Chapter IV: Part 4

Of the most famous London gardens--Marylebone, Ranelagh, and, greatest of them all, Vauxhall--Mr. Wroth writes at, of course, a becoming length. Marylebone Gardens, when at their largest, comprised about 8 acres. Beaumont Street, part of Devonshire Street and of Devonshire Place and Upper Wimpole Street, now occupy their site. Music was the main feature of Marylebone. A band played in the evening. Vocalists at different times drew crowds. Masquerades and fireworks appeared later in the history of the gardens, which usually were open three nights of the week. Dr. Johnson's turbulent behaviour, on the occasion of one of his frequent visits, will easily be remembered. Marylebone, at no period, says Mr. Wroth, attained the vogue of Ranelagh or the universal popularity of Vauxhall. In 1776 the gardens were closed, and two years later the builders began to lay out streets. Ranelagh is, perhaps, the greatest achievement of the eighteenth century. Its Rotunda, built in 1741, is compared by Mr. Wroth to the reading-room of the British Museum. No need to give its dimensions; only look at the print, and you will understand what Johnson meant when he declared that the _coup d'oeil_ of Ranelagh was the finest thing he had ever seen. The ordinary charge for admission was half a crown, which secured you tea or coffee and bread-and-butter. The gardens were usually open Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the amusements were music, tea-drinking, walking, and talking. Mr. Wroth quotes a Frenchman, who, after visiting Ranelagh in 1800, calls it 'le plus insipide lieu d'amusement que l'on ait pu imaginer,' and even hints at Dante's Purgatory. An earlier victim from Gaul thus records his experience of Ranelagh: 'On s'ennui avec de la mauvaise musique, du thé et du beurre.' So true is it that the cheerfulness you find anywhere is the cheerfulness you have brought with you. However, despite the Frenchman, good music and singing were at times to be heard at Ranelagh. The nineteenth century would have nothing to do with Ranelagh, and in 1805 it was pulled down. The site now belongs to Chelsea Hospital. Cuper's Gardens lacked the respectability of Marylebone and the style of Ranelagh, but they had their vogue during the same century. They were finely situated on the south side of the Thames opposite Somerset House. Cuper easily got altered into Cupid; and when on the death of Ephraim Evans in 1740 the business came to be carried on by his widow, a comely dame who knew a thing or two, it proved to be indeed a going concern. But the new Licensing Bill of 1752 destroyed Cupid's Garden, and Mrs. Evans was left lamenting and wholly uncompensated. Of Vauxhall Mr. Wroth treats at much length, and this part of his book is especially rich in illustrations. Every lover of Old London and old times and old prints should add Mr. Wroth's book to his library.

OLD BOOKSELLERS

There has just been a small flutter amongst those who used to be called stationers or text-writers in the good old days, before printing was, and when even Peers of the Realm (now so highly educated) could not sign their names, or, at all events, preferred not to do so--booksellers they are now styled--and the question which agitates them is discount. Having mentioned this, one naturally passes on.

No great trade has an obscurer history than the book trade. It seems to lie choked in mountains of dust which it would be suicidal to disturb. Men have lived from time to time of literary skill--Dr. Johnson was one of them--who had knowledge, extensive and peculiar, of the traditions and practices of 'the trade,' as it is proudly styled by its votaries; but nobody has ever thought it worth his while to make record of his knowledge, which accordingly perished with him, and is now irrecoverably lost.

In old days booksellers were also publishers, frequently printers, and sometimes paper-makers. Jacob Tonson not only owned Milton's _Paradise Lost_--for all time, as he fondly thought, for little did he dream of the fierce construction the House of Lords was to put upon the Copyright Act of Queen Anne--not only was Dryden's publisher, but also kept shop in Chancery Lane, and sold books across the counter. He allowed no discount, but, so we are told, 'spoke his mind upon all occasions, and flattered no one,' not even glorious John.

For a long time past the trades of bookselling and book-publishing have been carried on apart. This has doubtless rid booksellers of all the unpopularity which formerly belonged to them in their other capacity. This unpopularity is now heaped as a whole upon the publishers, who certainly need not dread the doom awaiting those of whom the world speaks well.

A tendency of the two trades to grow together again is perhaps noticeable. For my part, I wish they would. Some publishers are already booksellers, but the books they sell are usually only new books. Now it is obvious that the true bookseller sells books both old and new. Some booksellers are occasional publishers. May each usurp--or, rather, reassume--the business of the other, whilst retaining his own!

The world, it must be admitted, owes a great deal of whatever information it possesses about the professions, trades, and occupations practised and carried on in its midst to those who have failed in them. Prosperous men talk 'shop,' but seldom write it. The book that tells us most about booksellers and bookselling in bygone days is the work of a crack-brained fellow who published and sold in the reigns of Queen Anne and George I., and died in 1733 in great poverty and obscurity. I refer to John Dunton, whose _Life and Errors_ in the edition in two volumes edited by J.B. Nichols, and published in 1818, is a common book enough in the second-hand shops, and one which may be safely recommended to everyone, except, indeed, to the unfortunate man or woman who is not an adept in the art, craft, or mystery of skipping.

The book will strangely remind the reader of Amory's _Life of John Buncle_--those queer volumes to which many a reader has been sent by Hazlitt's intoxicating description of them in his _Round Table_, and a few perhaps by a shy allusion contained in one of the essays of Elia. The real John Dunton has not the boundless spirits of the fictitious John Buncle; but in their religious fervour, their passion for flirtation, their tireless egotism, and their love of character-sketching, they greatly resemble one another.

It is this last characteristic that imparts real value to Dunton's book, and makes it, despite its verbiage and tortuosity, throb with human interest. For example, he gives us a short sketch of no less than 135 then living London booksellers in this style: 'Mr. Newton is full of kindness and good-nature. He is affable and courteous in trade, and is none of those men of forty whose religion is yet to chuse, for his mind (like his looks) is serious and grave; and his neighbours tell me his understanding does not improve too fast for his practice, for he is not religious by start or sally, but is well fixed in the faith and practice of a Church of England man--and has a handsome wife into the bargain.'

Most of the 135 booksellers were good men, according to Dunton, but not all. 'Mr. Lee in Lombard Street. Such a pirate, such a cormorant was never before. Copies, books, men, shops, all was one. He held no propriety right or wrong, good or bad, till at last he began to be known; and the booksellers, not enduring so ill a man among them, spewed him out, and off he marched to Ireland, where he acted as _felonious Lee_ as he did in London. And as Lee lived a thief, so he died a hypocrite; for being asked on his death-bed if he would forgive Mr. C. (that had formerly wronged him), "Yes," said Lee, "if I die, I forgive him; but if I happen to live, I am resolved to be revenged on him."'

The Act of Union destroyed the trade of these pirates, but their felonious editions of eighteenth-century authors still abound. Mr. Gladstone, I need scarcely say, was careful in his Home Rule Bill (which was denounced by thousands who never read a line of it) to withdraw copyright from the scope of action of his proposed Dublin Parliament.

There are nearly eleven hundred brief character-sketches in Dunton's book, of all sorts and kinds, but with a preference for bookish people, divines, both of the Establishment and out of it, printers and authors. Sometimes, indeed, the description is short enough, and tells one very little. To many readers, references so curt to people of whom they never heard, and whose names are recorded nowhere else, save on their mouldering grave-stones, may seem tedious and trivial, but for others they will have a strange fascination. Here are a few examples:

'Affable _Wiggins_. His conversation is general but never
impertinent.

'The kind and golden _Venables_. He is so good a man, and so truly
charitable, he that will write of him, must still write more.

'Mr. _Bury_--my old neighbour in Redcross Street. He is a plain
honest man, sells the best coffee in all the neighbourhood, and
lives in this world like a spiritual stranger and pilgrim in a
foreign country.

'Anabaptist (alias _Elephant_) _Smith_. He was a man of great
sincerity and happy contentment in all circumstances of life.'

If an affection for passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley's poem who wept over a box labelled 'This side up,' I will shelter myself behind Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell's Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, 'of whose birth, death, and whole terrestrial _res gestae_ this only, and, strange enough, this actually, survives--"Sir, he lived in London, and hung loose upon society. _Stat_ PARVI _hominis umbra_."' On that peg Carlyle's imagination hung a whole biography.

Dunton, who was the son of the Rector of Aston Clinton, was apprenticed, about 1675, to a London bookseller. He had from the beginning a great turn both for religion and love. He, to use his own phrase, 'sat under the powerful ministry of Mr. Doolittle.' 'One Lord's day, and I remember it with sorrow, I was to hear the Rev. Mr. Doolittle, and it was then and there the beautiful Rachel Seaton gave me that fatal wound.'

The first book Dunton ever printed was by the Rev. Mr. Doolittle, and was of an eminently religious character.

'One Lord's Day (and I am very sensible of the sin) I was strolling about just as my fancy led me, and, stepping into Dr. Annesley's meeting-place--where, instead of engaging my attention to what the Doctor said, I suffered both my mind and eyes to run at random--I soon singled out a young lady that almost charmed me dead; but, having made my inquiries, I found to my sorrow she was pre-engaged.' However, Dunton was content with the elder sister, one of the three daughters of Dr. Annesley. The one he first saw became the wife of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, and the mother of John and Charles. The third daughter is said to have been married to Daniel De Foe.

As soon as he was out of his apprenticeship, Dunton set up business as a publisher and bookseller. He says grimly enough:

'A man should be well furnished with an honest policy if he intends
to set out to the world nowadays. And this is no less necessary in
a bookseller than in any other tradesman, for in that way there are
plots and counter-plots, and a whole army of hackney authors that
keep their grinders moving by the travail of their pens. These
gormandizers will eat you the very life out of a _copy_ so soon as
ever it appears, for as the times go, _Original_ and _Abridgement_
are almost reckoned as necessary as man and wife.'

The mischief to which Dunton refers was permitted by the stupidity of the judges, who refused to consider an abridgment of a book any interference with its copyright. Some learned judges have, indeed, held that an abridger is a benefactor, but as his benefactions are not his own, but another's, a shorter name might be found for him. The law on the subject is still uncertain.

Dunton proceeds: 'Printing was now the uppermost in my thoughts, and hackney authors began to ply me with _specimens_ as earnestly and with as much passion and concern as the watermen do passengers with _Oars_ and _Scullers_. I had some acquaintance with this generation in my apprenticeship, and had never any warm affection for them, in regard I always thought their great concern lay more in _how much a sheet_, than in any generous respect they bore to the _Commonwealth of Learning_; and indeed the learning itself of these gentlemen lies very often in as little room as their honesty, though they will pretend to have studied for six or seven years in the Bodleian Library, to have turned over the Fathers, and to have read and digested the whole compass both of human and ecclesiastic history, when, alas! they have never been able to understand a single page of St. Cyprian, and cannot tell you whether the Fathers lived before or after Christ.'

Yet of one of this hateful tribe Dunton is able to speak well. He declares Mr. Bradshaw to have been the best accomplished hackney author he ever met with. He pronounces his style incomparably fine. He had quarrelled with him, but none the less he writes: 'If Mr. Bradshaw is yet alive, I here declare to the world and to him that I freely forgive him what he owes, both in money and books, if he will only be so kind as to make me a visit. But I am afraid the worthy gentleman is dead, for he was wretchedly overrun with melancholy, and the very blackness of it reigned in his countenance. He had certainly performed wonders with his pen, had not his poverty pursued him and almost laid the necessity upon him to be unjust.'

All hackney authors were not poor. Some of the compilers and abridgers made what even now would be considered by popular novelists large sums. Scotsmen were very good at it. Gordon and Campbell became wealthy men. If authors had a turn for politics, Sir Robert Walpole was an excellent paymaster. Arnall, who was bred an attorney, is stated to have been paid £11,000 in four years by the Government for his pamphlets.

'Come, then, I'll comply.
Spirit of Arnall, aid me while I lie!'

It cannot have been pleasant to read this, but then Pope belonged to the opposition, and was a friend of Lord Bolingbroke, and would consequently say anything.

There is not a more interesting and artless autobiography to be read than William Hutton's, the famous bookseller and historian of Birmingham. Hutton has been somewhat absurdly called the English Franklin. He is not in the least like Franklin. He has none of Franklin's supreme literary skill, and he was a loving, generous, and tender-hearted man, which Franklin certainly was not. Hutton's first visit to London was paid in 1749. He walked up from Nottingham, spent three days in London, and then walked back to Nottingham. The jaunt, if such an expression is applicable, cost him eleven shillings less fourpence. Yet he paid his way. The only money he spent to gain admission to public places was a penny to see Bedlam.

Interesting, however, as is Hutton's book, it tells us next to nothing about book-selling, except that in his hands it was a prosperous undertaking.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT COPYRIGHT IN BOOKS

Copyright, which is the exclusive liberty reserved to an author and his assigns of printing or otherwise multiplying copies of his book during certain fixed periods of time, is a right of modern origin.

There is nothing about copyright in Justinian's compilations.

It is a mistake to suppose that books did not circulate freely in the era of manuscripts. St. Augustine was one of the most popular authors that ever lived. His _City of God_ ran over Europe after a fashion impossible to-day. Thousands of busy hands were employed, year out and year in, making copies for sale of this famous treatise. Yet Augustine had never heard of copyright, and never received a royalty on sales in his life.

The word 'copyright' is of purely English origin, and came into existence as follows:

The Stationers' Company was founded by royal charter in 1556, and from the beginning has kept register-books, wherein, first, by decrees of the Star Chamber, afterwards by orders of the Houses of Parliament, and finally by Act of Parliament, the titles of all publications and reprints have had to be entered prior to publication.

None but booksellers, as publishers were then content to be called, were members of the Stationers' Company, and by the usage of the Company no entries could be made in their register-books except in the names of members, and thereupon the book referred to in the entry became the 'copy' of the member or members who had caused it to be registered.

By virtue of this registration the book became, in the opinion of the Stationers' Company, the property _in perpetuity_ of the member or members who had effected the registration. This was the 'right' of the stationer to his 'copy.'

Copyright at first is therefore not an author's, but a bookseller's copyright. The author had no part or lot in it unless he chanced to be both an author and a bookseller, an unusual combination in early days. The author took his manuscript to a member of the Stationers' Company, and made the best bargain he could for himself. The stationer, if terms were arrived at, carried off the manuscript to his Company and registered the title in the books, and thereupon became, in his opinion, and in that of his Company, the owner, at common law, in perpetuity of his 'copy.'

The stationers, having complete control over their register-books, made what entries they chose, and all kinds of books, even Homer and the Classics, became the 'property' of its members. The booksellers, nearly all Londoners, respected each other's 'copies,' and jealously guarded access to their registers. From time to time there were sales by auction of a bookseller's 'copies,' but the public--that is, the country booksellers, for there were no other likely buyers--were excluded from the sale-room. A great monopoly was thus created and maintained by the trade. There was never any examination of title to a bookseller's copy. Every book of repute was supposed to have a bookseller for its owner. Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ was Mr. Ponder's copy, Milton's _Paradise Lost_ Mr. Tonson's copy, _The Whole Duty of Man_ Mr. Eyre's copy, and so on. The thing was a corrupt and illegal trade combination.

The expiration of the Licensing Act, and the consequent cessation of the penalties it inflicted upon unlicensed printing, exposed the proprietors of 'copies' to an invasion of their rights, real or supposed, and in 1703, and again in 1706 and 1709, they applied to Parliament for a Bill to protect them against the 'ruin' with which they alleged themselves to be threatened.[A]

[Footnote A: What the booksellers wanted was not to be left to their common law remedy--_i.e._, an action of trespass on the case--but to be supplied with penalties for infringement, and especially with the right to seize and burn unauthorized editions.]

In 1710 they got what they asked for in the shape of the famous Statute of Queen Anne, the first copyright law in the world. A truly English measure, ill considered and ill drawn, which did the very last thing it was meant to do--viz., destroy the property it was intended to protect.

By this Act, in which the 'author' first makes his appearance actually in front of the 'proprietor,' it was provided that, _in case of new books_, the author and his assigns should have the sole right of printing them for fourteen years, and if at the end of that time the author was still alive, a second term of fourteen years was conceded. In the case of _existing books_, there was to be but one term--viz., twenty-one years, from August 10, 1710.

Registration at the Stationers' Company was still required, but nothing was said as to who might make the entries, or into whose names they were to be made.

Then followed the desired penalties for infringement. The booksellers thought the terms of years meant no more than that the penalties were to be limited by way of experiment to those periods.

Many years flew by before the Stationers' Company discovered the mischief wrought by the statute they had themselves promoted. To cut a long matter short, it was not until 1774 that the House of Lords decided that, whether there ever had been a perpetuity in literary property at common law or not, it was destroyed by the Act of Queen Anne, and that from and after the passing of that law neither author, assignee, nor proprietor of 'copy' had any exclusive right of multiplication, save for and during the periods of time the statute created.

It was a splendid fight--a Thirty Years' War. Great lawyers were fee'd in it; luminous and lengthy judgments were delivered. Mansfield was a booksellers' man; Thurlow ridiculed the pretensions of the Trade. It can be read about in _Boswell's Johnson_ and in Campbell's _Lives of the Lord Chancellors_. The authors stood supinely by, not contributing a farthing towards the expenses. It was a booksellers' battle, and the booksellers were beaten, as they deserved to be.

All this is past history, in which the modern money-loving, motoring author takes scant pleasure. Things are on a different footing now. The Act of 1842 has extended the statutory periods of protection. The perpetuity craze is over. A right in perpetuity to reprint Frank Fustian's novel or Tom Tatter's poem would not add a penny to the present value of the copyright of either of those productions. In business short views must prevail. An author cannot expect to raise money on his hope of immortality. Milton's publisher, good Mr. Symonds, probably thought, if he thought about it at all, that he was buying _Paradise Lost_ for ever when he registered it as his 'copy' in the books of his Company; but into the calculations he made to discover how much he could afford to give the author posterity did not and could not enter. How was Symonds to know that Milton's fame was to outlive Cleveland's or Flatman's?

How many of the books published in 1905 would have any copyright cash value in A.D. 2000? I do not pause for a reply.

The modern author need have no quarrel with the statutory periods fixed by the Act of 1842,[A] though common-sense has long since suggested that a single term, the author's life and thirty or forty years after, should be substituted for the alternative periods named in the Act.

[Footnote A: Author's life _plus_ seven years, or forty-two years from date of publication, whichever term is the longer. The great objection to the second term is that an author's books go out of copyright at different dates, and the earlier editions go out first.]

What the modern author alone desiderates is a big, immediate, and protected market.

The United States of America have been a great disappointment to many an honest British author. In the wicked old days when the States took British books without paying for them they used to take them in large numbers, but now that they have turned honest and passed a law allowing the British author copyright on certain terms, they have in great measure ceased to take; for, by the strangest of coincidences, no sooner were British novels, histories, essays, and the like, protected in America, than there sprang up in the States themselves, novelists, historians, and essayists, not only numerous enough to supply their own home markets, but talented enough to cross the Atlantic in large numbers and challenge us in our own. Such a reward for honesty was not contemplated.

International copyright and the Convention of Berne are things to be proud of and rejoice over. As the first chapter in a Code of Public European Law, they may mark the beginning of a time of settled peace, order, and disarmament, but they have not yet enriched a single author, though hereafter possibly an occasional novelist or play-wright may prosper greatly under their provisions.

The copyright question is now at last really a settled question, save in a single aspect of it. What, if anything, should be done in the case of those authors, few in number, whose literary lives prove longer than the period of statutory protection? Should any distinction in law be struck between a Tennyson and a Tupper? between--But why multiply examples? There is no need to be unnecessarily offensive.

The law and practice of to-day give the meat that remains on the bones of the dead author after the expiration of the statutory period of protection to the Trade. Any publisher who likes to bring out an edition can do so, though by doing so he does not gain any exclusive rights. A brother publisher may compete with him. As a result the public is usually well served with cheap editions of those non-copyright authors whose works are worth reprinting the moment the copyright expires.

Some lovers of justice, however, think that it is unnecessary all at once to endow the Trade with these windfalls, and that if an author's family, or his or their assignees, were prepared to publish cheap editions immediately after the expiration of the usual period of protection, they ought to be allowed to do so for a further period of, say, forty years. If they failed within a reasonable time either to do so themselves or to arrange for others to do so, this extended period should lapse.

Were this to be the law nobody could say that it was unfair; but it is never likely to be the law. It would take time for discussion, and now there is no time left in which to discuss anything in Parliament. A much-needed Copyright Bill has been in draft for years, has been mentioned in Queen's and King's speeches, but it has never been read even a first time. If it ever is read a first time, its only chance of becoming law will be if it is taken in a lump, as it stands, without consideration or amendment. To such a pass has legislation been reduced in this country!

This draft Bill does not contain any provision for specially protecting the families of authors whose works long outlive their mortal lives. It makes no invidious distinctions. It leaves all the authors to hang together, the quick and the dead. Perhaps this is the better way.

HANNAH MORE ONCE MORE

I have been told by more than one correspondent, and not always in words of urbanity, that I owe an apology to the manes of Miss Hannah More, whose works I once purchased in nineteen volumes for 8s. 6d., and about whom in consequence I wrote a page some ten years ago.[A]

[Footnote A: See _Collected Essays_, ii. 255.]

To be accused of rudeness to a lady who exchanged witticisms with Dr. Johnson, soothed the widowed heart of Mrs. Garrick, directed the early studies of Macaulay, and in the spring of 1815 presented a small copy of her _Sacred Dramas_ to Mr. Gladstone, is no light matter. To libel the dead is, I know, not actionable--indeed, it is impossible; but evil-speaking, lying, and slandering are canonical offences from which the obligation to refrain knows no limits of time or place.

I have often felt uneasy on this score, and never had the courage, until this very evening, to read over again what in the irritation of the moment I had been tempted to say about Miss Hannah More, after the outlay upon her writings already mentioned. Eight shillings and sixpence is, indeed, no great sum, but nineteen octavo volumes are a good many books. Yet Richardson is in nineteen volumes in Mangin's edition, and Swift is in nineteen volumes in Scott's edition, and glorious John Dryden lacks but a volume to make a third example. True enough; yet it will, I think, be granted me that you must be very fond of an author, male or female, if nineteen octavo volumes, all his or hers, are not a little irritating and provocative of temper. Think of the room they take! As for selling them, it is not so easy to sell nineteen volumes of a stone-dead author, particularly if you live three miles from a railway-station and do not keep a trap. Elia, the gentle Elia, as it is the idiotic fashion to call a writer who could handle his 'maulies' in a fray as well as Hazlitt himself, has told us how he could never see well-bound books he did not care about, but he longed to strip them so that he might warm his ragged veterans in their spoils. My copy of _Hannah More_ was in full calf, but never once did it occur to me--though I, too, have many a poor author with hardly a shirt to his back shivering in the dark corners of the library--to strip her of her warm clothing. And yet I had to do something, and quickly too, for sorely needed was Miss More's shelf. So I buried the nineteen volumes in the garden. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' said I cheerfully, stamping them down.

This has hardly proved to be the case, for though Hannah More is incapable of a literary resurrection, and no one of her nineteen volumes has ever haunted my pillow, exclaiming,

'Think how thou stab'dst me in my prime of youth,'

nevertheless, I have not been able to get quite rid of an uneasy feeling that I was rude to her ten years ago in print--not, indeed, so rude as was her revered friend Dr. Johnson 126 years ago to her face; but then, I have not the courage to creep under the gabardine of our great Moralist.

When, accordingly, I saw on the counters of the trade the daintiest of volumes, hailing, too, from the United States, entitled _Hannah More_,[A] and perceived that it was a short biography and appreciation of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at last come. I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read, determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.

[Footnote A: _Hannah More_, by Marian Harland. New York and London: G.P. Putnam.]

Miss Harland's preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to 'bound sermons and semi-detached tracts,' was enlivened by the _Works of Hannah More_. She proceeds as follows:

'At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set
of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by
the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the
dear old home library.... The leaves of the book I held fell apart
at _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_.'

I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words made me:

'The usher took six hasty strides
As smit with sudden pain.'

I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding, their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.

Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of Charlotte Brontë's mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ might have grown up more like Hannah More than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home library, I might have read _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ and _The Search after Happiness_ of a Sunday, and found solace therein. But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with the _Pilgrim's Progress_, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained page of Mrs. Sherwood's _Tales from the Church Catechism_, and, 'more curious sport than that,' the _Bible in Spain_ of the never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.

What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland's enthusiasm for Hannah More's writings is that it expires with the preface. _There_, indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:

'And _The Search after Happiness!_ You cannot have forgotten all of
the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the
joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every
few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals
flung down by the warm wind.'

This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in _The Search after Happiness_, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head:

'As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words--
All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.'

Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous _Pauline_. The same note is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the following simple strain of William Allingham:

'Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears!'

If this be so--and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that so it is?--it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More's books, and from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting. Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to say nothing of a reader.

'Such books as Miss More's,' she says, 'would to-day in America fall from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion, creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a bubble in mid-Atlantic.'

And again:

'That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest contemporaries.'

However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude to this excellent lady.

I confess I never liked her love story. Anything more cold-blooded I never read. I am not going to repeat it. Why should I? It is told at length in Miss More's authorized biography in four volumes by William Roberts, Esq. I saw a copy yesterday exposed for sale in New Oxford Street, price 1s. Miss Harland also tells the tale, not without chuckling. I refer the curious to her pages.

Then there are those who can never get rid of the impression that Hannah More 'fagged' her four sisters mercilessly; but who can tell? Some people like being fagged.

Precisely _when_ Miss More bade farewell to what in later life she was fond of calling her gay days, when she wrote dull plays and went to stupid Sunday parties, one finds it hard to discover, but at no time did it ever come home to her that she needed repentance herself. She seems always thinking of the sins and shortcomings of her neighbours, rich and poor. Sometimes, indeed, when deluged with flattery, she would intimate that she was a miserable sinner, but that is not what I mean. She concerned herself greatly with the manners of the great, and deplored their cards and fashionable falsehoods. John Newton, captain as he had been of a slaver, saw the futility of such pin-pricks:

'The fashionable world,' so he wrote to Miss More, 'by their numbers form a phalanx not easily impressible, and their habits of life are as armour of proof which renders them not easily vulnerable. Neither the rude club of a boisterous Reformer nor the pointed, delicate weapons of the authoress before me can overthrow or rout them.'

But Miss More never forgot to lecture the rich or to patronize the poor.

_Coelebs in Search of a Wife_ is an impossible book, and I do not believe Miss Harland has read it; but as for the famous _Shepherd_, we are never allowed to forget how Mr. Wilberforce declared a few years before his death, to the admiration of the religious world, that he would rather present himself in heaven with _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ in his hand than with--what think you?--_Peveril of the Peak_! The bare notion of such a proceeding on anybody's part is enough to strike one dumb with what would be horror, did not amazement swallow up every other feeling. What rank Arminianism! I am sure the last notion that ever would have entered the head of Sir Walter was to take _Peveril_ to heaven.

But whatever may be thought of the respective merits of Miss More's nineteen volumes and Sir Walter's ninety-eight, there is no doubt that Barley Wood was as much infested with visitors as ever was Abbotsford. Eighty a week!

'From twelve o'clock until three each day a constant stream of carriages and pedestrians filled the evergreen bordered avenue leading from the Wrington village road.'

Among them came Lady Gladstone and W.E.G., aged six, the latter carrying away with him the _Sacred Dramas_, to be preserved during a long life.

Miss More was a vivacious and agreeable talker, who certainly failed to do herself justice with her pen. Her health was never good, yet, as she survived thirty-five of her prescribing physicians, her vitality must have been great. Her face in Opie's portrait is very pleasant. If I was rude to her ten years ago, I apologize and withdraw; but as for her books, I shall leave them where they are--buried in a cliff facing due north, with nothing between them and the Pole but leagues upon leagues of a wind-swept ocean.

ARTHUR YOUNG

The name of Arthur Young is a familiar one to all readers of that history which begins with the forebodings of the French Revolution. Thousands of us learnt to be interested in him as the 'good Arthur,' 'the excellent Arthur,' of Thomas Carlyle, a writer who had the art of making not only his own narrative, but the sources of it, attractive. Even 'Carrion-Heath,' in the famous introductory chapter to the _Cromwell_, is invested with a kind of charm, whilst in the stormy firmament of the _French Revolution_ the star of Arthur Young twinkles with a mild effulgency. The autobiography of such a man could hardly fail to be interesting.[A] The 'good Arthur' was born in 1741, the younger son of a small 'squarson' who inherited from his father the manor of Bradfield Combust, in Suffolk, but held the living of Thames Ditton. Here he made the acquaintance of the Onslow family, and Speaker Onslow was one of Arthur's godfathers. The Rev. Dr. Young died in 1759, much in debt. The Bradfield property had been settled for life on his wife, who had brought her husband some fortune, and to the manor-house she retired to economize.

[Footnote A: _The Autobiography of Arthur Young_. Edited by M. Betham Edwards. Smith, Elder and Co.]

Arthur's education had been muddled; and an attempt to make a merchant of him having fallen through, he found himself, on his father's death, aged eighteen, 'without education, profession, or employment,' and his whole fortune, during his mother's life, consisting of a copyhold farm of 20 acres, producing as many pounds. In these circumstances, to think of literature was well-nigh inevitable, and, in 1762, the autobiography tells us:

'I set on foot a periodical publication, entitled the _Universal
Museum_, which came out monthly, printed with glorious imprudence
on my own account. I waited on Dr. Johnson, who was sitting by the
fire so half-dressed and slovenly a figure as to make me stare at
him. I stated my plan, and begged that he would favour me with a
paper once a month, offering at the same time any remuneration that
he might name.'

Here we see dimly prefigured a modern editor prematurely soliciting the support of Great Names. But the Cham of literature, himself the son of a bookseller, would have none of it.

'"No, sir," he replied; "such a work would be sure to fail if the
booksellers have not the property, and you will lose a great deal
of money by it."

'"Certainly, sir," I said, "if I am not fortunate enough to induce
authors of real talent to contribute."

'"No, sir, you are mistaken; such authors will not support such a
work, nor will you persuade them to write in it. You will purchase
disappointment by the loss of your money, and I advise you by all
means to give up the plan."

'Somebody was introduced, and I took my leave.'

The _Universal Museum_, none the less, appeared, but after five numbers Young 'procured a meeting of ten or a dozen booksellers, and had the luck and address to persuade them to take the whole scheme upon themselves.' He then calmly adds, 'I believe no success ever attended it.' It was, indeed, 100 years before its time. Literature abandoned, Young took one of his mother's farms. 'I had no more idea of farming than of physic or divinity,' nor did he, man of European reputation as a farmer though he soon became, ever make farming pay. He had an itching pen, and after four years' farming (1763-1766) he published the result of his experience. Never, surely, before has an author spoken of his first-born as in the autobiography Young speaks of this publication:

'And the circumstance which perhaps of all others in my life I
most deeply regretted and considered as a sin of the blackest dye
was the publishing of my experience during these four years,
which, speaking as a farmer, was nothing but ignorance, folly,
presumption, and rascality.'

None the less, it was writing this rascally book that seems to have given him the idea of those agricultural tours which were to make his name famous throughout the world. His Southern tour was in 1767, his Northern in 1768, and his Eastern in 1770. The subject he specially illuminated in these epoch-making books was the rotation of crops, though he occasionally diverged upon deep-ploughing and kindred themes. The tours excited, for the first time, the agricultural spirit of Great Britain, and their author almost at once became a celebrated man.

In 1765 Young married the wrong woman, and started upon a career of profound matrimonial discomfort, and even misery; a blunt, truthful writer, he makes no bones about it. It was an unhappy marriage from its beginning in 1765 to its end in 1815. Young himself, though by no means vivacious in this autobiography, where he frankly complains of himself as having no more wit than a fig, was a very popular person with all classes and both sexes. He was an enormous diner-out, and his authority as an agriculturist, united to his undeniable charm as a companion, threw open to him all the great places in the country. But his finances were a perpetual trouble. On carrot seeds and cabbages he was an authority, but from 1766-1775 his income never exceeded £300 a year. He had an excellent mother, whom he dearly loved, and who with the characteristic bluntness of the family bade him think less about carrots and more about his Creator. 'You may call all this rubbish if you please, but a time will come when you will be convinced whose notions are rubbish, yours or mine.' And the old lady was quite right, as mothers so frequently turn out to be. In 1778 Young went over to Ireland as agent to Lord Kingsborough. He got £500 down, and was to have an annual salary of £500 and a house. Young soon got to work, and became anxious to persuade his employer to let his lands direct to the occupying cottar, and so get rid of the middlemen. This did not suit a certain Major Thornhill, a relative and leaseholder, and thereupon a pretty plot was hatched. Lady K. had a Catholic governess, a Miss Crosby, upon whom it was thought my lord occasionally cast the eye of partiality, whilst Arthur himself got on very well with her ladyship, who was heard to pronounce him to be, as he was, 'one of the most lively, agreeable fellows.' Out of these materials the Major and his helpmeet concocted a double plot--namely, to make the lord jealous of the steward, and the lady jealous of the governess, and to cause both lord and lady respectively to believe that the steward was deeply engaged both in abetting the amour of the lord and the governess, and in prosecuting his own amour with the lady. The result was that both governess and steward got notice to quit; but--and this is very Irish--both went off with life annuities, the governess with one of £50 per annum, and the steward with one of £72, and, what is still more odd, we find Young at the end of his life in receipt of his annuity. They were an expensive couple, these two.

In 1780 Young published his _Irish Tour_, which was immediately successful and popular in both kingdoms. In it he attacked the bounty paid on the land-carriage of corn to Dublin. The bounty was, in the session of Parliament next after the publication of Young's book, reduced by one-half, and soon given up entirely. Young maintains that this saved Ireland £80,000 a year. Nobody seems to have said 'Thank you.'

In May, 1783, was born the child 'Bobbin,' whose death, fourteen years later, was to change the current of Young's life. The following year Arthur Young paid his first visit to France, confining himself, however, to Calais and its neighbourhood, and in the same year his mother died, and, by an arrangement with his eldest brother, 'this patch of landed property,' as Young calls Bradfield, descended upon him. His first famous journey in France was made between May and November, 1787, and cost the marvellously small sum of £118 15s. 2d. His second and third French journeys were made in July, 1788, and in June, 1789. The third was the longest, and extended into 1790. Three years later Young was appointed, by Pitt, Secretary of the then Board of Agriculture. A melancholy account is given by Young of a visit he paid Burke at Gregory's in 1796. Young drove there in the chariot of his fussy chief, Sir John Sinclair, to discover what Burke's intentions might be as to an intended publication of his relating to the price of labour. The account, which occupies four pages, is too long for quotation. It concludes thus:

'I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the man who I
hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant gifts of any penman
of the age in which he lived. Whose conversation has often
fascinated me, whose eloquence has charmed; whose writings have
delighted and instructed the world; whose name will without
question descend to the latest posterity. But to behold so great a
genius, so deepened with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of
body, feeling the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to the
grave under accumulated misery--to see all this in a character I
venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded
every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost as
low-spirited as himself.'

But Young himself was soon to pass into the same Valley of the Shadow, not so much of Death as of Joyless Life. His beloved and idolized Bobbin died on July 14, 1797. She seems to have been a wise little maiden, to whom her father wrote most affectionate letters, full of rather unsuitable details, political and financial and otherwise, and not scrupling to speak of the child's mother in a disagreeable manner. Bobbin replies with delightful composure to these worrying letters:

'I have just got six of the most beautiful little rabbits you ever
saw; they skip about so prettily you can't think, and I shall have
some more in a few weeks. Having had so much physic, I am right
down tired of it. I take it still twice a day--my appetite is
better. What can you mind politics so for? I don't think about
them.--Well, good-bye, and believe me, dear papa, your dutiful
Daughter.'

After poor little Bobbin's death, it happened to Arthur Young even as his mother foretold. Carrots and crops and farming tours hastily retreat, and we find the eminent agriculturist busying himself, with the same seriousness and good faith he had devoted to the rotation of the crops, with the sermons and treatises of Clarke and Jortin and Secker and Tillotson, etc., and all to discover what had become of his dear little Bobbin. His outlook upon the world was changed--the great parties at Petworth, at Euston, at Woburn struck him differently; the huge irreligion of the world filled him as for the first time with amazement and horror:

'How few years are passed since I should have pushed on eagerly to
Woburn! This time twelve months I dined with the Duke on
Sunday--the party not very numerous, but chiefly of rank--the
entertainment more splendid than usual there. He expects me to-day,
but I have more pleasure in resting, going twice to church, and
eating a morsel of cold lamb at a very humble inn, than partaking
of gaiety and dissipation at a great table which might as well be
spread for a company of heathens as English lords and men of
fashion.'

It is all mighty fine calling this religious hypochondria and depression of spirits. It is one of the facts of life. Young stuck to his post, and did his work, and quarrelled with his wife to the end, or nearly so. He cannot have been so lively and agreeable a companion as of old, for we find him in November, 1806, at Euston, endeavouring to impress on the Duke of Grafton that by his tenets he had placed himself entirely under the covenant of works, and that he must be tried for them, and that 'I would not be in such a situation for ten thousand worlds. He was mild and more patient than I expected.' Perhaps, after all, Carlyle was not so far wrong when he praised our aristocracy for their 'politeness.' In 1808 Young became blind. In 1815 his wife died. In 1820 he died himself, leaving behind him seven packets of manuscript and twelve folio volumes of correspondence.

Young's great work, _Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789, undertaken more particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France_, published in 1792, is one of those books which will always be a great favourite with somebody. It will outlive eloquence and outstay philosophy. It contains some famous passages.

THOMAS PAINE

Proverbs are said to be but half-truths, but 'give a dog a bad name and hang him' is a saying almost as veracious as it is felicitous; and to no one can it possibly be applied with greater force than to Thomas Paine, the rebellious staymaker, the bankrupt tobacconist, the amazing author of _Common-sense_, _The Rights of Man_, and _The Age of Reason_.

Until quite recently Tom Paine lay without the pale of toleration. No circle of liberality was constructed wide enough to include him. Even the scouted Unitarian scouted Thomas. He was 'the infamous Paine,' 'the vulgar atheist.' Whenever mentioned in pious discourse it was but to be waved on one side as thus: 'No one of my hearers is likely to be led astray by the scurrilous blasphemies of Paine.'

I can well remember when an asserted intimacy with the writings of Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him in children's minds with a horrid fascination. The writings themselves were only to be seen in bookshops of evil reputation, and, when hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in small type and on villainous paper. For a boy to have bought them and taken them inside a decent home would have been to run the risk of fierce wrath in this life and the threat of it in the next. If ever there was a hung dog, his name was Tom Paine.