. This was a spell which Time only dissolved, that great revealer of secrets more deeply concealed.

When publication appeared thus terrible, an art which was not yet valued even the artists themselves would slight. We have a striking instance of this feeling in the circumstance of a sonnet of our Maiden Queen, on the conspiracies then hatching by the party of her royal sister of Scotland. One of the ladies of her bedchamber had surreptitiously transcribed the poem from her majesty's tablet; and the innocent criminal had thereby cast herself into extreme peril. The queen affected, or at least expressed, her royal anger lest the people should imagine that she was busied in "such toys," and her majesty was fearful of being considered too lightly of, for so doing. The grave sonnet might, however, have been accepted as a state-paper. The solemn theme, the grandeur of the queenly personages, and the fortunes of two great nations at issue, communicated to these verses the profound emotions of contemplative royalty, more exquisite than the poetry. Yet Elizabeth could be checked by "the fear to be held too lightly by such toys."

The same motive had influenced some of the great personages in our literature, who, by the suppression of their names, anxiously eluded public observation, at the very moment they were in reality courting it! _Ignoto_ and _Immerito_, or bare initials, were the concealing signatures of Rawleigh, of Sidney, and of Spenser. The works of the Earl of Surrey, then the finest poems in the language, were posthumous. "The Arcadia" of Sidney possibly was never intended for the press. The noble Sackville, who planned the grand poem of "The Mirror of Magistrates," willingly left his lofty "Induction" anonymous among the crowd. In the first poetical miscellany in our language collected by the printer Tottell, are "The Poems of _uncertain Authors_;" so careless were the writers themselves to preserve their names, and so little aware of having claims on posterity. Some years after, when those other poetical collections, "The Paradise of Dainty Devices" and "England's Helicon," were projected by their publishers, they were borrowed or stolen from manuscripts which lay neglected with their authors, and who for the most part conceal themselves under quaint signatures.

The metropolis, in the days of Elizabeth and James, bore a pretty close resemblance to those ancient cities now existing before us on the Continent, famous in their day, but which, from causes not here necessary to specify, have not grown with the growth of time. Cologne, Coblentz, and Mayence, are such cities; and the city of Rouen, in its more ancient site, exhibits a picture of the streets of London in the days of Shakspeare. Stationary in their limits and their population, the classes of society are more distinctly marked out; but the individual lives more constantly under the survey of his neighbours. Their art of living is to live in the public eye; to keep up appearances, however this pride may prove inconvenient. No one would seem to have an established household, or always care to indicate its locality; their meals are at a public table, and their familiar acquaintance are found in the same public resorts; their social life becomes contracted as their own ancient narrow streets.

Such was London, when the Strand was a suburb, with only a few scattered mansions; the present streets still retain the family names, thus separating London from its regal sister. The glory of the goldsmiths and the mercers blazed in Cheapside, "the beauty of London;" and Fleet-street was the Bond-street of fashionable loungers. In this contracted sphere, where all moved, and the observers had microscopical eyes, any trivial novelty was strangely magnified, and the great personage was an object for their scrutiny as well as the least considerable. Thus we find that the Lord Chancellor Bacon is censured by one of the gossiping pens of that day for his inordinate pride and pomp on the most ordinary occasions. He went in his state robes "to cheapen and buy silks and velvets at Sir Baptist Hicker's and Burner's shops." James the First, I think, once in Parliament alluded to the "goldsmiths at Cheap, who showed not the bravery of former days," as a mark of the decline of national prosperity. One of the popular alarms of that day was "the rising of the apprentices," whenever the city's clumsy "watch and ward" were put to the rout; the apprentices usually made an attempt on their abhorrence, Bridewell, or pulled down two or three houses on Shrove-Tuesday. Once, on the trying of some ordnance in Moorfields, the court was seized by a panic of "a rising in the city." From all this we may form some notion of the size of the metropolis, and its imbecile police. In a vast and flourishing metropolis the individual in liberty and security passes among the countless waves of this ocean of men.

A metropolis thus rising from its contracted infancy, extending in growth, and diversified by new classes of society, presented many novelties in its crowded scenes; mutable manners, humorous personages, all the affectations or the homeliness of its citizens. Many writers, among whom were some of admirable genius, devoted their pens to fugitive objects and evanescent scenes, sure of finding an immediate reception from the sympathy of their readers. New modes of life, and altered manners during a lengthened peace, brought men into closer observation of each other; the ranks in society were no longer insulated; their haunts were the same localities, the playhouse, the ordinary, and Paul's Walk. There we find the gay and the grave--the disbanded captain--the critic from the inns of court--fantastic "fashion-mongers"--the coney-catcher who watches "the warren,"--and the gull, "town or country," a term which, unlike that of "the coney-catcher," has survived the times before us, and is imbedded in the language.[1] They even touched on the verge of that last refinement in society, critical coteries. We learn from Jonson, that there was "a college of critics," where a new member, "if he could pay for their suppers," might abuse the works of any man, and purchase for himself "the terrible name of a critic;" and ladies "lived free from their husbands," held coteries, and "gave entertainments to all the wits." This was the incipient state of the new world of manners, and what we now call "society;" and society provokes satire!

It was at the close of the Elizabethan period that our first town-satirists arose, from whom we learn the complicate system of manners, in the artifices practised in society; and in looking on their phantasmagorias, we are often startled among their grotesque forms by discovering our own exact faces. Satires on manners, descriptive of the lighter follies and the more involved artifices of social life, could hitherto have had no scope. The great in station alone constituted what may be considered as society, without any of those marking differences resulting from the inequalities of fortune. Satire then, as with Skelton, was an invective discharged at some potent individual at the risk of life; or it was an attack on a whole body, as Piers Ploughman's on the clergy of the times, while Will, or John, or Piers, whatever was his name, hid himself behind a hedge on Malvern Hills. Society, in the modern acceptation, of a miscellaneous mixture, which equalizes men even in their inequality, supplying passing objects for raillery or indignation, opened that wider stage, which a growing metropolis only could exhibit. We must become intimate with men to sound even the depths of superficial follies, and declamation may even fall short in the conception of some enormous criminal. Society must have considerably advanced before a town-satirist could appear.

The change in style was not less remarkable than that in manners. Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, after the wild luxuriance of fancy which had everywhere covered the fresh soil of the public mind, in the riot of our genius, a great change was occurring in the minds of our writers. Nature, in her open paths of sunshine, no longer busied them, while they stole into the bye-corners of abstract ideas, and roved after glittering conceits. Philosophy introduced itself into poetry, and wit became the substitute for passion. It was then that Sir John Davies wrote his "Immortality of the Soul," which still remains a model of didactic verse; and Donne, "The Progress of the Soul," a progress which he did not venture to conclude--a poem the most creative and eccentric in the language, but which must be reserved for the few. Donne, who closed his life as a St. Austin, had opened it as a Catullus.

The depth of sentiment was contracted into sententious epigrams, alike in prose and verse; and in the display of their ingenuity, the remotest objects were brought into collision, and the most differing things into a strange coherence, to startle by surprises, and to make us admire these wonders by their novelty. They cast about them their pointed antitheses, and often subsided into a clink of similar syllables, and the clench of an ambiguous word.

In all matters they affected curt phrases; and it has been observed that even the colloquial style was barbarously elliptical. They spoke gruff and short, affecting brevity of words, which was probably held to be epigrammatic. It became fashionable to write what they entitled books of "Epigrams" and books of "Characters." They appear to have taken their notion of an epigram from the Greek anthology, where the term was confined to any inscription for a statue or a tomb, or any object to be commemorated. Modern literature, in adopting the term, has applied it to a different purpose from its original signification. An epigram now is a short satire closing with a point of wit. Wit, in our present sense, was yet unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered. Ben Jonson has composed books of epigrams; but, though he has censured Sir John Harrington's as not being epigrams, but mere narratives, has written himself in the prevalent style of his day. They are short poems on persons, and on incidents in his own life, which he poured out to relieve his own feelings when they were outraged, and, so far, they are a reflection of the poet's state of mind--the autobiography of his potent intellect. As among these epigrammatists we never had a Martial, so among these character-writers we could hardly expect a La Bruyere for his refined causticity; but the most skilful, as Sir Thomas Overbury and Bishop Earle, are so witty as to seem grotesque, but it is human nature disguised in the fashions of the day.[2]

This infection of style must have come from a higher source than a mere fashionable affectation of the day, for it endured through half a century. The axiomatic style of Bacon in his "Essaies," which first appeared in 1597, probably set the model of the curt period for these Senecas in prose and verse, who found no difficulty in putting together short sentences, without, however, having discovered the art of short thoughts.

This change in style is considered as characteristic of the age of James, but it began before his reign. The age of this monarch has been universally condemned as the age of pedantry, and of quibbles and conceits, all which, indeed, have been liberally ascribed to his taste; but in the plentiful evidence of his wit and humour, it would be difficult to find an instance of these bastard ornaments of style.

In the history of literature the names of sovereigns usually only serve to mark its dates; and an "author-sovereign," to use Lord Shaftesbury's emphatic expression, can exercise no prerogative, and yields even his precedence. In more than one respect JAMES THE FIRST may form an exception, for the barren list of his writings alone might serve to indicate the age; their subjects were not so peculiar to this monarch's taste as they were common with higher geniuses than his majesty.

When on the throne of England, it was deemed advisable to collect his majesty's writings, the honour of the editorship was conferred on Montague, Bishop of Winton, whom Fuller has characterised as "a potent courtier;" and the courtly potency of the prelatical editor effuses itself before the "majesty of kings" in the most awful of all prefaces.

Cavillers there were, who, on distinct principles, objected to a king being a writer of books, carrying on war "by the pen instead of the pike, and spending his passion on paper instead of powder." This was a military cry from those whose "occupation had long gone." Others, more critically nice, assumed that, "since writing of books had grown into a trade, it was as discreditable for a king to become an author as it would be for him to be a practitioner in a profession." Such objectors were not difficult to put down, and the bishop has furnished an ample catalogue of "royal authors" among all great nations; and, in our own, from Alfred to Elizabeth. The royal family of James were particularly distinguished for their literary acquirements. As that was the day when no argument could be urged without standing by the side of some authority, the bishop had done well, and no scholar in an upper class could have done better; but this bishop was imprudent, his restless courtliness fatigued his pen till he found a _divine origin of king-writing_! "The majesty of kings," he asserts, "is not unsuited to a writer of books;" and proceeds--"_The first royal author_ is the King of kings--God himself, who doth so many things for our imitation. It pleased his divine wisdom to be _the first in this rank_, that we read of, that did _ever write_. He wrote on the tables on both sides, which was the work of God." This was in the miserable strain of those unnatural thoughts and remote analogies which were long to disfigure the compositions even of our scholars. How James and the bishop looked on one another at their first meeting, after this preface was fairly read, one would like to learn; but here we have the age!

One work by this royal author must not pass away with the others; it is not only stamped with the idiosyncrasy of the author, but it is one of those original effusions which are precious to the history of man. "THE BASILICON DORON, or His Majesty's Instructions to His Dearest Son Henry the Prince," is a genuine composition in the vernacular idiom; not the prescribed labour of a secretary, nor the artificial composition of the salaried literary man, but warm with the personal emotions of the royal author. He writes for the Prince of Scotland, and about the Scottish people; he instructs the prince even by his own errors and misfortunes. Some might be surprised to find the king strenuously warning the prince against pedantry; exhorting his pupil to avoid what he calls any "corrupt leide, as book-language and pen-and-ink terms;" counselling him _to write in his own language_, "for it best becometh a king to purify and make famous his own tongue." To have ventured on so complete an emancipation from the prevalent prejudices, in the creation of a vernacular literature, is one evidence, among many, that this royal author was not a mere pedant; and the truth is, that his writings on popular subjects are colloquially unostentatious; abstaining from those oratorical periods and rhetorical fancies which the scholar indulged in his speeches and proclamations--the more solemn labours of his own hand.

It is due to the literary character of James the First to notice his prompt sympathies with the productions of genius. This monarch had not exceeded his twentieth year when we find him in an intercourse with men of letters and science at home and abroad. The death of Sidney called forth an elegiac poem, and the works of the astronomer Tycho Brahe are adorned by a poetical tribute from the royal hand; during the winter the king passed in Denmark he was a frequent visitor of the philosopher, on whom he conferred an honour and a privilege. That he addressed a letter to Shakspeare, grateful for the compliments received in _Macbeth_, there is little reason to doubt; for Davenant, the possessor of the letter, which was finally lost, told it to the Duke of Buckingham; few traditions are so clearly traced to their source; and indeed some mark of James's attention to Shakspeare is positively told by Ben Jonson in his Elegy on "The Swan of Avon"--

--------What a sight it were,
To see thee on our waters yet appear;
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and OUR JAMES![3]

Hooker was the favourite vernacular author of James; and his earliest inquiry, on his arrival in England, was after Hooker, whose death he deeply regretted. James wrote a congratulatory letter to Lord Bacon on his great work; the king at least bowed to the genius of the man. It was by the especial command of this royal "pedant," twenty-four years after the publication of Fairfax's _Tasso_, that a second edition revived that version; and he provided Herbert the poet with a sinecure or pension, that his muse might cease to be disturbed. James the First was not only the patron of Ben Jonson, but admitted the bard to a literary intercourse; and it is probable that we owe to those conferences some of the splendour of the Masques, and in which there are many strokes of the familiar acquaintance of the poet with his royal admirer. More grave and important objects sometimes engaged his attention. It was James the First who assigned to the learned Usher the task of unfolding the antiquities of the British churches; and it was under the protection of this monarch that Father Paul composed the famous history, which, as fast as it was written, was despatched to England by our ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton; and, in this country, this great history was first published. These are not the only testimonies of his strong affection for literature and literary men; but they may surprise some who only hear of a pedant-king, who in reality was only a "learned" one.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This technical term, designating the class of youthful loungers,
was a new term in 1596, when Sir John Davis wrote his "Epigrams"--

"Oft in my laughing rimes I name a GULL,
But this _new terme_ will many questions breed;
Therefore, at first, I will expresse at full
Who is a true and perfect Gull indeed."

His delineation is admirable; Gifford, in his "Jonson," quotes it at
length,--i. 14. But whoever may be curious about these masculine
"birds" will be initiated into the mysteries of "Gullery" by "The
Gulls' Horn-book" of DEKKER, of which we have a beautiful edition,
with appropriate embellishments, by Dr. Nott.

[2] Dr. Bliss has given an excellent edition of Bishop Earle's
"Microcosmography, or a Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and
Characters."

[3] Every atom of candour is to be grudged to this hapless monarch;
it is lamentable to see such a writer as Mr. Hallam prompt instantly
to confirm a mere suggestion of Mr. Collier, that James could never
have written a letter to Shakespeare, incapacitated to sympathize
with the genial effusions of our poet.

THE AGE OF DOCTRINES.

We now leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have entered into another reign; and, a new epoch arises in our Literature, our tastes, and our manners.

We turn from the noble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure, and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of corruption; breeding, in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who, as an honest soul among them said, "having been forty years in the desert, were rushing to take possession of the promised land." All was to be the festival of an unbroken repose--a court of shows and sports, the rejoicings of three kingdoms.

But the queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public; both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called Puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while the "true protestants of Elizabeth" closed not their eyes in watchfulness over both papist and presbyter.

To the monarch from the Kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for "the sincerest Kirk in the world," as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who had once glanced with a presbyter's eye on "an evil mass in England," the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops, nor without hope, to settle what they held to be "the purity" of church discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery, and knew what lay at the bottom--he had tasted the dregs. He did not like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was "the parity" of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarch declared, perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that "he came to maintain what the queen had established,"--he demanded from the puritans conformity to the State, and probably little imagined that they preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing, ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common sufferings of the party.[1]

The claims of the Romanists were more tender than those of the sons of John Knox; they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch, delayed what he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being "very charitable" to these votaries of an indefeasible right of monarchy, and his project of "meeting them half-way" startled the English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same? are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons? require absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome?

The main objection of the king himself to what he styled "the corruption of the mother-church," was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder. Here the popular patriot exclaimed, "Was the great revolution of civil liberty made only for the prince's safety?" Whatever might be this reverie of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled it, by the never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible divine autocracy. "The celestial court," omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the pacific heretic of England. It menaced his title, while its priests busily inculcated that "anything may be done against heretics, because they are worse than Turks and infidels;" then barrels of gunpowder were placed under his throne, and the papal breves equally shook his dominion by absolving the Romanists of England from their oath of allegiance. The English monarch chose to be the advocate of his own cause, to vindicate his regal rights, and to protest before all Europe against this monstrous usurpation. He wrote "The Apology for the Oath of Allegiance," and we must concede to his tract this merit, that if the cause were small, boundless and enduring was the effect. In every country in Europe, through all the ranks of the learned, and for many a year, this effusion of James occupied the pens alike of the advocates of the apostolical court, and of the promulgators of the emancipation of mankind;[2] nor is it remotely connected with the noble genius of Paul Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronized by the English monarch.

It was on a nation divided into unequal parts of irreconcileable opinions that James conferred the dubious blessing of a long peace; for twenty years there were no wars but the battle of pens, and the long artillery of a hundred volumes.

Polemical studies become political when the heads of parties mask themselves under some particular doctrine. Opinion only can neutralize opinion; but in the age of doctrines before us, authority was considered stronger than opinion, and in their unsettled notions and contested principles, each party seemed to itself impregnable. Every Aeneas brandished his weapon, but could never wound the flitting chimeras. It was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliffe, the Dean of Exeter, laid the foundations of a college for controversies or disputations at Chelsea, on the banks of the quiet Thames. In this institution the provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean scraped together all his properties in many an odd shape to endow it, obtained a charter, and obscured his own name by calling it "King James's College." He lived to see a small building begun, but which, like the controversies, was not to be finished. A college for controversy verily required inexhaustible funds. When the day arrived that those became the masters whom those dogmatists had so constantly refuted, the controversial college was oddly changed into a manufactory of leather-guns, which probably were not more efficacious.

James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all they desired, and he was the only monarch who cast a generous thought on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to be reflected in the court: and in that enchanted circle of flattery and of hope, the silvery voices of his silken parasites told how "he gave like a king;" but he himself, a man of simple habits, with an utter carelessness of money, learned a lesson which he never rightly comprehended, how an exchequer might be voided.

James was a polemical monarch when polemics were political. But what creed or system did this royal polemic wholly adopt? Born of Roman Catholic parents and not abhorrent to the mother-church, for the childhood of antiquity had its charms for him; brought up among the Scottish presbyterians, with whom he served a long accommodating apprenticeship of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican Church become the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his brother of France, modify his creed, for a crown, by the state-religion?

Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accompts of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favour. By puritans hated, by Romanists misliked, and surrounded by trains of the "blue-bonnets," who were acted on the stage, and balladed in the streets; little gracious with his English subjects, to whom from the first "the coming-in" seemed as much like an invasion as an accession; never forgiven by the foreigner for his insular genius, whose pacific policy refused to enter into a project of visionary conquest; and finally falling into a new age, when the monarch, reduced to a mere metaphysical abstraction, whose prerogative and privilege were alike indefinite, had to wrestle with "the five hundred kings," as James once called the Commons; deservedly or undeservedly, this monarch for all parties was a convenient subject for panegyric or for libel, true or false.

But in reality what was the character of James the First? Where shall we find it?[3]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed
for--the famous conference at Hampton Court.

[2] A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists
on both sides may be found in Irving's "Lives of the Scottish Poets,"
ii. 234.

[3] I have at least honestly attempted "An Inquiry into the Literary
and Political Character of James the First."

PAMPHLETS.

Pamphlets, those leaves of the hour, and volumes of a season and even of a week, slight and evanescent things as they appear, and scorned at by opposite parties, while each cherishes their own, are in truth the records of the public mind, the secret history of a people which does not always appear in the more open narrative; the true bent and temper of the times, the contending interests, the appeal of a party, or the voice of the nation, are nowhere so vividly brought before us as by these advocates of their own cause, too deeply interested to disguise their designs, and too contracted in their space to omit their essential points.

Of all the nations of Europe our country first offered a rapid succession of these busy records of men's thoughts, their contending interests, their mightier passions, their aspirations, and sometimes even their follies. Wherever pamphlets abound there is freedom, and therefore have we been a nation of pamphleteers. Even at the time when the press was not yet free, an invincible pamphlet struck a terror; the establishment of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth disturbed the little synagogue of puritans, and provoked the fury of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets; the pacific reign of James covered the land with a new harvest of agricultural pamphlets; but when we entered on an age when men thought what they listed, and wrote what they thought, pamphlets ran through the land, and then the philosophical speculator on human affairs read what had never before been written; the troubles of Charles the First and the nation sounded the trumpet of civil war by the blast of pamphlets; state-plots and state-cabals were hatched at least by the press, under the second Charles, and popery and arbitrary government terrified the nation by their pamphlets; the principles of English government and toleration expanded in the pamphlets of the reign of William the Third, even Locke's Treatises on Toleration and on Government were at first but pamphlets; and under Anne the nation observed the light skirmishes of Whig and Tory pamphlets.

Our neighbours in their great revolutionary agitation, if they could not comprehend our constitution, imitated our arts of insurgency, and from the same impulses at length rivalled us; but the very term of pamphlet is English; and the practice seemed to them so novel, that a recent French biographer designates an early period of the French revolution as one when "the art of PAMPHLETS had not yet reached perfection."

The history of pamphlets would form an extraordinary history; but whoever gathers a history from pamphlets must prepare for contradiction. Rushworth had formed a great collection to supply the materials of his volumes, but speaks slightly of them, while insinuating his own sagacity in separating truth from falsehood; but he concluded "very suspiciously," observed Oldys, that none need trouble themselves with any further examination than what he had been pleased to make. This suspicion was more manifest when Nalson began another collection from pamphlets to shake the evidence of the pamphlets of Rushworth. Each had found what he craved for; for whoever will look only into those on his favourite side, finds enough written with his own passions, but he will obtain little extension of knowledge, for this is much like looking at his own face in the glass.

But we must not consider pamphlets wholly in a political view; their circuit is boundless, holding all the world of man; they enter into every object of human interest. The silent revolutions in manners, language, habits, are there to be traced; the interest which was taken on novel objects of discovery would be wholly lost were it not for these records; and, indeed, it is the multiplicity of pamphlets on a particular topic or object which appear at a particular period, that offer the truest picture of public opinion.

Those who would not dare to compose a volume have fluttered in the leaves of a pamphlet. Three or four ideas are a good stock to set up a pamphlet, and look well in it, as picked wares in a shop-window. The mute who cannot speak at a dinner or on the hustings, is eloquent in a pamphlet; and he who speaks only to excite the murmurs of his auditors, amply vindicates himself by a pamphlet. I doubt whether there is a single important subject to which some English pamphlet may not form a necessary supplement. Many eminent in rank, or who, from their position, have never written anything else, have written a pamphlet; and as the motive must he urgent which induces any such to have recourse to their pen, so the matter is of deeper interest; and it has often happened that the public have thence derived information which else had not reached them. The heads of parties have sometimes issued these manifestoes; and the tails, in the form of a pamphlet, have sometimes let out secrets for which they have been reprimanded.

Some of the most original conceptions, whose very errors or peculiarities even may instruct, lie hidden in pamphlets. These effusions of a more permanent nature than those of politics, are usually literary, scientific, or artistical, the spontaneous productions of amateurs, the precious suggestions, and sometimes the original discoveries of taste or enthusiasm. These are the _deliciae_ of the amenities of literature; and such pamphlets have often escaped our notice, since their writers were not authors, and had no works of their own among which to shelter them.

The age of Charles the First may be characterised as the age of pamphlets. Of that remarkable period, we possess an extraordinary collection, which amounts to about thirty thousand pieces, uniformly bound in two thousand volumes of various sizes, accompanied by twelve folio volumes of the catalogue chronologically arranged, exhibiting their full titles. Even the date of the day is noted when each pamphlet was published. It includes a hundred in manuscript written on the king's side, which at the time were not allowed to be printed. The formation of this collection is a romantic incident in the annals of Bibliography.

In that critical year, 1640, a bookseller of the name of Thomason conceived the idea of preserving, in that new age of contested principles, an unbroken chain of men's arguments, and men's doings. We may suppose that this collector, commencing with the year 1640, and continuing without omission or interruption to the year 1660, could not at first have imagined the vast career he had to run; there was, perhaps, sagacity in the first thought, but there was far more intrepidity in never relinquishing this favourite object during these perilous twenty years, amid a conflict of costly expenditure, of personal danger, and almost insurmountable difficulties.

The design was carried on in secrecy through confidential servants, who at first buried the volumes as they collected them; but they soon became too numerous for such a mode of concealment. The owner, dreading that the ruling government would seize on the collection, watched the movements of the army of the Commonwealth, and carried this itinerant library in every opposite direction. Many were its removals, northward or westward, but the danger became so great, and the collection so bulky, that he had at one time an intention to pass them over into Holland, but feared to trust his treasure to the waves. He at length determined to place them in his warehouses, in the form of tables round the room, covered with canvas. It is evident that the loyalty of the man had rendered him a suspected person; for he was once dragged from his bed, and imprisoned for seven weeks, during which time, however, the collection suffered no interruption, nor was the secret betrayed.

The secret was, however, evidently not unknown to some faithful servants of the king; for when, in 1647, his Majesty at Hampton Court desired to see a particular pamphlet, it was obtained for him from this collection, though the collector was somewhat chary of the loan, fearing the loss of what he felt as a limb of his body, not probably recoverable. The king had the volume with him in his flight towards the Isle of Wight; but it was returned to the owner, with his Majesty's earnest exhortation, that he should diligently continue the collection. A slight accident which happened to the volume occasioned the collector to leave this interesting incident on record.[1]

When Cromwell ruled, a place of greater security was sought for than the owner's warehouses: a fictitious sale was made to the University of Oxford, who would be more able to struggle for their preservation than a private individual, if the Protector discovered and claimed these distracted documents of the history of his own times.