BUY A BRUSH, OR A TABLE BOOK.
Plate XI.
The Engraving from which the accompanying Plate was copied was one of a set published by Overton, but without date. Judging from the dress, it must have been made either in the reign of King James the First or in that of the succeeding monarch. The inscription over the figure is, “Buy a Brush or a Table Book.” The floors were not wetted, but rubbed dry, even until they bore a very high polish, particularly when it was the fashion to inlay staircases and floors of rooms with yellow, black, and brown woods. On the landing places of the great staircase in the house built by Lord Orford, now the Grand Hotel, at the end of King Street in Covent Garden, such inlaid specimens are still remaining, in a beautiful state of preservation. There are many houses of the nobility where the floors consist of small pieces of oak arranged in tessellated forms. The room now occupied by the servants in waiting, and that part of the house formerly a portion of the old gallery, at Cleveland House, St. James’s; the floors of the state rooms of Montagu House, now the British Museum; and the floor of the Library in St. Paul’s Cathedral, all retain their tessellated forms. These floors were rubbed by the servants, who wore brushes on their feet, and they were, and indeed are, so highly polished, in some of the country mansions, that in some instances they are dangerous to walk upon. This mode of dry-rubbing rooms by affixing the brush to the feet, is still practised in France, chiefly by men-servants.
The Table Book is of very ancient use. Shakspeare thus notices it in his play of Hamlet:
Ham. My tables: meet it is
I set it down.
It was a book consisting of several small pieces of slate set in frames of wood, fastened together with hinges, and closed, as a book for the pocket: for a representation of one, with a pencil attached to a string, as used in 1565, see Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakspeare and of Ancient Manners,” vol. II. p. 227. It was taken, says that writer, from Gesner’s Treatise De rerum fossilium figuris, &c. Tigur. 1565. The Almanacs of that time likewise contained tables of a composition like asses skin. One of these was in the possession of Mr. Douce.
It is a very curious fact that the farmers, graziers, and horse dealers, use at this day a Table Book consisting of slates bound in wood, with a pencil attached to it, exactly of the same make as that referred to as used in 1565, and such are now regularly sold at the toy shops. We may conclude that persons in the higher ranks of life used sheets of ivory put together as a book, for we frequently meet with such, elegantly adorned with clasps, of very old workmanship.
Howell, in his “Familiar Letters,” 4to. p. 7, published 1645, says, “This return of Sir Walter Raleigh from Guiana puts me in minde of a facetious tale I read lately in Italian, (for I have a little of that language already,) how Alphonso King of Naples sent a Moor, who had been his captive a long time, to Barbary, to buy horses, and to return by such a time. Now there was about the King a kinde of buffon or jester who had a Table Book, wherein he was used to register any absurdity, or impertinence, or merry passage, that happened about the Court. That day the Moor was dispatched for Barbary, the said jester waiting upon the King at supper, the King called for his journall, and askt what he had observed that day; thereupon he produced his Table Book, and amongst other things he read how Alphonso King of Naples had sent Beltran the Moor, who had been a long time his prisoner, to Morocco, his own country, with so many thousand crowns to buy horses. The King asked him ‘why he inserted that?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ‘I think he will never come back to be a prisoner again, and so you have lost both man and money.’ ‘But, if he do come, then your jest is marr’d,’ quoth the King. ‘No, sir; for if he return, I will blot out your name, and put him in for a fool.’”