The Book-Hunter / A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author

by John Hill Burton

A Vision of Mighty Book-Hunters.

s the first case, let us summon from the shades my venerable friend Archdeacon Meadow, as he was in the body. You see him now—tall, straight, and meagre, but with a grim dignity in his air which warms into benignity as he inspects a pretty little clean Elzevir, or a tall portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a peculiar grunting chuckle, known by the initiated to be an important announcement. This is no doubt one of the milder and more inoffensive types, but still a thoroughly confirmed and obstinate case. Its parallel to the classes who are to be taken charge of by their wiser neighbours is only too close and awful; for have not sometimes the female members of his household been known on occasion of some domestic emergency—or, it may be, for mere sake of keeping the lost man out of mischief—to have been searching for him on from bookstall unto bookstall, just as the mothers, wives, and daughters of other lost men hunt them through their favourite taverns or gambling-houses? Then, again, can one forget that occasion of his going to London to be examined by a committee of the House of Commons, when he suddenly disappeared with all his money in his pocket, and returned penniless, followed by a waggon containing 372 copies of rare editions of the Bible? All were fish that came to his net. At one time you might find him securing a minnow for sixpence at a stall—and presently afterwards he outbids some princely collector, and secures with frantic impetuosity, "at any price," a great fish he has been patiently watching year after year. His hunting-grounds were wide and distant, and there were mysterious rumours about the numbers of copies, all identically the same in edition and minor individualities, which he possessed of certain books. I have known him, indeed, when beaten at an auction, turn round resignedly and say, "Well, so be it—but I daresay I have ten or twelve copies at home, if I could lay hands on them."

It is a matter of extreme anxiety to his friends, and, if he have a well-constituted mind, of sad misgiving to himself, when the collector buys his first duplicate. It is like the first secret dram swallowed in the forenoon—the first pawning of the silver spoons—or any other terrible first step downwards you may please to liken it to. There is no hope for the patient after this. It rends at once the veil of decorum spun out of the flimsy sophisms by which he has been deceiving his friends, and partially deceiving himself, into the belief that his previous purchases were necessary, or, at all events, serviceable for professional and literary purposes. He now becomes shameless and hardened; and it is observable in the career of this class of unfortunates, that the first act of duplicity is immediately followed by an access of the disorder, and a reckless abandonment to its propensities. The Archdeacon had long passed this stage ere he crossed my path, and had become thoroughly hardened. He was not remarkable for local attachment; and in moving from place to place, his spoil, packed in innumerable great boxes, sometimes followed him, to remain unreleased during the whole period of his tarrying in his new abode, so that they were removed to the next stage of his journey through life with modified inconvenience.

Cruel as it may seem, I must yet notice another and a peculiar vagary of his malady. He had resolved, at least once in his life, to part with a considerable proportion of his collection—better to suffer the anguish of such an act than endure the fretting of continued restraint. There was a wondrous sale by auction accordingly; it was something like what may have occurred on the dissolution of the monasteries at the Reformation, or when the contents of some time-honoured public library were realised at the period of the French Revolution. Before the affair was over, the Archdeacon himself made his appearance in the midst of the miscellaneous self-invited guests who were making free with his treasures,—he pretended, honest man, to be a mere casual spectator, who, having seen, in passing, the announcement of a sale by auction, stepped in like the rest of the public. By degrees he got excited, gasped once or twice as if mastering some desperate impulse, and at length fairly bade. He could not brazen out the effect of this escapade, however, and disappeared from the scene. It was remarked by the observant, that an unusual number of lots were afterwards knocked down to a military gentleman, who seemed to have left portentously large orders with the auctioneer. Some curious suspicions began to arise, which were settled by that presiding genius bending over his rostrum, and explaining in a confidential whisper that the military hero was in reality a pillar of the Church so disguised.

The Archdeacon lay under what, among a portion of the victims of his malady, was deemed a heavy scandal. He was suspected of reading his own books—that is to say, when he could get at them; for there are those who may still remember his rather shamefaced apparition of an evening, petitioning, somewhat in the tone with which an old schoolfellow down in the world requests your assistance to help him to go to York to get an appointment—petitioning for the loan of a volume of which he could not deny that he possessed numberless copies lurking in divers parts of his vast collection. This reputation of reading the books in his collection, which should be sacred to external inspection solely, is, with a certain school of book-collectors, a scandal, such as it would be among a hunting set to hint that a man had killed a fox. In the dialogues, not always the most entertaining, of Dibdin's Bibliomania, there is this short passage: "'I will frankly confess,' rejoined Lysander, 'that I am an arrant bibliomaniac—that I love books dearly—that the very sight, touch, and mere perusal——' 'Hold, my friend,' again exclaimed Philemon; 'you have renounced your profession—you talk of reading books—do bibliomaniacs ever read books?'"

Yes, the Archdeacon read books—he devoured them; and he did so to full prolific purpose. His was a mind enriched with varied learning, which he gave forth with full, strong, easy flow, like an inexhaustible perennial spring coming from inner reservoirs, never dry, yet too capacious to exhibit the brawling, bubbling symptoms of repletion. It was from a majestic heedlessness of the busy world and its fame that he got the character of indolence, and was set down as one who would leave no lasting memorial of his great learning. But when he died, it was not altogether without leaving a sign; for from the casual droppings of his pen has been preserved enough to signify to many generations of students in the walk he chiefly affected how richly his mind was stored, and how much fresh matter there is in those fields of inquiry where compilers have left their dreary tracks, for ardent students to cultivate into a rich harvest. In him truly the bibliomania may be counted among the many illustrations of the truth so often moralised on, that the highest natures are not exempt from human frailty in some shape or other.

Let us now summon the shade of another departed victim—Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq. He, too, through a long life, had been a vigilant and enthusiastic collector, but after a totally different fashion. He was far from omnivorous. He had a principle of selection peculiar and separate from all other's, as was his own individuality from other men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the accepted nomenclatures peculiar to the initiated. He was not a black-letter man, or a tall copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an early-English-dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or an old-brown-calf man, or a Grangerite, or a tawny-moroccoite, or a gilt-topper, a marbled-insider, or an editio princeps man; neither did he come under any of the more vulgar classifications of collectors whose thoughts run more upon the usefulness for study than upon the external conditions of their library, such as those who affect science, or the classics, or English poetic and historical literature. There was no way of defining his peculiar walk save by his own name—it was the Fitzpatrick-Smart walk. In fact, it wound itself in infinite windings through isolated spots of literary scenery, if we may so speak, in which he took a personal interest. There were historical events, bits of family history, chiefly of a tragic or a scandalous kind,—efforts of art or of literary genius on which, through some hidden intellectual law, his mind and memory loved to dwell; and it was in reference to these that he collected. If the book were the one desired by him, no anxiety and toil, no payable price, was to be grudged for its acquisition. If the book were an inch out of his own line, it might be trampled in the mire for aught he cared, be it as rare or costly as it could be.

It was difficult, almost impossible, for others to predicate what would please this wayward sort of taste, and he was the torment of the book-caterers, who were sure of a princely price for the right article, but might have the wrong one thrown in their teeth with contumely. It was a perilous, but, if successful, a gratifying thing to present him with a book. If it happened to hit his fancy, he felt the full force of the compliment, and overwhelmed the giver with his courtly thanks. But great observation and tact were required for such an adventure. The chances against an ordinary thoughtless gift-maker were thousands to one; and those who were acquainted with his strange nervous temperament, knew that the existence within his dwelling-place of any book not of his own special kind, would impart to him the sort of feeling of uneasy horror which a bee is said to feel when an earwig comes into its cell. Presentation copies by authors were among the chronic torments of his existence. While the complacent author was perhaps pluming himself on his liberality in making the judicious gift, the recipient was pouring out all his sarcasm, which was not feeble or slight, on the odious object, and wondering why an author could have entertained against him so steady and enduring a malice as to take the trouble of writing and printing all that rubbish with no better object than disturbing the peace of mind of an inoffensive old man. Every tribute from such dona ferentes cost him much uneasiness and some want of sleep—for what could he do with it? It was impossible to make merchandise of it, for he was every inch a gentleman. He could not burn it, for under an acrid exterior he had a kindly nature. It was believed, indeed, that he had established some limbo of his own, in which such unwelcome commodities were subject to a kind of burial or entombment, where they remained in existence, yet were decidedly outside the circle of his household gods.

These gods were a pantheon of a lively and grotesque aspect, for he was a hunter after other things besides books. His acquisitions included pictures, and the various commodities which, for want of a distinctive name, auctioneers call "miscellaneous articles of vertu." He started on his accumulating career with some old family relics, and these, perhaps, gave the direction to his subsequent acquisitions, for they were all, like his books, brought together after some self-willed and peculiar law of association that pleased himself. A bad, even an inferior, picture he would not have—for his taste was exquisite—unless, indeed, it had some strange history about it, adapting it to his wayward fancies, and then he would adopt the badness as a peculiar recommendation, and point it out with some pungent and appropriate remark to his friends. But though, with these peculiar exceptions, his works of art were faultless, no dealer could ever calculate on his buying a picture, however high in artistic merit or tempting as a bargain. With his ever-accumulating collection, in which tiny sculpture and brilliant colour predominated, he kept a sort of fairy world around him. But each one of the mob of curious things he preserved had some story linking it with others, or with his peculiar fancies, and each one had its precise place in a sort of epos, as certainly as each of the persons in the confusion of a pantomime or a farce has his own position and functions.

After all, he was himself his own greatest curiosity. He had come to manhood just after the period of gold-laced waistcoats, small-clothes, and shoe-buckles, otherwise he would have been long a living memorial of these now antique habits. It happened to be his lot to preserve down to us the earliest phase of the pantaloon dynasty. So, while the rest of the world were booted or heavy shod, his silk-stockinged feet were thrust into pumps of early Oxford cut, and the predominant garment was the surtout, blue in colour, and of the original make before it came to be called a frock. Round his neck was wrapped an ante-Brummelite neckerchief (not a tie), which projected in many wreaths like a great poultice—and so he took his walks abroad, a figure which he could himself have turned into admirable ridicule.

One of the mysteries about him was, that his clothes, though unlike any other person's, were always old. This characteristic could not even be accounted for by the supposition that he had laid in a sixty years' stock in his youth, for they always appeared to have been a good deal worn. The very umbrella was in keeping—it was of green silk, an obsolete colour ten years ago—and the handle was of a peculiar crosier-like formation in cast-horn, obviously not obtainable in the market. His face was ruddy, but not with the ruddiness of youth; and, bearing on his head a Brutus wig of the light-brown hair which had long ago legitimately shaded his brow, when he stood still—except for his linen, which was snowy white—one might suppose that he had been shot and stuffed on his return home from college, and had been sprinkled with the frowzy mouldiness which time imparts to stuffed animals and other things, in which a semblance to the freshness of living nature is vainly attempted to be preserved. So if he were motionless; but let him speak, and the internal freshness was still there, an ever-blooming garden of intellectual flowers. His antiquated costume was no longer grotesque—it harmonised with an antiquated courtesy and high-bred gentleness of manner, which he had acquired from the best sources, since he had seen the first company in his day, whether for rank or genius. And conversation and manner were far from exhausting his resources. He had a wonderful pencil—it was potent for the beautiful, the terrible, and the ridiculous; but it took a wayward wilful course, like everything else about him. He had a brilliant pen, too, when he chose to wield it; but the idea that he should exercise any of these his gifts in common display before the world, for any even of the higher motives that make people desire fame and praise, would have sickened him. His faculties were his own as much as his collection, and to be used according to his caprice and pleasure. So fluttered through existence one who, had it been his fate to have his own bread to make, might have been a great man. Alas for the end! Some curious annotations are all that remain of his literary powers—some drawings and etchings in private collections all of his artistic. His collection, with its long train of legends and associations, came to what he himself must have counted as dispersal. He left it to his housekeeper, who, like a wise woman, converted it into cash while its mysterious reputation was fresh. Huddled in a great auction-room, its several catalogued items lay in humiliating contrast with the decorous order in which they were wont to be arranged. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Let us now call up a different and a more commonplace type of the book-hunter—it shall be Inchrule Brewer. He is guiltless of all intermeddling with the contents of books, but in their external attributes his learning is marvellous. He derived his nickname, from the practice of keeping, as his inseparable pocket-companion, one of those graduated folding measures of length which may often be seen protruding from the moleskin pocket of the joiner. He used it at auctions and on other appropriate occasions, to measure the different elements of a book—the letterpress—the unprinted margin—the external expanse of the binding; for to the perfectly scientific collector all these things are very significant.[26] They are, in fact, on record among the craft, like the pedigrees and physical characteristics recorded in stud-books and short-horn books. One so accomplished in this kind of analysis could tell at once, by this criterion, whether the treasure under the hammer was the same that had been knocked down before at the Roxburghe sale—the Askew, the Gordonstoun, or the Heber, perhaps—or was veritably an impostor—or was in reality a new and previously unknown prize well worth contending for. The minuteness and precision of his knowledge excited wonder, and, being anomalous in the male sex even among collectors, gave occasion to a rumour that its possessor must veritably be an aged maiden in disguise.

His experience, aided by a heaven-born genius tending in that direction, rendered him the most merciless detector of sophisticated books. Nothing, it might be supposed on first thought, can be a simpler or more easily recognised thing than a book genuine as printed. But in the old-book trade there are opportunities for the exercise of ingenuity inferior only to those which render the picture-dealer's and the horse-dealer's functions so mysteriously interesting. Sometimes entire facsimiles are made of eminent volumes. More commonly, however, the problem is to complete an imperfect copy. This will be most satisfactorily accomplished, of course, if another copy can be procured imperfect also, but not in the same parts. Great ingenuity is sometimes shown in completing a highly esteemed edition with fragments from one lightly esteemed. Sometimes a colophon or a decorated capital has to be imitated, and bold operators will reprint a page or two in facsimile; these operations, of course, involve the inlaying of paper, judiciously staining it, and other mysteries. Paris is the great centre of this kind of work, but it has been pretty extensively pursued in Britain; and the manufacture of first folio Shakespeares has been nearly as staple a trade as the getting up of genuine portraits of Mary Queen of Scots. It will establish a broad distinction to note the fact, that whereas our friend the Archdeacon would collect several imperfect copies of the same book, in the hope of finding materials for one perfect one among them, Inchrule would remorselessly spurn from him the most voluptuously got-up specimen (to use a favourite phrase of Dibdin's) were it tainted by the very faintest suspicion of "restoration."

Among the elements which constitute the value of a book—rarity of course being essential—one might say he counted the binding highest. He was not alone in this view, for it would be difficult to give the uninitiated a conception of the importance attached to this mechanical department of book-making by the adepts. About a third of Dibdin's Bibliographical Decameron is, if I recollect rightly, devoted to bindings. There are binders who have immortalised themselves—as Staggemier, Walther, Payne, Padaloup, Hering, De Rome, Bozerian, Deseuille, Bradel, Faulkner, Lewis, Hayday, and Thomson. Their names may sometimes be found on their work, not with any particularities, as if they required to make themselves known, but with the simple brevity of illustrious men. Thus you take up a morocco-bound work of some eminence, on the title-page of which the author sets forth his full name and profession, with the distinctive initials of certain learned societies to which it is his pride to belong; but the simple and dignified enunciation, deeply stamped in his own golden letters, "Bound by Hayday," is all that that accomplished artist deigns to tell.

And let us, after all, acknowledge that there are few men who are entirely above the influence of binding. No one likes sheep's clothing for his literature, even if he should not aspire to russia or morocco. Adam Smith, one of the least showy of men, confessed himself to be a beau in his books. Perhaps the majority of men of letters are so to some extent, though poets are apt to be ragamuffins. It was Thomson, I believe, who used to cut the leaves with his snuffers. Perhaps an event in his early career may have soured him of the proprieties. It is said that he had an uncle, a clever active mechanic, who could do many things with his hands, and contemplated James's indolent, dreamy, "feckless" character with impatient disgust. When the first of The Seasons—Winter it was, I believe—had been completed at press, Jamie thought, by a presentation copy, to triumph over his uncle's scepticism, and to propitiate his good opinion he had the book handsomely bound. The old man never looked inside, or asked what the book was about, but, turning it round and round with his fingers in gratified admiration, exclaimed—"Come, is that really our Jamie's doin' now?—weel, I never thought the cratur wad hae had the handicraft to do the like!"

The feeling by which this worthy man was influenced was a mere sensible practical respect for good workmanship. The aspirations of the collectors, however, in this matter, go out of the boundaries of the sphere of the utilitarian into that of the æsthetic. Their priests and prophets, by the way, do not seem to be aware how far back this veneration for the coverings of books may be traced, or to know how strongly their votaries have been influenced in the direction of their taste by the traditions of the middle ages. The binding of a book was, of old, a shrine on which the finest workmanship in bullion and the costliest gems were lavished. The psalter or the breviary of some early saint, a portion of the Scriptures, or some other volume held sacred, would be thus enshrined. It has happened sometimes that tattered fragments of them have been preserved as effective relics within outer shells or shrines; and in some instances, long after the books themselves have disappeared, specimens of these old bindings have remained to us beautiful in their decay;—but we are getting far beyond the Inchrule.

Your affluent omnivorous collector, who has more of that kind of business on hand than he can perform for himself, naturally brings about him a train of satellites, who make it their business to minister to his importunate cravings. With them the phraseology of the initiated degenerates into a hard business sort of slang. Whatever slight remnant of respect towards literature as a vehicle of knowledge may linger in the conversation of their employers, has never belonged to theirs. They are dealers who have just two things to look to—the price of their merchandise, and the peculiar propensities of the unfortunates who employ them. Not that they are destitute of all sympathy with the malady which they feed. The caterer generally gets infected in a superficial cutaneous sort of way. He has often a collection himself, which he eyes complacently of an evening as he smokes his pipe over his brandy-and-water, but to which he is not so distractedly devoted but that a pecuniary consideration will tempt him to dismember it. It generally consists, indeed, of blunders or false speculations—books which have been obtained in a mistaken reliance on their suiting the craving of some wealthy collector. Caterers unable to comprehend the subtle influences at work in the mind of the book-hunter, often make miscalculations in this way. Fitzpatrick Smart punished them so terribly, that they at last abandoned him in despair to his own devices.

Several men of this class were under the authority of the Inchrule, and their communings were instructive. "Thorpe's catalogue just arrived, sir—several highly important announcements," says a portly person with a fat volume under his arm, hustling forward with an air of assured consequence. There is now to be a deep and solemn consultation, as when two ambassadors are going over a heavy protocol from a third. It happened to me to see one of these myrmidons returning from a bootless errand of inspection to a reputed collection; he was hot and indignant "A collection," he sputtered forth—"that a collection!—mere rubbish, sir—irredeemable trash. What do you think, sir?—a set of the common quarto edition of the Delphini classics, copies of Newton's works and Bacon's works, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and so forth—nothing better, I declare to you: and to call that a collection!" Whereas, had it contained The Pardoner and the Frere, Sir Clyomon and Clamydes, A Knacke to knowe a Knave, Banke's Bay Horse in a Trance, or the works of those eminent dramatists, Nabbes, May, Glapthorne, or Chettle, then would the collection have been worthy of distinguished notice. On another occasion, the conversation turning on a name of some repute, the remark is ventured, that he is "said to know something about books," which brings forth the fatal answer—"He know about books! Nothing—nothing at all, I assure you; unless, perhaps, about their insides."

The next slide of the lantern is to represent a quite peculiar and abnormal case. It introduces a strangely fragile, unsubstantial, and puerile figure, wherein, however, resided one of the most potent and original spirits that ever frequented a tenement of clay. He shall be called, on account of associations that may or may not be found out, Thomas Papaverius. But how to make palpable to the ordinary human being one so signally divested of all the material and common characteristics of his race, yet so nobly endowed with its rarer and loftier attributes, almost paralyses the pen at the very beginning.

In what mood and shape shall he be brought forward? Shall it be as first we met at the table of Lucullus, whereto he was seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who entertained novel and anarchical opinions regarding the Golden Ass of Apuleius? No one speaks of waiting dinner for him. He will come and depart at his own sweet will, neither burdened with punctualities nor burdening others by exacting them. The festivities of the afternoon are far on when a commotion is heard in the hall as if some dog or other stray animal had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival—he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? a street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a parti-coloured belcher handkerchief; on his feet are list-shoes, covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night; and the trousers—some one suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them. What can be the theory of such a costume? The simplest thing in the world—it consisted of the fragments of apparel nearest at hand. Had chance thrown to him a court single-breasted coat, with a bishop's apron, a kilt, and top-boots, in these he would have made his entry.

The first impression that a boy has appeared vanishes instantly. Though in one of the sweetest and most genial of his essays he shows how every man retains so much in him of the child he originally was—and he himself retained a great deal of that primitive simplicity—it was buried within the depths of his heart—not visible externally. On the contrary, on one occasion when he corrected an erroneous reference to an event as being a century old, by saying that he recollected its occurrence, one felt almost a surprise at the necessary limitation in his age, so old did he appear, with his arched brow loaded with thought, and the countless little wrinkles which engrained his skin, gathering thickly round the curiously expressive and subtle lips. These lips are speedily opened by some casual remark, and presently the flood of talk passes forth from them, free, clear, and continuous—never rising into declamation—never losing a certain mellow earnestness, and all consisting of sentences as exquisitely jointed together as if they were destined to challenge the criticism of the remotest posterity. Still the hours stride over each other, and still flows on the stream of gentle rhetoric, as if it were labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum. It is now far in to the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of civilisation, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the special, he could testify to the inconvenience of late hours; for, was it not the other night that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his own door, he knocked, and knocked, but the old woman within either couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and, having taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme unpleasantness of such a couch. The predial groove might indeed nourish kindly the infant seeds and shoots of the peculiar vegetable to which it was appropriated, but was not a comfortable place of repose for adult man.

Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore, he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he should get a penny and go home—a proposal which he subjected to some philosophical criticism very far wide of its practical tenor. How far he had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even whether he had eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting articulate utterance from him. Though his costume was muddy, however, and his communications about the material wants of life very hazy, the ideas which he had stored up during his wandering poured themselves forth as clear and sparkling, both in logic and language, as the purest fountain that springs from a Highland rock.

How that wearied, worn, little body was to be refreshed was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him—the hard he could not eat. Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops! nonsense. If the wine-glasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal size, there was no risk—and so the weary is at rest for a time.

At early morn a triumphant cry of Eureka! calls me to his place of rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a considerable heap of them around him. That one which specially claims his attention—my best bound quarto—is spread upon a piece of bedroom furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it occurred to me that I had seen something like the scene in Dutch paintings of the temptation of St Anthony.

Suppose the scene changed to a pleasant country-house, where the enlivening talk has make a guest forget

"The lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,"

that lie between him and his place of rest. He must be instructed in his course, but the instruction reveals more difficulties than it removes, and there is much doubt and discussion, which Papaverius at once clears up as effectually as he had ever dispersed a cloud of logical sophisms; and this time the feat is performed by a stroke of the thoroughly practical, which looks like inspiration—he will accompany the forlorn traveller, and lead him through the difficulties of the way—for have not midnight wanderings and musings made him familiar with all its intricacies? Roofed by a huge wideawake, which makes his tiny figure look like the stalk of some great fungus, with a lantern of more than common dimensions in his hand, away he goes down the wooded path, up the steep bank, along the brawling stream, and across the waterfall—and ever as he goes there comes from him a continued stream of talk concerning the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and other kindred matters. Surely if we two were seen by any human eyes, it must have been supposed that some gnome, or troll, or kelpie was luring the listener to his doom. The worst of such affairs as this was the consciousness that, when left, the old man would continue walking on until, weariness overcoming him, he would take his rest, wherever that happened, like some poor mendicant. He used to denounce, with his most fervent eloquence, that barbarous and brutal provision of the law of England which rendered sleeping in the open air an act of vagrancy, and so punishable, if the sleeper could not give a satisfactory account of himself—a thing which Papaverius never could give under any circumstances. After all, I fear this is an attempt to describe the indescribable. It was the commonest of sayings when any of his friends were mentioning to each other "his last," and creating mutual shrugs of astonishment, that, were one to attempt to tell all about him, no man would believe it, so separate would the whole be from all the normal conditions of human nature.

The difficulty becomes more inextricable in passing from specific little incidents to an estimation of the general nature of the man. The logicians lucidly describe definition as being per genus et differentiam. You have the characteristics in which all of the genus partake as common ground, and then you individualise your object by showing in what it differs from the others of the genus. But we are denied this standard for Papaverius, so entirely did he stand apart, divested of the ordinary characteristics of social man—of those characteristics without which the human race as a body could not get on or exist. For instance, those who knew him a little might call him a loose man in money matters; those who knew him closer laughed at the idea of coupling any notion of pecuniary or other like responsibility with his nature. You might as well attack the character of the nightingale, which may have nipped up your five-pound note and torn it to shreds to serve as nest-building material. Only immediate craving necessities could ever extract from him an acknowledgment of the common vulgar agencies by which men subsist in civilised society; and only while the necessity lasted did the acknowledgment exist. Take just one example, which will render this clearer than any generalities. He arrives very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission—a process in which he often endured impediments—he represents, with his usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the realm—the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or fancying he discovers, signs that his eloquence is likely to be unproductive, he is fortunately reminded that, should there be any difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he is at that moment in possession of a document, which he is prepared to deposit with the lender—a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove any feeling of anxiety which the most prudent person could experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled bit of paper, and spreads it out—a fifty-pound bank-note! The friend, who knew him well, was of opinion that, had he, on delivering over the seven shillings and sixpence, received the bank-note, he never would have heard anything more of the transaction from the other party. It was also his opinion that, before coming to a personal friend, the owner of the note had made several efforts to raise money on it among persons who might take a purely business view of such transactions; but the lateness of the hour, and something in the appearance of the thing altogether, had induced these mercenaries to forget their cunning, and decline the transaction.

He stretched till it broke the proverb that to give quickly is as good as to give twice. His giving was quick enough on the rare occasions when he had wherewithal to give, but then the act was final, and could not be repeated. If he suffered in his own person from this peculiarity, he suffered still more in his sympathies, for he was full of them to all breathing creatures, and, like poor Goldy, it was agony to him to hear the beggar's cry of distress, and to hear it without the means of assuaging it, though in a departed fifty pounds there were doubtless the elements for appeasing many a street wail. All sums of money were measured by him through the common standard of immediate use; and with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note, might he inform you that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be nearest to him at the time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in negotiating a loan of "twopence." He was and is a great authority in political economy. I have known great anatomists and physiologists as careless of their health as he was of his purse, whence I have inferred that something more than a knowledge of the abstract truth of political economy is necessary to keep some men from pecuniary imprudence, and that something more than a knowledge of the received principles of physiology is necessary to bring others into a course of perfect sobriety and general obedience to the laws of health. Further, Papaverius had an extraordinary insight into practical human life; not merely in the abstract, but in the concrete; not merely as a philosopher of human nature, but as one who saw into those who passed him in the walk of life with the kind of intuition attributed to expert detectives—a faculty that is known to have belonged to more than one dreamer, and is one of the mysteries in the nature of J.J. Rousseau; and, by the way, like Rousseau's, his handwriting was clear, angular, and unimpassioned, and not less uniform and legible than printing—as if the medium of conveying so noble a thing as thought ought to be carefully, symmetrically, and decorously constructed, let all other material things be as neglectfully and scornfully dealt with as may be.

This is a long proemium to the description of his characteristics as a book-hunter—but these can be briefly told. Not for him were the common enjoyments and excitements of the pursuit. He cared not to add volume unto volume, and heap up the relics of the printing-press. All the external niceties about pet editions, peculiarities of binding or of printing, rarity itself, were no more to him than to the Arab or the Hottentot. His pursuit, indeed, was like that of the savage who seeks but to appease the hunger of the moment. If he catch a prey just sufficient for his desires, it is well; yet he will not hesitate to bring down the elk or the buffalo, and, satiating himself with the choicer delicacies, abandon the bulk of the carcass to the wolves or the vultures. So of Papaverius. If his intellectual appetite were craving after some passage in the [OE]dipus, or in the Medeia, or in Plato's Republic, he would be quite contented with the most tattered and valueless fragment of the volume, if it contained what he wanted; but, on the other hand, he would not hesitate to seize upon your tall copy in russia gilt and tooled. Nor would the exemption of an editio princeps from everyday sordid work restrain his sacrilegious hands. If it should contain the thing he desires to see, what is to hinder him from wrenching out the twentieth volume of your Encyclopédie Méthodique, or Ersch und Gruber, leaving a vacancy like an extracted front tooth, and carrying it off to his den of Cacus? If you should mention the matter to any vulgar-mannered acquaintance given to the unhallowed practice of jeering, he would probably touch his nose with his extended palm and say, "Don't you wish you may get it?" True, the world at large has gained a brilliant essay on Euripides or Plato—but what is that to the rightful owner of the lost sheep?

The learned world may very fairly be divided into those who return the books borrowed by them, and those who do not. Papaverius belonged decidedly to the latter order. A friend addicted to the marvellous boasts that, under the pressure of a call by a public library to replace a mutilated book with a new copy, which would have cost £30, he recovered a volume from Papaverius, through the agency of a person specially bribed and authorised to take any necessary measures, insolence and violence excepted—but the power of extraction that must have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding landlady. In other instances the book has been recognised at large, greatly enhanced in value by a profuse edging of manuscript notes from a gifted pen—a phenomenon calculated to bring into practical use the speculations of the civilians about pictures painted on other people's panels.[27] What became of all his waifs and strays, it might be well not to inquire too curiously. If he ran short of legitimate tabula rasa to write on, do you think he would hesitate to tear out the most convenient leaves of any broad-margined book, whether belonging to himself or another? Nay, it is said he once gave in copy written on the edges of a tall octavo Somnium Scipionis; and as he did not obliterate the original matter, the printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny jumble between the letterpress Latin and the manuscript English. All these things were the types of an intellectual vitality which despised and thrust aside all that was gross or material in that wherewith it came in contact. Surely never did the austerities of monk or anchorite so entirely cast all these away as his peculiar nature removed them from him. It may be questioned if he ever knew what it was "to eat a good dinner," or could even comprehend the nature of such a felicity. Yet in all the sensuous nerves which connect as it were the body with the ideal, he was painfully susceptible. Hence a false quantity or a wrong note in music was agony to him; and it is remembered with what ludicrous solemnity he apostrophised his unhappy fate as one over whom a cloud of the darkest despair had just been drawn—a peacock had come to live within hearing distance from him, and not only the terrific yells of the accursed biped pierced him to the soul, but the continued terror of their recurrence kept his nerves in agonising tension during the intervals of silence.

Peace be with his gentle and kindly spirit, now for some time separated from its grotesque and humble tenement of clay. It is both right and pleasant to say that the characteristics here spoken of were not those of his latter days. In these he was tended by affectionate hands; and I have always thought it a wonderful instance of the power of domestic care and management that, through the ministrations of a devoted offspring, this strange being was so cared for, that those who came in contact with him then, and then only, might have admired him as the patriarchal head of an agreeable and elegant household.

Let us now, for the sake of variety, summon up a spirit of another order—Magnus Lucullus, Esq. of Grand Priory. He is a man with a presence—tall, and a little portly, with a handsome pleasant countenance looking hospitality and kindliness towards friends, and a quiet but not easily solvable reserve towards the rest of the world. He has no literary pretensions, but you will not talk long with him without finding that he is a scholar, and a ripe and good one. He is complete and magnificent in all his belongings, only, as no man's qualities and characteristics are of perfectly uniform balance and parallel action, his library is the sphere in which his disposition for the complete and the magnificent has most profusely developed itself.

As you enter its Gothic door a sort of indistinct slightly musky perfume, like that said to frequent Oriental bazaars, hovers around. Everything is of perfect finish—the mahogany-railed gallery—the tiny ladders—the broad-winged lecterns, with leathern cushions on the edges to keep the wood from grazing the rich bindings—the books themselves, each shelf uniform with its facings or rather backings, like well-dressed lines at a review. Their owner does not profess to indulge much in quaint monstrosities, though many a book of rarity is there. In the first place, he must have the best and most complete editions, whether common or rare; and, in the second place, they must be in perfect condition. All the classics are there—one complete set of Valpy's in good russia, and many separate copies of each, valuable for text or annotation. The copies of Bayle, Moreri, the Trevoux Dictionary, Stephens's Lexicon, Du Cange, Mabillon's Antiquities, the Benedictine historians, the Bollandists' Lives of the Saints, Grævius and Gronovius, and heavy books of that order, are in their old original morocco, without a scratch or abrasure, gilt-edged, vellum-jointed, with their backs blazing in tooled gold. Your own dingy well-thumbed Bayle or Moreri possibly cost you two or three pounds; his cost forty or fifty. Further, in these affluent shelves may be found those great costly works which cross the border of "three figures," and of which only one or two of the public libraries can boast, such as the Celebri Famiglie Italiane of Litta, Denon's Egypt, the great French work on the arts of the middle ages, and the like; and many is the scholar who, unable to gratify his cravings elsewhere, has owed it to Lucullus that he has seen something he was in search after in one of these great books, and has been able to put it to public use.

Throughout the establishment there is an appearance of care and order, but not of restraint. Some inordinately richly-bound volumes have special grooves or niches for themselves lined with soft cloth, as if they had delicate lungs, and must be kept from catching cold. But even these are not guarded from the hand of the guest. Lucullus says his books are at the service of his friends; and, as a hint in the same direction, he recommends to your notice a few volumes from the collection of the celebrated Grollier, the most princely and liberal of collectors, on whose classic book-stamp you find the genial motto, "Joannis Grollierii et amicorum." Having conferred on you the freedom of his library, he will not concern himself by observing how you use it. He would as soon watch you after dinner to note whether you eschew common sherry and show an expensive partiality for that madeira at twelve pounds a-dozen, which other men would probably only place on the table when it could be well invested in company worthy of the sacrifice. Who shall penetrate the human heart, and say whether a hidden pang or gust of wrath has vibrated behind that placid countenance, if you have been seen to drop an ink-spot on the creamy margin of the Mentelin Virgil, or to tumble that heavy Aquinas from the ladder and dislocate his joints? As all the world now knows, however, men assimilate to the conditions by which they are surrounded, and we civilise our city savages by substituting cleanness and purity for the putrescence which naturally accumulates in great cities. So, in a noble library, the visitor is enchained to reverence and courtesy by the genius of the place. You cannot toss about its treasures as you would your own rough calfs and obdurate hogskins; as soon would you be tempted to pull out your meerschaum and punk-box in a cathedral. It is hard to say, but I would fain believe that even Papaverius himself might have felt some sympathetic touch from the spotless perfection around him and the noble reliance of the owner; and that he might perhaps have restrained himself from tearing out the most petted rarities, as a wolf would tear a fat lamb from the fold.

Such, then, are some "cases" discussed in a sort of clinical lecture. It will be seen that they have differing symptoms—some mild and genial, others ferocious and dangerous. Before passing to another and the last case, I propose to say a word or two on some of the minor specialties which characterise the pursuit in its less amiable or dignified form. It is, for instance, liable to be accompanied by an affection, known also to the agricultural world as affecting the wheat crop, and called "the smut." Fortunately this is less prevalent among us than the French, who have a name for the class of books affected by this school of collectors in the Bibliothèque bleue. There is a sad story connected with this peculiar frailty. A great and high-minded scholar of the seventeenth century had a savage trick played on him by some mad wags, who collected a quantity of the brutalities of which Latin literature affords an endless supply, and published them in his name. He is said not long to have survived this practical joke; and one does not wonder at his sinking before such a prospect, if he anticipated an age and a race of book-buyers among whom his great critical works are forgotten, and his name is known solely for the spurious volume, sacred to infamy, which may be found side by side with the works of the author of Trimalcion's Feast—"par nobile fratrum."

There is another failing, without a leaning to virtue's side, to which some collectors have been, by reputation at least, addicted—a propensity to obtain articles without value given for them—a tendency to be larcenish. It is the culmination, indeed, of a sort of lax morality apt to grow out of the habits and traditions of the class. Your true collector—not the man who follows the occupation as a mere expensive taste, and does not cater for himself—considers himself a finder or discoverer rather than a purchaser. He is an industrious prowler in unlikely regions, and is entitled to some reward for his diligence and his skill. Moreover, it is the essence of that very skill to find value in those things which, in the eye of the ordinary possessor, are really worthless. From estimating them at little value, and paying little for them, the steps are rather too short to estimating them at nothing, and paying nothing for them. What matters it, a few dirty black-letter leaves picked out of that volume of miscellaneous trash—leaves which the owner never knew he had, and cannot miss—which he would not know the value of, had you told him of them? What use of putting notions into the greedy barbarian's head, as if one were to find treasures for him? And the little pasquinade is so curious, and will fill a gap in that fine collection so nicely! The notions of the collector about such spoil are indeed the converse of those which Cassio professed to hold about his good name, for the scrap furtively removed is supposed in no way to impoverish the loser, while it makes the recipient rich indeed.

Those habits of the prowler which may gradually lead a mind not strengthened by strong principle into this downward career, are hit with his usual vivacity and wonderful truth by Scott. The speaker is our delightful friend Oldenbuck of Monkbarns, the Antiquary, and what he says has just enough of confession in it to show a consciousness that the narrator has gone over dangerous ground, and, if we did not see that the narrative is tinged with some exaggeration, has trodden a little beyond the limits of what is gentlemanly and just.

"'See this bundle of ballads, not one of them later than 1700, and some of them a hundred years older. I wheedled an old woman out of these, who loved them better than her psalm-book. Tobacco, sir, snuff, and the Complete Syren, were the equivalent! For that mutilated copy of the Complaynt of Scotland I sat out the drinking of two dozen bottles of strong ale with the late learned proprietor, who in gratitude bequeathed it to me by his last will. These little Elzevirs are the memoranda and trophies of many a walk by night and morning through the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Bow, St Mary's Wynd—wherever, in fine, there were to be found brokers and trokers, those miscellaneous dealers in things rare and curious. How often have I stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer's first price, he should be led to suspect the value I set upon the article!—how have I trembled lest some passing stranger should chop in between me and the prize, and regarded each poor student of divinity that stopped to turn over the books at the stall as a rival amateur or prowling bookseller in disguise!—And then, Mr Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure!—Then to dazzle the eyes of our wealthier and emulous rivals by showing them such a treasure as this' (displaying a little black smoked book about the size of a primer)—'to enjoy their surprise and envy, shrouding meanwhile, under a veil of mysterious consciousness, our own superior knowledge and dexterity;—these, my young friend, these are the white moments of life, that repay the toil and pains and sedulous attention which our profession, above all others, so peculiarly demands!'"

There is a nice subtle meaning in the worthy man calling his weakness his "profession," but it is in complete keeping with the mellow Teniers-like tone of the whole picture. Ere we have done I shall endeavour to show that the grubber among book-stalls has, with other grubs or grubbers, his useful place in the general dispensation of the world. But his is a pursuit exposing him to moral perils, which call for peculiar efforts of self-restraint to save him from them; and the moral Scott holds forth—for a sound moral he always has—is, If you go as far as Jonathan Oldenbuck did—and I don't advise you to go so far, but hint that you should stop earlier—say to yourself, Thus far, and no farther.

So much for one of the debased symptoms which in very bad cases sometimes characterise an otherwise genial failing. There is another peculiar, and, it may be said, vicious propensity, exhibited occasionally in conjunction with the pursuit. This propensity is, like the other, antagonistic in spirit to the tenth commandment, and consists in a desperate coveting of the neighbour's goods, and a satisfaction, not so much in possessing for one's self, as in dispossessing him. This spirit is said to burn with still fiercer flame in the breasts of those whose pursuit would externally seem to be the most innocent in the world, and the least excitive of the bad passions—namely, among flower-fanciers. From some mysterious cause, it has been known to develop itself most flagrantly among tulip-collectors, insomuch that there are legends of Dutch devotees of this pursuit who have paid their thousands of dollars for a duplicate tuber, that they might have the satisfaction of crushing it under the heel.[28] This line of practice is not entirely alien to the book-hunter. Peignot tells us that it is of rare occurrence among his countrymen, and yet, as we have seen, he thought it necessary to correct the technical term applied to this kind of practitioner, by calling him a Bibliothapte when he conceals books—a Bibliolyte when he destroys them. Dibdin warmed his convivial guests at a comfortable fire, fed by the woodcuts from which had been printed the impression of the Bibliographical Decameron. It was a quaint fancy, and deemed to be a pretty and appropriate form of hospitality, while it effectually assured the subscribers to his costly volumes that the vulgar world who buy cheap books was definitively cut off from participating in their privileges.

Let us, however, summon a more potent spirit of this order. He is a different being altogether from those gentle shadows who have flitted past us already. He was known in the body by many hard names, such as the Vampire, the Dragon, &c. He was an Irish absentee, or, more accurately, a refugee, since he had made himself so odious on his ample estate that he could not live there. How on earth he should have set about collecting books is one of the inscrutable mysteries which ever surround the diagnosis of this peculiar malady. Setting aside his using his books by reading them as out of the question, he yet was never known to indulge in that fondling and complacent examination of their exterior and general condition, which, to Inchrule and others of his class, seemed to afford the highest gratification that, as sojourners through this vale of tears, it was their lot to enjoy. Nor did he luxuriate in the collective pride—like that of David when he numbered his people—of beholding how his volumes increased in multitude, and ranged with one another, like well-sized and properly dressed troops, along an ample area of book-shelves. His collection—if it deserved the name—was piled in great heaps in garrets, cellars, and warerooms, like unsorted goods. They were accumulated, in fact, not so much that the owner might have them, as that other people might not. If there were a division of the order into positive, or those who desire to make collections—and negative, or those who desire to prevent them being made, his case would properly belong to the latter. Imagine the consternation created in a small circle of collectors by a sudden alighting among them of a helluo librorum with such propensities, armed with illimitable means, enabling him to desolate the land like some fiery dragon! What became of the chaotic mass of literature he had brought together no one knew. It was supposed to be congenial to his nature to have made a great bonfire of it before he left the world; but a little consideration showed such a feat to be impossible, for books may be burnt in detail by extraneous assistance, but it is a curious fact that, combustible as paper is supposed to be, books won't burn. If you doubt this, pitch that folio Swammerdam or Puffendorf into a good rousing fire, and mark the result.

No—it is probable that, stored away in some forgotten repositories, these miscellaneous relics still remain; and should they be brought forth, some excitement might be created; for, ignorant as the monster was, he had an instinct for knowing what other people wanted, and was thus enabled to snatch rare and curious volumes from the grasp of systematic collectors. It was his great glory to get hold of a unique book and shut it up. There were known to be just two copies of a spare quarto called Rout upon Rout, or the Rabblers Rabbled, by Felix Nixon, Gent. He possessed one copy; the other, by indomitable perseverance, he also got hold of, and then his heart was glad within him; and he felt it glow with well-merited pride when an accomplished scholar, desiring to complete an epoch in literary history on which that book threw some light, besought the owner to allow him a sight of it, were it but for a few minutes, and the request was refused. "I might as well ask him," said the animal, who was rather proud of his firmness than ashamed of his churlishness, "to make me a present of his brains and reputation."

It was among his pleasant ways to attend book-sales, there to watch the biddings of persons on whose judgment he relied, and cut in as the contest was becoming critical. This practice soon betrayed to those he had so provoked the chinks in the monster's armour. He was assailable and punishable at last, then, this potent tyrant—but the attack must be made warily and cautiously. Accordingly, impartial bystanders, ignorant of the plot, began to observe that he was degenerating by degrees in the rank of his purchases, and at last becoming utterly reckless, buying, at the prices of the sublimest rarities, common works of ordinary literature to be found in every book-shop. Such was the result of judiciously drawing him on, by biddings for valueless books, on the part of those whom he had outbid in the objects of their desire. Auctioneers were surprised at the gradual change coming over the book-market, and a few fortunate people obtained considerable prices for articles they were told to expect nothing for. But this farce, of course, did not last long; and whether or not he found out that he had been beaten at his own weapons, the devouring monster disappeared as mysteriously as he had come.

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Reminiscences.

uch incidents bring vividly before the eye the scenes in which they took place long long ago. If any one in his early youth has experienced some slight symptoms of the malady under discussion, which his constitution, through a tough struggle with the world, and a busy training in after life, has been enabled to throw off, he will yet look back with fond associations to the scenes of his dangerous indulgence. The auction-room is often the centre of fatal attraction towards it, just as the billiard-room and the rouge-et-noir table are to excesses of another kind. There is that august tribunal over which at one time reigned Scott's genial friend Ballantyne, succeeded by the sententious Tait, himself a man of taste and a collector, and since presided over by the great Nisbet, whose hand has dropped the ensign of office even before the present lot has an opportunity of obtaining from it the crowning honour. I bow with deferential awe to the august tribunal before which so vast a mass of literature has changed hands, and where the future destinies of so many thousands—or, shall it be rather said, millions—of volumes have been decided, each carrying with it its own little train of suspense and triumph.

More congenial, however, in my recollection, is that remote and dingy hall where rough Carfrae, like Thor, flourished his thundering hammer. There it was that one first marked, with a sort of sympathetic awe, the strange and varied influence of their peculiar maladies on the book-hunters of the last generation. There it was that one first handled those pretty little pets, the Elzevir classics, a sort of literary bantams, which are still dear to memory, and awaken old associations by their dwarfish ribbed backs like those of ponderous folios, and their exquisite, but now, alas! too minute type. The eyesight that could formerly peruse them with ease has suffered decay, but they remain unchanged; and in this they are unlike to many other objects of early interest. Children, flowers, animals, scenery even, all have undergone mutation, but no perceptible shade of change has passed over these little reminders of old times.

There it was that one first could comprehend how a tattered dirty fragment of a book once common might be worth a deal more than its weight in gold. There it was too, that, seduced by bad example, the present respected pastor of Ardsnischen purchased that beautiful Greek New Testament, by Jansen of Amsterdam, which he loved so, in the freshness of its acquisition, that he took it with him to church, and, turning up the text, handed it to a venerable woman beside him, after the fashion of an absorbed and absent student who was apt to forget whether he was reading Greek or English. The presiding genius of the place, with his strange accent, odd sayings, and angular motions, accompanied by good-natured grunts of grotesque wrath, became a sort of household figure. The dorsal breadth of pronunciation with which he would expose Mr Ivory's Erskine, used to produce a titter which he was always at a loss to understand. Though not the fashionable mart where all the thorough libraries in perfect condition went to be hammered off—though it was rather a place where miscellaneous collections were sold, and therefore bargains might be expected by those who knew what they were about—yet sometimes extraordinary and valuable collections of rare books came under his hammer, and created an access of more than common excitement among the denizens of the place. On one of these occasions a succession of valuable fragments of early English poetry brought prices so high and far beyond those of ordinary expensive books in the finest condition, that it seemed as if their imperfections were their merit; and the auctioneer, momentarily carried off with this feeling, when the high prices began to sink a little, remonstrated thus, "Going so low as thirty shillings, gentlemen,—this curious book—so low as thirty shillings—and quite imperfect!"

Those who frequented this howf, being generally elderly men, have now nearly all departed. The thunderer's hammer, too, has long been silenced by the great quieter. One living memorial still exists of that scene—the genial and then youthful assistant, whose partiality for letters and literary pursuits made him often the monitor and kindly guide of the raw student, and who now, in a higher field, exercises a more important influence on the destinies of literature. I passed the spot the other day—it was not desolate and forsaken, with the moss growing on the hearthstone; on the contrary, it flared with many lights—a thronged gin-palace. When one heard the sounds that issued from the old familiar spot, the reflection not unnaturally occurred that, after all, there are worse pursuits in the world than book-hunting.

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Classification.

erhaps it would be a good practical distribution of the class of persons under examination, to divide them into private prowlers and auction-hunters. There are many other modes of classifying them, but none so general. They might be classified by the different sizes of books they affect—as folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos—but this would be neither an expressive nor a dignified classification. In enumerating the various orders to which Fitzpatrick Smart did not belong, I have mentioned many of the species, but a great many more might be added. Some collectors lay themselves out for vellum-printed volumes almost solely. There are such not only among very old books, but among very new; for of a certain class of modern books it frequently happens that a copy or two may be printed on vellum, to catch the class whose weakness takes that direction.

It may be cited as a signal instance of the freaks of book-collecting, that of all men in the world Junot, the hard-fighting soldier, had a vellum library—but so it was. It was sold in London for about £1400. "The crown octavos," says Dibdin, "especially of ancient classics, and a few favourite English authors, brought from four to six guineas. The first virtually solid article of any importance, or rather of the greatest importance, in the whole collection, was the matchless Didot Horace, of 1799, folio, containing the original drawings from which the exquisite copperplate vignettes were executed. This was purchased by the gallant Mr George Hibbert for £140. Nor was it in any respect an extravagant or even dear purchase." It now worthily adorns the library of Norton Hall.

Some collectors may be styled Rubricists, being influenced by a sacred rage for books having the contents and marginal references printed in red ink. Some "go at" flowered capitals, others at broad margins. These have all a certain amount of magnificence in their tastes; but there are others again whose priceless collections are like the stock-in-trade of a wholesale ballad-singer, consisting of chap-books, as they are termed—the articles dealt in by pedlars and semi-mendicants for the past century or two. Some affect collections relating to the drama, and lay great store by heaps of play-bills arranged in volumes, and bound, perhaps, in costly russia. Of a more dignified grade are perhaps those who have lent themselves to the collection of the theses on which aspirants after university honours held their disputations or impugnments. Sometimes out of a great mass of rubbish of this kind the youthful production of some man who has afterwards become great turns up. Of these theses and similar tracts a German, Count Dietrich, collected some hundred and forty thousand, which are now in this country.

Those collectors whose affections are invested in the devices or trade emblems of special favourites among the old printers must not be passed without a word of recognition.

Men who have had the opportunity of rummaging among old libraries in their boyhood are the most likely to cultivate pets of this kind. There is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold serene classic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular writer on the Æsthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual," ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly. To intellects not far enough advanced to acknowledge the influence of such terms, or to comprehend their application to what we should or should not like and admire, there is a fortunate element even in their deficiencies. They can admire the devices of the old printers from association with the boyish days when they were first noticed, from an absolute liking for their fantastic fancies, and possibly from an observation in some of them of the indications of the gradual development of artistic purity and beauty. In many of them in which the child has seen only an attractive little picture, the man has afterwards found a touch of poetic or religious thought.

There is the hand pouring oil into a lamp of pure Etruscan shape, symbolical of the nutriment supplied to the intellectual flame. In another, the gardener carefully plants the seedlings which are to bear the fruit of knowledge to the coming generations; in another, the sun rising bright over the eastern sea signifies the dawn of the restoration of classical learning to the European nations.

Other interpretations of the kind, called quaint conceits, can be read from these printers' devices. There is Gesner's Bibliotheca swarming with frogs and tadpoles like a quagmire in honour of its printer, a German Frog, latinised Christopherus Froshoverus. The Quæ Extant of Varro, printed at Dort, are adorned with many lively cuts of bears and their good-humoured cubs, because the printer's name is Joannis Berewout. So the Aulus Gellius, printed by Gryphius of Lyons, more than a hundred years earlier, begins and ends with formidable effigies of griffins. The device of Michael and Phillip Lenoir is a jet-black shield, with an Ethiopian for crest, and Ethiopians for supporters; and Apiarius has a neat little cut representing a bear robbing a bee's nest in a hollow tree. Most instructive of them all, Ascensius has bequeathed to posterity the lively and accurate representation, down to every nail and screw, of the press in which the great works of the sixteenth century were printed, with the brawny pressman pulling his proof.

Collectors there have been, not unimportant for number and zeal, whose mission it is to purchase books marked by peculiar mistakes or errors of the press. The celebrated Elzevir Cæsar of 1635 is known by this, that the number of the 149th page is misprinted 153. All that want this peculiar distinction are counterfeits. The little volume being, as Brunet says, "une des plus jolies et plus rares de la collection des Elsevier," gave a temptation to fraudulent imitators, who, as if by a providential arrangement for their detection, lapsed into accuracy at the critical figure. How common errors are in editions of the classics, is attested by the one or two editions which claim a sort of canonisation as immaculate—as, for instance, the Virgil of Didot, and the Horace of Foulis. A collector, with a taste for the inaccurate, might easily satiate it in the editions so attractive in their deceptive beauty of the great Birmingham printer Baskerville.

The mere printers' blunders that have been committed upon editions of the Bible are reverenced in literary history; and one edition—the Vulgate issued under the authority of Sixtus V.—achieved immense value from its multitude of errors. The well-known story of the German printer's wife, who surreptitiously altered the passage importing that her husband should be her lord (Herr) so as to make him be her fool (Narr), needs confirmation. If such a misprint were found, it might quite naturally be attributed to carelessness. Valarian Flavigny, who had many controversies on his hand, brought on the most terrible of them all with Abraham Ecchellensis by a mere dropped letter. In the rebuke about the mote in thy brother's eye and the beam in thine own, the first letter in the Latin for eye was carelessly dropped out, and left a word which may be found occasionally in Martial's Epigrams, but not in books of purer Latin and purer ideas.[29]

Questions as to typographical blunders in editions of the classics are mixed up with larger critical inquiries into the purity of the ascertained text, and thus run in veins through the mighty strata of philological and critical controversy which, from the days of Poggio downwards, have continued to form that voluminous mass of learning which the outer world contemplates with silent awe.

To some extent the same spirit of critical inquiry has penetrated into our own language. What we have of it clusters almost exclusively around the mighty name of Shakespeare. Shakespearian criticism is a branch of knowledge by itself. To record its triumphs—from that greatest one by which the senseless "Table of Greenfield," which interrupted the touching close of Falstaff's days, was replaced by "'a babbled of green fields"—would make a large book of itself. He who would undertake it, in a perfectly candid and impartial spirit, would give us, varied no doubt with much erudition and acuteness, a curious record of blundering ignorance and presumptuous conceit, the one so intermingling with the other that it would be often difficult to distinguish them.[30]

The quantity of typographical errors exposed in those pages, where they are least to be expected, and are least excusable, opens up some curious considerations. It may surely be believed that, between the compositors who put the types together and the correctors of the press, the printing of the Bible has generally been executed with more than average care. Yet the editions of the sacred book have been the great mine of discovered printers' blunders. The inference from this, however, is not that blunders abound less in other literature, but that they are not worth finding there. The issuing of the true reading of the Scripture is of such momentous consequence, that a mistake is sure of exposure, like those minute incidents of evidence which come forth when a murder has been committed, but would never have left their privacy for the detection of a petty fraud.

The value to literature of a pure Shakespearian text, has inspired the zeal of the detectives who work on this ground. Some casual detections have occurred in minor literature,—as, for instance, when Akenside's description of the Pantheon, which had been printed as "serenely great," was restored to "severely great." The reason, however, why such detections are not common in common books, is the rather humiliating one that they are not worth making. The specific weight of individual words is in them of so little influence, that one does as well as another. Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to achieve—as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which the cunning of his hand cannot accomplish. Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the contrary, sometimes rather improved. I might refer to a signal instance of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second and fourth of each quatrain changed places. This transposition was pronounced to operate a decided improvement on the spirit and originality of the piece,—an opinion in which, unfortunately, the author did not concur; nor could he appreciate the compliment of a critic, who remarked that the experiment tested the soundness of the lines, which could find their feet whatever way they were thrown about.[31]

There have been, no doubt, cruel instances of printers' blunders in our own days, like the fate of the youthful poetess in the Fudge family:—

"When I talked of the dewdrops on freshly-blown roses,
The nasty things printed it—freshly-blown noses."

Suchlike was the fatality which suddenly dried up the tears of those who read a certain pathetic ode, in which the desolate widow was printed as "dissolute;" and the accident which destroyed a poetic reputation by making the "pale martyr in his sheet of fire" come forward with "his shirt on fire." So also a certain printer, whose solemn duty it was to have announced to the world that "intoxication is folly," whether actuated by simplicity of soul or by malignity, was unable to resist the faint amendment which announced the more genial doctrine that "intoxication is jolly."[32]

A solid scholar there was, who, had he been called to his account at a certain advanced period of his career, might have challenged all the world to say that he had ever used a false quantity, or committed an anomaly in syntax, or misspelt a foreign name, or blundered in a quotation from a Greek or Latin classic—to misquote an English author is a far lighter crime, but even to this he could have pleaded not guilty. He never made a mistake in a date, or left out a word in copying the title-page of a volume; nor did he ever, in affording an intelligent analysis of its contents, mistake the number of pages devoted to one head. As to the higher literary virtues, too, his sentences were all carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the most sensitive kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of ending a sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the same five lines, choosing always some judicious method of circumlocution to obviate reiteration. Poor man! in the pride of his unspotted purity, he little knew what a humiliation fate had prepared for him. It happened to him to have to state how Theodore Beza, or some contemporary of his, went to sea in a Candian vessel. This statement, at the last moment, when the sheet was going through the press, caught the eye of an intelligent and judicious corrector, more conversant with shipping-lists than with the literature of the sixteenth century, who saw clearly what had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting the author. The consequence was, that people read with some surprise, under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had gone to sea in a Canadian vessel. The victim of this calamity had undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophical equanimity; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, destitute of the organ of veneration, thoughtlessly asked him about the last new popular work, as if it were something that he had read or even heard of, and actually went so far in their contumelious disrespect as to speak to him about the productions of a certain Charles Dickens. The "Canadian vessel," however, was a more serious disaster, and was treated accordingly. A charitable friend broke his calamity to the author at a judicious moment, to prevent him from discovering it himself at an unsuitable time, with results the full extent of which no one could foresee. It was an affair of much anxiety among his friends, who made frequent inquiries as to how he bore himself in his affliction, and what continued to be the condition of his health, and especially of his spirits. And although he was a confirmed book-hunter, and not unconscious of the merits of the peculiar class of books now under consideration, it may be feared that it was no consolation to him to reflect that, some century or so hence, his books and himself would be known only by the curious blunder which made one of them worth the notice of the book-fanciers. Consequences from printers' blunders of a still more tragic character even than this, have been preserved—as for instance, the fate of Guidi the Italian poet, whose end is said to have been hastened by the misprints in his poetical paraphrase of the Homilies of his patron, Clement XI.

An odd accident occurred to a well-known book lately published, called Men of the Time. It sometimes happens in a printing-office that some of the types, perhaps a printed line or two, fall out of "the forme." Those in whose hands the accident occurs generally try to put things to rights as well as they can, and may be very successful in restoring appearances with the most deplorable results to the sense. It happened thus in the instance referred to. A few lines dropping out of the Life of Robert Owen, the parallelogram Communist, were hustled, as the nearest place of refuge, into the biography of his closest alphabetical neighbour—"Oxford, Bishop of." The consequence is that the article begins as follows:—

"Oxford, the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of, was born in 1805. A more kind-hearted and truly benevolent man does not exist. A sceptic, as regards religious revelation, he is nevertheless an out-and-out believer in spirit movements."

Whenever this blunder was discovered, the leaf was cancelled; but a few copies of the book had got into circulation, which some day or other may be very valuable.

From errors of the press there is a natural transition to the class who incur the guilt of perpetrating them, and whose peculiar mental qualities impart to them their special characteristics. That mysterious body called compositors, through whose hands all literature passes, are reputed to be a placid and unimpressionable race of practical stoics, who do their work dutifully, without yielding to the intellectual influences represented by it. A clause of an Act of Parliament, with all its whereases, and be it enacteds, and hereby repealeds, creates, it is said, quite as much emotion in them as the most brilliant burst of the fashionable poet of the day. They will set you up a psalm or a blasphemous ditty with the same equanimity, not retaining in their minds any clear distinction between them. Your writing must be something very wonderful indeed, before they distinguish it from other "copy," except by the goodness or badness of the hand. A State paper which all the world is mad to know about, is quite safe in a printing-office; and, if report speak truly, they will set up what is here set down of them, without noting that it refers to themselves. It is said that this stoic indifference is a wonderful provision for the preservation of the purity of literature, and that, were compositors to think with the author under the "stick," they might make dire havoc.

We are not to suppose, however, that they take less interest in, or are less observant of, the work of their hands than other workmen. The point of view, however, from which their observation is taken, is not exactly the same as that of their co-operator, the author whose writing they set up, nor is their notification of specialties of a kind which would always be felt by him as complimentary. The tremendous philippic of Junius Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age, is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of the predicate, is solely associated with the characteristic fact that the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could recall, who, with a kind of exulting indignation, thought he had discovered a celebrated brother of the lyre appropriating his ewe lamb in a flagrant plagiarism. There was at least one man who had the opportunity of being acquainted with the productions of his unappreciated muse—the printer. To him, accordingly, he appealed for confirmation of his suspicions, demanding if he did not see in the two productions a similarity that in some places even approached identity. The referee turned over page after page with the scrupulous attention of one whose acuteness is on trial. After due deliberation he admitted that there was a very striking similarity, only it seemed to him that the other's brevier was a shade thinner in the hair-stroke than his own, and the small caps. would go a thought more to the pound; while as to the semicolons and marks of interrogation, they looked as if they came out of a different font altogether.

It is pleasant to be remembered for something, and the present author has the assurance that these pages will be imprinted on the memory of the "chapel" by the decorated capitals and Gothic devices with which a better taste than his own has strewed them. The position, indeed, conceded to him in the book-hunting field through the influence of these becoming decorations has communicated to him something of the uneasiness of Juvenal's

"Miserum est aliorum incubere famæ,
Ne collapsa ruant subductis tecta columnis."

And having so disburdened himself, he rejoices in the thought that whoever compliments him again on the taste and talent displayed in the printing and adorning of this volume, will only prove that he has not read it.

Returning to compositors, and what they note and do not note, if the fresh author has happened to feel it a rather damping forecast of his reception by the public that those who have had the first and closest contact with his efforts are not in any way aroused by their remarkable originality, yet one who may have had opportunities of taking a wide view of the functions of the compositor will not wonder that, like the deaf adder, he systematically closes his ear to the voice of the charmer.

That the uninitiated reader may form some practical conception of my meaning, I propose to set down a few items from the weekly contents of a compositor's "bill-book," slightly enlarging his brief entries with the view of rendering them the more intelligible.

"1. A time job—viz., inserting, as per author's proof, 50 'hear hears' and 20 'great cheerings' in report of speech to be delivered by Alderman Noddles at the great meeting on the social system.

"2. Picking out all the 'hear hears' and 'great cheerings' from said speech, in respect it was not permitted to be delivered, the meeting having dispersed when the alderman stood up; and breaking up the same into pages, with title, 'A plan for the immediate and total extirpation of intemperance by prohibiting the manufacture of bottles.'

"3. A sheet of a volume of poems, titled 'Life thoughts by a Life thinker,' beginning—

"'Far I dipt beneath the surface, through the texture of the earth,
Till my heart's triumphant musings dreamt the dream of that new birth,
When the engineer's deep science through the mighty sphere shall probe,
And the railway trains to Melbourne sweep the centre of the globe,
And the electro-motive engine renders it no more absurd
That a human being should be in two places like a bird.'

"Item—Introduction, explaining the difficulties in the way of the poet's success, in an age devoted to forms and superficialities, by reason of his muscular originality, impulsive grasping at the infinite, and resolute disdain of popular and conventional models; but expressing opinion that, as he turns round on the pivot of his own individual idiosyncrasy, he will come out all right.

"4. Advertisement by a disinterested draper, beginning, 'awful sacrifices,' and ending, 'early application necessary to prevent disappointment.'

"5. Two sticks of prayer for a devotional work which has had an unexpected run, and is largely distributed over the office for an expeditious issue of a new edition.

"6. Part of an accountant's report, containing 45 schemes for the ranking of the creditors on ten bankrupt estates, each of which has drawn accommodation bills on all the others.

"7. Signature YY of 'A treatise on the form and material of the sickle used by the Welsh Druids in cutting the mistletoe,' being a series of quotations in Arabic, Hindoo, Greek, German, and Gaelic, cemented together by thin lines of English. This is a stock job which keeps the office going like a balance-wheel when there is nothing else specially pressing, and is rather popular, as it contains a good many ethnological and etymological tables, implying scheme-work, which the compositors who are adepts in that department contemplate with great satisfaction as they put it together."

It is surely pleasant to suppose that the compositor has acquired the faculty of passing such dizzying whirls of heterogeneous elements without absorbing them all, and that, when his day's labour is over, he may find his own special intellectual food in his Milton or his Locke. In this view, his apathy to the literary matter passing through his hands may be contemplated as among the special beneficences in the providential order of things, like the faculty of healthy vitality to throw off morbid influences; and perhaps it has still closer analogy to that professional coolness which separates the surgeon from a nervous sympathy with the sufferings of those on whom he operates—a phenomenon which, though sometimes denounced as professional callousness, is one of the most beneficent specialties in the lot of mankind.

In the several phases of the book-hunter, he whose peculiar glory it is to have his books illustrated—the Grangerite, as he is technically termed—must not be omitted. "Illustrating" a volume consists in inserting in or binding up with it portraits, landscapes, and other works of art bearing a reference to its contents. This is materially different from the other forms of the pursuit, in as far as the quarry hunted down is the raw material, the finished article being a result of domestic manufacture. The Illustrator is the very Ishmaelite of collectors—his hand is against every man, and every man's hand is against him. He destroys unknown quantities of books to supply portraits or other illustrations to a single volume of his own; and as it is not always known concerning any book that he has been at work on it, many a common book-buyer has cursed him on inspecting his own last bargain, and finding that it is deficient in an interesting portrait or two. Tales there are, fitted to make the blood run cold in the veins of the most sanguine book-hunter, about the devastations committed by those who are given over to this special pursuit. It is generally understood that they received the impulse which has rendered them an important sect, from the publication of Granger's Biographical History—hence their name of Grangerites. So it has happened that this industrious and respectable compiler is contemplated with mysterious awe as a sort of literary Attila or Gengis Khan, who has spread terror and ruin around him. In truth the illustrator, whether green-eyed or not, being a monster that doth make the meat he feeds on, is apt to become excited with his work, and to go on ever widening the circle of his purveyances, and opening new avenues toward the raw material on which he works. To show how widely such a person may levy contributions, I propose to take, not a whole volume, not even a whole page, but still a specific and distinguished piece of English literature, and describe the way in which a devotee of this peculiar practice would naturally proceed in illustrating it. The piece of literature to be illustrated is as follows:—

"How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!"

The first thing to be done is to collect every engraved portrait of the author, Isaac Watts. The next, to get hold of any engravings of the house in which he was born, or houses in which he lived. Then will come all kinds of views of Southampton—of its Gothic gate, and its older than Gothic wall. Any scrap connected with the inauguration of the Watts statue must of course be scrupulously gathered. To go but a step beyond such commonplaces—there is a traditional story about the boyhood of Isaac which has been told as follows. He took precociously to rhyming: like Pope, he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. It happened that this practice was very offensive to his father, a practical man, who, finding his admonitions useless, resolved to stop it in an effectual manner. He accordingly, after the practice of his profession—being a schoolmaster—assailed with a leathern thong, duly prepared, the cuticle of that portion of the body which has from time immemorial been devoted to such inflictions. Under torture, the divine songster abjured his propensity in the following very hopeful shape—

"Oh, father, do some pity take,
And I will no more verses make."

It is not likely that this simple domestic scene has been engraved either for the Divine Hymns, or the Improvement of the Mind. The illustrator will therefore require to get a picture of it for his own special use, and will add immensely to the value of his treasure, while he gives scope to the genius of a Cruikshank or a Doyle.

We are yet, it will be observed, only on the threshold. We have next to illustrate the substance of the poetry. All kinds of engravings of bees Attic and other, and of bee-hives, will be appropriate, and will be followed by portraits of Huber and other great writers on bees, and views of Mount Hybla and other honey districts. Some Scripture prints illustrative of the history of Samson, who had to do with honey and bees, will be appropriate, as well as any illustrations of the fable of the Bear and the Bees, or of the Roman story of the Sic vos non vobis. A still more appropriate form of illustration may, however, be drawn upon by remembering that a periodical called The Bee was edited by Dr Anderson; and it is important to observe that the name was adopted in the very spirit which inspired Watts. In both instances the most respected of all winged insects was brought forward as the type of industry. Portraits, then, of Dr Anderson, and any engravings that can be connected with himself and his pursuits, will have their place in the collection. It will occur, perhaps, to the intelligent illustrator, that Dr Anderson was the grandfather of Sir James Outram, and he will thus have the satisfaction of opening his collection for all illustrations of the career of that distinguished officer. Having been aptly called the Bayard of the Indian service, the collector who has exhausted him and his services will be justified by the principles of the craft in following up the chase, and picking up any woodcuts or engravings referring to the death of the false Bourbon, or any other scene in the career of the knight without fear or reproach. Here, by a fortunate and interesting coincidence, through the Bourbons the collector gets at the swarms of bees which distinguish the insignia of royalty in France. When the illustrator comes to the last line, which invites him to add to what he has already collected a representation of "every opening flower," it is easy to see that he has indeed a rich garden of delights before him.

In a classification of book-hunters, the aspirants after large-paper copies deserve special notice, were it only for the purpose of guarding against a common fallacy which confounds them with the lovers of tall copies. The difference is fundamental, large-paper copies being created by system, while tall copies are merely the creatures of accident; and Dibdin bestows due castigation in a celebrated instance in which a mere tall copy had, whether from ignorance or design, been spoken of as a large-paper copy. This high development of the desirable book is the result of an arrangement to print so many copies of a volume on paper of larger size than that of the bulk of the impression. The tall copy is the result of careful cutting by the binder, or of no cutting at all. In this primitive shape a book has separate charms for a distinct class of collectors who esteem rough edges, and are willing, for the sake of this excellence, to endure the martyrdom of consulting books in that condition.[33]

The historian of the private libraries of New York makes us acquainted with a sect well known in the actually sporting world, but not heretofore familiar in the bibliological. Here is a description of the Waltonian library of the Reverend Dr Bethune. In the sunshine he is a practical angler, and—

"During the darker seasons of the year, when forbidden the actual use of his rod, our friend has occupied himself with excursions through sale catalogues, fishing out from their dingy pages whatever tends to honour his favourite author or favourite art, so that his spoils now number nearly five hundred volumes, of all sizes and dates. Pains have been taken to have not only copies of the works included in the list, but also the several editions; and when it is of a work mentioned by Walton, an edition which the good old man himself may have seen. Thus the collection has all the editions of Walton, Cotton, and Venables in existence, and, with few exceptions, all the works referred to by Walton, or which tend to illustrate his favourite rambles by the Lea or the Dove. Every scrap of Walton's writing, and every compliment paid to him, have been carefully gathered and garnered up, with prints and autographs and some precious manuscripts. Nor does the department end here, but embraces most of the older and many of the modern writers on ichthyology and angling."

---

The Prowler and the Auction-Haunter.

hese incidental divisions are too numerous and complex for a proper classification of book-hunters, and I am inclined to go back to the idea that their most effective and comprehensive division is into the private prowler and the auction-haunter. The difference between these is something like, in the sporting world, that between the stalker and the hunter proper. Each function has its merits, and calls for its special qualities and sacrifices. The one demands placidity, patience, caution, plausibility, and unwearied industry—such attributes as those which have been already set forth in the words of the Antiquary. The auction-room, on the other hand, calls forth courage, promptness, and the spirit of adventure. There is wild work sometimes there, and men find themselves carried off by enthusiasm and competition towards pecuniary sacrifices which at the threshold of the temple they had solemnly vowed to themselves to eschew. But such sacrifices are the tribute paid to the absorbing interest of the pursuit, and are looked upon in their own peculiar circle as tending to the immortal honour of those who make them. This field of prowess has, it is said, undergone a prejudicial change in these days, the biddings being nearly all by dealers, while gentlemen-collectors are gradually moving out of the field. In old days one might have reaped for himself, by bold and emphatic biddings at a few auctions, a niche in that temple of fame, of which the presiding deity is Dr Frognal Dibdin—a name familiarly abbreviated into that of Foggy Dibdin. His descriptions of auction contests are perhaps the best and most readable portions of his tremendously overdone books.

Conspicuous beyond all others stands forth the sale of the Roxburghe library, perhaps the most eminent contest of that kind on record. There were of it some ten thousand separate "lots," as auctioneers call them, and almost every one of them was a book of rank and mark in the eyes of the collecting community, and had been, with special pains and care and anxious exertion, drawn into the vortex of that collection. Although it was created by a Duke, yet it has been rumoured that most of the books had been bargains, and that the noble collector drew largely on the spirit of patient perseverance and enlightened sagacity for which Monkbarns claims credit. The great passion and pursuit of his life having been of so peculiar a character—he was almost as zealous a hunter of deer and wild swans, by the way, as of books, but this was not considered in the least peculiar—it was necessary to find some strange influencing motive for his conduct; so it has been said that it arose from his having been crossed in love in his early youth. Such crosses, in general, arise from the beloved one dying, or proving faithless and becoming the wife of another. It was, however, the peculiarity of the Duke's misfortune, that it arose out of the illustrious marriage of the sister of his elected. She was the eldest daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Though purchased by a sacrifice of regal rank, yet there would be many countervailing advantages in the position of an affluent British Duchess which might reconcile a young lady, even of so illustrious a descent, to the sacrifice, had it not happened that Lord Bute and the Princess of Wales selected her younger sister to be the wife of George III. and the Queen of Great Britain, long known as the good Queen Charlotte. Then there arose, it seems, the necessity, as a matter of state and political etiquette, that the elder sister should abandon the alliance with a British subject.

So, at all events, goes the story of the origin of the Duke's bibliomania; and it is supposed to have been in the thoughts of Sir Walter Scott, when he said of him that "youthful misfortunes, of a kind against which neither wealth nor rank possess a talisman, cast an early shade of gloom over his prospects, and gave to one splendidly endowed with the means of enjoying society that degree of reserved melancholy which prefers retirement to the splendid scenes of gaiety." Dibdin, with more specific precision, after rambling over the house where the great auction sale occurred, as inquisitive people are apt to do, tells us of the solitary room occupied by the Duke, close to his library, in which he slept and died: "all his migrations," says the bibliographer, "were confined to these two rooms. When Mr Nichol showed me the very bed on which this bibliomaniacal Duke had expired, I felt—as I trust I ought to have felt on the occasion." Scott attributed to an incidental occurrence at his father's table the direction given to the great pursuit of his life. "Lord Oxford and Lord Sunderland, both famous collectors of the time, dined one day with the second Duke of Roxburghe, when their conversation happened to turn upon the editio princeps of Boccaccio, printed in Venice in 1474, and so rare that its very existence was doubted of." It so happened that the Duke remembered this volume having been offered to him for £100, and he believed he could still trace and secure it: he did so, and laid it before his admiring friends at a subsequent sitting. "His son, then Marquess of Bowmont, never forgot the little scene upon this occasion, and used to ascribe to it the strong passion which he ever afterwards felt for rare books and editions, and which rendered him one of the most assiduous and judicious collectors that ever formed a sumptuous library."[34] And this same Boccaccio was the point of attack which formed the climax in the great contest of the Roxburghe roup, as the Duke's fellow-countrymen called it. I am not aware that any of the English bibliographers have alluded to any special cause for this volume's extreme rarity. Peignot attributes it to a sermon preached by the Italian pulpit orator Savonarola, on the 8th of February 1497, against indecorous books, in consequence of which the inhabitants of Florence made a bonfire of their Boccaccios,—an explanation which every one who pleases is at liberty to believe.[35]

The historian of the contest terms it "the Waterloo among book-battles," whereto "many a knight came far and wide from his retirement, and many an unfledged combatant left his father's castle to partake of the glory of such a contest." He also tells us that the honour of the first effective shot was due to a house in the trade—Messrs Payne and Foss—by whom "the Aldine Greek Bible was killed off the first in the contest. It produced the sum of £4, 14s. 6d. Thus measuredly, and guardedly, and even fearfully, did this tremendous battle begin." The earliest brilliant affair seems to have come off when Lord Spencer bought two Caxtons for £245, a feat of which the closing scene is recorded, with a touching simplicity, in these terms:—"His Lordship put each volume under his coat, and walked home with them in all the flush of victory and consciousness of triumph." As every one does not possess a copy of the three costly volumes of which the Bibliographical Decameron consists—and, further, as many a one so fortunate as to possess them has not had patience and perseverance enough to penetrate to the middle of the third volume, where the most readable part is to be found—a characteristic extract, describing the heat of the contest, may not be unwelcome:—

"For two-and-forty successive days—with the exception only of Sundays—were the voice and hammer of Mr Evans heard with equal efficacy in the dining-room of the late Duke, which had been appropriated to the vendition of the books; and within that same space (some thirty-five feet by twenty) were such deeds of valour performed, and such feats of book-heroism achieved, as had never been previously beheld, and of which the like will probably never be seen again. The shouts of the victors and the groans of the vanquished stunned and appalled you as you entered. The striving and press, both of idle spectators and determined bidders, was unprecedented. A sprinkling of Caxtons and De Wordes marked the first day, and these were obtained at high, but, comparatively with the subsequent sums given, moderate prices. Theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, and philology chiefly marked the earlier days of this tremendous contest; and occasionally during these days, there was much stirring up of courage, and many hard and heavy blows were interchanged; and the combatants may be said to have completely wallowed themselves in the conflict. At length came poetry, Latin, Italian, and French: a steady fight yet continued to be fought; victory seemed to hang in doubtful scales—sometimes on the one, sometimes on the other side of Mr Evans, who preserved throughout (as it was his bounden duty to preserve) a uniform, impartial, and steady course; and who may be said on that occasion, if not 'to have rode the whirlwind,' at least to have 'directed the storm.'"

But the dignity and power of the historian's narrative cannot be fully appreciated until we find him in the midst of the climax of the contest—the battle, which gradually merged into a single combat, for the possession of the Venetian Boccaccio. According to the established historical practice, we have in the first place a statement of the position taken up by the respective "forces."

"At length the moment of sale arrived. Evans prefaced the putting-up of the article by an appropriate oration, in which he expatiated on its extreme rarity, and concluding by informing the company of the regret, and even anguish of heart, expressed by Mr Van Praet that such a treasure was not to be found in the Imperial collection at Paris. Silence followed the address of Mr Evans. On his right hand, leaning against the wall, stood Earl Spencer; a little lower down, and standing at right angles with his Lordship, appeared the Marquess of Bland-ford. Lord Althorp stood a little backward, to the right of his father, Earl Spencer."

The first movement of the forces gives the historian an opportunity of dropping a withering sneer at an unfortunate man, so provincial in his notions as to suppose that a hundred pounds or two would be of any avail in such a contest.

"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."

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PART II.—HIS FUNCTIONS.

The Hobby.

aving 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

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]

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The Desultory Reader or Bohemian of Literature.

aving 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.

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.

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The Collector and the Scholar.

ither 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.

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]

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.

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