Chapter VII: The End (4)

"The honour of firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil from the reverberation of the report himself had made. 'One hundred guineas,' he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued; but anon the biddings rose rapidly to five hundred guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident that the firing was but masked and desultory. At length all random shots ceased, and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other, resolving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths. _A thousand guineas_ were bid by Earl Spencer--to which the Marquess added _ten_. You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned--all breathing wellnigh stopped--every sword was put home within its scabbard--and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter except that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand."

But even this exciting sort of narrative will tire one when it goes on page after page, so that we must take a leap to the conclusion. "Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds his usual _ten_" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell, made a short pause--and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid air. However, at last down dropped the hammer."

Such a result naturally created excitement beyond the book-collectors' circle, for here was an actual stroke of trade in which a profit of more than two thousand per cent had been netted. It is easy to believe in Dibdin's statement of the crowds of people who imagined they were possessors of the identical Venetian Boccaccio, and the still larger number who wanted to do a stroke of business with some old volume, endowed with the same rarity and the same or greater intrinsic value. The general excitement created by the dispersal of the Roxburghe collection proved an epoch in literary history, by the establishment of the Roxburghe Club, followed by a series of others, the history of which has to be told farther on.

Of the great book-sales that have been commemorated, it is curious to observe how seldom they embrace ancestral libraries accumulated in old houses from generation to generation, and how generally they mark the short-lived duration of the accumulations of some collector freshly deposited. One remarkable exception to this was in the Gordonstoun library, sold in 1816. It was begun by Sir Robert Gordon, a Morayshire laird of the time of the great civil wars of the seventeenth century. He was the author of the History of the Earldom of Sutherland, and a man of great political as well as literary account. He laid by heaps of the pamphlets, placards, and other documents of his stormy period, and thus many a valuable morsel, which had otherwise disappeared from the world, left a representative in the Gordonstoun collection. It was increased by a later Sir Robert, who had the reputation of being a wizard. He belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to take a victim annually; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get off with merely the loss of his shadow; and many a Morayshire peasant has testified to having seen him riding forth on a sunny day, the shadow of his horse visible, with those of his spurs and his whip, but his body offering no impediment to the rays of the sun. He enriched the library with books on necromancy, demonology, and alchemy.

The largest book-sale probably that ever was in the world, was that of Heber's collection in 1834. There are often rash estimates made of the size of libraries, but those who have stated the number of his books in six figures seem justified when one looks at the catalogue of the sale, bound up in five thick octavo volumes. For results so magnificent, Richard Heber's library had but a small beginning, according to the memoir of him in the Gentleman's Magazine, where it is said, that "having one day accidentally met with a little volume called The Vallie of Varietie, by Henry Peacham, he took it to the late Mr Bindley of the Stamp-office, the celebrated collector, and asked him if this was not a curious book. Mr Bindley, after looking at it, answered, 'Yes--not very--but rather a curious book.'" This faint morsel of encouragement was, it seems, sufficient to start him in his terrible career, and the trifle becomes important as a solemn illustration of the _obsta principiis_. His labours, and even his perils, were on a par with those of any veteran commander who has led armies and fought battles during the great part of a long life. He would set off on a journey of several hundred miles any day in search of a book not in his collection. Sucking in from all around him whatever books were afloat, he of course soon exhausted the ordinary market; and to find a book obtainable which he did not already possess, was an event to be looked to with the keenest anxiety, and a chance to be seized with promptitude, courage, and decision. At last, however, he could not supply the cravings of his appetite without recourse to duplicates, and far more than duplicates. His friend Dibdin said of him, "He has now and then an ungovernable passion to possess more copies of a book than there were ever parties to a deed or stamina to a plant; and therefore I cannot call him a duplicate or a triplicate collector." He satisfied his own conscience by adopting a creed, which he enounced thus: "Why, you see, sir, no man can comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for a show copy, and he will probably keep it at his country-house; another he will require for his own use and reference; and unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends."

This last necessity is the key-note to Heber's popularity: he was a liberal and kindly man, and though, like Wolsey, he was unsatisfied in getting, yet, like him, in bestowing he was most princely. Many scholars and authors obtained the raw material for their labours from his transcendent stores. These, indeed, might be said less to be personal to himself than to be a feature in the literary geography of Europe. "Some years ago," says the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, "he built a new library at his house at Hodnet, which is said to be full. His residence at Pimlico, where he died, is filled, like Magliabechi's at Florence, with books, from the top to the bottom--every chair, every table, every passage containing piles of erudition. He had another house in York Street, leading to Great James's Street, Westminster, laden from the ground-floor to the garret with curious books. He had a library in the High Street, Oxford, an immense library at Paris, another at Antwerp, another at Brussels, another at Ghent, and at other places in the Low Countries and in Germany."

_PART II.--HIS FUNCTIONS._

The Hobby.

Having devoted the preceding pages to the diagnosis of the book-hunter's condition, or, in other words, to the different shapes which the phenomena peculiar to it assume, I now propose to offer some account of his place in the dispensations of Providence, which will probably show that he is not altogether a mischievous or a merely useless member of the human family, but does in reality, however unconsciously to himself, minister in his own peculiar way to the service both of himself and others. This is to be a methodical discourse, and therefore to be divided and subdivided, insomuch that, taking in the first place his services to himself, this branch shall be subdivided into the advantages which are purely material and those which are properly intellectual.

And, first, of material advantages. Holding it to be the inevitable doom of fallen man to inherit some frailty or failing, it would be difficult, had he a Pandora's box-ful to pick and choose among, to find one less dangerous or offensive. As the judicious physician informs the patient suffering under some cutaneous or other external torture, that the poison lay deep in his constitution--that it must have worked in some shape--and well it is that it has taken one so innocuous--so may even the book-hunter be congratulated on having taken the innate moral malady of all the race in a very gentle and rather a salubrious form. To pass over gambling, tippling, and other practices which cannot be easily spoken of in good society, let us look to the other shapes in which man lets himself out--for instance to horse-racing, hunting, photography, shooting, fishing, cigars, dog-fancying, dog-fighting, the ring, the cockpit, phrenology, revivalism, socialism; which of these contains so small a balance of evil, counting of course that the amount of pleasure conferred is equal--for it is only on the datum that the book-hunter has as much satisfaction from his pursuit as the fox-hunter, the photographer, and so on, has in his, that a fair comparison can be struck? These pursuits, one and all, leave little or nothing that is valuable behind them, except, it may be, that some of them are conducive to health, by giving exercise to the body and a genial excitement to the mind; but every hobby gives the latter, and the former may be easily obtained in some other shape. They leave little or nothing behind--even the photographer's portfolio will bring scarcely anything under the hammer after the death of him whose solace and pursuit it had been, should the positives remain visible, which may be doubted. And as to the other enumerated pursuits, some of them, as we all know, are immensely costly, all unproductive as they are.

But the book-hunter may possibly leave a little fortune behind him. His hobby, in fact, merges into an investment. This is the light in which a celebrated Quaker collector of paintings put his conduct, when it was questioned by the brethren, in virtue of that right to admonish one another concerning the errors of their ways, which makes them so chary in employing domestic servants of their own persuasion. "What had the brother paid for that bauble [a picture by Wouvermans], for instance?" "Well, £300." "Was not that then an awful wasting of his substance on vanities?" "No. He had been offered £900 for it. If any of the Friends was prepared to offer him a better investment of his money than one that could be realised at a profit of 200 per cent, he was ready to alter the existing disposal of his capital."

It is true that amateur purchasers do not, in the long-run, make a profit, though an occasional bargain may pass through their hands. It is not maintained that, in the general case, the libraries of collectors would be sold for more than they cost, or even for nearly so much; but they are always worth something, which is more than can be said of the residue of other hobbies and pursuits. Nay, farther; the scholarly collector of books is not like the ordinary helpless amateur; for although, doubtless, nothing will rival the dealer's instinct for knowing the money-value of an article, though he may know nothing else about it, yet there is often a subtle depth in the collector's educated knowledge which the other cannot match, and bargains may be obtained off the counters of the most acute.

A small sprinkling of these--even the chance of them--excites him, like the angler's bites and rises, and gives its zest to his pursuit. It is the reward of his patience, his exertion, and his skill, after the manner in which Monkbarns has so well spoken; and it is certain that, in many instances, a collector's library has sold for more than it cost him.

No doubt, a man may ruin himself by purchasing costly books, as by indulgence in any other costly luxury, but the chances of calamity are comparatively small in this pursuit. A thousand pounds will go a great way in book-collecting, if the collector be true to the traditions of his pursuit, such as they are to be hereafter expounded. There has been one instance, doubtless, in the records of bibliomania, of two thousand pounds having been given for one book. But how many instances far more flagrant could be found in picture-buying? Look around upon the world and see how many men are the victims of libraries, and compare them with those whom the stud, the kennel, and the preserve have brought to the Gazette. Find out, too, anywhere, if you can, the instance in which the money scattered in these forms comes back again, and brings with it a large profit, as the expenditure of the Duke of Roxburghe did when his library was sold.

But it is necessary to arrest this train of argument, lest its tenor might be misunderstood. The mercenary spirit must not be admitted to a share in the enjoyments of the book-hunter. If, after he has taken his last survey of his treasures, and spent his last hour in that quiet library, where he has ever found his chief solace against the wear and worry of the world, the book-hunter has been removed to his final place of rest, and it is then discovered that the circumstances of the family require his treasures to be dispersed,--if then the result should take the unexpected shape that his pursuit has not been so ruinously costly after all--nay, that his expenditure has actually fructified--it is well. But if the book-hunter allow money-making--even for those he is to leave behind--to be combined with his pursuit, it loses its fresh relish, its exhilarating influence, and becomes the source of wretched cares and paltry anxieties. Where money is the object, let a man speculate or become a miser--a very enviable condition to him who has the saving grace to achieve it, if we hold with Byron that the accumulation of money is the only passion that never cloys.

Let not the collector, therefore, ever, unless in some urgent and necessary circumstances, part with any of his treasures. Let him not even have recourse to that practice called barter, which political philosophers tell us is the universal resource of mankind preparatory to the invention of money as a circulating medium and means of exchange. Let him confine all his transactions in the market to purchasing only. No good ever comes of gentlemen amateurs buying and selling. They will either be systematic losers, or they will acquire shabby, questionable habits, from which the professional dealers--on whom, perhaps, they look down--are exempt. There are two trades renowned for the quackery and the imposition with which they are habitually stained--the trade in horses and the trade in old pictures; and these have, I verily believe, earned their evil reputation chiefly from this, that they are trades in which gentlemen of independent fortune and considerable position are in the habit of embarking.

The result is not so unaccountable as it might seem. The professional dealer, however smart he may be, takes a sounder estimate of any individual transaction than the amateur. It is his object, not so much to do any single stroke of trade very successfully, as to deal acceptably with the public, and make his money in the long-run. Hence he does not place an undue estimate on the special article he is to dispose of, but will let it go at a loss, if that is likely to prove the most beneficial course for his trade at large. He has no special attachment to any of the articles in which he deals, and no blindly exaggerated appreciation of their merits and value. They come and go in an equable stream, and the cargo of yesterday is sent abroad to the world with the same methodical indifference with which that of to-day is unshipped. It is otherwise with the amateur. He feels towards the article he is to part with all the prejudiced attachment, and all the consequent over-estimate, of a possessor. Hence he and the market take incompatible views as to value, and he is apt to become unscrupulous in his efforts to do justice to himself. Let the single-minded and zealous collector then turn the natural propensity to over-estimate one's own into its proper and legitimate channel. Let him guard his treasures as things too sacred for commerce, and say, _Procul, o procul este, profani_, to all who may attempt by bribery and corruption to drag them from their legitimate shelves. If, in any weak moment, he yield to mercenary temptation, he will be for ever mourning after the departed unit of his treasure--the lost sheep of his flock. If it seems to be in the decrees of fate that all his gatherings are to be dispersed abroad after he is gone to his rest, let him, at all events, retain the reliance that on them, as on other things beloved, he may have his last look; there will be many changes after that, and this will be among them. Nor, in his final reflections on his conduct to himself and to those he is to leave, will he be disturbed by the thought that the hobby which was his enjoyment has been in any wise the more costly to him that he has not made it a means of mercenary money-getting.[36]

[Footnote 36: Atticus was under the scandal of having disposed of his books, and Cicero sometimes hints to him that he might let more of them go his way. In truth, Atticus carried this so far, however, that he seems to have been a sort of dealer, and the earliest instance of a capitalist publisher. He had slaves whom he occupied in copying, and was in fact much in the position of a rich Virginian or Carolinian, who should find that the most profitable investment for his stock of slaves is a printing and publishing establishment.]

The Desultory Reader or Bohemian of Literature.

Having so put in a plea for this pursuit, as about the least costly foible to which those who can afford to indulge in foibles can devote themselves, one might descant on certain auxiliary advantages--as, that it is not apt to bring its votaries into low company; that it offends no one, and is not likely to foster actions of damages for nuisance, trespass, or assault, and the like. But rather let us turn our attention to the intellectual advantages accompanying the pursuit, since the proper function of books is in the general case associated with intellectual culture and occupation. It would seem that, according to a received prejudice or opinion, there is one exception to this general connection, in the case of the possessors of libraries, who are under a vehement suspicion of not reading their books. Well, perhaps it is true in the sense in which those who utter the taunt understand the reading of a book. That one should possess no books beyond his power of perusal--that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight through what he has already bought--is a supposition alike preposterous and unreasonable. "Surely you have far more books than you can read," is sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may be sure that he has got the value of his money.

It is true that there are some books--as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, and Scott--which every man should read who has the opportunity--should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. To neglect the opportunity of becoming familiar with them is deliberately to sacrifice the position in the social scale which an ordinary education enables its possessor to reach. But is one next to read through the sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, and the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and the Encyclopædia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in succession? Such a course of reading would certainly do a good deal towards weakening the mind, if it did not create absolute insanity.

But in all these just named, even in the Statutes at large, and in thousands upon thousands of other books, there is precious honey to be gathered by the literary busy bee, who passes on from flower to flower. In fact, "a course of reading," as it is sometimes called, is a course of regimen for dwarfing the mind, like the drugs which dog-breeders give to King Charles spaniels to keep them small. Within the span of life allotted to man there is but a certain number of books that it is practicable to read through, and it is not possible to make a selection that will not, in a manner, wall in the mind from a free expansion over the republic of letters. The being chained, as it were, to one intellect in the perusal straight on of any large book, is a sort of mental slavery superinducing imbecility. Even Gibbon's Decline and Fall, luminous and comprehensive as its philosophy is, and rapid and brilliant the narrative, will become deleterious mental food if consumed straight through without variety. It will be well to relieve it occasionally with a little Boston's Fourfold State, or Hervey's Meditations, or Sturm's Reflections for Every Day in the Year, or Don Juan, or Ward's History of Stoke-upon-Trent.

Isaac D'Israeli says, "Mr Maurice, in his animated memoirs, has recently acquainted us with a fact which may be deemed important in the life of a literary man. He tells us, 'We have been just informed that Sir William Jones _invariably_ read through every year the works of Cicero.'" What a task! one would be curious to know whether he felt it less heavy in the twelve duodecimos of Elzevir, or the nine quartos of the Geneva edition. Did he take to it doggedly, as Dr Johnson says, and read straight through according to the editor's arrangement, or did he pick out the plums and take the dismal work afterwards? For the first year or two of his task, he is not to be pitied perhaps about the Offices, or the Dialogue on Friendship, or Scipio's Dream, or even the capital speeches against Verres and Catiline; but those tiresome Letters, and the Tusculan Questions, and the De Natura! It is a pity he did not live till Angelo Maï found the De Republica. What disappointed every one else might perhaps have commanded the admiration of the great Orientalist.

But here follows, on the same authority, a more wonderful performance still. "The famous Bourdaloue reperused every year St Paul, St Chrysostom, and Cicero."[37] The sacred author makes but a slight addition to the bulk, but the works of St Chrysostom are entombed in eleven folios. Bourdaloue died at the age of seventy-two; and if he began his task at the age of twenty-two, he must have done it over fifty times. It requires nerves of more than ordinary strength to contemplate such a statement with equanimity. The tortures of the classic Hades, and the disgusting inflictions courted by the anchorites of old, and the Brahmins of later times, do not approach the horrors of such an act of self-torture.

[Footnote 37: Curiosities of Literature, iii. 339.]

Of course any one ambitious of enlightening the world on either the political or the literary history of Rome at the commencement of the empire, must be as thoroughly acquainted with every word of Cicero as the writer of the Times leader on a critical debate is with the newly-delivered speeches. The more fortunate vagabond reader, too, lounging about among the Letters, will open many little veins of curious contemporary history and biography, which he can follow up in Tacitus, Sallust, Cæsar, and the contemporary poets. Both are utterly different from the stated-task reader, who has come under a vow to work so many hours or get through so many pages in a given time. _They_ are drawn by their occupation, whether work or play; _he_ drives himself to his. All such work is infliction, varying from the highest point of martyrdom down to tasteless drudgery; and it is as profitless as other supererogatory inflictions, since the task-reader comes to look at his words without following out what they suggest, or even absorbing their grammatical sense, much as the stupid ascetics of old went through their penitential readings, or as their representatives of the present day, chiefly of the female sex, read "screeds of good books," which they have not "the presumption" to understand. The literary Bohemian is sometimes to be pitied when his facility of character exposes him to have a modification of this infliction forced upon him. This will occur when he happens to be living in a house frequented by "a good reader," who solemnly devotes certain hours to the reading of passages from the English or French classics for the benefit of the company, and becomes the mortal enemy of every guest who absents himself from the torturing performance.

As to collectors, it is quite true that they do not in general read their books successively straight through, and the practice of desultory reading, as it is sometimes termed, must be treated as part of their case, and if a failing, one cognate with their habit of collecting. They are notoriously addicted to the practice of standing arrested on some round of a ladder, where, having mounted up for some certain book, they have by wayward chance fallen upon another, in which, at the first opening, has come up a passage which fascinates the finder as the eye of the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding-guest, and compels him to stand there poised on his uneasy perch and read. Peradventure the matter so perused suggests another passage in some other volume which it will be satisfactory and interesting to find, and so another and another search is made, while the hours pass by unnoticed, and the day seems all too short for the pursuit which is a luxury and an enjoyment, at the same time that it fills the mind with varied knowledge and wisdom.

The fact is that the book-hunter, if he be genuine, and have his heart in his pursuit, is also a reader and a scholar. Though he may be more or less peculiar, and even eccentric, in his style of reading, there is a necessary intellectual thread of connection running through the objects of his search which predicates some acquaintance with the contents of the accumulating volumes. Even although he profess a devotion to mere external features--the style of binding, the cut or uncut leaves, the presence or the absence of the gilding--yet the department in literature holds more or less connection with this outward sign. He who has a passion for old editions of the classics in vellum bindings--Stephenses or Aldines--will not be put off with a copy of Robinson Crusoe or the Ready Reckoner, bound to match and range with the contents of his shelves. Those who so vehemently affect some external peculiarity are the eccentric exceptions; yet even they have some consideration for the contents of a book as well as for its coat.

The Collector and the Scholar.

Either the possession, or, in some other shape, access to a far larger collection of books than can be read through in a lifetime, is in fact an absolute condition of intellectual culture and expansion. The library is the great intellectual stratification in which the literary investigator works--examining its external features, or perhaps driving a shaft through its various layers--passing over this stratum as not immediate to his purpose, examining that other with the minute attention of microscopic investigation. The geologist, the botanist, and the zoologist, are not content to receive one specimen after another into their homes, to be thoroughly and separately examined, each in succession, as novel-readers go through the volumes of a circulating library at twopence a-night--they have all the world of nature before them, and examine as their scientific instincts or their fancies suggest. For all inquirers, like pointers, have a sort of instinct, sharpened by training and practice, the power and acuteness of which astonish the unlearned. "Reading with the fingers," as Basnage said of Bayle--turning the pages rapidly over and alighting on the exact spot where the thing wanted is to be found--is far from a superficial faculty, as some deem it to be,--it is the thoroughest test of active scholarship. It was what enabled Bayle to collect so many flowers of literature, all so interesting, and yet all found in corners so distant and obscure.

In fact, there are subtle dexterities, acquired by sagacious experience in searching for valuable little trinkets in great libraries, just as in other pursuits. A great deal of that appearance of dry drudgery which excites the pitying amazement of the bystander is nimbly evaded. People acquire a sort of instinct, picking the valuables out of the useless verbiage, or the passages repeated from former authors. It is soon found what a great deal of literature has been the mere "pouring out of one bottle into another," as the Anatomist of melancholy terms it. There are those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations. Compared with these, all the intellectual efforts of our recent degenerate days seem the work of pigmies; and for any of us even to profess to read all that some of those indomitable giants wrote, would seem an audacious undertaking. But, in fact, they were to a great extent solemn shams, since the bulk of their work was merely that of the clerk who copies page after page from other people's writings.

Surely these laborious old writers exhibited in this matter the perfection of literary modesty. Far from secretly pilfering, like the modern plagiarist, it was their great boast that they themselves had not suggested the great thought or struck out the brilliant metaphor, but that it had been done by some one of old, and was found in its legitimate place--a book. I believe that if one of these laborious persons hatched a good idea of his own, he could experience no peace of mind until he found it legitimated by having passed through an earlier brain, and that the author who failed thus to establish a paternity for his thought would sometimes audaciously set down some great name in his crowded margin, in the hope that the imposition might pass undiscovered. Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in literature. First come Aristotle and Plato, with the other great classical ancients; next the primitive fathers; then Abailard, Erigena, Peter Lombard, Ramus, Major, and the like. If the matter be jurisprudence, we shall have Marcianus, Papinianus, Ulpianus, Hermogenianus, and Tryphonius to begin with; and shall then pass through the straits of Bartolus and Baldus, on to Zuichemus, Sanchez, Brissonius, Ritterhusius, and Gothofridus. If all these say the same thing, each of the others copying it from the first who uttered it, so much the more valuable to the literary world is deemed the idea that has been so amply backed--it is like a vote by a great majority, or a strongly-signed petition. There is only one quarter in which this practice appears to be followed at the present day--the composition, or the compilation, as it may better be termed, of English law-books. Having selected a department to be expounded, the first point is to set down all that Coke said about it two centuries and a half ago, and all that Blackstone said about it a century ago, with passages in due subordination from inferior authorities. To these are added the rubrics of some later cases, and a title-page and index, and so a new "authority" is added to the array on the shelves of the practitioner.

Whoever is well up to such repetitions has many short cuts through literature to enable him to find the scattered originalities of which he may be in search. Whether he be the enthusiastic investigator resolved on exhausting any great question, or be a mere wayward potterer, picking up curiosities by the way for his own private intellectual museum, the larger the collection at his disposal the better--it cannot be too great.[38] No one, therefore, can be an ardent follower of such a pursuit without having his own library. And yet it is probably among those whose stock is the largest that we shall find the most frequent visitors to the British Museum and the State Paper Office; perhaps, for what cannot be found even there, to the Imperial Library at Paris, or the collections of some of the German universities.

[Footnote 38: I am quite aware that the authorities to the contrary are so high as to make these sentiments partake of heresy, if not a sort of classical profanity.

"Studiorum quoque, quæ liberalissima impensa est, tamdiu rationem habet, quamdiu modum. Quo innumerabiles libros et bibliothecas, quarum dominus vix tota vita indices perlegit? Onerat discentem turba, non instruit: multoque satius est paucis te auctoribus tradere, quam errare per multos. Quadraginta millia librorum Alexandræ arserunt: pulcherrimum regiæ opulentiæ monumentum alius laudaverit, sicut et Livius, qui elegantiæ regum curæque egregium id opus ait fuisse. Non fuit elegantia illud aut cura, sed studiosa luxuria. Immo ne studiosa quidem: quoniam non in studium, sed in spectaculum comparaverant: sicut plerisque, ignaris etiam servilium literarum libri non studiorum instrumenta, sed coenationum ornamenta sunt. Paretur itaque librorum quantum satis sit, nihil in apparatum. Honestius, inquis, hoc te impensæ, quam in Corinthia pictasque tabulas effuderint. Vitiosum est ubique, quod nimium est. Quid habes, cur ignoscas homini armaria citro atque ebore captanti, corpora conquirenti aut ignotorum auctorum aut improbatorum, et inter tot millia librorum oscitanti, cui voluminum suorum frontes maxime placent titulique? Apud desidiosissimos ergo videbis quicquid orationum historiarumque est, tecto tenus exstructa loculamenta; jam enim inter balnearia et thermas bibliotheca quoque ut necessarium domus ornamentum expolitur. Ignoscerem plane, si studiorum nimia cupidine oriretur: nunc ista conquisita, cum imaginibus suis descripta et sacrorum opera ingeniorum in speciem et cultum parietum comparantur."--_Seneca_, De Tranquillitate, c. ix.

There are some good hits here, which would tell at the present day. Seneca is reported to have had a large library; it is certain that he possessed and fully enjoyed enormous wealth; and it is amusing to find this commendation of literary moderation following on a well-known passage in praise of parsimonious living, and of the good example set by Diogenes. Modern scepticism about the practical stoicism of the ancients is surely brought to a climax by a living writer, M. Fournier, who maintains that the so-called tub of Diogenes was in reality a commodious little dwelling--neat but not gorgeous. It must be supposed, then, that he spoke of his tub much as an English country gentleman does of his "box."]

To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength, there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings, the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to the life of man.

That the night cometh when no man can work, haunts those who have gone so far in their investigations, and draws their entire energies into their pursuit with an exclusiveness which astonishes the rest of the world. But the energies might be more unfitly directed. Look back, for instance--no great distance back--on the great high-priest of our national school of logic and metaphysics,--he who gathered up its divers rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must have sought it elsewhere. You see in him the nature that must follow up all inquiries, not by languid solicitation but hot pursuit. His conquests as he goes are rapid but complete. Summing up the thousands upon thousands of volumes, upon all matters of human study and in many languages, which he has passed through his hands, you think he has merely dipped into them or skimmed them, or in some other shape put them to superficial use. You are wrong: he has found his way at once to the very heart of the living matter of each one; between it and him there are henceforth no secrets.[39]

[Footnote 39: How a nature endowed with powerful impulses like these might be led along with them into a totally different groove, I am reminded by a traditionary anecdote of student life. A couple of college chums are under the impression that their motions are watched by an inquisitive tutor, who for the occasion may be called Dr Fusby. They become both exceeding wroth, and the more daring of the two engages on the first opportunity to "settle the fellow." They are occupied in ardent colloquy, whether on the predicates or other matters it imports not, when a sudden pause in the conversation enables them to be aware that there is a human being breathing close on the other side of the "oak." The light is extinguished, the door opened, and a terrific blow from a strong and scientifically levelled fist hurls the listener down-stairs to the next landing-place, from which resting-place he hears thundered after him for his information, "If you come back again, you scoundrel, I'll put you into the hands of Dr Fusby." From that source, however, no one had much to dread for some considerable period, during which the Doctor was confined to his bedroom by serious indisposition. It refreshed the recollection of this anecdote, years after I had heard it, and many years after the date attributed to it, to have seen a dignified scholar make what appeared to me an infinitesimally narrow escape from sharing the fate of Dr Fusby, having indeed just escaped it by satisfactorily proving to a hasty philosopher that he was not the party guilty of keeping a certain copy of Occam on the sentences of Peter Lombard out of his reach.]

Descending, however, from so high a sphere, we shall find that the collector and the scholar are so closely connected with each other that it is difficult to draw the line of separation between them. As dynamic philosophers say, they act and react on each other. The possession of certain books has made men acquainted with certain pieces of knowledge which they would not otherwise have acquired. It is, in fact, one of the amiable weaknesses of the set, to take a luxurious glance at a new acquisition. It is an outcropping of what remains in the man, of the affection towards a new toy that flourished in the heart of the boy. Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his new-bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under observation in the course of my own clinical inquiries into the malady; but I am not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far on in the night. In this incidental manner is a general notion sometimes formed of the true object and tenor of a book, which is retained in the mind, stored for use, and capable of being refreshed and strengthened whenever it is wanted. In the skirmish for the Caxtons, which began the serious work in the great conflict of the Roxburghe sale, it was satisfactory to find, as I have already stated, on the authority of the great historian of the war, that Earl Spencer, the victor, "put each volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of victory and consciousness of triumph."[40] Ere next morning he would know a good deal more about the contents of the volumes than he did before.

[Footnote 40: The author, from a vitiated reminiscence, at first made the unpardonable blunder of attributing this touching trait of nature to the noble purchaser of the Valderfaer Boccaccio. For this, as not only a mistake, but in some measure an imputation on the tailor who could have made for his lordship pockets of dimensions so abnormal, I received due castigation from an eminent practical man in the book-hunting field.]

The Gleaner and his Harvest.

There are sometimes agreeable and sometimes disappointing surprises in encountering the interiors of books. The title-page is not always a distinct intimation of what is to follow. Whoever dips into the Novellæ of Leo, or the Extravagantes, as edited by Gothofridus, will not find either of them to contain matter of a light, airy, and amusing kind. Dire have been the disappointments incurred by The Diversions of Purley--one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade over one of our best story-books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the late Mrs Johnston. The great scholar, Leo Allatius, who broke his heart when he lost the special pen with which he wrote during forty years, published a work called Apes Urbanæ--Urban Bees. It is a biographical work, devoted to the great men who flourished during the Pontificate of Urban VIII., whose family carried bees on their coat-armorial. The History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, has sorely perplexed certain strong-minded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search of the absolutely correct and improving; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders. There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called MacEwen on the Types--a theological book, in fact, treating of the types of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might have it and be d----d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means rams: but the other competitor also declined the lot; he was a compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr Ruskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of sheepfolds." I have been informed that this work had a considerable run among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. I think I could also point to a public library in England, the keeper of which justified his high character for classification and arrangement by binding up this production between "suggestions as to eating off turnips with stock" and "an inquiry concerning the best materials for smeering." Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a department in Bibliography, "Titres de livres qui ont induit en erreur des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits." After mentioning a treatise De Missis Dominicis, which was not a religious book, as it might seem, but an inquiry into the functions of certain officers sent into the provinces by the emperors and the early kings of France, he comes nearer to our own door in telling how "un ignorant avait placé le _Traité des Fluxions de Maclaurin_ avec les livres de pathologie, prenant pour une maladie les fluxions mathématiques."[41]

[Footnote 41: Dict. de Bibliologie, i. 391.]

Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a title-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and constitute an infallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of all literature it may be said that man has been continually struggling after this achievement, and struggling in vain; and it is a humiliating fact, that the greatest adepts, abandoning the effort in despair, have taken refuge in some fortuitous word, which has served their purpose better than the best results of their logical analysis. The book which has been the supreme ruler of the intellect in this kind of work, stands forth as an illustrious example of failure. To those writings of Aristotle which dealt with mind, his editing pupils could give no name,--therefore they called them the things after the physics--the _metaphysics_; and that fortuitous title the great arena of thought to which they refer still bears, despite of efforts to supply an apter designation in such words as Psychology, Pneumatology, and Transcendentalism.

Writhing under this nightmare kind of difficulty, men in later times tried to achieve completeness by lengthening the title-page; but they found that the longer they made it, the more it wriggled itself into devious tracks, and the farther did it depart from a comprehensive name. Some title-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.[42] One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy titles--they afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their malignity towards each other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the face of the adversary. It will thus often happen that the controversialist states his case first in the title-page; he then gives it at greater length in the introduction; again, perhaps, in a preface; a third time in an analytical form, through means of a table of contents; after all this skirmishing, he brings up his heavy columns in the body of the book; and if he be very skilful, he may let fly a few Parthian arrows from the index.

[Footnote 42: A good modern specimen of a lengthy title-page may be found in one of the books appropriate to the matter in hand, by the diligent French bibliographer Peignot:--

"DICTIONNAIRE RAISONNÉ DE BIBLIOLOGIE: contenant--1mo, L'explication des principaux termes relatifs à la bibliographie, à l'art typographique, à la diplomatique, aux langues, aux archives, aux manuscrits, aux médailles, aux antiquités, &c.; 2do, Des notices historiques détaillées sur les principales bibliothèques anciennes et modernes; sur les différentes sectes philosophiques; sur les plus célèbres imprimeurs, avec une indication des meilleures éditions sorties de leurs presses, et sur les bibliographes, avec la liste de leurs ouvrages; 3tio, enfin, L'exposition des différentes systèmes bibliographiques, &c.,--ouvrage utile aux bibliothécaires, archivistes, imprimeurs, libraires, &c. Par G. Peignot, Bibliothécaire de la Haute-Saône, membre-correspondant de la Société libre d'emulation du Haut-Rhin. _Indocti discant, et ament meminisse periti._ Paris, An x. 1802."

Here follows a rival specimen selected from the same department of literature:--

"BIBLIOGRAPHIE INSTRUCTIVE; OU, TRAITÉ DE LA CONNAISSANCE DES LIVRES RARES ET SINGULIERS; contenant un catalogue raisonné de la plus grande partie de ces livres précieux, qui ont paru successivement dans la république des lettres, depuis l'invention de l'imprimerie jusqu'à nos jours; avec des notes sur la différence et la rareté de leurs éditions, et des remarques sur l'origine de cette rareté actuelle, et son dégré plus ou moins considerable; la manière de distinguer les éditions originales, d'avec les contrefaites; avec une description typographique particulière, du composé de ces rares volumes, au moyen de laquelle il sera aisé de reconnoître facilement les exemplaires, ou mutilés en partie, ou absolument imparfaits, qui s'en rencontrent journellement dans le commerce, et de les distinguer sûrement de ceux qui seront exactement complets dans toutes leurs parties. Disposé par ordre de matières et de facultés, suivant le système bibliographique généralement adopté; avec une table générale des auteurs, et un système complet de bibliographie choisie. Par Guillaume-François de Bûre le jeune, Libraire de Paris."]

It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and had his ears cut off, and become one of the chief causes of our great civil wars, all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book containing more than a thousand. It was as far down in his very index as W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio-Mastix was found, under the head "Women actors." The words which follow are rather unquotable in this nineteenth century; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her--something like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of the Emperor." The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had. The calamitous discovery of the sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible. Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger, until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immorality of stage-plays to exclaim that church-music is not the noise of men, but rather "a bleating of brute beasts--choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen, bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney took surely a more nice distinction when he made a charge against the author in these terms: "All stage-players he terms them rogues: in this he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament; for _unless they go abroad_, they are not rogues."

In the very difficulties in the way of framing a conclusive and exhaustive title, there is a principle of compensation. It clears literature of walls and hedgerows, and makes it a sort of free forest. To the desultory reader, not following up any special inquiry, there are delights in store in a devious rummage through miscellaneous volumes, as there are to the lovers of adventure and the picturesque in any district of country not desecrated by the tourist's guide-books. Many readers will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edition of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive book-hunter, Dr Richard Farmer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they are examples of what may be found in the place they have come from.