Chapter L: Johnson (1)

ON THE LIBRARY AT CAMBRIDGE

In that great maze of books I sighed, and said,--
'It is a grave-yard, and each tome a tomb;
Shrouded in hempen rags, behold the dead,
Coffined and ranged in crypts of dismal gloom,--
Food for the worm and redolent of mould,
Traced with brief epitaph in tarnished gold.'--
Ah, golden-lettered hope!--Ah, dolorous doom!
Yet, mid the common death, when all is cold,
And mildewed pride in desolation dwells,
A few great Immortalities of old
Stand brightly forth;--not tombs but living shrines,
Where from high saint or martyr virtue wells,
Which on the living yet works miracles,
Spreading a relic wealth, richer than golden mines.

J. M.

THE SOUL'S VIATICUM

Books looked on as to their readers or authors do at the very first mention challenge pre-eminence above the world's admired fine things. Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by. They are life's best business: vocation to these hath more emolument coming in than all the other busy terms of life. They are fee-less councillors, no delaying patrons, of easy access, and kind expedition, never sending away empty any client or petitioner. They are for company the best friends; in doubts, counsellors; in damp, comforters; Time's perspective; the home traveller's ship, or horse, the busy man's best recreation; the opiate of idle weariness; the mind's best ordinary; Nature's garden and seed-plot of Immortality. Time spent, needlessly, from them is consumed, but with them twice gained. Time captivated and snatched from thee by incursions of business, thefts of visitants, or by thy own carelessness lost, is by these redeemed in life; they are the soul's viaticum; and against death its cordial. In a true verdict, no such treasure as a library.--B. WHITELOCKE.

NOTES

PAGE 1. _Lamb._--The extracts from the works of Charles Lamb are from the Oxford edition, edited by T. Hutchinson. Not content with 'grace' before Milton and Shakespeare, Lamb suggests elsewhere (see p. 130) a solemn service.

P. 1. _Petrarch._--When the love-sick Petrarch retired from Avignon to Vaucluse, in 1338, his only companions were his books; for his friends rarely visited him, alleging that his mode of life was unnatural. Petrarch replied as in the text, which is quoted from Mrs. S. Dodson's _Life_. On another occasion, however, Petrarch wrote: 'Many have found the multitude of their books a hindrance to learning, and abundance has bred want, as sometimes happens. But if the many books are at hand, they are not to be cast aside, but to be gleaned, and the best used; and care should be taken that those which might have proved seasonable auxiliaries do not become hindrances out of season.' See Leigh Hunt's reference on page 20 to Petrarch as 'the god of the Bibliomaniacs'.

P. 2. _Waller._--Carlyle, aged 22, wrote to Robert Mitchell that, lacking society, he found 'books are a ready and effectual resource'. 'It is lawful,' he added, 'for the solitary wight to express the love he feels for those companions so steadfast and unpresuming--that go or come without reluctance, and that, when his fellow-animals are proud or stupid or peevish, are ever ready to cheer the languor of his soul, and gild the barrenness of life with the treasures of bygone times.'

Walter Pater, in _Appreciations: Style_, observes that 'different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not only scholars but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem like _Lycidas_, a perfect fiction like _Esmond_, the perfect handling of a theory like Newman's _Idea of a University_, has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat".'

P. 4. _Chesterfield._--Folio, a book whose sheets are folded into two leaves; quarto, sheets folded into four leaves, abbreviated into 4to; octavo, sheets folded into eight leaves, 8vo; duodecimo, sheets folded into twelve leaves, 12mo. The first three words come to us from the Italian, through the French; the last is from the Latin _duodecim_.

P. 4. _Southey._--

Better than men and women, friend,
That are dust, though dear in our joy and pain,
Are the books their cunning hands have penned,
For they depart, but the books remain....
When others fail him, the wise man looks
To the sure companionship of books.--R. H. STODDARD.

P. 5. _Southey_ ('A heavenly delight').--See p. 320.

P. 5. _Southey_ ('The best of all possible company').--Castanheda died in 1559, Barros in 1570, Osorio (da Fonseca) in 1580. They were Portuguese historians.

P. 6. _Emerson._

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.--J. R. LOWELL.

P. 7. _Whittier._--The poet explains that the 'lettered magnate' was his friend Fields (James Thomas, 1817-81), who edited the _Atlantic Monthly_. Among Fields's friends were Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, Miss Mitford, and Dickens. Longfellow's 'Auf Wiedersehen' was written 'in memory of J. T. F.', and Whittier himself wrote some elegiac verse after his death.

It may be noted that Elzevir was the name of a famous family of Dutch printers, whose books were chiefly issued between 1592 and 1681. Louis Elzevir (? 1540-1617) was the first to make the name famous.

P. 9. _Roscoe._--The sale of Roscoe's library, necessary on account of financial failure, took place in August and September 1816. This Roscoe is the historian of the Medici.

Washington Irving quotes Roscoe's sonnet in his reference to the incident.

P. 10. _Longfellow._--These valedictory lines were written in December 1881. In the following year Longfellow died.

P. 10. _Jonson._--Goodyer or Goodier (spelt Goodyere by Herrick) was the friend of Donne and of many other literary men, and he wrote verses on his own account. His father, Sir Henry Goodyer, was the patron of Michael Drayton.

P. 11. _Sheridan._--Written to Dean Swift, then in London.

P. 12. _Tupper._--'Next to possessing a true, wise, and victorious friend seated by your fireside, it is blessed to have the spirit of such a friend embodied--for spirit can assume any embodiment--on your bookshelves. But in the latter case the friendship is all on one side. For full friendship your friend must love you, and know that you love him.'--GEORGE MACDONALD.

Compare C. S. C.'s parody on page 135; and Goethe's statement that he only hated parodies 'because they lower the beautiful, noble, and great'.

P. 13. _de Bury._--Richard de Bury was born near Bury St. Edmunds in 1287, his father being Sir Richard Aungervile. He had a distinguished career at Oxford, and was the tutor of Edward III. Sent as ambassador to the papal court at Avignon, he formed a friendship with Petrarch (see pp. 1 and 369). While Bishop of Durham, he was for a short time Lord Chancellor and also Treasurer of England. He finished the _Philobiblon_ less than three months before he died, in 1345. Thomas Fuller says that he had more books than all the other English bishops in that age put together. He had a library at each of his residences, and Mr. E. C. Thomas tells us, on the authority of William de Chambre, that wherever he was residing so many books lay about his bedchamber that it was hardly possible to stand or move without treading upon them. All the time he could spare from business was devoted either to religious offices or to books, and daily at table he would have a book read to him. The _Philobiblon_ was printed first at Cologne in 1473, then ten years later at Spires, and in 1500 at Paris. The first edition printed in England appeared in 1598, and it was a product of the Oxford Press. It was not until 1832 that any English translation was published. This, although the name was not divulged in the book, was the work of John Bellingham Inglis. More than half a century passed before another translation was made--that of Mr. Thomas, who personally examined or collated twenty-eight MSS. Inglis's translation, according to his successor, is a work of more spirit than accuracy, but it is the spirit that quickeneth, and it is the 1832 volume which I have used.

P. 14. _Addison._--Ovid, _Met._ xv. 871:

--which nor dreads the rage
Of tempests, fire, or war, or wasting age.--WELSTED.

Fielding says in _Tom Jones_:--'I question not but the ingenious author of the _Spectator_ was principally induced to prefix Greek and Latin mottoes to every paper, from the same consideration of guarding against the pursuit of those scribblers who, having no talents of a writer but what is taught by the writing-master, are yet not more afraid nor ashamed to assume the same titles with the greatest genius, than their good brother in the fable was of braying in the lion's skin. By the device, therefore, of his motto, it became impracticable for any man to presume to imitate the _Spectators_, without understanding at least one sentence in the learned languages.'

'No praise of Addison's style,' Lord Lytton declares, 'can exaggerate its merits. Its art is perfectly marvellous. No change of time can render the workmanship obsolete. His manner has that nameless urbanity in which we recognize the perfection of manner--courteous, but not courtier-like; so dignified, yet so kindly; so easy, yet so high-bred. Its form of English is fixed--a safe and eternal model, of which all imitation pleases--to which all approach is scholarship--like the Latin of the Augustan age.'

So much for style. For the rest Hazlitt remarks that 'it is the extremely moral and didactic tone of the _Spectator_ which makes us apt to think of Addison (according to Mandeville's sarcasm) as "a parson in a tie-wig"'. How often history repeats itself.

P. 15. _Dodd._--His _Beauties of Shakespeare_, published in 1752, is still well known. Dodd was hanged for forgery, despite many efforts, including those of Dr. Johnson, on his behalf.

P. 16. _Hunt._--The periods referred to by Leigh Hunt are 'the dark ages, as they are called', and 'the gay town days of Charles II, or a little afterwards'. In the first the essayist imagines 'an age of iron warfare and energy, with solitary retreats, in which the monk or the hooded scholar walks forth to meditate, his precious volume under his arm. In the other, I have a triumphant example of the power of books and wit to contest the victory with sensual pleasure:--Rochester staggering home to pen a satire in the style of Monsieur Boileau; Butler, cramming his jolly duodecimo with all the learning that he laughed at; and a new race of book poets come up, who, in spite of their periwigs and petit-maîtres, talk as romantically of "the bays" as if they were priests of Delphos.'

In Chapman's translation of Homer occur the words: 'The fortresses of thorniest queaches.' A queach is a thick bushy plot, or a quickset hedge.

You will see Hunt--one of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This world would smell like what it is--a tomb.

SHELLEY. _Letter to Maria Gisborne._

P. 17. _Lamb._--

What youth was in thy years,
What wisdom in thy levity, what truth
In every utterance of that purest soul!
Few are the spirits of the glorified

W. S. LANDOR.

Encumbered dearly with old books,
Thou, by the pleasant chimney nooks,
Didst laugh, with merry-meaning looks,
Thy griefs away.--LIONEL JOHNSON.

P. 18. _Burton._--Compare the remark of the 'Hammock School' reviewers in Mr. G. K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_--'Next to authentic goodness in a book (and that, alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness.'

P. 19. _Channing._--An address introductory to the Franklin lectures delivered at Boston, 1838. Channing's influence increased after his death, which occurred in 1842. In the seventies nearly 50,000 copies of his _Complete Works_ were circulated in America and Europe.

P. 20. _Hunt._--The novel _Camilla_ is Madame D'Arblay's; the entire passage relating to the Oxford scholar's books is given on page 216. Petrarch is quoted on pages 1 and 369.

P. 21. _Landor._--See 'Old-Fashioned Verse' on p. 186.

P. 26. _Burton._--Lord Byron is reported by Moore to have said: 'The book, in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble, is Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him. If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted, at least in the English language.'

Dr. Johnson, while admitting that the _Anatomy_ is a valuable work, suggests that it is overloaded with quotation. But he adds, 'It is the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise.'

P. 28. _Southey._--'Southey's appearance is _Epic_; and he is the only existing entire man of letters. All the others have some pursuit annexed to their authorship'.--LORD BYRON.

Ye, loved books, no more
Shall Southey feed upon your precious lore,
To works that ne'er shall forfeit their renown,
Adding immortal labours of his own.--WORDSWORTH.
(Inscription for a monument in Crosthwaite Church).

P. 32. _Montaigne._--Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, began to write his essays in his château at Montaigne in Périgord in 1572, at the age of thirty-nine. The essays were published in 1580, and five editions had appeared before his death in 1592.

_The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne_ translated by John Florio were first published in 1603. The translator was born in London about 1553, and he died in 1625. It is this translation from which my excerpts are given, and it is the only book known to have been in Shakespeare's library; the volume contains his autograph, and is now in the British Museum.

Emerson classes Montaigne in his _Representative Men_ as the Sceptic. He calls to mind that Gibbon reckoned, in the bigoted times of the period, but two men of liberality in France--Henry IV and Montaigne--and adds, 'Though a Biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence is superficial.... I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.'

P. 33. _Denham._--Dominico Mancini wrote the _Libellus de quattuor Virtutibus_, published in Paris, 1484.

P. 37. _Johnson._--The excerpts from Johnson and from Boswell's _Life_ are taken, where possible, from Dr. Birkbeck Hill's Oxford edition.

P. 41. _Rabelais._--The translation is that of Peter Anthony Motteux (1660-1718) and of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660).

It may be remembered that Pantagruel on his travels found in Paris 'the library of St. Victor, a very stately and magnificent one, especially in some books which were there', of which the Repertory or Catalogue is given. A few of the titles are:--_The Pomegranate of Vice_, _The Henbane of the Bishops_, _The Crucible of Contemplation_, _The Flimflams of the Law_, _The Pleasures of the Monachal Life_, _Sixty-nine fat Breviaries_, and _The Chimney-sweeper of Astrology_. Some of the titles are too 'Rabelaesian', or what some booksellers call 'curious', to print. A certain number of the books appear to have actually existed outside the author's imagination.

P. 45. _Herrick._--These are, of course, separate poems, scattered fruit of the _Hesperides_. See also the note on page 390.

'Absyrtus-like': an allusion, of course, to the story of Medea, who took her brother Absyrtus with her when she fled with Jason. Being nearly overtaken by her father, Medea murdered Absyrtus, and strewed the road with pieces of his body so that the pursuit might be stayed.

P. 46. _Daniel._--This sonnet was prefaced to the second edition of Florio's _Montaigne_ (1613), and is often ascribed to the translator; but the weight of criticism credits the authorship to Daniel. Mr. Locker-Lampson was tempted to write a couple of verses for the fly-leaf of the Rowfant Montaigne, which not only belonged to Shakespeare, but was also given by Pope to Gay and enjoyed by Johnson:

For me the halycon days have passed,
I'm here and with a dunce at last.

See note on previous page.

P. 47. _Milton._--Milton's prose masterpiece was printed, in a modified form, by Mirabeau, under the title _Sur la Liberté de la Presse_, imité de l'Anglais, de Milton.

P. 49. _Leighton._--

Methinks in that refulgent sphere
That knows not sun or moon,
An earth-born saint might long to hear
One verse of 'Bonnie Doon'.--O. W. HOLMES.

P. 49. _Hazlitt._--'Because they both wrote essays and were fond of the Elizabethans,' Mr. Augustine Birrell says, 'it became the fashion to link Hazlitt's name with Lamb's. Hazlitt suffered by the comparison.'

P. 50. _Hunt._--The poet is Wordsworth and the lines 'Oh that my name' are found in 'Personal Talk'. See page 21.

P. 52. _Carlyle._--In _The Hero as Priest_ Carlyle wrote of Luther's written works: 'The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest; his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He flashes-out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humour too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to _work_ an Epic Poem, not write one.'

Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanter's wand!--itself a nothing.--
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless!--Take away the sword--
States can be saved without it!

LYTTON. _Richelieu_, Act II, sc. ii.

P. 53. _Macaulay._--'Macaulay is like a book in breeches.'--SYDNEY SMITH.

P. 53. _Maurice._--The first Ptolemy founded the famous Alexandrian Library which is supposed to have been partly destroyed by Christian fanatics in 391 A.D., the Arabs in 641 completing the work of destruction.

P. 57. _Fuller._--'Fuller's language!' Coleridge writes: 'Grant me patience, Heaven! A tithe of his beauties would be sold cheap for a whole library of our classical writers, from Addison to Johnson and Junius inclusive. And Bishop Nicolson!--a painstaking old charwoman of the Antiquarian and Rubbish Concern! The venerable rust and dust of the whole firm are not worth an ounce of Fuller's earth!'

The rest of this essay will be found on page 79. The learned man referred to in the last paragraph is Erasmus.

P. 58. _Browne._--Pineda in _Monarchica Ecclesiastica_ mentions 1,040 authors. See the note above on Maurice.

P. 60. _Addison._--'The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of loaves. On the day when Christ created that symbol, he caught a glimpse of printing. His miracle is this marvel. Behold a book. I will nourish with it five thousand souls--a million souls--all humanity. In the action of Christ bringing forth the loaves, there is Gutenberg bringing forth books. One sower heralds the other.... Gutenberg is for ever the auxiliary of life; he is the permanent fellow-workman in the great work of civilization. Nothing is done without him. He has marked the transition of the man-slave to the free man. Try and deprive civilization of him, you become Egypt.'--VICTOR HUGO on Shakespeare.

P. 61. _De Quincey._--'The few shelves which would hold all the true classics extant might receive as many more of the like as there is any chance that the next two or three centuries could produce, without burthening the select and leisurely scholar with a sense of how much he had to read.'--C. PATMORE. _Principle in Art: William Barnes._

P. 63. _Temple._--Sir William Temple's historic dispute with Wotton and Bentley, in which he had the assistance of Charles Boyle, afterwards Earl of Orrery, provoked Swift's _Battle of the Books_. Compare Boileau's _La Lutrin_.

P. 63. _Swift._--'"The Battle of the Books" is the fancy of a lover of libraries.'--LEIGH HUNT.

The royal library at St. James's alluded to was one of the nine privileged libraries which received copies of new books under the Copyright Act of Anne. The privilege passed to the British Museum in 1757, when George II made over the royal collection to the nation.

P. 65. _Bacon._--Sir William Temple in his _Essay on the Ancient and Modern Learning_ (pp. 59, 63, 110) concludes 'with a Saying of Alphonsus Sirnamed the Wise, King of Aragon: That among so many things as are by Men possessed or pursued in the Course of their Lives, all the rest are Bawbles, Besides Old Wood to Burn, Old Wine to Drink, Old Friends to Converse with, and Old Books to Read'.

P. 67. _Goldsmith._--Horace Walpole wrote to the Rev. William Cole (Letter 2337; Oxford edition): 'There is a chapter in Voltaire that would cure anybody of being a great man even in his own eyes. It is the chapter in which a Chinese goes into a bookseller's shop, and marvels at not finding any of his own country's classics.'

P. 69. _Hazlitt._--'William Hazlitt, I believe, has no books, except mine; but he has Shakespeare and Rousseau by heart.'--LEIGH HUNT.

P. 71. _Hazlitt._--Hazlitt wrote this essay in Florence, on his honeymoon, and it opens with a quotation from Sterne: 'And what of this new book, that the whole world make such a rout about?' Lord Byron had died in the previous year, 1824.

'Laws are not like women, the worse for being old.'--The Duke of Buckingham's speech in the House of Lords in Charles the Second's time (Hazlitt's note).

P. 72. _Dudley._--Rogers is reported to have said, 'When a new book comes out I read an old one.'

P. 73. _Macaulay._--Pyrgopolynices (Plautus: _Miles Gloriosus_); Thraso (Terence: _Eunuch_); Bobadil (Ben Jonson: _Every Man in his Humour_); Bessus (Beaumont and Fletcher: _A King and no King_); Pistol (_The Merry Wives of Windsor_); Parolles (_All's Well that Ends Well_); Nephelococcygia (Aristophanes: _The Birds_--the cuckoos' town in the clouds); Lilliput (Swift: _Gulliver's Travels_--the pygmies' country).

P. 77. _Ascham._--Thomas Blundeville wrote some lines in praise of Roger Ascham's Latin grammar:--

Of English books as I could find,
I have perused many a one:
Yet so well done unto my mind,
As this is, yet have I found none.

The words of matter here do rise,
So fitly and so naturally,
As heart can wish or wit devise,
In my conceit and fantasy.

The words well chosen and well set,
Do bring such light unto the sense:
As if I lacked I would not let
To buy this book for forty pence.

This was published in 1561.

P. 78. _Wither._--Bevis of Hampton, a hero of early mediaeval romance. The story has been published by the Early English Text Society.

Compare 'The common rabble of scribblers and blur-papers which nowadays stuff stationers' shops.'--MONTAIGNE.

P. 79. _Fuller._--The other portion of this essay will be found on page 57. Arius Montanus was the court chaplain of Philip II of Spain, and he personally superintended the printing of the _Biblia Polyglotta_ (8 vols., 1569-73), the most famous of the books printed by Christophe Plantin. The printing office is one of the sights of Antwerp, whose council bought the property from Plantin's descendants in 1876 for £48,000.

Compare also: 'Evil books corrupt at once both our manners and our taste.'--FIELDING.

P. 80. _Addison._--Addison 'takes off the severity of this speculation' with an anecdote of an atheistical author who was sick unto death. A curate, to comfort him, said he did not believe any besides the author's particular friends or acquaintance had ever been at the pains of reading his book, or that anybody after his death would ever inquire after it. 'The dying Man had still so much the Frailty of an Author in him, as to be cut to the Heart with these Consolations; and without answering the good Man, asked his Friends about him (with a Peevishness that is natural to a sick Person) where they had picked up such a Blockhead?' It seems that the author recovered, 'and has since written two or three other Tracts with the same Spirit, and very luckily for his poor Soul with the same success.'

P. 83. _Milton._--'For he [Pliny the Elder] read no book which he did not make extracts from. He used to say that "no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it."'--PLINY THE YOUNGER.

P. 84. _Baxter._--'Richard, Richard, dost thou think we will let thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old knave. Thou hast written books enough to load a cart, and every book as full of sedition as an egg is full of meat.'--Judge Jeffreys' address at Baxter's trial.

P. 85. _Athenian Mercury._--An 'answer to correspondents'--the question 'Whether 'tis lawful to read Romances?' being asked in _The Athenian Mercury_. This, the first popular periodical published in this country, was started in 1691, and written by John Dunton, R. Sault, and Samuel (the father of John) Wesley; the last number appeared in 1697, and Dunton collected into three volumes the most valuable questions and answers under the title of _The Athenian Oracle_.

Gray's wish was to be always lying on sofas, reading 'eternal new novels of Crébillon and Marivaux'.

P. 86. _Cobbett._--Cobbett attacks Dr. Johnson, because in a pamphlet he urged war on the American colonies; Burke, because in another pamphlet he urged war on revolutionary France. 'The first war lost us America, the last cost us six hundred millions of money, and has loaded us with forty millions a year of taxes.'

P. 86. _More._--Tom Hickathrift, who killed a giant at Tylney, Norfolk, with a cartwheel. He dates from the Conquest, and was made governor of Thanet.

P. 87. _Austen._--_Cecilia_ and _Camilla_, both by Mme. D'Arblay; _Belinda_, by Miss Edgeworth.

'She [Diana] says of Romance: "The young who avoid that region escape the title of Fool at the cost of a celestial crown."'-GEORGE MEREDITH. _Diana of the Crossways._

P. 87. _Herschel._--'The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.'--R. L. STEVENSON.

P. 89. _Burton._--'They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.'--BURTON.

P. 90. _Milton._--South said that _Eikon Basilike_ was 'composed with such an unfailing majesty of diction, that it seems to have been written with a sceptre rather than a pen'.

Milton condemns the king for having 'so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself, or to his friends, or sense of his afflictions, or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop [Juxon] who attended him, for a special relic of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_'.

P. 91. _Dryden._--Hazlitt, who could not 'much relish Ben Jonson', describes him as 'a great borrower from the works of others, and a plagiarist even from nature; so little freedom is there in his imitations of her, and he appears to receive her bounty like an alms'. J. A. Symonds, stating that Jonson 'held the prose writers and poets of antiquity in solution in his spacious memory', points out that such looting on his part of classical treasuries of wit and wisdom was accounted no robbery in his age.

P. 91. _Sheridan._--Churchill has the same thought in _The Apology_:

Like gypsies, lest the stolen brat be known,
Defacing first, then claiming for their own.

P. 93. _Pattison._--Matthew Arnold, in the preface to _Literature and Dogma_ (1873), points out that 'To read to good purpose we must read a great deal, and be content not to use a great deal of what we read. We shall never be content not to use the whole, or nearly the whole, of what we read, unless we read a great deal.'

P. 96. _Mitford._--'Every abridgement of a good book is a stupid abridgement.'--MONTAIGNE.

P. 98. _Tennyson._--J. J. Jusserand, in the first annual Shakespeare lecture before the British Academy (July 5, 1911), used eloquent language which might be said to justify bibliographies:--'Books, like their authors, have their biography. They live their own lives. Some behave like honourable citizens of the world of thought, do good, propagate sound views, strengthen heart and courage, assuage, console, improve those men to whose hearths they have been invited. Others corrupt or debase, or else turn minds towards empty frivolities. In proportion to their fame, and to the degree of their perenniality, is the good or evil that they do from century to century, eternal benefactors of mankind or deathless malefactors. Posted on the road followed by humanity, they help or destroy the passers-by; they deserve gratitude eternal, or levy the toll of some of our life's blood, leaving us weaker; highwaymen or good Samaritans. Some make themselves heard at once and continue to be listened to for ever; others fill the ears for one or two generations, and then begin an endless sleep; or, on the contrary, long silent or misunderstood, they awake from their torpor, and astonished mankind discovers with surprise long-concealed treasures like those trodden upon by the unwary visitor of unexplored ruins.'

P. 99. _Helps._--'My desire is ... that mine adversary had written a book.'--The Author of Job, ch. 31.

'Curll, Pope's victim and accomplice ... hit on one of those epoch-making ideas which are so simple when once they are conceived, so difficult, save for the loftiest genius, in their first conception. It occurred to him that, in a world governed by the law of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another's remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate _Lives_, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, of famous and notorious persons who had the ill-fortune to die during his lifetime.... His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.'--SIR W. RALEIGH. _Six Essays on Johnson._

It is related in _The Percy Anecdotes_ that 'A gentleman calling on Archbishop Tillotson observed in his library one shelf of books of various forms and sizes, all richly bound, finely gilt and lettered. He inquired what favourite authors these were that had been so remarkably distinguished by his Grace. "These," said the Archbishop, "are my own personal friends; and what is more I have made them such (for they were avowedly my enemies), by the use I have made of those hints which their malice had suggested to me. From these I have received more profit than from the advice of my best and most cordial friends; and therefore you see I have rewarded them accordingly."'

P. 99. _Disraeli._--Compare Emerson: 'There is properly no history, only biography; and Carlyle: 'History is the essence of innumerable biographies.'

'Those that write of men's lives,' says Montaigne, 'forasmuch as they amuse and busy themselves more about counsels than events, more about that which cometh from within than that which appeareth outward; they are fittest for me.'

P. 102. _Glanvill._--An original Fellow of the Royal Society, and in many ways an interesting divine, probably best known in these days through Matthew Arnold's 'Scholar-Gypsy', whose story is told in _The Vanity of Dogmatizing_ (1661), from which this quotation and that on page 118 are made.

P. 103. _Jonson._--The poem 'To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us' appeared in 1623.

P. 105. _Jonson._--This was printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, 1623, on the page opposite the Droeshout portrait.

P. 105. _Milton._--These lines were printed anonymously in the Second Folio Shakespeare, 1632, and, it is believed, this was Milton's first appearance as a poet.

P. 106. _Dryden._--This was printed under the engraving in Tonson's folio edition of _Paradise Lost_ (1688). Mr. F. A. Mumby, in _The Romance of Bookselling_, recalls that in Moseley's first edition of Milton's poems there was an atrocious portrait of the poet by William Marshall. Milton wrote four lines in Greek, which the artist, innocent of that language, gravely cut into the plate, lines that Dr. Masson has thus translated:

That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You'd say at once, seeing the living face;
But, finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching artist's mis-attempt.

P. 106. _Fletcher._--The subject of this poem was Giles Fletcher, the author of _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 'equally beloved of the Muses and Graces.'

P. 106. _Crashaw._--From _The Flaming Heart_. 'His masterpiece, one of the most astonishing things in English or any literature, comes without warning at the end of _The Flaming Heart_. For page after page the poet has been playing on some trifling conceit ... and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet's inspiration catches fire, and then rushes up into the heaven of poetry the marvellous rocket of song: "Live in these conquering leaves," &c. The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the colourlessness of the beginning and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw's work.'--PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY. _History of Elizabethan Literature._

As an interesting example of Crashaw's conceits it may be noted that, when alluding to Mary Magdalene, he speaks of her eyes as 'Portable and compendious oceans.'

P. 107. _Voltaire._--The philosopher also remarks, in the same article, that 'there is hardly a single philosophical or theological book in which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or adding to, or subtracting from, the sense'.

P. 112. _Carlyle._--Abelard, born 1079, died 1142, is less known now as a famous teacher at the University of Paris than as the lover of Héloise.

P. 113. _Trapp and Browne._--When George I sent a present of some books, in November 1715, to the University of Cambridge, he sent at the same time a troop of horse to Oxford. This inspired Dr. Trapp and provoked the rejoinder from Sir William Browne.

P. 114. _Earle._--Mr. A. S. West, in his edition of Earle's _Microcosmographie; or a Piece of the World discovered; in Essayes and Characters_, says: 'The critic supposed that _omneis_ was the original form of the accusative plural of _omnis_, and that the forms _omnes_ and _omnis_ had taken its place. In order to adhere to the older spelling "he writes _omneis_ at length". _Quicquid_ is cited as an instance of pedantry because the ordinary man wrote the word as _quidquid_, and doubtless so pronounced it. The critic's gerund may be described as "inconformable" because it resists attraction--remains a gerund and does not become a gerundive. Or Earle may have had in view passages in which the gerund of transitive verbs with _est_ govern an object.'

P. 115. _Goldsmith._--'When Dr. Johnson is free to confess that he does not admire Gray's _Elegy_, and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the courage of their opinions?' Such is the question asked by James Payn in the _Nineteenth Century_ (March 1880), his article being entitled 'Sham Admiration in Literature'. Mr. Payn noted that 'curiously enough, it is women who have the most courage in the expression of their literary opinions', instancing the authoress of _Jane Eyre_, who 'did not derive much pleasure from the perusal of the works of the other Jane [Austen]', and Harriet Martineau, who confessed to him that she could see no beauties in _Tom Jones_.

'There is no ignorance more shameful than to admit as true that which one does not understand: and there is no advantage so great as that of being set free from error.'--XENOPHON. _Memorabilia._

P. 118. _Fielding._--'What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, _The Alchemist_, and _Tom Jones_, the three most perfect plots ever planned.... How charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is!'--S. T. COLERIDGE. _Table Talk._

P. 123. _Erasmus._--The translation is the work of Nathaniel Bailey, lexicographer and schoolmaster, who died in 1742. Desiderius and Erasmus are Latin and Greek for Gerhard 'the beloved', the name of the scholar's father.

P. 123. _Colton._--Compare R. B. Sheridan's: 'Easy writing's curst hard reading.'

P. 124. _Bacon._--Mr. A. S. Gaye, in the new Clarendon Press edition of the _Essays_, points out that on almost every page the reader will find quotations from the Bible and from the Greek and Latin classics, especially Tacitus, Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid, besides frequent allusions to biblical, classical, and mediaeval history. 'It is also remarkable that the quotations are more often than not inaccurate, not only in words but in sense.... Bacon furnished in himself an exception to the rule which he laid down in his Essay "Of Studies"; for though "reading" made him "a full man", "writing" did not make him "an exact man".'

P. 128. _Boswell._--One of Mrs. Piozzi's anecdotes of Dr. Johnson is that he asked 'Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers excepting _Don Quixote_, _Robinson Crusoe_, and the _Pilgrim's Progress_?' Johnson declared that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, 'speaking of it, I mean, as a book of entertainment.'

P. 132. _Emerson._--Shakespeare's phrase: _Taming of the Shrew_, Act I, sc. i.

P. 133. _Emerson._--O. W. Holmes applies the proverb to the Bible. 'What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.'

P. 135. _Calverley._--See Tupper's lines on page 12. The allusions are, of course, to the creations of Bulwer-Lytton.

P. 138. _Gibbon._--F. W. Robertson's opinion is worth recording: 'It is very surprising to find how little we retain of a book, how little we have really made our own, when we come to interrogate ourselves as to what account we can give of it, however we may seem to have mastered it by understanding it. Hundreds of books read once have passed as completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline of mind got by writing down, not copying, an abstract of a book which is worth the trouble, fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables one to read other books with more attention and more profit.'

P. 140. _Hamilton._--'This assumes that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us.'--LORD MORELY.

P. 145. _Addison._--Hor. _Ars Poet._ 1. 319:--

When the sentiments and manners please,
And all the characters are wrought with ease,
Your tale, though void of beauty, force, and art,
More strongly shall delight and warm the heart;
Than where a lifeless pomp of verse appears,
And with sonorous trifles charms our ears.--FRANCIS.

Butler, writing of 'A small poet' (_Characters_), says: 'There was one that lined a hat-case with a paper of Benlowe's poetry: Prynne bought it by chance, and put a new demicastor into it. The first time he wore it he felt a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a vertigo.' A 'demicastor' is a hat.

P. 147. _Scott._--Mr. W. J. Courthope, in his Warton Lecture on English Poetry before the British Academy, read on October 25, 1911, observes that 'the best illustration of historic change in "romantic" temper is perhaps to be found in a comparison of Cervantes' account of the character of Don Quixote [see p. 155] with Walter Scott's representation of the romanticism of the hero of _Waverley_. Don Quixote's "fancy", says Cervantes, "grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it." ... "My intention," says Scott, "is not to follow the steps of the inimitable Cervantes in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but the more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic colouring."' Scott expatiates at length on Waverley's reading in the third chapter of his novel.

P. 148. _Boswell._--Macaulay writes in his review of Southey's edition of _The Pilgrim's Progress_: 'Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. That work was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories.'

Boswell relates that Dr. Johnson 'had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end.'

P. 149. _Chandos._--The authorship of _Horae Subsecivae_ is not absolutely known, but it is attributed to James I's favourite courtier. It was published in 1620, the year before Chandos died.

P. 149. _Waller._--'A library well chosen cannot be too extensive, but some there are who amass a great quantity of books, which they keep for show, and not for service. Of such persons, Louis XI of France aptly enough observed, that "they resembled _hunch-backed_ people, who carried a great burden, which _they never saw_".'--W. KEDDIE. _Cyclopaedia_.

P. 153. _Coleridge._--The most deadly thing that Coleridge wrote was when he classed the patrons of the circulating libraries as lower in the scale than that reading public nine-tenths of whose reading is confined to periodicals and 'Beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas [Anecdotes]'.

P. 153. _Boswell._--Dr. Birkbeck Hill points out that Boswell alludes to this opinion in one of his letters, modestly adding: 'I am afraid I have not read books enough to be able to talk from them.' Johnson particularized Langton as talking from books, 'and Garrick would if he talked seriously.'

P. 154. _S. Smith._--Bettinelli, a scholar and a Jesuit (1718-1808), who attacked the reputation of Dante and Petrarch.

Coventry Patmore wrote: 'If you want to shine as a diner-out, the best way is to know something which others do not know, and not to know many things which everybody knows. This takes much less reading, and is doubly effective, inasmuch as it makes you a really good, that is, an interested listener, as well as a talker.'--(_On Obscure Books._)

P. 154. _Colton._--'Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an index and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's treasure.'--J. GLANVILL. _The Vanity of Dogmatizing._

P. 155. _Cervantes._--A whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of Don Quixote's library. (Part i, chap, vi.) The books that, condemned by the priest, were passed into the housekeeper's hands and thence into the fire were:--_Adventures of Esplandian_; _Amadis of Greece_; _Don Olivante de Laura_; _Florismarte of Hyrcania_; _The Knight Platir_; _The Knight of the Cross_; _Bernardo del Carpio_; _Roncesvalles_; _Palmerin de Oliva_; _Diana_, called the Second, by Salmantino; _The Shepherd of Iberia_; _The Nymphs of Henares_; and _The Curse of Jealousy_. The priest, however, put by for further examination or determined to save: _Amadis de Gaul_; _The Mirror of Chivalry_, and 'all other books that shall be found treating of French matters'; _Palmerin of England_; _Don Belianis_; _Tirante the White_; _Diana_, of Montemayor, and its continuation by Gil Polo; _Ten Books of the Fortune of Love_; _The Shepherd of Filida_; _The Treasure of Divers Poems_ (de Padilla); _Book of Songs_, by Lopez Maldonado; _Galatea_, by Cervantes; _Araucana_; _Austriada_; _Monserrate_; and the _Tears of Angelica_. The curious reader will find these volumes traced in the admirable notes in J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly's edition of _Don Quixote_ in 'The World's Classics'. Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly says, devoured in his wandering youth, 'those folios of chivalrous adventures which he, and he alone, has saved from the iniquity of oblivion'. The early association of Barabbas and books will be noticed.

It is the translation by Charles Jervas, first published in 1742, which is here employed.

_The Renowned Romance of Amadis of Gaul_, by Vasco Lobeira, which was expressly condemned by Montaigne (see p. 144), was translated from the Spanish version of Garciodonez de Montalvo by Southey.

P. 159. _Ruskin._--As Mr. Frederic Harrison points out, 'Books are no more education than laws are virtue; and, just as profligacy is easy within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found with a narrow education.'

P. 159. _E. B. Browning._--This letter was written to 'Orion' Horne three years before Mrs. Browning's marriage in 1843, when she was thirty-seven. Compare Matthew Arnold in the preface to _Literature and Dogma_ (1873): 'Nothing can be truer than what Butler says, that really, in general, no part of our time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading. Still, culture is indispensably necessary, and culture is reading; but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system.'

P. 161. _Maurice._--This is better than Sydney Smith's attitude expressed in the question, 'Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?'

P. 162. _Blackie._--'Reading is seeing by proxy--is learning indirectly through another man's faculties, instead of directly through one's own faculties; and such is the prevailing bias, that the indirect learning is thought preferable to the direct learning, and usurps the name of cultivation.'--HERBERT SPENCER. _The Study of Sociology._

P. 163. _Montaigne._--'Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.'--LORD MORLEY.

P. 163. _Davies._--

What is the end of Fame? 'Tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper ...
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.

LORD BYRON, _Don Juan_.

P. 164. _Hall._--'Hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppitations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies.'--R. BURTON. _The Anatomy of Melancholy._

P. 165. _Lytton._--'I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop, filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.'--O. W. HOLMES. _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table._

P. 169. _Walpole._--Mr. Augustine Birrell in _Obiter Dicta: The Office of Literature_ writes that the author's office is to make the reader happy:--

'Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books--these are our demands....

'Literature exists to please--to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures--and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office.'

P. 169. _Chaucer._--The book referred to is Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.

P. 169. _Digby._--Sir Kenelm Digby's 'observations' are generally printed with _Religio Medici_, although in a letter to Sir T. Browne, who had written to him on the subject, he explained that the hastily set down notes did not merit the press, and would 'serve only for a private letter, or a familiar discourse with lady-auditors'.

To Sir Thomas Browne, 'a library,' says Coleridge, 'was a living world, and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood.'

P. 170. _Boswell._--'Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, where as in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, ends, falls of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c. Plutarch therefore calls them _secundas mensas et bellaria_, the second courses and junkets, because they were usually read at noblemen's feasts.'--R. BURTON. _Anatomy_.

P. 171. _Rabelais._--

Whence is thy learning? Hath thy toil
O'er books consumed the midnight oil?--J. GAY.

P. 171. _Wilson._--This is often taken to be an antique. As a matter of fact, Mr. John Wilson, a London bookseller, stated to Mr. Austin Dobson that he wrote the lines as a motto for one of his second-hand catalogues. Wilson, Mr. Dobson tells us, was amused at the vogue the lines eventually obtained.

P. 172. _Chaucer._--This is the earlier version, and to be preferred to the later, in which the passage ends:

Farwel my book and my devocioun!

wel unethe=scarcely any.

P. 175. _Tickle._--'Written in a fit of the gout.'

'And laid the storm,' &c.: the advice given to Augustus by Athenodorus the Stoic philosopher.

See Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_, Act v, sc. i. Holofernes 'teaches boys the horn-book'.

P. 181. _Richardson._--In his preface to _Pamela_ Richardson claims to give 'practical examples worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the obliging wife'. The heroine becomes Mrs. B----, and Billy is the first-born. Locke's treatise was published in 1693, or forty-seven years before Richardson's novel, and the philosopher observes 'That most Children's Constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by _Cockering and Tenderness_'. 'Mr. B.' recommended better than he knew.

P. 181. _Johnson_ ('At large in the library').--Ruskin gives the same advice. See p. 208.

P. 183. _Gibbon._--The _Autobiography_, in Sir Archibald Alison's opinion, is 'the most perfect account of an eminent man's life, from his own hand, which exists in any language'.

P. 186. _Landor._--See the poem to Wordsworth on p. 21.

P. 187. _Hunt._--The friend referred to was Shelley.

P. 188. _Dickens._--Of this passage, Forster says in the _Life of Dickens_, 'It is one of the many passages in _Copperfield_ which are literally true.... Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into _David Copperfield_; the only change in the fiction being his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by means of which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.'

Apropos of Defoe, Macaulay, who could not 'understand the mania of some people about Defoe', admitted that 'he certainly wrote an excellent book--the first part of _Robinson Crusoe_ ... my delight before I was five years old'.

P. 189. _Hazlitt._--It is reported (Dibdin relates in _Bibliomania_) that a certain man, of the name of Similis, who fought under the Emperor Hadrian, became so wearied and disgusted with the number of troublesome events which he met with in that mode of life, that he retired and devoted himself wholly to leisure and reading, and to meditations upon divine and human affairs, after the manner of Pythagoras. In this retirement, Similis was wont frequently to exclaim that '_now_ he began to _live_': at his death he desired the following inscription to be placed upon his tomb.

Here lies Similis;
In the seventieth year of his age
But only the seventh of his life.

In a note it is stated that 'This story is related by Dion Cassius and from him told by Spizelius in his _Infelix Literarius_'.

P. 190. _Donne._--This is the title given by Donne's editors, but is nonsense. Grosart explains that Pindar's instructress was Corinna the Theban, and that Lucan's 'help' is probably his helpmeet--Argentaria Polla, his wife who survived him.

P. 192. _Dante._--This is the famous passage in Canto V referring to Paolo and Francesca.--(Cary's translation.)

P. 196. _Moore._--

For where is any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?

SHAKESPEARE. _Love's Labour's Lost_, Act IV. Sc. iii.

P. 198. _More._--Warton thinks it probable that Sir Thomas More--'one of the best jokers of the age'--may have written this epigram, which he considers the first pointed epigram in our language. But by some the lines are credited to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who is memorable, among other things, for introducing the sonnet from Italy into England, a distinction which he shares with Wyatt.

P. 199. _Moore._--'Mamurra was a dogmatic philosopher, who never doubted about anything, except who was his father; Bombastus, one of the names of the great scholar and quack Paracelsus. St. Jerome was scolded by an angel for reading Cicero, as Gratia tells the story in his _Concordantia discordantium Canonum_, and says, that for this reason bishops were not allowed to read the classics'.

P. 203. _Scott._--The Roxburgh Club was inaugurated on the day of the sale of the Duke of Roxburgh's library in 1812 in order to print for members rare books or manuscripts. The club had numerous offspring, including the Bannatyne Club (see p. 270, and the note thereon). The Duke of Roxburgh's library, which was celebrated for its Caxtons, sold for £23,341.

P. 205. _E. B. Browning._--

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

E. FITZGERALD. _Omar Khayyám._