Chapter II: Part 2

This anecdote pleasingly illustrates the habits of the confirmed reader. Nor let the worldling sneer. Happy is the man who, in the hours of solitude and depression, can read a history of Birmingham. How terrible is the story Welbore Ellis told of Robert Walpole in his magnificent library, trying book after book, and at last, with tears in his eyes, exclaiming: 'It is all in vain: I cannot read!'

Edmund Malone, the Shakespearian commentator and first editor of _Boswell's Johnson_, was as confirmed a reader as it is possible for a book-collector to be. His own life, by Sir James Prior, is full of good things, and is not so well known as it should be. It smacks of books and bookishness.

Malone, who was an Irishman, was once, so he would have us believe, deeply engaged in politics; but he then fell in love, and the affair, for some unknown reason, ending unhappily, his interest ceased in everything, and he was driven as a last resource to books and writings. Thus are commentators made. They learn in suffering what they observe in the margin. Malone may have been driven to his pursuits, but he took to them kindly, and became a vigorous and skilful book-buyer, operating in the market both on his own behalf and on that of his Irish friends with great success.

His good fortune was enormous, and this although he had a severely restricted notion as to price. He was no reckless bidder, like Mr. Harris, late of Covent Garden, who, just because David Garrick had a fine library of old plays, was determined to have one himself at whatever cost. In Malone's opinion half a guinea was a big price for a book. As he grew older he became less careful, and in 1805, which was seven years before his death, he gave Ford, a Manchester bookseller, £25 for the Editio Princeps of _Venus and Adonis_. He already had the edition of 1596--a friend had given it him--bound up with Constable's and Daniel's Sonnets and other rarities, but he very naturally yearned after the edition of 1593. He fondly imagined Ford's copy to be unique: there he was wrong, but as he died in that belief, and only gave £25 for his treasure, who dare pity him? His copy now reposes in the Bodleian. He secured Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) and the first edition of the _Rape of Lucrece_ for two guineas, and accounted half a crown a fair average price for quarto copies of Elizabethan plays.

Malone was a truly amiable man, of private fortune and endearing habits. He lived on terms of intimacy with his brother book-collectors, and when they died attended the sale of their libraries and bid for his favourite lots, grumbling greatly if they were not knocked down to him. At Topham Beauclerk's sale in 1781, which lasted nine days, Malone bought for Lord Charlemont 'the pleasauntest workes of George Gascoigne, Esquire, with the princely pleasures at Kenilworth Castle, 1587.' He got it cheap (£1 7s.), as it wanted a few leaves, which Malone thought he had; but to his horror, when it came to be examined, it was found to want eleven more leaves than he had supposed. 'Poor Mr. Beauclerk,' he writes, 'seems never to have had his books examined or collated, otherwise he would have found out the imperfections.' Malone was far too good a book-collector to suggest a third method of discovering a book's imperfections--namely, reading it. Beauclerk's library only realized £5,011, and as the Duke of Marlborough had a mortgage upon it of £5,000, there must have been after payment of the auctioneer's charges a considerable deficit.

But Malone was more than a book-buyer, more even than a commentator: he was a member of the Literary Club, and the friend of Johnson, Reynolds, and Burke. On July 28, 1789, he went to Burke's place, the Gregories, near Beaconsfield, with Sir Joshua, Wyndham, and Mr. Courtenay, and spent three very agreeable days. The following extract from the recently published Charlemont papers has interest:

'As I walked out before breakfast with Mr. Burke, I proposed to him
to revise and enlarge his admirable book on the _Sublime and
Beautiful_, which the experience, reading, and observation of
thirty years could not but enable him to improve considerably. But
he said the train of his thoughts had gone another way, and the
whole bent of his mind turned from such subjects, and that he was
much fitter for such speculations at the time he published that
book than now.'

Between the Burke of 1758 and the Burke of 1789 there was a difference indeed, but the forcible expressions, 'the train of my thoughts' and 'the whole bent of my mind,' serve to create a new impression of the tremendous energy and fertile vigour of this amazing man. The next day the party went over to Amersham and admired Mr. Drake's trees, and listened to Sir Joshua's criticisms of Mr. Drake's pictures. This was a fortnight after the taking of the Bastille. Burke's hopes were still high. The Revolution had not yet spoilt his temper.

Amongst the Charlemont papers is an amusing tale I do not remember having ever seen before of young Philip Stanhope, the recipient of Lord Chesterfield's famous letters:

'When at Berne, where he passed some of his boyhood in company with
Harte and the excellent Mr., now Lord, Eliott (Heathfield of
Gibraltar), he was one evening invited to a party where, together
with some ladies, there happened to be a considerable number of
Bernese senators, a dignified set of elderly gentlemen,
aristocratically proud, and perfect strangers to fun. These most
potent, grave, and reverend signors were set down to whist, and
were so studiously attentive to the game, that the unlucky brat
found little difficulty in fastening to the backs of their chairs
the flowing tails of their ample periwigs and in cutting,
unobserved by them, the tyes of their breeches. This done, he left
the room, and presently re-entered crying out, "Fire! Fire!" The
affrighted burgomasters suddenly bounced up, and exhibited to the
amazed spectators their senatorial heads and backs totally deprived
of ornament or covering.'

Young Stanhope was no ordinary child. There is a completeness about this jest which proclaims it a masterpiece. One or other of its points might have occurred to anyone, but to accomplish both at once was to show real distinction.

Sir William Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield's brother, felt no surprise at his nephew's failure to acquire the graces. 'What,' said he, 'could Chesterfield expect? His mother was Dutch, he was educated at Leipsic, and his tutor was a pedant from Oxford.'

Papers which contain anecdotes of this kind carry with them their own recommendation. We hear on all sides complaints--and I hold them to be just complaints--of the abominable high prices of English books. Thirty shillings, thirty-six shillings, are common prices. The thing is too barefaced. His Majesty's Stationery Office set an excellent example. They sell an octavo volume of 460 closely but well-printed pages, provided with an excellent index, for one shilling and elevenpence. There is not much editing, but the quality of it is good.

If anyone is confined to his room, even as Johnson was when Malone found him roasting apples and reading a history of Birmingham, he cannot do better than surround himself with the publications of the Historical Manuscripts Commission; they will cost him next to nothing, tell him something new on every page, revive a host of old memories and scores of half-forgotten names, and perhaps tempt him to become a confirmed reader.

FIRST EDITIONS

This is an age of great publicity. Not only are our streets well lighted, but also our lives. The cosy nooks and corners, crannies, and dark places where, in old-fashioned days, men hugged their private vices without shamefacedness have been swept away as ruthlessly as Seven Dials. All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly, childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time--the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, and made merry over a _virtuoso's_ whim. Somebody else--Mr. Slater, I think it was--thought fit to put in a defence, and thereupon a dispute arose as to why men bought first editions dear when they could buy last editions cheap. Brutal, domineering fellows bellowed their complete indifference to Shakespeare's Quartos till timid _dilettanti_ turned pale and fled.

The fact, of course, is that in such a dispute as this there is but one thing to do--namely, to persuade the Attorney-General of the day to enter up a _nolle prosequi_, and for him who collects first editions to go on collecting. There is nothing to be serious about in the matter. It is not literature. Some of the greatest lovers of letters who have ever lived--Dr. Johnson, for example, and Thomas de Quincey and Carlyle--have cared no more for first editions than I do for Brussels sprouts. You may love Moliere with a love surpassing your love of woman without any desire to beggar yourself in Paris by purchasing early copies of the plays. You may be perfectly content to read Walton's _Lives_ in an edition of 1905, if there is one; and as for _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Gulliver_ and the _Vicar of Wakefield_--are they not eternal favourites, and just as tickling to the fancy in their nineteenth-century dress as in their eighteenth? The whole thing is but a hobby--but a paragraph in one chapter of the vast, but most agreeable, history of human folly. If John Doe is blankly indifferent to Richard Roe's Elizabethan dramatists, it is only fair to remember how sublime is Richard's contempt for John's collection of old musical instruments. If these gentlemen are wise they will discuss, when they meet, the weather, or the Death Duties, or some other extraneous subject, and leave their respective hobbies in the stable. Never mind what your hobby is--books, prints, drawings, china, scarabaei, lepidoptera--keep it to yourself and for those like-minded with you. Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless indifference. Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin--the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer madness to puff and praise your hobby, and to invite Dick, Tom, and Harry to inspect your stable: such conduct is to invite rebuff, to expose yourself to just animadversion. Keep the beast in its box. This is my first advice to the hobby-hunter.

My second piece of advice is equally important, particularly at the present time, when the world is too much with us, and it is this--never convert a taste into a trade. The moment you become a tradesman you cease to be a hobbyist. When the love of money comes in at the window the love of books runs out at the door. There has been of late years a good deal of sham book-collecting. The morals of the Stock Exchange have corrupted even the library. Sordid souls have been induced by wily second-hand booksellers to buy books for no other reason than because the price demanded was a high one. This is the very worst possible reason for buying a book. Whether it is ever wise to buy a book, as Aulus Gellius used to do, simply because it is cheap, and regardless of its condition, is a debatable point, but to buy one dear at the mere bidding of a bookseller is to debase yourself. The result of this ungodly traffic has been to enlarge for the moment the circle of book-buyers by including in it men with commercial instincts, sham hobbyists. But these impostors have been lately punished in the only way they could be punished--namely, in their pockets--by a heavy fall of prices. The stuff they were induced to buy has not, and could not, maintain its price, and the shops are now full of the volumes which, seven or ten years ago, fetched fancy sums.

If a young book-collector does but bear in mind the two bits of advice I have proffered him, he may safely be bidden godspeed and congratulated on his choice of a hobby, for it is, without a shadow of a doubt, the cheapest he could have chosen. Even without means to acquire the treasures of a Quaritch or a Pickering, he may yet derive infinite delight from the perusal of the many hundreds of catalogues that now weekly issue from the second-hand booksellers in town and country. He may write an imaginary letter, ordering the books he has previously selected from the catalogue, and then he has only to forget to post it to avoid all disagreeable consequences.

The constant turnover of old books is amazing. There seems no rest in this world even for folios and quartos. The first edition of old Burton's _Anatomy_, printed at Oxford in a small quarto in 1621, rises to the surface as a rule no less than four times a year; so, too, does Coryat's _Crudities_, hastily gobbled up in five months' travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Germany, etc., 1611. What a seething, restless place this world is, to be sure! The constant recurrence of copies of the same books is almost startling. Hardly a year passes but every book of first-rate importance and interest is knocked down to the highest bidder. No doubt there are still old libraries where, buried in dust and cobwebs, the folios and quartos lie undisturbed; but to turn the pages or examine the index of _Book Prices Current_ is to have a vision before your eyes of whole regiments of books passing and repassing across the stage amidst the loud cries of auctioneers and the bidding of booksellers.

In the auction-mart taste is pretty steady. The old favourites hold their own. Every now and again an immortal joins their ranks. Puffing and pretension may win the ear of the outside public, and extort praise from the press, but inside the rooms of a Sotheby, a Puttick, or a Hodgson, these foolish persons count for nothing, and their names are seldom heard. Were an author to turn the pages of _Book Prices Current_, he could hardly fail, as he there read the names of famous men of old, to breathe the prayer, 'May my books some day be found forming part of this great tidal wave of literature which is for ever breaking on Earth's human shores!' But the vanity of authors is endless, and their prayers are apt to be but empty things.

GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY

There were no books in Eden, and there will be none in heaven; but between times--and it is of those I speak--it is otherwise. Mr. Thomas Greenwood, in a most meritorious work on Public Libraries, supplies figures which show that, without counting pamphlets (which are books gone wrong) or manuscripts (which are books _in terrorem_), there are at this present moment upwards of 71,000,000 printed books in bindings in the several public libraries of Europe and America. To estimate the number and extent of private libraries in those countries is impossible. In many large houses there are no books at all--which is to make ignorance visible; whilst in many small houses there are, or seem to be, nothing else--which is to make knowledge inconvenient; yet as there are upwards of 280,000,000 of inhabitants of Europe and America, I cannot greatly err if a passion for round numbers drives me to the assertion that there are at least 300,000,000 books in these countries, not counting bibles and prayer-books. It is a poor show! Russia is greatly to blame, her European population of 88,000,000 being so badly provided for that it brings down the average. Were Russia left out in the cold, we might, were our books to be divided amongst our population _per capita_, rely upon having two volumes apiece. This would not afford Mr. Gosse (the title of one of whose books I have stolen) much material for gossip, particularly as his two books might easily chance to be duplicates. There are no habits of man more alien to the doctrine of the Communist than those of the collector, and there is no collector, not even that basest of them all, the Belial of his tribe, the man who collects money, whose love of private property is intenser, whose sense of the joys of ownership is keener than the book-collector's. Mr. William Morris once hinted at a good time coming, when at almost every street corner there would be a public library, where beautiful and rare books will be kept for citizens to examine. The citizen will first wash his hands in a parochial basin, and then dry them on a parochial towel, after which ritual he will walk in and stand _en queue_ until it comes to be his turn to feast his eye upon some triumph of modern or some miracle of old typography. He will then return to a bookless home proud and satisfied, tasting of the joy that is in widest commonalty spread. Alas! he will do nothing of the kind, not, at least, if he is one of those in whom the old Adam of the bookstalls still breathes. A public library must always be an abomination. To enjoy a book, you must own it. 'John Jones his book,' that is the best bookplate. I have never admired the much-talked-of bookplate of Grolier, which, in addition to his own name, bore the ridiculous advice _Et Amicorum_. Fudge! There is no evidence that Grolier ever lent any man a book with his plate in it. His collection was dispersed after his death, and then sentimentalists fell a-weeping over his supposed generosity. It would be as reasonable to commend the hospitality of a dead man because you found amongst his papers a vast number of unposted invitations to dinner upon a date he long outlived. Sentiment is seldom in place, but on a bookplate it is peculiarly odious. To paste in each book an invitation to steal it, as Grolier seems to have done, is foolish; but so also is it to invoke, as some book-plates do, curses upon the heads of all subsequent possessors--as if any man who wanted to add a volume to his collection would be deterred by such braggadocio. But this is a digression. Public libraries can never satisfy the longings of book-collectors any more than can the private libraries of other people. Whoever really cared a snap of his fingers for the contents of another man's library, unless he is known to be dying? It is a humorous spectacle to watch one book-collector exhibiting his stores to another. If the owner is a gentleman, as he usually is, he affects indifference--'A poor thing,' he seems to say, 'yet mine own'; whilst the visitor, if human, as he always is, exhibits disgust. If the volume proffered for the visitor's examination is a genuine rarity, not in his own collection, he surlily inquires how it was come by; whilst if it is no great thing, he testily expresses his astonishment it should be thought worth keeping, and this although he has the very same edition at home.

On the other hand, though actual visits to other men's libraries rarely seem to give pleasure, the perusal of the catalogues of such libraries has always been a favourite pastime of collectors; but this can be accounted for without in any way aspersing the truth of the general statement that the only books a lover of them takes pleasure in are his own.

Mr. Gosse's recent volume, _Gossip in a Library_, is a very pleasing example of the pleasure taken by a book-hunter in his own books. Just as some men and more women assume your interest in the contents of their nurseries, so Mr. Gosse seeks to win our ears as he talks to us about some of the books on his shelves. He has secured my willing attention, and is not likely to be disappointed of a considerable audience.

We live in vocal times, when small birds make melody on every bough. The old book-collectors were a taciturn race--the Bindleys, the Sykeses, the Hebers. They made their vast collections in silence; their own tastes, fancies, predilections, they concealed. They never gossiped of their libraries; their names are only preserved to us by the prices given for their books after their deaths. Bindley's copy fetched £3 10s., Sykes' £4 15s. Thus is the buyer of to-day tempted to his doom, forgetful of the fact that these great names are only quoted when the prices realized at their sales were less than those now demanded.

But solacing as is the thought of those grave, silent times, indisposed as one often is for the chirpy familiarities of this present, it is, or it ought to be, a pious, and therefore pleasant, reflection that there never was a time when more people found delight in book-hunting, or were more willing to pay for and read about their pastime than now.

Rich people may, no doubt, still be met with who think it a serious matter to buy a book if it cost more than 3s. 9d. It was recently alleged in an affidavit made by a doctor in lunacy that for a well-to-do bachelor to go into the Strand, and in the course of the same morning spend £5 in the purchase of 'old books,' was a ground for belief in his insanity and for locking him up. These, however, are but vagaries, for it is certain that the number of people who will read a book like Mr. Gosse's steadily increases. This is its justification, and it is a complete one. It can never be wrong to give pleasure. To talk about books is better than to read about them, but, as a matter of hard fact, the opportunities life affords of talking about books are very few. The mood and the company seldom coincide; when they do, it is delightful, but they seldom do.

Mr. Gosse's book ought not to be read in a fierce, nagging spirit which demands, What is the good of this? or, Who cares for that? His talk, it must be admitted, is not of masterpieces. The books he takes down are--in some instances, at all events--sad trash. Smart's poems, for example, in an edition of 1752, which does not contain the 'David,' is not a book which, viewed baldly and by itself, can be honestly described as worth reading. This remark is not prompted by jealousy, for I have the book myself, and seldom fail to find the list of subscribers interesting, for, among many other famous names, it contains those of 'Mr. Gray, Peter's College, Cambridge,' 'Mr. Samuel Richardson, editor of _Clarissa_, two books,' and 'Mr. Voltaire, Historiographer of France.' There are various Johnsons among the subscribers, but not Samuel, who apparently would liefer pray with Kit Smart than buy his poetry, thereby showing the doctor's usual piety and good sense.[A]

[Footnote A: 'He insisted on people praying with him, and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as with anyone else.']

Although the nagging spirit before referred to is to be deprecated, it is sometimes amusing to lose your temper with your own hobby. If a book-collector ever does this, he longs to silence whole libraries of bad authors. ''Tis an inglorious acquist,' says Joseph Glanvill in his famous _Vanity of Dogmatizing_--I quote from the first edition, 1661, though the second is the rarer--'to have our heads or volumes laden as were Cardinal Campeius his mules, with old and useless luggage.' ''Twas this vain idolizing of authors,' Glanvill had just before observed, 'which gave birth to that silly vanity of _impertinent citations_, and inducing authority in things neither requiring nor deserving it.' In the same strain he proceeds, 'Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an _Index_ and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's Treasure. To boast a _Memory_ (the most that these pedants can aim at) is but an humble ostentation. 'Tis better to own a Judgment, though but with a _Curta Supellex_ of coherent notions, than a _Memory_ like a sepulchre furnished with a load of broken and discarnate bones.' Thus far the fascinating Glanvill, whose mode of putting things is powerful.

There are times when the contemplation of huge libraries wearies, and when even the names of Bindley and Sykes fail to please. Dr. Johnson's library sold at Christie's for £247 9s. Let those sneer who dare. It was Johnson, not Bindley, who wrote the _Lives of the Poets_.

But, of course, no sensible man ever really quarrels with his hobby. A little petulance every now and again variegates the monotony of routine. Mr. Gosse tells us in his book that he cannot resist Restoration comedies. The bulk of them he knows to be as bad as bad can be. He admits they are not literature--whatever that may mean--but he intends to go on collecting them all the same till the inevitable hour when Death collects him. This is the true spirit; herein lies happiness, which consists in being interested in something, it does not much matter what. In this spirit let me take up Mr. Gosse's book again, and read what he has to tell about _Pharamond; or, the History of France. A Fam'd Romance. In Twelve Parts_, or about Mr. John Hopkins' collection of poems, printed by Thomas Warren for Bennet Bunbury at the Blue Anchor, in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1700. The Romance is dull, and as it occupies more than 1,100 folio pages may be pronounced tedious, and the poetry is bad, but as I do not seriously intend ever to read a line of either the Romance or the poetry, this is no great matter.

LIBRARIANS AT PLAY

No man of feeling will grudge the librarians of the universe their annual outing. Their pursuits are not indeed entirely sedentary, since at times they have to climb tall ladders, but of exercise they must always stand in need, and as for air, the exclusively bookish atmosphere is as bad for the lungs as it is for the intellectuals. In 1897 the Second International Library Conference met in London, attended several concerts, was entertained by the Marchioness of Bute and Lady Lubbock; visited Lambeth Palace and Stafford and Apsley Houses; witnessed a special performance of Irving's _Merchant of Venice_; were elected honorary members of the City Liberal, Junior Athaeneum, National Liberal, and Savage Clubs; and, generally speaking, enjoyed themselves after the methods current during that period. They also read forty-six papers, which now alone remain a stately record of their proceedings.

I have lately spent a pleasant afternoon musing over these papers. Their variety is endless, and the dispositions of mind displayed by these librarians are wide as the poles asunder. Some of them babble like babies, others are evidently austere scholars; some are gravely bent on the best methods of classifying catalogues, economizing space, and sorting borrowers' cards; others, scorning such mechanical details, bid us regard libraries, and consequently librarians, as the primary factors in human evolution. 'Where,' asks Mr. Ernest Cushing Richardson, the librarian of Princetown University, New Jersey, U.S.A., 'lies the germ of the library?' He answers his own question after the following convincing fashion: 'At the point where a definitely formed concept from another's mind is placed beside one's own idea for integration, the result being a definite new form, including the substance of both.' The pointsman who presides over this junction is the librarian.

The young woman of whom Mr. Matthews, the well-known librarian of Bristol, tells us, who, being a candidate for the post of assistant librarian, boldly pronounced Rider Haggard to be the author of the _Idylls of the King_, Southey of _The Mill on the Floss_, and Mark Twain of _Modern Painters_, undoubtedly placed her own ideas at the service of Bristol alongside the preconceived conceptions of Mr. Matthews; but she was rejected all the same.

To speak seriously, who are librarians, and whence come they in such numbers? Of Bodley's librarian we have heard, and all the lettered world honours the name of Richard Garnett, late keeper of the printed books at the British Museum. But beyond these and half a dozen others a great darkness prevails. This ignorance is well illustrated by a pleasing anecdote told at the Conference by Mr. MacAlister:

'Only the day before yesterday, on the Calais boat, I was
introduced to a world-famed military officer who, when he
understood I had some connection with the Library Association,
exclaimed: "Why, you're just the man I want! I have been anxious of
late about my man, old Atkins. You see the old boy, with a stoop,
sheltering behind the funnel. Poor old beggar! quite past his work,
but as faithful as a dog. It has just occurred to me that if you
could shove him into some snug library in the country, I'd be
awfully grateful to you. His one fault is a fondness for reading,
and so a library would be just the thing."'

The usual titled lady also turned up at the Conference. This time she was recommending her late cook for the post of librarian, alleging on her behalf the same strange trait of character--her fondness for reading. Here, of course, one recalls Mark Pattison's famous dictum, 'The librarian who reads is lost,' about which there is much to be said, both _pro_ and _con_; but we must not be put off our inquiry, which is: Who are these librarians, and whence come they? They are the custodians of the 70,000,000 printed books (be the numbers a little more or less) in the public libraries of the Western world, and they come from guarding their treasures. They deserve our friendliest consideration. If occasionally their enthusiasm provokes a smile, it is, or should be, of the kindliest. When you think of 70,000,000 books, instinctively you wish to wash your hands. Nobody knows what dust is who has not divided his time between the wine-cellar and the library. The work of classification, of indexing, of packing away, must be endless. Great men have arisen who have grappled with these huge problems. We read respectfully of Cutter's rules, which are to the librarian even as Kepler's laws to the astronomer. We have also heard of Poole's index. We bow our heads. Both Cutter and Poole are Americans. The parish of St. Pancras has just, by an overwhelming majority, declined to have a free library, and consequently a librarian. Brutish St. Pancras!

Libraries are obviously of two kinds: those intended for popular use and those meant for the scholar. The ordinary free library, in the sense of Mr. Ewart's Act of Parliament of 1850, is a popular library where a wearied population turns for distraction. Fiction plays a large part. In some libraries 80 per cent. of the books in circulation are novels. Hence Mr. Goldwin Smith's splenetic remark, 'People have no more right to novels than to theatre-tickets out of the taxes.' Quite true; no more they have--or to public gardens or to beautiful pictures or to anything save to peep through the railings and down the areas of Mr. Gradgrind's fine new house in Park Lane.

When we are considering popular libraries, it does not do to expect too much of tired human nature. This popular kind of library was well represented--perhaps a little over-represented, at the Conference. All our American cousins are not Cutters and Pooles. There was Mr. Crunden, who keeps the public library at St. Louis, U.S.A. He is all against dull text-books. As a boy he derived his inspiration from Sargent's _Standard Speaker_, and the interesting sketch he gives us of his education makes us wonder whether amidst his multitudinous reading he ever encountered Newman's marvellous description and handling of the young and over-read Mr. Brown, which is to be found under the heading 'Elementary Studies' in _Lectures and Essays on University Subjects_.

I shuddered just a little on reading in Mr. Crunden's paper of the boy who, before he was nine, had read Bulfinch's _Age of Chivalry_ and _Age of Charlemagne_, Bryant's _Translation of the 'Iliad'_, a prose translation of the _Odyssey_, Malory's _King Arthur, and several other versions of the Arthurian legend_, Prescott's _Peru and Mexico_, Macaulay's _Lays_, Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ and _Miles Standish_, the Jungle Books, and other books too numerous to mention. A famous list, but perilously long.

Mr. Crunden supports his case for varied reading by quotations from all quarters--Dr. William T. Harris, President Eliot, Professor Mackenzie, Charles Dudley Warner, Sir John Lubbock--but their scraps of wisdom or of folly do not remove my uneasiness about the digestion of the little boy who, before he was nine years old, had (not content with Malory) read several versions of the Arthurian legend!

Ladies make excellent librarians, and have tender hearts for children, and so we find a paper written by a lady librarian, entitled _Books that Children Like_. She quotes some interesting letters from children: 'I like books about ancient history and books about knights, also stories of adventure, and mostly books with a deep plot and mystery about them.' 'I do not like _Gulliver's Travels_, because I think they are silly.' 'I read _Little Men_. I did not like this book.' 'I like _Ivanhoe_, by Scott, better than any.' 'My favourite books are _Tom Sawyer_, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and _Scudder's American History_. I like Tom Sawyer because he was so jolly, Uncle Tom because he was so faithful, and Nathan Hale because he was so brave.' These are unbought verdicts no wise man will despise.

All this is popular enough. But the unpopular library must not be overlooked, for, after all, libraries are for the learned. We must not let the babes and sucklings, or the weary seamstress or badgered clerk, or even the working-man, ride rough-shod over Salmasius and Scaliger. In the papers of Mr. Garnett, Mr. Pollard, Mr. Dziatzko, Mr. Cutter, and others, the less popular and nobler side of the library is duly exhibited.

My anxiety about these librarians, who are beginning to be a profession by themselves, is how they are to be paid. That librarians must live is at least as obvious in their case as in that of any other class. They must also, if they are to be of any use, be educated. In 1878 the late Mr. Robert Harrison, who for many years led a grimy life in the London Library, advocated £250 as a minimum annual salary for a competent librarian. But, as Mr. Ogle, of Bootle, pertinently asked at the Conference, 'Are his views yet accepted?' We fear not. Mr. Ogle courageously proceeds:

'The fear of a charge of trades unionism has long kept librarians
silent, but this matter is one of public importance, and affects
educational progress. A School-Board rate of 6d. or 1s. is
willingly paid to teach our youth to read. Shall an additional 2d.
be grudged to turn that reading talent into right and safe
channels, where it may work for the public welfare and economy?'

_Festina lente_, good Mr. Ogle, I beseech you. That way fierce controversy and, it may be, disaster lies. Do not stir the Philistine within us. The British nation is still savage under the skin. It has no real love for books, libraries, or librarians. In its hidden heart it deems them all superfluous. Anger it, and it may in a fit of temper sweep you all away. The loss of our free librarians would indeed be grievous. Never again could they meet in conference and read papers full of quaint things and odd memories. What, for example, can be more amusing than Mr. Cowell's reminiscences of forty years' library work in Liverpool, of the primitive days when a youthful Dicky Sam (for so do the inhabitants of that city call themselves) mistook the _Flora of Liverpool_ for a book either about a ship or a heroine? He knows better now. And what shall we say of the Liverpool brushmaker who, at a meeting of the library committee, recited a poem in praise of woman, containing the following really magnificent line?--

'The heart that beats fondest is found in the stays.'

There is nothing in Roscoe or Mrs. Hemans (local bards) one half so fine. Long may librarians live and flourish! May their salaries increase, if not by leaps and bounds, yet in steady proportions. Yet will they do well to remember that books are not everything.

LAWYERS AT PLAY

That dreary morass, that Serbonian bog, the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, has been lately lit up as by the flickering light of a will-o'-the-wisp, by the almost simultaneous publication of an imaginary charge delivered to an equally imaginary jury by a judge of no less eminence than the late Lord Penzance (that tough Erastian) and of the still bolder _jeu d'esprit_, _A Report of the Trial of an Issue in Westminster Hall_, June 20, 1627, which is the work of the unbridled fancy of His Honour Judge Willis, late Treasurer of the Inner Temple, and a man most intimately acquainted with the literature of the seventeenth century.

Neither production of these playful lawyers, clothed though they be in the garb of judicial procedure, is in the least likely to impress the lay mind with that sense of 'impartiality' or 'indifference' which is supposed to be an attribute of justice, or, indeed, with anything save the unfitness of the machinery of an action at law for the determination of any matter which invokes the canons of criticism and demands the arbitrament of a well-informed and lively taste.

Lord Penzance, who favours the Baconians, made no pretence of impartiality, and says outright in his preface that his readers 'must not expect to find in these pages an equal and impartial leaning of the judge alternately to the case of both parties, as would, I hope, be found in any judicial summing-up of the evidence in a real judicial inquiry.' And, he adds, 'the form of a summing-up is only adopted for convenience, but it is in truth very little short of an argument for the plaintiffs, _i.e._, the Baconians.'

Why any man, judge or no judge, who wished to prepare an argument on one side of a question should think fit to cast that argument for convenience' sake in the form of a judicial summing-up of both sides is, and must remain, a puzzle.

Judge Willis, who is a Shakespearean, bold and unabashed, is not content with a mere summing-up, but, with a gravity and wealth of detail worthy of De Foe, has presented us with what purports to be a verbatim report of so much of the proceedings in a suit of Hall _v._ Russell as were concerned with the trial before a jury of the simple issue--whether William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, 'the testator in the cause of _Hall v. Russell_,' was the author of the plays in the Folio of 1623. We are favoured with the names of counsel employed, who snarl at one another with such startling verisimilitude, whilst the remarks that fall from the bench do so with such naturalness, that it is perhaps not surprising, or any very severe reflection upon his literary _esprit_, that a member of the Bar, having heard Judge Willis deliver his lecture in the Inner Temple Hall, repaired next day to the library to study at his leisure the hitherto unnoted case of _Hall v. Russell_. Ten witnesses are put in the box to prove the affirmative--that Shakespeare was the author of the plays. Mr. Blount and M. Jaggard, the publishers of the Folio, give a most satisfactory account of the somewhat crucial point--how they came by the manuscripts, with all the amendments and corrections, and pass lightly over the fact that those manuscripts had disappeared. 'Rare Ben Jonson' in the witness-box is a masterpiece of dramatic invention; he demolishes Bacon's advocate with magnificent vitality. John Selden makes a stately witness, and Francis Meres a very useful one. Generally speaking, the weakest part in these interesting proceedings is the cross-examination. I have heard the learned judge do better in old days. No witnesses are called for the Baconians, though all the writings of the great philosopher were put in for what they were worth. The Lord Chief Justice, who seems to have been a friend of Shakespeare's, sums up dead in his favour, and the jury (with whose names we are not supplied, which is a pity--Bunyan or De Foe would have given them to us), after a short absence, a quarter of an hour, return a Shakespearean verdict, which of course ought by rights to make the whole question _res judicata_.

But it has done nothing of the kind. Could we really ask Blount and Jaggard how they came by the manuscripts, and who made the corrections, and did we believe their replies, why, then a stray Baconian here and there might reluctantly abandon his strange fancy; but as _Hall v. Russell_ is Judge Willis's joke, it will convert no Baconians any more than Dean Sherlock's once celebrated _Trial of the Witnesses_ compels belief in the Resurrection.

The question in reality is a compound one. Did Shakespeare write the plays? If yes, the matter is at rest. If no--who did? If an author can be found--Bacon or anyone else--well and good. If no author can be found--Anon. wrote them--a conclusion which need terrify no one, since the plays would still remain within our reach, and William Shakespeare, apart from the plays, is very little to anybody who has not written his life.

But this is not the form the controversy has assumed. The anti-Shakespeareans are to a man Baconians, and fondly imagine that if only Will Shakespeare were put out of the way their man must step into the vacant throne. Lord Penzance in charging his jury told them that those of their number 'who had studied the writings of Bacon' and were 'keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers' would probably have 'no difficulty,' if once satisfied that the author they were seeking after was _not_ Shakespeare, in finding as a fact that he _was_ Bacon. But suppose James Spedding had been on that jury, and, rising in his place, had spoken as follows:

'My Lord,--If any man has ever studied the writings of Bacon, I
have. For twenty-five years I have done little else. If any man is
keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers, I am that man. I am
also deeply read in the plays attributed to Shakespeare, and I
think I am in a condition to say that, whoever was the real author,
it was _not_ Bacon.'

That this is exactly what Spedding would have said we know from the letter he wrote on the subject to Mr. Holmes, reprinted in _Essays and Discussions_, and it completely upsets the whole scheme of arrangement of Lord Penzance's summing-up, which proceeds on the easy footing that the more difficulties you throw in Shakespeare's path the smoother becomes Bacon's.

That there are difficulties in Shakespeare's path, some things very hard to explain, must be admitted. Lord Penzance makes the most of these. It is, indeed, a most extraordinary thing that anybody should have had the mother-wit to write the plays traditionally assigned to Shakespeare. Where did he get it from? How on earth did the plays get themselves written? Where, when, and how did the author pick up his multifarious learnings? Lord Penzance, good, honest man, is simply staggered by the extent of the play-wright's information. The plays, so he says, 'teem with erudition,' and can only have been written by someone who had the classics at his finger-ends, modern languages on the tip of his tongue--by someone who had travelled far and read deeply; and, above all, by a man who had spent at least a year in a conveyancer's chambers! And yet, when this has been said, would Lord Penzance have added that the style and character of the playwright is the style and character of a really learned man of his period! Can anything less like such a style be imagined? Once genius is granted, heaven-born genius, a mother-wit beyond the dreams of fancy, and then plain humdrum men, ordinary judicial intelligences, will do well to be on their guard against it. 'Beware--beware! he is fooling thee.' Shakespeare's genius has simply befooled Lord Penzance. Seafaring men, after reading _The Tempest_, are ready to maintain that its author must have been for at least a year before the mast. As for Shakespeare's law, which has taken in so many matter-of-fact practitioners, one can now refer to Ben Jonson's evidence in _Hall v. Russell_, where that great dramatist has no difficulty in showing that if none but a lawyer could have written Shakespeare's plays, a lawyer alone could have preached Thomas Adams's sermons. Judge Willis's profound knowledge of sound old divinity has served him here in good stead. The fact is it is simply impossible to exaggerate the quick-wittedness and light-heartedness of a great literary genius. The absorbing power, the lightning-like faculty of apprehension, the instant recognition of the uses to which any fact or fancy can be put, the infinite number and delicacy of the mental feelers, thrust out in all directions, which belong to the creative brain and keep it in tremulous and restless activity, are quite enough so to differentiate the possessor of these endowments from his fellow mortals as to make comparison impossible. Shakespeare the actor was by the common consent of his enemies one of the deftest fellows that ever made use of other men's materials--'Convey, the wise it call.' I will again quote Spedding:

'If Shakespeare was not trained as a scholar or a man of science,
neither do the works attributed to him show traces of trained
scholarship or scientific education. Given the _faculties_, you
will find that all the acquired knowledge, art, and dexterity which
the Shakespearean plays imply were easily attainable by a man who
was labouring in his vocation and had nothing else to do.'

I greatly prefer this cool judgment of a scholar deeply read in Elizabethan lore to Lord Penzance's heated and almost breathless admiration for the 'teeming erudition' of the plays.

Lord Penzance likewise displays a very creditable non-acquaintance with the disposition of authors one to another. He is quite shocked at the callousness of Shakespeare's contemporaries to Shakespeare if he were indeed the author of the Quartos which bore his name in his lifetime. But as it cannot be suggested that in, say, 1600 it was generally known that Shakespeare was not the author of these plays, it is hard to see how his contemporaries can be acquitted of indifference to his prodigious superiority over themselves. Authors, however, never take this view. Shakespeare's contemporaries thought him a mighty clever fellow and no more. Why, even Wordsworth was well persuaded he could write like Shakespeare had he been so minded. Mr. Arnold remained all his life honestly indifferent to and sceptical about the fame of both Tennyson and Browning. Great living lawyers and doctors do not invariably idolize each other, nor do the lawyers and doctors in a small way of business always speak well of those in a big way. The poets and learned critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--Dryden, Pope, Johnson--looked upon Shakespeare with an indulgent eye, as a great but irregular genius, after much the same fashion as did the old sea-dogs of Nelson's day regard the hero of Trafalgar. 'Do not criticise him too harshly,' said Lord St. Vincent; 'there can only be one Nelson.'

These are not the real difficulties, though they seem to have pressed somewhat heavily on Lord Penzance.

The circumstances attendant upon the publication of the Folio of 1623 are undoubtedly puzzling. Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving behind him more than forty plays circulating in London and more or less associated with his name. His will, a most elaborate document, does not contain a single reference to his literary life or labours. Seven years after his death the Folio appears, which contains twenty-six plays out of the odd forty just referred to, and ten extra plays which had never before been in print, and about six of which there is a very scanty Shakespearean tradition. Of the twenty-six old plays, seventeen had been printed in small Quartos, possibly surreptitiously, in Shakespeare's lifetime, but the Folio does not reprint from these Quartos, but from enlarged, amended, and enormously improved copies. Messrs. Heminge and Condell, the editor of this priceless treasure, the First Folio, wrote a long-winded dedication to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, which contains but one pertinent passage, in which they ask their readers to believe that it had been the office of the editors to collect and publish the author's 'mere writings,' he being dead, and to offer them, not 'maimed and deformed,' in surreptitious and stolen copies, but 'cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, who as he was a happie imitator of Nature was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.'

From whose custody did those 'papers' come? Where had they been all the seven years? Of what did they consist? If in truth unblotted, all the seventeen Quartos as well as the new plays must have been printed from fair manuscript copies. From whom were these unblotted copies received, and what became of them? The silence of these players is irritating and perplexing,--though, possibly, the explanation of the mystery, were it forthcoming, would be, as often happens, of the simplest. It may be that these unblotted copies were in the theatre library all the time.

Whether these interrogatories, now unanswerable, raise doubts in the mind of sufficient potency to destroy the tradition of centuries, and to prevent us from sharing the conviction of Milton, of Dryden, of Pope, and Johnson that Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare's plays must be left for individual consideration. But, however destructive these doubts may prove, they do not go a yard of the way to let in Bacon.

Once more I will quote Spedding, for he, of all the moderns, by virtue of his taste and devouring studies, is the best qualified to speak:

'Aristotle was an extraordinary man. Plato was an extraordinary
man. That two men each severally so extraordinary should have been
living at the same time in the same place was a very extraordinary
thing. But would it diminish the wonder to suppose the two to be
one? So I say of Bacon and Shakespeare. That a human being
possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should
exist is extraordinary. That a human being possessed of the
necessary faculties to make Bacon should exist is extraordinary.
That two such human beings should have been living in London at the
same time was more extraordinary still. But that one man should
have existed possessing the faculties and opportunities necessary
to make _both_ would have been the most extraordinary thing of
all' (see Spedding's _Essays and Discussions_, 1879, pp. 371, 372).

'Great writers, especially being contemporary, have many features
in common, but if they are really great writers they write
naturally, and nature is always individual. I doubt whether there
are five lines together to be found in Bacon which could be
mistaken for Shakespeare, or five lines in Shakespeare which could
be mistaken for Bacon, by one who was familiar with their several
styles and practised in such observations' (_Ibid._, p. 373).

THE NON-JURORS