Chapter C: S. CALVERLEY. Proverbial Philosophy (5)

Vanity Fair,
With the Pilgrims suffering there.

I delight in the recollection of the puzzle I used to have with the frontispiece of the _Tale of a Tub_, of my real horror at the sight of that crawling old man representing Avarice, at the beginning of _Enfield's Speaker_, the _Looking Glass_, or some such book; and even of the careless schoolboy hats, and the prim stomachers and cottage bonnets, of such golden-age antiquities as the _Village School_. The oldest and most worn-out woodcut, representing King Pippin, Goody Two Shoes, or the grim Soldan, sitting with three staring blots for his eyes and mouth, his sceptre in one hand, and his other five fingers raised and spread in admiration at the feats of the Gallant London Prentice, cannot excite in me a feeling of ingratitude.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My Books._

A NEAT RIVULET OF TEXT

LADY SNEERWELL. I wonder, Sir Benjamin, you never publish anything.

SIR BENJAMIN BACKBITE. To say truth, ma'am, 'tis very vulgar to print; and as my little productions are mostly satires and lampoons on particular people, I find they circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the friends of the parties. However, I have some love elegies, which, when favoured with this lady's smiles, I mean to give to the public.

CRABTREE. 'Fore Heaven, ma'am, they'll immortalize you!--you will be handed down to posterity, like Petrarch's Laura, or Waller's Sacharissa.

SIR BENJAMIN. Yes, madam, I think you will like them, when you shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.--R. B. SHERIDAN. _The School for Scandal._

THE BOOKWORMS

Through and through the inspired leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings;
But, oh! respect his lordship's taste,
And spare his golden bindings.

R. BURNS.

THE BOOKWORM

Come hither, boy, we'll hunt to-day
The bookworm, ravening beast of prey,
Produced by parent Earth, at odds,
As fame reports it, with the Gods.
Him frantic hunger wildly drives
Against a thousand authors' lives:
Through all the fields of wit he flies;
Dreadful his head with clustering eyes,
With horns without, and tusks within,
And scales to serve him for a skin.
Observe him nearly, lest he climb
To wound the bards of ancient time,
Or down the vale of fancy go
To tear some modern wretch below.
On every corner fix thine eye,
Or ten to one he slips thee by.
See where his teeth a passage eat:
We'll rouse him from his deep retreat.
But who the shelter's forced to give?
'Tis sacred Virgil, as I live!
From leaf to leaf, from song to song,
He draws the tadpole form along,
He mounts the gilded edge before,
He's up, he scuds the cover o'er,
He turns, he doubles, there he passed,
And here we have him, caught at last.

Insatiate brute, whose teeth abuse
The sweetest servants of the Muse--
Nay, never offer to deny,
I took thee in the act to fly.
His roses nipped in every page,
My poor Anacreon mourns thy rage;
By thee my Ovid wounded lies;
By thee my Lesbia's Sparrow dies;
Thy rabid teeth have half destroyed
The work of love in Biddy Floyd;
They rent Belinda's locks away,
And spoiled the Blouzelind of Gay.
For all, for every single deed,
Relentless justice bids thee bleed:
Then fall a victim to the Nine,
Myself the priest, my desk the shrine.

Bring Homer, Virgil, Tasso near,
To pile a sacred altar here:
Hold, boy, thy hand outruns thy wit,
You reached the plays that Dennis writ;
You reached me Philips' rustic strain;
Pray take your mortal bards again.

Come, bind the victim,--there he lies,
And here between his numerous eyes
This venerable dust I lay
From manuscripts just swept away.
The goblet in my hand I take,
For the libation's yet to make:
A health to poets! all their days
May they have bread, as well as praise;
Sense may they seek, and less engage
In papers filled with party rage.
But if their riches spoil their vein,
Ye Muses, make them poor again.

Now bring the weapon, yonder blade
With which my tuneful pens are made.
I strike the scales that arm thee round,
And twice and thrice I print the wound;
The sacred altar floats with red,
And now he dies, and now he's dead.

How like the son of Jove I stand,
This Hydra stretched beneath the hand!
Lay bare the monster's entrails here,
And see what dangers threat the year:
Ye gods! what sonnets on a wench!
What lean translations out of French!
'Tis plain, this lobe is so unsound,
S-- prints, before the months go round.

But hold, before I close the scene
The sacred altar should be clean.
O had I Shadwell's second bays,
Or, Tate, thy pert and humble lays!
(Ye pair, forgive me, when I vow
I never missed your works till now,)
I'd tear the leaves to wipe the shrine,
That only way you please the Nine:
But since I chance to want these two,
I'll make the songs of D'Urfey do.

Rent from the corpse, on yonder pin,
I hang the scales that braced it in;
I hang my studious morning gown,
And write my own inscription down.
'This trophy from the Python won,
This robe, in which the deed was done,
These, Parnell, glorying in the feat,
Hung on these shelves, the Muses' seat.
Here Ignorance and Hunger found
Large realms of wit to ravage round;
Here Ignorance and Hunger fell,
Two foes in one I sent to hell.
Ye poets who my labours see
Come share the triumph all with me!
Ye critics, born to vex the Muse,
Go mourn the grand ally you lose!'

T. PARNELL.

A MOTH

Here he beholds in triumph sit
The bane of beauty, sense, and wit;
Demolished distichs round his head,
Half lines and shattered stanzas spread,
While the insulting conqueror climbs
O'er mighty heaps of ruined rhymes,
And, proudly mounted, views from high,
Beneath, the harmonious fragments lie;
Boasting himself from foes secured,
In stanzas lodged, in verse immured.

W. KING (?) _Bibliotheca._

THE CURE FOR BOOKWORMS

There is a sort of busy worm
That will the fairest books deform,
By gnawing holes throughout them;
Alike through every leaf they go,
Yet of its merits naught they know,
Nor care they aught about them.

Their tasteless tooth will tear and taint
The poet, patriot, sage, or saint,
Nor sparing wit nor learning:
Now, if you'd know the reason why,
The best of reasons I'll supply--
'Tis bread to the poor vermin.

Of pepper, snuff, or 'bacca smoke,
And russia-calf they make a joke.
Yet why should sons of science
These puny, rankling reptiles dread?
'Tis but to let their books be read,
And bid the worms defiance.

J. F. M. DOVASTON.

ROYAL PATRONAGE OF BOOKS

Queen Charlotte, when discussing books with Fanny Burney and Mrs. Delany, during the former's residence at Court at Windsor, praised the work of a writer who had translated a German book into English, saying 'I wish I knew the translator,' to which Miss Burney replied, 'I wish the translator knew that!'

'Oh,' said the Queen,--'it is not--I should not like to give my name, for fear I have judged ill: I picked it up on a stall. Oh, it is amazing what good books there are on stalls.'

'It is amazing to me,' said Mrs. Delany, 'to hear that.'

'Why, I don't pick them up myself; but I have a servant very clever; and if they are not to be had at the bookseller's, they are not for me any more than for another.'--From MADAME D'ARBLAY. _Diary._

THE TREASURE

Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare--and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent-garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late--and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bed-wards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome--and when you presented it to me--and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (_collating_ you called it)--and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes, which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in that over-worn suit--your old corbeau--for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or sixteen shillings was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.--C. LAMB. _Old China._

THE MOST VALUABLE BOOK

We ought not to get books too cheaply. No book, I believe, is ever worth half so much to its reader as one that has been coveted for a year at a bookstall, and bought out of saved halfpence; and perhaps a day or two's fasting. That's the way to get at the cream of a book.--J. RUSKIN. _Political Economy of Art (A Joy for Ever)._

THE READERS AT THE BOOKSTALL

There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without affection--the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls--the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they 'snatch a fearful joy'. Martin B----, in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares that under no circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralized upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas:

I saw a boy with eager eye
Open a book upon a stall,
And read, as he'd devour it all;
Which when the stall-man did espy,
Soon to the boy I heard him call,
'You, Sir, you never buy a book,
Therefore in one you shall not look.'
The boy passed slowly on and with a sigh
He wished he never had been taught to read,
Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.

Of sufferings the poor have many,
Which never can the rich annoy:
I soon perceived another boy,
Who looked as if he'd not had any
Food, for that day at least--enjoy
The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.
This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder,
Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny,
Beholding choice of dainty-dressèd meat:
No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learned to eat.