The book-plate illustrates an incident described in Boswell. Johnson and Goldsmith were walking one day in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Looking at the graves, Johnson solemnly repeated a line from a Latin poet, which might be freely translated, “Perchance some day our names will mingle with these.” As they strolled home through the Strand, Goldsmith’s eye lighted upon the heads of two traitors rotting on the spikes over Temple Bar. Remembering that Johnson and he were rather Jacobitic in sentiment, pointing to the heads and giving Johnson’s quotation a twist, Goldsmith remarked, “Perhaps some day our heads will mingle with those.”
He was working in my library some years ago on an exquisite appreciation of Johnson, when, noticing on my writing-table a pen-and-ink sketch, he asked, “What’s this?” I replied with a sigh that it was a suggestion for a book-plate which I had just received from London. I had described in a letter exactly what I wanted—an association plate strictly in eighteenth-century style. Fleet Street was to be indicated, with Temple Bar in the background. It was to be plain and dignified in treatment. What came was indeed a sketch of Fleet Street and very much more. There were scrolls and flourishes, eggs and darts and fleurs-de-lis—a little of everything. In a word it was impossible. “Let me see what I can do,” said Osgood.
When I returned home that evening there was waiting for me an exquisite pencil sketch, every detail faultless: Fleet Street with its tavern signs, in the background Temple Bar with Johnson and Goldsmith, the latter pointing to it and remarking slyly, “Forsitan et nomen nostrum miscebitur istis.” I was delighted, as I had reason to be. In due course, after discussions as to the selection of a suitable motto, we finally agreed on a line out of Boswell: “Sir, the biographical part of literature is what I love most”; and the sketch went off to Sidney Smith of Boston, the distinguished book-plate engraver.
I have a fondness for college professors. I must have inherited it from a rich old uncle, from whom I unluckily inherited nothing else, who had a similar weakness for preachers. Let a man, however stupid, once get a license to wear his collar backwards, and the door was flung wide and the table spread. I have often thought what an ecstasy of delight he would have been thrown into had he met a churchman whose rank permitted him to wear his entire ecclesiastical panoply backwards.
My weakness for scholars is just such a whimsy. As a rule they are not so indulgent to collectors as they should be. They write books that we buy and read—when we can. My lifelong friend, Felix Schelling (in England he would be Sir Felix) is more lenient than most. My copy of his “Elizabethan Drama,” which has made him famous among students, is uncut and, I am afraid, to some extent unopened. Frankly, it is too scholarly to read with enjoyment. Indeed, I sometimes think that it was my protest that led him to adopt the easier and smoother style apparent in his later books, “English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare,” and “The English Lyric.” Be this as it may, he has shown that he can use the scholarly and the familiar style with equal facility; and when he chooses, he can turn a compliment like one of his own sixteenth-century courtiers.
I had always doubted that famous book-index story, “Mill, J. S., ‘On Liberty’; Ditto, ‘On the Floss,’” until one day my friend Tinker sent me a dedication copy of his “Dr. Johnson and Fanny Burney,” in which I read—and knew that he was poking fun at me for my bookish weakness—this:—
This copy is a genuine specimen of the first edition, uncut and unopened, signed and certified by the editor.
Chauncey Brewster Tinker.
No copy is now known to exist of the suppressed first state of the first edition—that in which, instead of the present entry in the index, under Pope, Alexander, page 111, occurred the words, “Pope Alexander 111.”