Chapter II: Part 2

A Dofob would not assert with offensive pride that the majority of people in this prosperous country are devoid of a real affection for books, but he is sorry for some of those who fondly imagine that they are bookish, occasionally reveal their inmost thoughts about books, and unconsciously disclose their sad incapacity to understand the essential nature of book-loving. In the matter of bindings, for example, there is commonly a lamentable ignorance. A few years ago I fortunately discovered a book printed in the latter part of the eighteenth century, produced in New York, and bound in the fine old calf of the period: a little dilapidated by the ravages of time and the bookseller’s shelves, but by no means in a state of ruin. That very binding made it cost me a goodly sum, for the contents were of no general interest; the book itself, the entity, binding and all, gave it value. I honored that book and after petting it properly, gladly gave it to a dear old gentleman, the only man in the city who knew anything about the subject dealt with in the book. A few weeks later he proudly brought it back to me in order that I might inscribe a few words on the fly leaf, and he said with considerable satisfaction, “You see, sir, that I have it neatly rebound!” And so he had, to my horror. The splendid old calf—I am referring to the binding—in which a Dofob would have rejoiced greatly, had been replaced by smug, cheap and modern cloth. Then it was that I grieved because my vocabulary was limited to the few thousand words which the devotee of statistics allows to the average man. All the languages of Mezzofanti could not have done justice to the situation; but the heroic self-restraint of a Dofob came into play and I suffered in silence. The honest but misguided friend will never know the full extent of the crime, and as the book is more to his liking in its present garb than it was in what he was pleased to call its “shabby” dress, it would have been needlessly cruel to undeceive him; and, after all, the matter was beyond remedy.

The kind friend who understands the intricacies of the stock-market and who tells me much that I care not for, about my garden, where I should buy my clothes, and what I should have in my library; who enlightens me, as many of our merciless fellow-beings love to do, about all questions of religion or of politics; the dear creature who is fond of saying “Now, what _you_ ought to do is”—whatever in the plentitude of his self-contentment he ardently believes to be what every one else should do, because _he_ does it; this one, I say, seldom knows anything about bindings. “_I_ buy books to read”, he brags, as if one could not read comfortably a well-bound book. If you mention Tout, or Rivière, or Hayley, or Zaehnsdorf, to say nothing of Lortic, Prideaux, De Sauty or Cobden-Sanderson, he stares at you with glassy eyes of indifference and perhaps he calls your attention to a Barrie “edition de looks”, or to some of the paralyzing productions which the simple-minded are deluded into purchasing by the influence of alluring advertisements and insinuating circulars designed to mislead the ambitious but unwary buyers of books in the market-place.

I plead guilty to the charge of being a dreary old fool over books, but chiefly over old books, for they have a settled and permanent character which no one may impeach. We may be tolerably sure about them; they are generally what they seem to be, with their broad margins, their solid, substantial type, and their charming air of dignity. Most of the books of our day are unworthy of absolute confidence, and their paper, their binding, and their typography are a source of grief to the judicious. The man whose literary pabulum is sufficiently supplied by his daily newspaper may ask why an old book, with aged and decayed covers, is better than a new one with that outward adornment of gilt which some publishers delight to lavish upon us. The sagacious Dofob will not undertake the task of breaking his way into the solid density of such a mind or of explaining to him the reason, for the game is not worth the candle. When I was a boy I rashly attempted to convince a likely colored lad that slavery was right and should never be abolished, but to my fervid eloquence he invariably responded “Well, I doan’ know ’bout that”. It was an effective rejoinder and I now believe that he was fairly entitled to his name of Solomon. The smart individual of these times is beyond the reach of argument, and all one can do is to say to him, “Go to your newspaper, buy subscription editions of ‘standard authors’, fill your shelves with ‘the best sellers’, and be as happy as you may”.

But notwithstanding what I have just said, it is a favorite fallacy quite prevalent among the uninitiated that a book must be old in order to attract the bibliolater. True, as Emily Dickinson, with a magnificent disregard of rhyme, sings:

“A precious mouldering pleasure ’tis
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore:
A privilege, I think.”

A Dofob, however, does not restrict himself to such dolorous delights as “mouldering pleasures”, and sees no good reason why he should not be fascinated by something fresh from a good press as well as by what writers about books are addicted to calling “musty tomes”. A “tome”, I believe has come to mean “a large book”, but a Dofob does not necessarily prize it above a slender duodecimo, any more than he would prefer a fat friend to a thin one; and while gray hairs may be held dear, blond locks and jetty curls may be just as winning. A thoughtful physician once told me that he never read a book that was less than ten years old; he was not and could never be a Dofob. The rule may be well enough when applied to fiction, and a rigid observance of it would save some valuable time; but why should a man living in the earliest quarter of the last century have delayed for a decade the reading of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”, or “Rob Roy”, or “The Heart of Midlothian,” or the two precious volumes of “Charles Lamb’s works”, then given to the world? A Dofob cannot be persuaded that any book should be neglected because it is old or condemned merely because it is new. The passion for rare relics of antiquity is one not difficult to comprehend, but it is not exclusive of a passion for the best of modern books. Whether the date upon the title be that of the reign of Elizabeth or of the time of Victoria or Edward, “a book’s a book for a’ that”.

There is a good deal of sameness in the praises of books by book-lovers. In his Anthology called “Book Song”, Mr. Gleeson White says: “friends that never tire, that cannot be scorned or dallied with, is an idea that recurs constantly”, and in regard to those eulogies of special volumes with which most of us are familiar, he remarks justly, “at times the pride of ownership becomes a little irritating and seems deliberately worded to provoke jealousy”. It is a characteristic of Dofobishness that the Dofob does not indulge in panegyrics upon his own property, although he may do a little private bragging among intimates. He may dote upon the book of another, and borrow it too, giving no credence to the common delusion that a borrowed book is never returned. That is where he shows his superiority over the ordinary man. Nor does he glorify his books as “friends who never tire”. I would not care much for any friend who was so devoid of human qualities as not to be tiresome now and then. A companion who was always entertaining would be a cloying sort of person, and even his perfections would grow wearisome in time. The book has an advantage over a friend in this, that it may be thrown in a corner, or thrust in a cabinet, or banished to the back-rows when its allurements begin to pall, and if it experiences any sense of resentment or mortification at such a summary dismissal, it gives no outward or visible signs of dissatisfaction. Moreover books are immensely superior to human friends for they never “call one up” on the telephone, that imperious invader of peace and comfort, a modern affliction more dreadful even than the motor-cycle, that Moloch of the highways, because it has a wider field of operation. One may have some respect for the automobile, king of our roads, but for the vulgar, snorting tyrant, the degradation of a graceful, noiseless bicycle, naught but disgust and horror. No self-respecting horse can meet it without justifiable rebellion. I have found it the Juggernaut of New Jersey.

Few comprehend fully the bookishness of a book, its deserving dignity, and its peculiar sensitiveness. This man will deliberately turn down the corner of a leaf, and that man will cut the sheets with rude, iconoclastic finger or ruthlessly bend open the tender volume until its back is well-nigh broken. There ought to be a constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishments of books, for surely they are fellow-citizens of worth and as much entitled to protection as the red men of the West who have recently been added to the number of our masters, or the voluble and dagger-loving emigrant from Italy who comes to us with droves of his kind and cheerfully stabs his women or his rivals in our public streets. I shudder when I remember how often I have beheld the shocking spectacle of a Philistine actually pulling a book from the shelf by the top, or wetting his fingers as he turned the pages of a sacred first edition. But it is better not to dwell upon such harrowing subjects.

However boastful, arrogant and censorious these deliberations may appear, I protest that I am not quite as conceited as I pretend to be. The bravado is assumed. I am really humble, conscious of my limitations, and profoundly deferential towards the experts who are masters of book-history and are able to “collate”, while I am, by natural incapacity, utterly unable to share in the collation. I admire these mighty men afar off, and am devoured by envy of their learning. Let me however disclose the miserable truth that I find old Dibdin stupid, that I am dreadfully bored by the tedious catalogues given to us from time to time by some of our non-Dofobian book clubs, and that in fact I abhor all catalogues of things which I can never hope to call my own. It may be a mark of genuine Dofobery to scorn scientific book-description; it always makes me uneasy and discontented. It affects me much in the same way as the formal phrases of what the companion of my childhood, (bookishly speaking) Captain Mayne Reid, used to call “the closet naturalists”—now known as “nature fakirs”—must affect men who pursue the tremendous teddy-bear and the bodacious bob-cat in their native wilds. I am so much in love with my own few books that I would no more dream of regarding them from the cataloguer’s point of view than I would of measuring my Dulcinea’s features in order to ascertain whether or not she comes up to the standard of beauty prescribed by the dull and pedantic persons who reduce everything to formulas.

Candidly, anything hereinbefore contained to the contrary notwithstanding, I believe that in our beloved country there are more enthusiastic lovers of books than may be found in any other land. Yet, if I am not sadly mistaken, England is the paradise of Dofobs. She ought to be; she is so much older than we are; she was bookish when we were busy in building an empire and boasted more bears than books. It makes my heart palpitate when I glance over the fascinating lists of Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, and see what the libraries of the well-to-do Britons disgorge without ostentation,—treasures which make the book-lover’s soul thrill with the indescribable tremor which only a long-desired book can bring. I find myself wondering whether it will go on forever, if the resources of the innumerable “gentleman’s libraries” in England will be exhausted in our own time at least. I trust not, although I fear that the insatiable demands of American buyers may ultimately absorb the supply. I am not by any means an Anglomaniac, for our English cousins are fast becoming too socialistic for my taste, but surely their auction-sales are more attractive than ours, and what is more delectable than one of their best “book shops”? Why cannot we have such palaces of joy as those which may be found on the Strand, or in Piccadilly, or in the regions adjacent to the British Museum, or indeed in other places than London, where a Dofob may discover almost everything necessary to sate his appetite. I am affectionately reminiscent of Maggs’s. I am not trying to advertise Maggs’s; the name is not beautiful, euphonious, or seductive; it reminds one of the nomenclature of Dickens. But the shop is a dream, the managers are tactful and considerate, and there one may browse undisturbed and uninterrupted, with no sorrow but that which comes from the fact that while the prices are low when compared with ours, the purse of a plutocrat could never suffice to give us all the jewels preserved in the coffers of those polite and kindly vendors of dainties. I do not know what may be in Chicago, but in New York we have scarcely anything as alluring or as charming. Why are we denied such luxuries? When I am daring enough to enter the precincts of a New York “book-store”—it is never a “shop”—I approach the majestic salesman with fear and trembling, having already left my pocket-book with the gentle cabman. Does the nobleman lead me smilingly to a quiet recess, place a chair and a table at my disposal, and with tender solicitude submit to me the latest acquisition, the first edition, the extra-illustrated treasure, the autograph letter or manuscript which has just “come in” and has not yet been advertised or catalogued? By no means; he regards me with the same contemptuous hauteur which is displayed by the clerk of a popular hotel when I register my name and plead for “a room with bath”. I depart from the chilly halls feeling that I ought to be ashamed for having disturbed the lofty serenity of the supercilious magnate. They do these things better in France and in England: better in almost every other country as those who have had experience well know. They are content, these foreigners, with moderate profits. It is true that an American bookseller is obliged to pay higher rent and is subjected to heavier expenses because of the extravagant exactions of almost every one in this free land of ours—except, of course, the modest and diffident lawyers. Patriotism does not require one to acquiesce uncomplainingly in the exorbitant prices of our own book dealers. Let me however be fair and qualify my sweeping assertions: I know a few very decent book-vendors in New York and in Boston who want to be reasonable and are “not so bad”. I am grateful to them for many favors. In the words of Heron-Allen’s “Ballade of Olde Books”,

“I’ve haunted Brentano and John Delay,
And toyed with their stories of France so free,
At Putnam’s and Scribner’s from day to day
I’ve flirted with Saltus and Roe (E. P.):
But weary of all, I have turned with glee
To Bouton’s murk shelves with their wealth untold,
Yearning for Quaritch in Piccadilly
Where the second-hand books are bought and sold.”

This would be more accurate if some of the names were changed. I plead not guilty to Saltus and Roe, and I may perhaps be forgiven for not remembering at the moment who John Delay was or is.

Why do we allow such sordid considerations as prices to influence us in any way? Most of us Dofobs are devoid of a surplus of funds, but we value our possessions all the more because we may have had to make some sacrifices to secure them. If we were indifferent about cost, we would lose much of the pleasure of ownership. I well remember the time when I abstained from luncheon in order to buy a second-hand, shabby volume at Leggatt’s. I do not have to deny now my appetite for midday food, but whenever I come upon one of those old books in my peregrinations about the library, I have the pleasant little throb of the heart which brings back to me the ardor of youth, and those cheap treasures take to themselves a halo which transcends the brilliancy of even an illuminated missal or a noble Caxton. Those long cherished companions speak to me in eloquence scarcely to be comprehended by one who is not a Dofob to the core.

We are grateful to the kindly dealers who send to us catalogues full of temptations for those who are so ready to be tempted. With James Freeman Clarke already quoted, we repeat that “it is a pleasure even to read the description and the title”, and often like Eugene Field of blessed memory we mark the items which are too bewitching to resist as if we were going to acquire them and then either forget about them or resolve that our purse cannot afford the luxury, afterwards confident that we bought them and searching for them in vain in the entrancing regions of the book-cases.

Then what an insane joy there is in arranging the volumes, sometimes lamenting because the shelves are not exactly adapted to the association of fellow-books so that we fear that they will not be as friendly one to another as we would like to have them. If any one needs occupation for a rainy day, what more agreeable work may he find than that of assorting the books, so that not only will their sky-line be less jagged than that of lower New York, but that their contents may be of a nature to make them as sociable as they ought to be: while it must be borne in mind that the colors of their bindings should not be too glaringly inharmonious. And after all have been arranged, it is the joy of the genuine Dofob to arrange them all over again. There are times when the shelves overflow, and then comes the question of a new book-case and a still graver question as to where it shall be placed, leading to a further question about the enlargement of the house, which should be constructed on the Globe-Wernicke principle, for the main use of a house is to store books in it.

But there comes to every Dofob the thought that it will not be long before he must leave them. What is to become of them? No one will ever worship them as he has done all his life. They are interwoven with his existence and it is pitiful to think that he must be parted from them. I fear that in the world of the hereafter there may be no books, but it is not easy for me to imagine a heaven where books are not. I do not mean to be irreverent and I do not know whether I may attain even a bookless heaven, but I am unorthodox enough to own that I might prefer a bookish Hades.

IN A LIBRARY CORNER

I hate an orderly library. It has a formal air which repels familiarity; one cannot ramble in it, stroll aimlessly about it, come upon unexpected “finds”, or pluck a blossom here and there without fear of consequences. It is as devoid of charm as the stiff, uncompromising gardens of the eighteenth century which arouse ill temper by their arrogant right-angles. The card-catalogue itself is an encourager of angry passions; and glass doors are odiously inhospitable. What care I if dust accumulate? It is a blessed privilege to brush it off. What need have I of a card-index, when in hunting for what I want I may discover treasures hitherto lost to memory? When I encounter glass doors, those grudging guardians of the sanctuary, I long to fracture the panes with one mighty kick, for they are offensive with their _noli me tangere_ exclusiveness. I want my books where I need not open a door to get at them or climb a ladder to reach them.

Not that I am averse to a certain method of arrangement, or to a well-defined color-scheme in the matter of bindings. No one wishes to put a tiny 16mo by the side of a towering quarto, or to fill the lower shelves with duodecimos and the upper ones with folios; nor does any one desire to fret his eyes by massing together colors which scream at each other and disturb the peace. I would not have Petroleum V. Nasby or the Orpheus C. Kerr Papers elbowing the “voluminous pages” of Gibbon or the serious dignity of Grote; but Boswell and Trevelyan need not be aggrieved by a close proximity to such inferior productions as Collingwood’s _Life of Lewis Carroll_ or Hallam Tennyson’s disappointing Memoir of his illustrious father. “There are few duller biographies”, says Augustine Birrell, “than those written by wives, secretaries, or other domesticated creatures. Neither the purr of the hearth-rug nor the unemancipated admiration of the private secretary should be allowed to dominate a biography”. True, Trevelyan was Macaulay’s nephew, but he was barely of age when his uncle died, and had not yet been wholly “domesticated”.

It is almost needless to say that these wise utterances are not intended to apply to public libraries, those mausoleums of books, where one may “consult volumes” but never really read them; for how is it possible for anybody who is not endowed with a power of phenomenal self-absorption, to forget that the custodians, although unseen, are perpetually on guard, while the enforced silence of the place is a constant temptation, well-nigh irresistible, to arouse the echoes with defiant yells. In one of those halls of grandeur miscalled “reading rooms”, I am always reminded of “study hour” in school, and am in momentary expectation of hearing some one ask of the grim presiding functionary the old, familiar question, “Please, sir, may I go out?”

In every true library, there are sacred corners. In their cosy precincts you do not usually come upon the dress-parade volumes, imposing in their garb of polished calf or of velvety morocco, addressing you in solemn accents, reminding you of the aristocracy of their long descent, forbidding you to disturb them by casual pullings-down or thoughtless turning of their chilly pages. Their glacial aspect appals the ardent lover and freezes the founts of affection. These are seldom to be found in corners; they demand the showy places on the shelves where they may intimidate the beholder and turn him away abashed at their impressive array. They are as much shut off from the admirer’s fond touch as are the alleged crown-jewels in the Tower or the priceless manuscripts in the British Museum. My ideal library is composed chiefly of corners where one may linger in morning-jacket and slippers, and not be conscious of the need of attiring himself in the evening garments which conventionality decrees to be necessary for those who take part in stately functions. I often long to disarrange the symmetry of some “gentleman’s library”, just as when reading Johnson, or Gibbon, or Hamilton W. Mabie I have a fiendish propensity to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition.

Now if I were bent on making a foolish pretense of what is known as “good taste”, which I have no right or disposition to boast of, I would assert untruthfully, but no one could disprove it, that in these snug retreats I feast upon “The Proficience and Advancement of Learning”, or Evelyn’s Diary, or Pepys, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Elia. Every one who affects a literary “pose” is given to praising Elia; and there are few more precious books in the world. Yet if those immortal essays should appear to-day for the first time, they would have only what the newspapers style a “limited circulation”. A dinosaurus would have just as much popularity in the annual Horse Show, for they belong to the era of the stage-coach when people did not “do the Lake Country” in an escorted tour on a Hodgman car, and the Venetian gondola had not been crowded out of the Grand Canal by snorting motor-boats; when there were great men; poets, novelists, essayists, historians and statesmen. To the question, “Why have we no great men?” Mr. Chesterton rejects the answer that it is because of “advertisement, cigarette smoking, the decay of religion, the decay of agriculture, too much humanitarianism, too little humanitarianism, the fact that people are educated insufficiently, the fact that they are educated at all”. But his own answer, “We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them”, may be smart, but it is not convincing. The fact is that we do not have great men chiefly because we think we have no need of them.

The craze for equality has so possessed our minds that if one of us is presumptuous enough to thrust his head above the struggling mob that surrounds him, we set to work with one accord to pull him down, for who is he, forsooth, that he should assume to know more than we do or to be more than we are? In the days when the ignorant and the mediocre had not come to understand the might of their power, there were leaders; but however greatly they may need wise leaders now, they have become the leaders themselves and the ambitious are only astute and adroit followers. The state of the times is reflected in our literature; and as every man has arrived at the belief that he is an infallible judge upon questions of politics and of government, so he fancies that he is divinely endowed as a judge of all things literary. Thus it has come to pass that the guerdon of fame is bestowed, not upon the best book but upon the best seller. It has also come to pass that the only individual who is allowed to dominate his race is the editor of a newspaper. Great is the power of humbug; there is but one god, which is “the people”,—and the editor is his prophet. Every one from the cardinal to the curate, from the President to the postmaster, trembles before the majesty of a malicious monkey who by some mischance has contrived to get hold of a printing-press; for his penny compendium of slander and of crimes reaches the sons of manual toil who go to their work in the early morning, filled with envy of the well-to-do, grumbling at the fate which condemns them to labor while men whom they regard as no better than themselves enjoy sports and luxuries denied to them, ready to drink in the flattery addressed to them and rejoicing in the bitterest of assaults upon wealth and vested interests. No one is great to them except the crafty demagogue who ministers to their self-importance.

The mild and gentle Thomas Bailey Aldrich said in a moment of unusual irritation: “American newspapers are fearfully and wonderfully made. If about twenty thousand of them could be suppressed, the average decency of the world would be increased from twenty-five to fifty per cent.” This is no new cry; but it does not avail much to us soured old sufferers from their multitudinous lies and libels, to retire to our library corners and scold at them. In spite of our complaints, we think it a hardship if we cannot peer at them through our glasses over the matutinal coffee and enjoy their lies—about other people.

Great is the power of humbug, I repeat, with an air of imparting a new and important truth. I have just been reading—in a corner—a sketch of James Kent by Mr. James Brown Scott. He says of Charles Sumner that he, said Sumner, was “an ornament of the bar as he later was an ornament of the Senate”. But Sumner was not a real lawyer; he was not fitted for the conflicts of the bar. There is nothing like the battles of the law to take the vanity and pomposity out of a man. I do not wish to be understood as saying that there are no vain or pompous members of the legal profession, but they seldom win much respect or distinction. I doubt even if Sumner can justly be called “an ornament of the Senate”. He never _did_ anything, he never originated anything; he only “orated”, so that in a sense he may have been ornamental; surely not useful. His speeches were carefully prepared and rehearsed; he was weak in debate. If any one cares to waste time upon the speech for which he was caned by Preston Brooks, he will be amazed at the scurrility of the language and the indecency of the vituperation. It is hard to believe that a man of his stalwart frame could be permanently injured by the blows of a light stick such as the one which Brooks used that day. The assault was a wicked performance, but Washington laughed in its sleeve over the outcry which the castigated one made about it. In those days the anti-slavery speakers were hunting for martyrdom, and Sumner made the most of his beating. In course of time, he was supplanted, as a martyr, by the deified horse-thief and murderer, John Brown. When the Senator assumed to dictate to Grant, he found his well-merited fate, and he has passed into oblivion. His useful, modest, hard-working colleague, Henry Wilson, as earnest and enthusiastic an opponent of slavery as Sumner was, is far better entitled to be called “an ornament of the Senate” than his more cultured but less effective associate.

Down in a quiet corner hides an humble cloth-clad little book which scarcely any one cares for except myself, and its interest to me comes less from its mild satire than from my affection for its author. “Salander and the Dragon, by Frederick William Shelton, M.A. Rector of St. John’s Church, Huntington, N. Y.”, with its Goodman, its Duke d’Envy, its Gudneiburud, Drownthort, and all the other parodies of Bunyan’s nomenclature, makes dull reading for the present generation, and it may be that my liking for it is only a form of perverse vanity. As I glance over the faded leaves, they bring before me the gentle, scholarly Shelton, who had been my father’s class-mate at Princeton—delightfully old-fashioned in the time when I had a boyish acquaintance with him. He was quite like his books, small, decorous, with a gleam of the humorous mingled with reflective sadness. I can fancy his shudder of dismay over most of our present-day sensational, highly-colored “literature” falsely so-called. I never knew more than two persons who had ever read “Salander”. But it aroused my indignation a year or two ago to read in a flippant review published in one of our magazines, a contemptuous reference to Doctor Shelton, whose nature and whose style were too sweet and pure for the taste of the pert, feminine scribbler.

Near the unoffending duodecimo is the well-beloved “Squibob Papers”, not as good as the immortal “Phoenixiana” which George Derby’s friends induced him to publish in the middle fifties, a famous precursor of our later and more elaborate “books of American humor”. My copy is not of the issue of 1859, but one which was printed by Carleton in 1865, after the author’s death. As most people know, poor Derby, who died at thirty-eight, was an officer of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, or, in his own words, “a Topographical Engineer who constantly wears a citizen’s dress, for fear some one will find it out.” Comparing them with the Engineers, he remarked that “the Corps of Topographical Engineers was only formed in 1838, while the Engineers date from the time when Noah, sick of the sea, landed and threw up a field-work on Mount Ararat”. It was an odd training school for a humorist, but Derby did not need much training.

His “great railroad project” of “The Belvidere and Behrings’ Straits Union Railroad”, with its branches to the North Pole “to get the ice trade”, to Kamchatka “to secure the seal trade for the Calcutta market”, and to Cochin China “to secure the fowl trade”, reads very much like the prospectus of an exceedingly modern enterprise. His “Sewing Machine with Feline Attachment”, by which a cat, induced by a suspended mouse, operates the mechanism, is an ingenious device, and he records that he “has seen one cat (a tortoise-shell) of so ardent and unwearying disposition, that she made eighteen pairs of men’s pantaloons, two dozen shirts, and seven stitched shirts, before she lay down exhausted”. The Fourth of July Oration, commemorating our forefathers who “planted corn and built houses, killed the Indians, hung the Quakers and Baptists, burned the witches and were very happy and comfortable indeed, and fought the battle named ‘the battle of Bunker Hill’, on account of its not having occurred on a hill of that name”, should never be forgotten if only for the story of the boy who picked his nose on the Fourth of July because it was Independence Day. Not very refined fun, you may say, but food for laughter, and with no taint of a peculiar kind of vulgarity which mars the fun of certain more classic fooling.

Among the tenants of the corner is a cheap and shabby American edition, in two fat, awkward volumes, of my pet novel, “Ten Thousand a Year”, much pawed over and alas! dog’s eared; while the first English edition, in three volumes, (Blackwood, 1841, “original cloth”), is seldom aroused from its serene repose on a conspicuous shelf. Ten thousand pounds a year then stood for colossal wealth; and when my boyish mind first applied itself to the study of the fitful fortunes of Tittlebat Titmouse, that income still appeared to represent riches beyond the dreams of avarice. When I began the study of law, I was one day toiling over Kent’s Commentaries, and the senior partner, bluff and kindly Aaron J. Vanderpoel, came upon me suddenly, crying out “What are you reading, young man?” I confessed, with the conscious pride which one feels when detected in doing something supposed to be virtuous, that I was reading Kent. “Don’t read Kent!” he shouted, “read ‘Ten Thousand a Year’”. Perhaps his advice was good; at all events I took it, and I did not tell him that I knew it already from cover to cover.

It is the best “lawyer’s novel” ever written, even if it is full of doubtful law. For the hundredth time you will follow with eager interest the progress of the great suit of _Doe ex dem. Titmouse vs. Jolter_, and await in breathless suspense the momentous decision of Lord Widdrington upon the question of the admission of that famous deed with the erasure, however well you may know that he is sure to exclude it; a ruling undeniably wrong, but if his lordship had held otherwise the story must have come to a sudden and ignominious close at the end of the first volume. This would have been a calamity, although the Aubreys and their woes become quite fatiguing and Oily Gammon turns out to be “more kinds of a villain” than is to be met with in actual life. He deserved a different fate; he ought to have married Kate Aubrey, and lived unhappily ever afterwards. I refuse to believe that he was guilty of the meaner crimes attributed to him in the account of his dying moments; but Warren probably thought that as Gammon had to die, he might as well depart this life in the odor of perfect villainy. He, Gammon, was a liar, thief, perjurer, forger—almost a murderer; but his crowning act of infamy was to devise an elaborate method of suicide to defraud a life-insurance company. If he had lived a little longer, he might have been found giving a rebate or riding on a Third Avenue car without paying his fare.

Warren had about all the worst faults chargeable against a novelist, yet the book has life. It may not be found in the drawing room or on my lady’s table, or in the languid hands of those who continually do recline on the sunny side of transatlantic steamers, but it endures. The account of the election in which, to my secret satisfaction, Titmouse defeats Mr. Delamere, is far better than Dickens’s attempt to describe the Eatanswill contest and fully as good as Trollope’s effort in the same field. Mr. Delamere, one of those impeccable figureheads created chiefly for the purpose of providing a husband for the equally impeccable young female angel who is so transcendently pure that she blushes deeply at the mere thought of a lover, oblivious of the fact that her adored parents must at some time have surrendered shamelessly to the sway of Cupid, is almost too noble for words; and as for Charles Aubrey, did not Thackeray pronounce him to be the greatest of all snobs? But he is such a precious snob.

Yet after we leave the nobility and gentry we find an abundance of humanity in the numerous “characters” who throng the pages, particularly among the lawyers. They would be just as well off without their impossible names which give them an air of unreality. But at that time it was a favorite custom of fiction-writers to label their personages with tags, and if Dickens may be pardoned for his Verisophts and his Gradgrinds, and Thackeray for Mr. Deuceace, Warren may surely be forgiven for Quicksilver, Subtle, Tag-rag and Going-Gone; and the world will continue to apply the name of “Quirk, Gammon and Snap” to attorneys’ firms as long as we have those useful adjuncts of civilization. In my time I have known several Quirks, not a few Gammons, and many Snaps. Snap is a sort of lawyer whom only a lawyer could conceive of; and Gammon, stripped of the basest of his qualities, may be encountered a dozen times a day between the Court House and the Battery.

Not far removed from the company of Titmouse and Gammon, is “Trilby”; the copy with the autograph letter of Du Maurier to Osgood, not the elaborately bound assemblage of the original _Harper_ chapters, whose illustrations are so much more attractive than those in the later-published book, with the cancelled pages about Lorrimer and Joe Sibley which so offended the shrinking, diffident Whistler that they were remorselessly cut out—Whistler, who never hurt the feelings of a friend or learned “the gentle art of making enemies”. Then there are “The Bab Ballads”, and Lear’s “Nonsense Book,” and Alice, my Lady of Wonderland, and my Lady of Looking Glass country, whom so many adore and so many fail to comprehend. For there are myriads who, like the little Scotch lad, can see nothing in Carroll’s playful extravagances except that they contain “a great deal of feection”.

It is sad that the modern disposition to overdo everything should have so trampled upon such a delicious thing as “Trilby”; made it so common; worn it threadbare; and when it was no longer fresh, thrown it aside like a shattered toy. It is a manifestation of the childishness of the multitude which goes wild over some temporary hero and then lets him fall into the limbo of the forgotten when there are none so poor to do him reverence. There must be some magical elixir in “Pinafore”, for although thirty years have gone by since it sprang into universal favor, it still survives, is laughed at and admired, and is even quoted in after-dinner speeches. The mention of these speeches, without which no public or semi-public dinner is considered to be worth eating, brings painful reflections. We seem to be losing the art; perhaps we are approaching the heaviness and prosiness of our English cousins on such occasions. It is a melancholy thought that some reformers have introduced the plan of hearing the speeches first and devouring the dinner afterwards; and very lately diners were encouraged by the engraved announcement on the cards of invitation, that there would be “only six speeches, strictly limited to ten minutes each”. Yet, as a rule, the speakers are not burning for an opportunity to talk; they may truly say, as a beloved college president was wont to remark to a disorderly class, disturbing his lecture with horse-play, “Young men, this may be a bore to you but it is infinitely more of a bore to me.” There is difficulty in adjusting a speech to the tastes of the present-day dinner crowds; the time of the unending stream of anecdotes has passed, with its everlasting “that reminds me”, and it seems to be succeeded by an epidemic of the serious, which is not easily dealt with in the presence of a mob flushed with champagne and shrouded in tobacco-smoke. Some resort to epigram, but in fifteen minutes the epigram begins to degenerate into jerky twaddle and palls upon the jaded appetite. Now and again the orator exhibits an inclination to do what our newspapers are forever howling about—to “probe” something or somebody; but probing is always a painful operation and frequently does much more harm than good. It is not given to many to be really entertaining in discourse, so that our few entertainers are sadly overworked. This unhappy condition of affairs has brought us to the latest stage of infamy, when post-prandial talkers demand pay for their performances: and we may expect to see the day or the night, when the star of the evening will refuse to rise in his place and do his act until the pecuniary reward has been tendered to him in specie, bills, or certified cheque. Fancy the toast-master’s emotions if as he begins the familiar “We have with us to-night” he is interrupted by a cry from the hired guest, “You’re a saxpence short!”

Much unlike the books of which we have been speaking, but in its own way as attractive, is Mr. Atlay’s “Victorian Chancellors”, a collection of model biographies, of interest not only to lawyers but to lovers of history. Atlay makes no claim that his undertaking is to be regarded as a continuation of Lord Campbell’s “Lives”, and his methods are absolutely different from those of Campbell, who is amusing but so palpably unfair and often inaccurate that full faith and credit cannot be given to him. I regret that the “Lives of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court” have not been written by some competent lawyer of our time, with sufficient leisure and a taste for authorship, as fair and free from personal prejudice as Atlay’s work proves him to be. The “Lives” that have hitherto appeared are by no means satisfactory. Flanders, Van Santvoord, and Tyler, the biographer of Roger Brooke Taney, are painstaking enough and undoubtedly conscientious, but they are of the old school, dull in style, with little or no sense of historical perspective. The biographies of Jay and of Marshall are not adequate; they do not reveal the men to us with that distinctness which is necessary to hold the reader’s attention. The “Lives” of Chase are weak and flimsy. Some of the great Associate Justices might be included in the series—Story, Curtis, Nelson, Miller; and perhaps others—famous for long and faithful judicial service if not for surpassing legal ability. Somehow our modern writers are not at their best in biography; those of sufficient skill and industry, like Henry Adams and James Ford Rhodes, are led to devote themselves to general history which affords a broader field. Moreover, a Justice of the Supreme Court is not as closely identified with politics and the administration of the government as an English Chancellor usually is, and the dry technical details of the career of a mere lawyer are not tempting to the man of letters.

There is a different corner, in a darker part of the library, where one may well linger when the wind is in the east and teeth are in need of gnashing. One of the discomforts of advanced years is that you are unable to do any gnashing without inflicting more pain upon the gnasher than is actually worth while. In this corner are gathered together some of the few books which cannot be loved; wall-flowers of literature, which never made the bookman’s heart palpitate with any fond emotion.

Here let us approach with hesitation and timidity, for however dry and disagreeable a book may be, still it is a book. “Somebody loved it”. The man who evolved it, who brought it forth, who labored over it, who corrected the proofs, was pleased with it; deformed and misshapen though it may be in the eyes of others, it was beautiful to him. Moreover, much may after all be learned from the poorest of books; and the food from which I would turn in scorn, may to another be palatable. Therefore I wish it to be clearly understood that in making what are called “derogatory” remarks about any book, I am guiltless of the offence of setting up my own judgment and preference against the view and opinion of any one else whomsoever; I am merely expressing my own personal feelings. If it be asserted by some one who chances not to agree with me, that these feelings are of no importance to any one but to myself, I may reply that I admit it and that no one is obliged to read what I have written; and should he complain that he has paid “very hard cash” for my book and has a right to full consideration, I will answer, as Mr. Lang answered somebody,—that he should read Mazzini, and learn that man has no rights worth mentioning, only duties. Moreover I would say to him that if he can prove that he paid for the volume its full price, and did not pick it up at a discount in some second-hand book shop, that refuge of lame, halt and blind books, or at a bargain counter in a department store, I will cheerfully refund his money, provided he will furnish me with a sworn affidavit declaring solemnly that he sincerely admires the book which I detest. But even the omnivorous reader must like some books better than others. If, as was truly said, no cigars are bad, some are certainly more smokeable than others, and some pretty women are prettier than other pretty women. If the books I do not like were the only books in the world, I suppose that I would be fond of them as Frederick was of Ruth until he beheld the loveliness of Major-General Stanley’s numerous daughters.

One of the black sheep of my flock is called “Random Reminiscences: by Charles H. E. Brookfield”, published in 1902. The author is the son of Thackeray’s Brookfield, and his portrait shows what manner of man he must be. How any rational human being could write out or cause to be published such a flat, stale and unprofitable mess, passes understanding. The most wretched of anecdotes are retailed, and if he chances upon a fairly good one he spoils it in the telling. “I am not aware”, he says in his preface, “that I have included in this volume anything which appears to me of importance; I trust that I have not either committed the impertinence of expressing any views.” This may have been meant in a facetious way, but it is obviously so true that one is impelled to ask why on earth he wrote it. He is so proud of his pointless stories that he makes one long to go out and kill something, thus creating a counter-irritant. How can any one fail to give way to inextinguishable laughter over this final outburst of glee: “Thanks to Dr. Walther and his treatment, I put on nearly 2 stone weight in a little over two months. I was 10 stone 4 before I went, and 12 stone 2 when I left. And I am over 12 stone to-day, three years later”. From his humor I should think that he was heavier. I have been waiting patiently for a second edition to ascertain whether he has grown to any extent, but none has appeared. No wonder that he finished his autobiography with a quotation from a newspaper which said of him, on his supposed decease: “But, after all, it is at his club that he will be most missed”. Jolly dog, how he must have warmed the cockles of their hearts with his merry jests!

In the same corner with the jovial Brookfield and his “twelve stone” are gathered together the various biographies whose titles begin with “The True” or “The Real”. I confess that I have not read through “The True Thomas Jefferson”, although I am burdened with two copies, but I have ploughed through “The True Abraham Lincoln”, and found it an ordinary piece of hack-work, marred by blunders. The calm assumption which leads a writer to proclaim that he alone portrays “the true” and “the real”, as if all other accounts were false, is condemnatory at the outset. As for Jeaffreson’s lot,—“The Real Lord Byron” and “The Real Shelley”,—they are monuments of dullness, the subjects overloaded with petty details of no value to any one. Mr. John Cordy Jeaffreson, who was always publishing “Books About” something or somebody, has presented to mankind his “Recollections”, conspicuous chiefly for its covert sneers at Thackeray, whom he hated, and studied disparagement of the personal character of that giant who towered so far above Jeaffresonian pigmies. Jeaffreson’s books belong to the Sawdust School of literature. He has not even the brightness of Percy Fitzgerald, who has so long made the most of his stock in trade, a certain friendship and association with Dickens, and who in his two volumes of “Memories of an Author” is almost as bad as Jeaffreson at his best. It is true that Dickens had a personal liking for Fitzgerald, when the latter was a contributor to “All The Year Round”, but I believe that Charles Dickens the Younger not many years ago expressed some doubts as to the intimacy of the two men.

Jeaffreson was a weak and self-important person, jealous of his betters. George Somes Layard says, in his interesting “Life of Shirley Brooks”,[3] that Jeaffreson in his “Book of Recollections” wrote “with ill concealed envy of a far abler and more successful man than himself” a silly fling at Brooks concerning the name “Shirley”; and elsewhere refers to the “Recollections” as a “querulous and pawky book”. The characterization is undeniably just; plainly in accord with the opinion of the reading public; and the two pawky volumes rest peacefully in the trash corner.

In company with Jeaffreson will be found everything written by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, who, in a long life of devotion to the accumulation of miscellaneous information of doubtful value and to the parading of the name of Hazlitt, has caused a vast number of pages to be covered with typographical records of his diligence and of his unfailing capacity for making blunders. Full forty years ago he was unlucky enough to come into close contact with the keen lance of one James Russell Lowell, who riddled his editions of Webster and of Lovelace, included in John Russell Smith’s “Library of Old Authors”. Lowell wrote that “of all Mr. Smith’s editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst. He is at times positively incredible, worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is saying a good deal.”[4] Whether Hazlitt was worth flaying as Lowell flayed him, may be questioned. But Hazlitt still goes on, in his Boeotian way; always inept; sometimes so offensive that, as in the case of his “Four Generations of a Literary Family” it has been necessary to withdraw the work from circulation.[5] An example of his “foolish notions” may be seen in one of his latest books, “The Book-Collector” (1904) which has a sub-title composed of fifty-one words. Mr. Hazlitt announces the astonishing generalization that the autograph collector does not care for books or for manuscripts beyond the extent of a fly leaf or inscribed title-page, and that he is a modern and inexcusable Bagford who tears out the inscription and throws away the book. He cites the case of “a copy of Donne’s Sermons, with a brilliant portrait of the author—and a long inscription by Izaak Walton presenting the volume to his aunt. It was in the pristine English calf binding, as clean as when it left Walton’s hands _en route_ to his kinswoman, and such a delightful signature. What has become of it? It is sad even to commit to paper the story—one among many. An American gentleman acquired it, tore the portrait and leaf of inscription out, and threw the rest away”.