Chapter VII: Part 7

Of Greek, it is probable that Herrick's knowledge was only slight. There is even some slight reason to believe that his acquaintance with Greek authors was mainly derived from Latin translations. 'The Cruel Maid' is a very close imitation of part of the twenty-third Idyll of Theocritus; the only other Greek poetry which plays a serious part in his verse is the pseudo-Anacreon. To the collection of sportive poems, whose very slightness is their charm, which passed under Anacreon's name, Herrick's obligations are really immense. It is not only that several of his most charming poems--'The Cheat of Cupid,' 'The Wounded Cupid,' 'On Himself,' 'Upon His Grey Hairs,' etc.--are directly translated or closely imitated from the Greek; but we feel in the case of these lyrics that they really helped the development of Herrick's own gifts in a way in which none of his Latin storehouses even approached. Thus it would be easy to make out a fairly long list of poems, in which he comes so close to the spirit of 'Anacreon' that the curious student of such matters is sent hunting through the pages of his Bergk in a vain search for originals which never existed.

Herrick went late to the University, and, despite the extreme propriety of the language as to his reading which we find in his letters to his goldsmith-uncle when he was in need of a remittance, it is difficult to believe that he was ever a very earnest or laborious student. Thus the list of authors from whom he borrowed comes rather as a surprise. It is probable that a little discount must be taken off the amount of erudition with which it might incline us to credit him. His poems make it absolutely certain that he was steeped in the works of Ben Jonson and well acquainted with Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' and the Essays of Montaigne. Now Jonson, Burton, and Montaigne, as it is hardly necessary to remark, all three drew inspiration from the classics, and it would not be difficult to prove that at times Herrick's quotations came to him filtered through these authors, and not directly from the fountain head. This helps us to understand some excursions of the poet which seem unusually far afield. For instance, there can be no doubt that the ultimate original of Herrick's--

'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying'--

is from Ausonius (361, ll. 49-50):--

'Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus, et nova pubes,
Et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.'

But how came Herrick to be reading an author so little known? The probable answer is that he found the lines in Burton (III. ii. s. sec. 5), where they are quoted with the gloss:--

'A virgin is like a flower, a rose withered on a sudden. Let them
take time then while they may, make advantage of youth,' etc.

So too when we find Herrick in his 'Jove for our labours all things sells us,' quoting Epicharmus, economy bids us imagine that he found the saying ([Greek: _tôn ponôn pôlousin hêmin panta tagath' hoi Theoi_]) not in Xenophon's 'Memorabilia' ii. i. 20), where it first appears, but in Montaigne (II. 20), where it is quoted. For we know Herrick read Montaigne, and we have no evidence that he read Xenophon. Where the quotation is from Horace, or Martial, or Seneca, or any other author whom we may be reasonably sure that Herrick studied at first hand, it is of course quite as likely that he found it for himself as that his attention was drawn to it by Jonson, Burton, or Montaigne. Probably the poet himself would sometimes have been puzzled to trace his obligations to their sources. In any case, when all necessary allowance has been made, it is obvious that his knowledge of the chief Latin writers was considerable, and that according to the stereotyped phrase, he must have 'kept up his classics' very diligently after leaving Cambridge.

What effect should this tracking out the poet's quotations and adaptations to their sources have on our judgment of his genius? Surely, it should make us rate it more highly. We may almost say that what Herrick borrowed was intrinsically of little more value than the tags from a Latin delectus. He breathed upon them and filled them with his music, so that they assimilate so admirably with his verse, that even when he printed them in italics the meaning of the change of type has long remained a secret to his commentators. It has become a commonplace of criticism to write of Herrick as a 'butterfly,' but he was really a conscious artist, and no mean one. The examples which have been given in this paper have necessarily been chosen chiefly to illustrate the width of his reading. If space allowed, it would be pleasant to adduce others with the special object of exhibiting the skilfulness of his transmutations. Even in those we have given, few genuine lovers of poetry will deny that while to translate 'luserunt navigia' by 'where late they danced' is merely a happy stroke of scholarship, the rendering of 'in lubrico' by 'on icy pavements,' or 'regnare nescit' by 'he _rents_ his crown,' is sheer genius.

PRINTERS' MARKS OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES[25]

[25] From the 'Connoisseur,' by leave of the editor.

If truth is to be told, I have never as yet met with any amateur who collected books for the sake of the printer's mark at the beginning or end of them. But it has always seemed to me that it would be an agreeable variety of book-collecting to do this, and one which would lead the collector along many by-paths of curious knowledge. For fear of any possible mistake, I should perhaps emphasise the point that the collection must be one not of printers' marks cut out from books, but of books in which the marks are printed. Even in the case of book-plates, it has often been noted how much they gain in interest when they are found _in situ_, though there is always the haunting fear that the conjunction of book and plate may only be due to the ingenuity of the vendor. Book-plates, however, have of right a separate existence apart from books, since they are made separately and must await their owners' pleasure before they can be set to their proper work. But the printer's device is an integral part of the book in which it occurs, nor can any limpet torn from its rock look more unhappy than one of these marks cut out from the page on which it was printed, and pasted in a scrap-book. Unhappily, it must be said that, like the book-plate, though more rarely, a device is sometimes found attached to a book to which it does not belong. Thus, in the last Inglis sale an edition of a 'Defensorium Curatorum' by an unknown French printer, was catalogued as from the press of Colard Mansion on the score of Mansion's device, cut out with extraordinary neatness, being pasted on the last leaf. The buyer of it certainly bid with open eyes, but it is annoying to pay even a few shillings more because of such a freak. So, too, a leaf with Caxton's device bound at the end of Pynson's edition of the 'Speculum Vitae Christi' led the late Mr. Blades to believe that Pynson was Caxton's apprentice. But these misdeeds or mishaps are exceptional, and it is the collector of scraps, from Bagford downwards, whom the printers' device has chiefly to fear.

The merits of printers' devices are twofold--many of them are very pretty, and all of them, when duly studied, are capable of throwing considerable light on the history of printing, more especially on the often important point of the order in which books were issued and the year, or even the month, to which an undated book belongs. The prettiness or beauty of some of the designs will be shown by our illustrations, nor is it difficult to explain how the devices throw light on the careers of their printers.

Always executed in the manner of wood-cuts, that is to say, in relief, some of them were cut with a knife in wood, others with a graver on very soft metal. The lines of the wood block break with use, the lines of the metal block bend, and by careful examination of any two prints a good guess can mostly be made as to which was the earlier. A palmary instance of this is a metal block which Richard Pynson began to use in 1496. Its lower border began to bend almost at once; by 1503 the bend was as much as an eighth of an inch, and year by year it increased, till in 1513 the border broke altogether. Needless to say, that every undated book in which this border appears can be dated almost as easily as if the year of publication were printed in it. When several examples by the same printer are brought together, a little observation, if carefully verified, will give a good clue to the date at which a device first came into use and when it was abandoned for another, and herein lie both the usefulness and the sport which may be obtained from the study of printers' devices. What the collector should aim at is to obtain the earliest book in which the mark is used, and to make notes of its subsequent history.

Perhaps from the fact that the Anchor and Dolphin which Aldus adopted as his device were counterfeited with evil intent, it has sometimes been said that the devices were used as trade marks to protect the copyright of the books in which they occur. Copyright as such did not exist in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and books could only be protected by their printer obtaining a special 'privilege' either for an individual book or for books of a particular kind. With this the devices had nothing to do, and although a pleasing design often begat a whole progeny of similar ones, this copying, when it was not merely lazy, was probably complimentary rather than competitive. We must take it that the devices were purely ornamental, aiming, no doubt, at the glorification of the printers who used them, but not possessing any commercial significance. Hence, perhaps, the variety we find in them. They may be simply personal, containing only the printer's private arms or in some few cases his portrait. They may join his initials or some motto of his choice to the arms of the city in which he worked, or to some more or less graceful scroll work. They may reproduce the sign of his shop or the figure of his patron saint; or lastly, a kind much in vogue in the sixteenth century, they may be allegorical. As we should expect, there is a fairly steady movement from simplicity to ornateness. The earliest device (the first of our illustrations), that used by Fust and Schöffer at the end of the Latin Bible they printed at Mainz in 1462, consists only of two shields slung from a branch. That of Arnold ther Hoernen, of Cologne (about 1470), is in the same style, but even more modest. A few years later, Günther Zainer, of Augsburg, showed greater ambition in his mark, which represents a wild man holding a shield, on which is a crowned lion rampant. But though Schöffer, ther Hoernen, and Zainer thus led the way, their example was very little followed in Germany during the fifteenth century, and it is in other countries and in the books of native printers rather than of the German teachers of the craft that the development of the ornamental device must be looked for.

In Italy, despite what has just been said, the earliest device known is that of a German printer, Sixtus Riessinger, who worked at Naples, 1471-80. It represents a woman holding a shield, while behind her is a scroll bearing the letters 'S.R.D.A., Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina,' _i.e._ of Cologne. This device stands by itself, the real sequence of Italian designs beginning with that used at Venice by Nicolas Jenson and John of Cologne in 1481. This consists of a circle and of a straight line, crossed by two bars, rising at right angles to the base of a segment of it. It was imitated by one Italian printer after another at Venice, Pavia, Brescia, and elsewhere, and with various ornamental modifications re-appears in quite three out of four of the fifteenth century Italian devices. From Italy it passed to France, and from France to England, where it was used by Julian Notary. The design, by dividing the circle into three parts, allows the printer to place his initials in them, and this was frequently done. Jenson was also a very famous printer, and his example would naturally be imitated. But how it came to be imitated so widely, and whether any meaning, symbolical or otherwise, can be extracted from the design, are problems to which no satisfactory answer has been returned. Among the prettier modifications of this too popular design are those used by Franciscus de Mazaliis, of Reggio, and by Egmont and Barrevelt, the printers of the Venice edition of the Sarum Missal. The latter is shown on page 229.

Among designs of other patterns, mention may be made of the crown used by Mazochius, of Ferrara; the 'putti' of Filippo Giunta, and the crowned dolphin of Piero Pacini, both of Florence; the fourteen varieties of angels which appear on as many devices used by the brothers De Legnano, of Milan; the shielded warrior of Bernardinus de Garaldis, of Milan; the S. Jerome of Bernardinus Benalius; the fleur-de-lys of Lucantonio Giunta; the S. Antony of Philippus Pintius; the S. George and the Dragon of Giorgio Rusconi; and the mouse-eating cat of J. B. Sessa, reproduced on page 231. The last five printers all worked at Venice, and almost all of those we have named belonged not only to the fifteenth century, but to the sixteenth, in which the vogue of the Jenson model at last came to an end.

It has already been said that for variety and artistic treatment among printers' devices, the first place must be given to those found in French books. Yet their beginning was poor enough, the representation of the ship, taken from the arms of the city of Paris, which was used by Louis Martineau about 1484, being badly cut and quite insignificant. Jean Du Pré (for his first device), Pierre Levet, Jean Lambert, and one or two other French printers at Paris, used some of the features of the normal Italian design, though in a far more elaborate and decorative form; while at Lyons, where Italian influence was always strong, simple copying was thought good enough.

But the typical French device is much more pictorial than any of these. The arms of France and of the city of Paris are prominent in many of them, and in that of André Bocard both are used at once; but the printer used often to take a suggestion from his Christian name, from the sign by which his shop was known, or from the motto with which most early French devices are encircled. The second device of Antoine Caillaut (reproduced on p. 241) is a beautiful and early example of the appearance of a patron saint in a device; while that of the two swans used by Du Pré, whose printing house had the 'Deux Cygnes' for its sign, is a good example of the second class. The device here chosen for our second French illustration I take to be an example of the pictorial expansion of a motto, Regnault's expression of trust in God being well represented by this quiet little pastoral scene (see page 234).

Though far inferior to the best French examples, the printers' marks used in the Low Countries are also numerous, varied and good. They range from the twin shields of Veldener and Gerard Leeu to such imposing devices as the elephant and howdah used, with punning intent, by an unknown printer ('G.D.') at Gouda, and the bannered castle, the arms of the city of Antwerp, adopted by Thierry Martens. Among the earliest are the small portraits of the printers themselves found in some of the books of John and Conrad, of Paderborn, in Westphalia. That of the former, here reproduced, is sometimes found in red ink as well as black, and is referred to in one of his colophons as 'meum solitum signum.' The bird-cage used by Godfrid Back at Antwerp has no parallel among devices that I know of, but as a specimen of the larger Dutch marks we will take that of his fellow-citizen, Matthias van der Goes, which represents a very vigorous 'wild man' with club and shield (see page 228).

Spanish devices are in some cases adapted from the French or Italian, in others rather dull and uninteresting. Of those which belong to neither of these classes, by far the finest as a piece of decorative work is that of Diego de Gumiel, of Valladolid (see page 236), the effect of which is as rich as that of the best of William Morris's initial letters.

Next in interest to this we may perhaps rank the rather elaborate device (see page 230) of Arnold Guillem de Brocar, the printer of the Complutensian Polyglot, who at different times in his career had presses also at four other places. The motto upon it, 'Inimici hominis domestici ejus,' though it has been made the basis of some theories as to Brocar's career, is still unexplained. If the 'domestici,' the 'those of his own household,' could be extended to Brocar's workpeople, we should have here a fine example of an early grumble by a master printer, but the suggestion is perhaps more pleasing than probable. Cryptic mottoes seem to have run in Brocar's family. His son Juan adopted an extraordinary device of a knight seizing a lady by the hair, with an inscription 'Legitime certanti,' which must be taken as sarcastic.

The history of printers' marks in England begins with that used by Caxton for the first time as late in his career as 1487. Out of respect for his master, Wynkyn de Worde adopted the essential parts of this, _i.e._ the initials 'W.C.' and the interlacement between them in all his fifteen different devices, thus conferring on them a rather painful monotony. English printers, indeed, seem to have set little store on originality in these matters, the earliest device of Pynson being adapted from that of Le Talleur, of Rouen, that of Richard Faques from Thielmann Kerver's, the 'wild men' of Peter Treveris from those of Pigouchet, and John Byddell's unprepossessing figure of Virtue from that used by Jacques Sacon, of Lyons. Nevertheless, English devices at once interesting and original are not lacking. That used by Pynson at the end of Lord Berner's translation of 'Froissart' (see page 232) is one of the largest and not the least fine of armorial marks, the interlaced triangles of William Faques make a singularly neat device, and John Day's picture of two men gazing on a skeleton, with the motto, 'Etsi mors indies accelerat vivet tamen post funera virtus,' has its own merits. England also contributes two of the very small number of portrait marks, a large one of Day and a smaller one (here reproduced) of John Wight,[26] a bookseller of St. Paul's Churchyard, who published a few books between 1551 and 1589. It seemed permissible to come down as late as this in the case of our own country, but to speak of the French and German devices of the middle of the sixteenth century would open up too large a field. All that has been attempted here is to give a few characteristic examples of comparatively early date, so as to exhibit the different styles of printers' marks, used in different countries by one generation of printers. I hope that any of my readers who had not hitherto made the acquaintance of these little designs will have been convinced that they are worthy of further study.

[26] Our illustration shows the cut in an interesting state, when
the original I. of the first initial had been altered to an R. to
suit John's descendant Robert. The change is one of a kind with
which collectors of book-plates are familiar.

Any one who desires to take up the subject more or less seriously will find a considerable literature ready to his hand. To Messrs. Bell and Co.'s 'Ex Libris' series Mr. William Roberts has contributed a pleasant volume, which offers an easy introduction for beginners. More serious students will find an almost exhaustive series of woodcut copies of French devices in Silvestre's 'Marques typographiques,' and much prettier facsimiles abound in M. Claudin's great 'Histoire de l'Imprimerie en France,' though this as yet treats only of Paris printers of the fifteenth century. For Italy, Dr. Kristeller's 'Die Italienischen Buchdrucker und Verlegerzeichen bis 1525' is excellent, and its publishers (Heitz and Mündel) have brought out similar monographs on the marks used at Strasburg, Basel, Frankfort, and Cologne, and also in Spain and Portugal. The earlier Low Country marks will be found in Holtrop's 'Monumens typographiques des Pays-Bas'; the earlier English ones in the 'Handlists of English Printers' issued by the Bibliographical Society.

As to collecting, it is certainly a little alarming to have to buy a whole book for the sake of a single device in it, or at most two. On the other hand, the books are pleasant things in themselves, and there is an alleviation in the fact that the devices only begin to abound a little before 1490, and that books of this date can be acquired, even now, at prices which seem reasonable compared with those fetched by the real first-fruits of the press. Many very pretty devices will be found in the thin volumes of Latin verse published at Paris in the early parts of the sixteenth century, and a bookman who meets a 'tract-volume' containing several of these bound together, will probably find sufficient devices among them to start his collection.

THE FRANKS COLLECTION OF ARMORIAL BOOK-STAMPS[27]

[27] From the 'Library,' by leave of the editor.

Some little time after the death of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks the Library of the British Museum acquired, through the kindness of his successor in the Keepership of Mediæval Antiquities, Mr. C. H. Read, some three hundred books, of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, bearing on their bindings armorial book-stamps. For lack of a better word these three hundred books have been dignified in the heading of this article by the title of a 'collection,' but it is due to the great reputation of Sir Wollaston Franks as a collector to say that he himself would probably have smiled if he had heard them called so. As all bookish people know, one of his real hobbies was the collection of book-plates, his countless specimens of which passed at his death to another department of the British Museum, that of Prints and Drawings, where considerable progress has been made in describing and cataloguing them. By the side of his thousands of book-plates these three hundred or so old books with armorial stamps on their covers are a merely subsidiary collection, sufficient to illustrate the method of marking ownership, which book-plates first rivalled and then, alas, almost entirely superseded.

The £500 which Sir Wollaston Franks gave for the copy of the 'Ptolemy' of 1490, with the badge of Mary Queen of Scots, recently the subject of one of the Bibliographical Society's Monographs, shows the spirit in which he would have pursued the collection of armorial bindings had he taken it up seriously. As it was, he seems to have given a standing order to several booksellers to send him any books or odd volumes, of which the chief value lay in the stamped arms, and which they were willing to sell for a small sum, and to have taken his chance. There are worse ways of collecting than this, for a bookseller who knows that he can always place a book of a certain class with a customer, will often be content to buy it at a venture for a small price and pass it on at once at a few shillings' profit without examining it very carefully or inquiring too curiously into its market value. As will be seen from some of the books soon to be mentioned, this was certainly the experience in this instance of Sir Wollaston Franks, and the foregoing depreciation of the specimens he thus got together must be understood as written solely to prevent his name in the title of this article from raising expectation too high.

Before describing any individual specimens, it may be worth while to say a few words about book-stamps in general. Compared with book-plates, of which the literature during the last ten or twelve years has grown with such rapidity, they have as yet received very little attention outside France, where Guigard's 'Armorial du Bibliophile' in its second edition (1892) gives as full information about most French examples as can reasonably be desired. In the third volume of 'Bibliographica,' Mr. W. Y. Fletcher wrote an interesting article on 'English Armorial Book-stamps,' and it is much to be wished that he could be persuaded to print in full his notes on the subject, which are certainly more complete-- or less incomplete--than those in the possession of any one else. A few years ago the Grolier Club of New York held an exhibition of books bearing these marks of ownership, and printed a small catalogue of it, which I have not had the advantage of seeing. Other information, as far as I am aware, can only be obtained by painful search in books of heraldry and genealogy and in biographies.

Towards the close of the age of manuscripts, it became a fairly common practice, more especially in Italy, for book-lovers to cause their arms to be painted as part of the decoration of the first page of text. In the last years of the fifteenth century book-plates came into use in Germany, and during the next hundred years were slowly adopted both in France and England. But until the sixteenth century was far advanced the commonest way of marking possession of a book in England remained that of inscribing the owner's name on the title-page or a fly-leaf. Thus all the books in the large libraries of Archbishop Cranmer and Lord Lumley bear their names, 'Thomas Cantuariensis' and 'Lumley,' in the handwriting of their secretaries or librarians. One or two instances are found of names printed or written on book-edges. That of 'Anna Regina Anglie,' _i.e._ Anne Boleyn, on a vellum presentation copy of Tyndale's New Testament of 1534, is a well-known example of this. On the outside of books names are found from a very early period; but in the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth they are mostly those, not of the owners of the volume, but of the bookbinder, as in the case of Conrad of Strasburg, Johann Richenbach, and André Boule. Every one, however, knows the inscriptions which the three great collectors, Grolier, Maioli, and Lauwrin put on their books. As the sixteenth century grew older the names or initials of the owner, with sometimes a date added, are found on a fair number of bindings. In Germany such names and dates were frequently branded in black on pigskin bindings. In other countries the names are, as a rule, stamped in gold. As late as the eighteenth century Lord Oxford used to stamp his name, 'Robert Harley,' on his books, in addition to his arms.

Coming at last to armorial book-stamps, we find that from the fifteenth century onwards books were often impressed with the royal arms. These were used both as marks of possession and also, at least in England (as noted by Mr. Davenport in his article on 'Some Popular Errors as to old Bindings' in vol. ii. of 'The Library'), as decorative designs on the trade bindings of loyal stationers. Crowned initials and royal badges are often found, and these nearly always mark royal ownership. When this use of armorial book-stamps was first adopted by collectors beneath the royal rank is not easy to say. Grolier is said to have occasionally placed his arms on his books, but I believe that until about 1560, the practice did not become at all common even in foreign countries, and in England it was probably some ten years later. It is, perhaps, worth noting that in France the fashion must undoubtedly have received a great impetus from the sumptuary law of 1577, which restricted the use of the elaborate 'fanfare' style of ornamenting books to those in royal ownership. The splendid bindings of a few of the books of Jacques Auguste de Thou (associated, rightly or wrongly, with the name of Nicolas Eve) must all have been executed before this date. Thereafter he adopted the plain morocco covers decorated only with the stamps of his arms with which all book-lovers are familiar. Other collectors followed his example, and in their respective kinds both the strong, massively stamped books of De Thou, and the more finely grained red moroccos of later French bookmen, in which the tiny stamp of arms has a Legasconesque delicacy of finish, offer examples of simple decoration which the wealthiest collector may well imitate.

Of books bearing the arms of French collectors upwards of one hundred and fifty were brought together by Sir Wollaston Franks, but the English stamps, which number rather over a hundred, must engage our first attention. One of the earliest of these is a small stamp of the arms of Archbishop Parker, forming the centre of a rather decorative binding, obviously of English work. The book it is found on is a copy of Beza's Latin New Testament, printed at London by Vautrollier, in 1574, on the yellow paper occasionally used during the middle of the sixteenth century, presumably as less trying to the eyes than the ordinary white. Parker's patronage of John Day is well known, but in view of the likelihood of this being a presentation copy to the Archbishop from Vautrollier, it would be rash to credit Day with the binding of this volume, which is, moreover, not quite so original as Day's work at its best.

Two other books in the Franks collection are connected by their stamps with Parker's royal mistress. One of these bears the well-known Falcon badge which Elizabeth adopted in imitation of her mother. This is found on a copy of Etienne Dolet's 'De Latina lingua' printed at Basel in 1539. I do not know if the point has been raised and settled as to whether this badge was used by Elizabeth, both as queen and as princess, but there is at least nothing to prevent our supposing that this treatise of Dolet's was one of Elizabeth's school-books, and thus often in her hands. It is at least a point in favour of such a supposition that the badge in this case is sharper and fresher than on any other book I have ever seen. The other Elizabethan book in the collection is even more interesting, for its covers are embossed with the portrait-stamp of the queen here reproduced, and no other instance of the use of the stamp is recorded. The book is the Plantin Greek Testament of 1583, an edition which the queen would be very likely to possess. But whether this copy was ever in her library we have no means of deciding, the alternatives of presentation to and presentation by, of ownership by the original of the portrait or by some loyal subject, being very equally balanced. The stamp in this case is slightly raised, and is the earliest instance of a cameo stamp on any English binding.

The only other sixteenth-century English armorial stamps in the collection are two examples of the stamp used by William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, one in gold on a copy of the Greek Testament of Erasmus printed at Basel in 1570, the other in silver on a Hebrew Bible issued from the press of Plantin in 1583. It is certainly a very decorative stamp, but I must confess to preferring to it the simple inscription 'William' and 'Mildred Cicyll' on a binding which entered the Museum with the old Royal Library. In the present collection a little Lyons Virgil printed by Gryphius in 1571, though with a decorative instead of an heraldic stamp, bears the initials, 'W.P.,' of an English owner, a book-plate of 'The Right Honble. Robert James L^d Petre, Thorndon in Essex,' combined with a manuscript note, dated 1589, enabling us to identify W. P. with William Petre the second Baron (1575-1607). The note, apparently written when Petre was fourteen years old, records that the book was acquired by exchange with a certain Dominus Bigge.

Passing to the seventeenth century, we may notice first two books which bear the Towneley arms, Nichols's translation of Thucydides printed at London in 1550, and the 'Scholia in quatuor Evangelia' of Lyons, 1602. The arms are stamped in silver instead of the more usual gold, and alone of all the book-stamps with which I am acquainted they bear a date, that of the year 1603. Readers familiar with Mr. Hardy's excellent little treatise on Bookplates may remember that the Towneley plate which forms its frontispiece bears the date 1702, just a century later. The two marks of ownership are really, however, separated by a somewhat smaller interval, for while 1702 is no doubt the date of the plate (such dated plates being unusually common at the beginning of the eighteenth century), the 1603 of the book-stamp is probably the birth-date of Christopher Towneley, the antiquary, who was born at Towneley Hall, Lancashire, on 9th January 1603, old style.

We come now to an interesting group of books, once in the possession of Ralph Sheldon, the seventeenth-century antiquary. The first of these bears not his own arms but those of Augustine Vincent, the Windsor Herald, which two years ago attracted attention from being found, stamped in blind, on the splendid copy of the first Folio Shakespeare presented to him by William Jaggard, one of its publishers.[28] In the present instance they are impressed in gold on Estienne de Cypres' 'Genealogies de soixante et sept tres nobles Maisons,' printed at Paris in 1586. Augustine Vincent died in 1626, and his son sold his books to Ralph Sheldon, who on his death in 1684 bequeathed his manuscripts to the College of Arms. The printed books apparently remained for some time in the possession of the family, for this volume bears a Sheldon book-plate, and Sir Wollaston Franks was able to purchase two other books with Ralph Sheldon's book-stamp, Campian's 'Historia Anglicana' (Douay, 1632), and the 'Prophecies' of Nostradamus (London, 1672). On both of these the Sheldon arms are quartered with those of Ralph's wife (Henrietta Maria, daughter of Thomas Savage, Viscount Rock Savage), and both books have written in them the motto, 'In Posterum,' apparently in Ralph's autograph. A third book, Greenway's translation of the 'Annals' of Tacitus (London, 1640), bears on its title-page the autograph of 'Geo. Sheldon,' and on the cover the Sheldon arms as here shown.

[28] This copy, in the possession of Mr. Coningsby Sibthorp, of
Sudbrooke Holme, Lincoln, to whose family it has belonged for more
than a century, is fully described by Mr. Sidney Lee on p. 171 of
his 'Shakespeare's Life and Work.' By a curious coincidence the
copy he describes on the previous page is one, now owned by the
Baroness Burdett-Coutts, which formerly belonged to Ralph Sheldon,
who bought Vincent's library. Presumably both copies at one time
belonged to him.

The next two volumes we may note are Thomas Mason's 'Of the Consecration of Bishops in the Church of England' (1613), and the 'Works' of King James I. (1616), both of them bearing the Hatton arms. From their dates these must therefore have belonged not to Elizabeth's favourite, whose arms are figured in Mr. Fletcher's article, since he died in 1591, but to a son of his cousin of the same name, of Clay Hall, Barking. This third Christopher Hatton was baptized and probably born in 1605, and was a prominent man during the reign of Charles I., by whom he was created Baron Hatton in 1643. He was responsible for an edition of the Psalms with prayers attached (1644), which went by the name of Hatton's 'Psalter,' and was philosopher enough to be able to make himself happy with his 'books and fiddles' while a Royalist exile.

A few of these early seventeenth-century books possess bindings interesting for other reasons besides their marks of ownership. Thus, a fine Hebrew folio is decorated not only with the arms of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, but with some striking examples of the handsome, if heavy, corner-pieces in vogue in the reign of James I. On a copy of Brent's 'History of the Council of Trent' the arms of Berkeley look all the better for being inclosed in a handsome scroll-work centrepiece. So again we find both fine cornerpieces and a good central stamp on the three volumes of the works of that learned divine William Perkins (London, 1612), which bear also the initials H. L. beneath a coronet. The owner was presumably Henry Yelverton, created Viscount Longueville in 1690, to whom also belonged a copy of the 1660 edition of More's 'Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness.' On the Perkins volumes his coroneted initials were plainly added as an afterthought, while a much smaller M. Y., inclosed in the cornerpieces as part of the original design, suggests that the volume had in the first instance belonged to Mary Yelverton, the wife of the Judge of Court of Common Pleas, who died in 1630.

The works of Perkins were popular in the seventeenth century, and Sir Wollaston Franks acquired another edition of them, that of 1626, bearing the arms of one of the descendants of Thomas Smythe, Farmer of the Customs in the reign of Elizabeth, whose arms combined with those of his wife, Alice Judde, were figured by Mr. Fletcher. The coat now in question may have belonged either to his grandson, Thomas, who was not created Viscount Strangford until two years after the publication of the book, or to the Viscount's brother, the ambassador to the Court of Russia, who fitted out an Arctic expedition, and has his munificence commemorated in the name of 'Smith's Sound.'

A copy of the 1617 edition of Spenser's 'Faery Queen,' bearing the initials M. C. beneath a coronet, offers another example of a mark of ownership attached by a descendant of the original possessor. Who M. C. was is explained by the pretentious inscription on a book-plate inside the cover, which proclaims itself the property of 'The Right Honb^{le} Mary, wife of Charles, Earle of Carnarvon & Sister of James, Earle of Abingdon.' The Earl of Carnarvon here named was the second earl, Charles Dormer, who died in 1709, and his countess was the daughter of Montague Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, by his second wife Bridget, Baroness Norreys of Rycote. This descent accounts for the inscription on the title-page, 'Norreys, 1647,' and we may conclude that the volume was at one time owned either by the Baroness Norreys or her first husband. The book-plate of the Countess of Carnarvon is here reproduced as presumably a rather early example of a lady's plate in the heraldic style. It certainly does not deserve the honour for its artistic merits, the design and engraving being as poor as the inscription is foolish.

Copies of a Commelinus Tacitus (1595) and a Horace, Persius and Juvenal (London, 1614-15) bear the arms of John Maitland, created Viscount Lauderdale in 1616; those of the Earl of Huntingdon are found on a Camden's 'Britannica' of 1627; those of William Covert of Sussex, on the 1615 edition of the works of Gervase Babington; The Right Hon.^{ble} Mary Wife of Charles Earle of Carnarvon & Sister of James Earle of Abingdon those of Chetwynd, on Matthew of Westminster's 'Flores Historiarum' (Frankfort, 1601); those of Wilmer on Stowe's 'Survey of London,' 1618. Further investigation would no doubt yield a tale as to each of these volumes, but we may not linger over them. We must stop, however, to note that the arms of Archbishop Laud, on a copy of his 'Relation of a conference with Fisher the Jesuit,' do not clearly indicate that this was his own library copy, since an inscription (apparently in Laud's handwriting) informs us that the book was 'presented by y^e author to S^r Jo. Bramston, Ch[ief] Ju[stice] of the K[ing's] B[ench],' a book-plate of one of whose descendants, 'ThomasBramston, Esq., of Skreens,' is found in the volume. In the same way, in the next century, we find Speaker Onslow possessed of a copy of Locke's 'Letters concerning Toleration,' presented to him by Thomas Hollis, and bearing some of the donor's favourite emblems, the cap of liberty, the owl of Minerva and a pen, with the motto 'Placidam sub libertate quietem.' There is no special reason to suppose that either Archbishop Laud or Hollis intended these volumes originally for their libraries, and after having had them bound with that intention subsequently gave them away. It may, of course, have been so, but we should not entirely exclude the supposition that books were also sometimes impressed with the arms or device of the donor, in order to remind the recipient of the source whence the gift came, just as we find gift-plates alongside of the more usual book-plates denoting personal ownership.

Owing to the library of Sir Kenelm Digby having been seized after his death in France under the inhospitable French law which gave to the king the chattels of strangers dying in his country, books with his arms are not often found in England. Sir Wollaston Franks was, therefore, fortunate in obtaining three volumes thus decorated, two of them showing his coat with that of his first wife, Venetia Stanley on an escutcheon of pretence, as figured in Mr. Fletcher's article, while the third bears his coat impaled with hers, and is much more finely cut.

The arms of the Duke of Albemarle are found on the 1634 edition of Harrington's 'Orlando Furioso,' those of the Earl of Arlington on a copy of a Spanish religious work, 'Trabajos de Iesus,' printed at Madrid in 1647, those of Lord Cornwallis, with a cipher imitated from that of Charles II., on a 1669 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Other seventeenth-century collectors of minor note might be mentioned, but we must pass on now beyond the Revolution of 1688, and notice a few coats of later date. A copy of Dryden's 'Miscellany Poems' of 1702 bears the arms of Charles, Lord Halifax ('the Treasurer'), as well as a book-plate dated with the same year, 1702; a Roman History of 1695 and a Prayer Book of 1700 carry two different stamps of the arms of John, Lord Somers; there are three books with the stamp and name of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and three with the Carteret arms. Of these last two, Hammond's 'Sermons' and the 'Divi Britannici,' both published in 1675, bear 'the bloody hand' that marks a baronet, while a Horace of Paris, 1567, shows Lord Carteret's arms as a peer. On Sanderson's 'Nature and Obligation of Conscience' (1722) we have another instance of a lady's book-stamp, that of Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos; the arms and book-plate of the Duke of Montagu are found on a copy of Bishop Berkeley's famous treatise on the virtues of tar-water (1744); lastly, a Utrecht Callimachus of 1697 is adorned with the arms of Sir Philip Sydenham, Bart., and with the book-plate of John Wilkes, who, if a demagogue, was a demagogue of classical tastes.

These eighteenth-century books and their owners are somewhat less interesting than the earlier ones to which most of this article has been devoted, and in attempting to enumerate them it is difficult to avoid the style of a catalogue. The danger is all the greater when we turn to the French books, for here Guigard has been before us, and there is no purpose to be served by making extracts from his pages. As might be expected, the collection contains more than one specimen of the books of De Thou, in which the British Museum was already fairly rich. Among other notable stamps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may mention that of Antoine de Leve, Abbé de l'Isle en Barrois, on three books published between 1574 and 1624; of Estampes de Valency on a book of 1557; of Peiresc (on a 'Harpocrationis Dictionarium,' 1614), and of Louis Philippeaux, Seigneur de la Vaillière. Of later date are those of the Comtesse de Verrue, Beatrix de Choiseul, La Rochefoucald, President Seguier, Turgot, Montausier, Marie Leczinska, and a host of others too numerous to mention.

The German books are few and apparently unimportant, the Italian mostly ecclesiastical, those from the Low Countries mostly school-prizes. There are also two or three Spanish books, all the more welcome because Spanish bindings are so seldom met with in England, and a few fairly good specimens of the bookbinder's craft without armorial stamps. But the English books are the main feature of the collection.

A QUEEN ANNE POCKET-BOOK[29]

(BY ALICE POLLARD)

Some forty years ago there was picked up in the cellar of a large private bank in Lombard Street a little pocket-book, which must have lain there for at least a century. Its parchment covers were yellow and time-stained, and the brown ribbon which fastened them together had become ragged and moth-eaten, but despite its somewhat faded brown ink the crabbed handwriting remained as legible as ever. After its removal from the Lombard Street cellar the queer little book lay for another forty years in the musk-scented drawer of a Chippendale secretaire, which formed for it a not unfitting resting-place. Thence it has to-day been unearthed, and is now to be made to tell its old-world story. This, in truth, is but a simple one, as the book contains chiefly a very carefully kept memorandum of the moneys spent by its owner during his youth and early manhood; but running through these accounts we can trace something of his family history, of his employments, tastes, and habits, and so, I think, gain a very fair idea of the writer's individuality. Now and then, as if to help us, he uses a page as a diary, and by means of such entries as births, deaths, and marriages, we can piece our story together.

[29] From 'Longman's Magazine,' by leave of the publishers.

'John Payne, 1699,' that is the first information which our book gives us, and we turn from the fly-leaf, where it is boldly written, to inquire who this John Payne was, and what was his business and rank in life. We start with a predisposition to believe that he was a banker, because it was in a bank which still bears his name that his pocket-book was picked up; but the pocket-book itself has nothing to say about banking, while it is very profuse on the subjects of 'Linsayes, dyapers, Westfalia linen,' etc., and informs us that its owner was frequently sending home house linen and dress stuffs to his mother, sisters, and friends. Somewhat reluctantly, therefore, we conclude that our hero began life as a draper, and it is with satisfaction (for we would fain have him cut a figure) that we note sundry entries of a Sir James and my Lady, a Sir Stephen, and a Lady Langham in a connection which shows them to have been either relations or old family friends. There are not wanting other indications that our young draper came of a well-to-do stock, and we may, therefore, conclude that in coming to London to serve a seven years' apprenticeship, he was only acting on the excellent rule that to win success as a merchant (or anything else) you must begin at the beginning. As has been already said, the date inside the pocket-book is 1699, but the accounts begin on January 10, 1696, so that those of the first three years have evidently been copied in from some earlier notes. This ascertained, we become excited to find the entry of the purchase of the book itself, and are rewarded after a little search by the information that, together with some paper and quills, it only cost one shilling and fourpence, certainly no excessive outlay for a book constantly in use for over a quarter of a century. In copying his back accounts into his new purchase, John divided his book into two halves, keeping the first for 'what I have layd out since I came to London on my Father's charge,' and the second for his disbursements from 'the money that I did bring up to town at the first coming up (4_l_ 8_s._), and sent me since and given me by freinds.' In looking over his accounts for him we will follow the order of his own choosing, and begin with his expenditure for what he considered the necessaries he might fairly charge to his father.

On his first arrival in town the youthful John evidently found himself somewhat behind the times in the cut of his clothes and the fashion of his hair, for on the first page of the book we have distinct suggestions of visits to his tailor and the barber, who between them arrayed his outer man for a first entry into town life, and managed to do so at the moderate cost of £5, 3s. 6d. Here are the items:

Layed out between y^e 10^{th} of January & y^e 20^{th} of February 169-5/6.

£ _s._ _d._
A paire of Gloves 00 01 02
A box & hatband 00 02 06
A pennknife 00 00 08
A Queer of paper 00 00 06
A Coppy Booke 00 00 08
A Porter & letter 00 00 06
The Barber 00 00 03
Sugar Candy 00 00 02
Damask 4 y^{ds} 00 14 06
2 y^{ds} 3/4 of B^d Cloth 01 13 00
5 y^{ds} of Shaloone 00 11 00
Buttons & fustin 00 10 11
Buckrum & Canvis 00 01 03
Glaz^d Lin: 00 00 05
The Taylors Bill 01 06 00
--------
05 03 06

Tailors were evidently more modest in their charges in those days. It is difficult at first to see under what pretext John could have set down twopennyworth of sugar candy under the head of 'Thinges layd out on my Father's charge,' but we soon find a further entry of 'Things for my cold,' and doubtless the sugar candy might also have come under that head; indeed, the London fogs seem not to have agreed with the Huntingdonshire lad, for more than once in each year we find references to colds which mostly appear to have been treated by blood-letting.

After the first month of 169-5/6 the father could have had no cause to complain of his son's extravagance, for his whole expenses for the next quarter come to seventeen shillings and fourpence, even including 'Sister Betty's fringe,' for which he paid eightpence, a tip of sixpence given to 'Y^e Maide,' and 'Close mending from Top to Toe,' which cost him four shillings and threepence! During the next year and a half he has a fair number of new clothes and makes some wonderful bargains, obtaining 'A Comb: Sisers: Blade & Buttons' for one shilling and ninepence. His barber is still an expensive item, for his 'Peruke' needs constant attention; his cold also requires 'sugar candy and other things,' but he executes a great piece of economy by having 'Wastcoate turned to Breeches' at a cost of only 2s. 1d. In 1699 his 'wigg' again proves costly; it appears to have been thoroughly done up and trimmed to the latest fashion previous to a visit to his home, for we find two entries following each other:

£ _s._ _d._
My Wigg & its Mending 01 04 00
My place ith' Coach & charge on the Roade 01 00 00

The remaining accounts which he sends in to his father from time to time have no particular interest, being more or less repetitions of those which have gone before, but on the last page of the book he sums up the whole seven years as follows: 'Spent on father's acc^t in y^e whole 7 years of Apprenticeship, 64_l._ 19_s._ 11_d._ Spent on my own acc^t on Self and freinds, 19_l._ 15_s._ 9_d._ Spent less than I had saved before and given me after I came to towne in y^e 7 years, 3_l._ 13_s._ 5_d._' The seven years' private accounts start as follows:

The Money that I did bring up to town att y^e first coming up was
4_l._ 8_s._ 0_d._

Lent me since y^t & given me by freinds: