Not many years ago a man at Moreton said something slanderous about another man there. He was threatened with an action, and compromised it by agreeing to publish an apology and devote a sum of money to any public purpose that the injured party chose to name. The public purpose was chosen very astutely—taking the whitewash off the almshouses, a fine old granite building dated 1637. The building is mentioned in the guide-books, and many people go to see it. Finding it improved, they ask about it; and then (as the astute man had foreseen) they hear the story of the other man’s discomfiture.
In another country town a man did something that really was discreditable; but people went on exaggerating it until at last they dropped the real facts out, as these were much too trivial to be worth mentioning in such a lurid tale. And thus he found himself in a position to deny it all on oath. So he denied it, threatening prosecutions, and received a whitewashing that he did not at all deserve, the local papers denouncing “these unjustifiable aspersions on a man of blameless life.”
When people had to see a lawyer, they seldom told him the whole tale, and thus got bad advice, unless he knew enough of their affairs beforehand to enable him to get at all the facts. They would never trust a lawyer if he kept a clerk, and hesitated if he were in partnership, feeling that a clerk was sure to gossip and a partner might. And thus the little country towns were full of lawyers with small practices, each doing his own office work. There is a letter to my father, 12 September 1852, from a lawyer at Moreton, a very able man, who died in early life from no complaint but being bored to death. He says—“I copied 29 sheets draft and engrossed a deed and settled two mortgages and a lease yesterday: hard work that.”
There came a time when lawyers (and others) did not work so hard at Moreton. In his diary on 20 January 1870, two months before his death, my grandfather notes that he had been to Moreton in the morning to see the lawyer and the doctor—“neither at home, one hunting, the other shooting: so lost my labour.”
That lawyer who went hunting, used to tell his clients, when they had a good possessory title, they had much better burn their title-deeds, as these were certain to have some blunder in them that would cause trouble some day. He had drawn a good many of these deeds himself, so I suppose he knew what they were likely to contain.
Writing to my father on 3 December 1844, my grandfather says—“There is a literary society formed in Moreton. I suppose it must be a sort of mechanics’ institute. I fear the intellect of Moreton is too shallow to make much progress for some time. However, that is the way to make it better.”
A friend of my father’s writes to him from Moreton on 23 November 1844, “We have a meeting tomorrow for the purpose of establishing a Reading Room and Library for all classes,” and then on 13 December, “I enclose a copy of the rules of our Society for the promotion of knowledge.... We have £11 to lay out in books at once. We have expended a portion of that sum already in the purchase of selections from the ‘Family Library’ 2/6 per vol, Cabinet and Lardner’s Cyclopedia 3/-, and Chambers very useful elementary books on the sciences etc., all the nos (27) of Knights weekly volume 1/-each (the cheapest and best almost now publishing) and two or three of Murrays cheap edition etc. etc., in all nearly 90 volumes: cost about £7. We are going to take in weekly the ‘Athenæum’, Chambers Journal and Chambers Miscellany, some mechanics magazine and one or two other monthlys. Lectures once a week till April. The object of the Society is to benefit all classes and particularly tradesmen and their apprentices and mechanics etc. who will be much better in the reading room for a couple of hours than in a public house.” The reading room was to be open three times a week, and the librarian was to have £8 a year for the use of the room (it being in his house) including coals and candles and his own services.
There is now a Public Library at Moreton, an ostentatious building which must have cost at least a hundred times as much as the books that it contains. People can read newspapers there and bring away light literature to read at home. But such libraries are seldom of real use. There is not a library in Devon where real work can be done on very many subjects; and the buildings of these libraries might be turned to some account, if each one took a subject and acquired the proper books.
Being a Cambridge man, I can get books from the University Library—Oxford men cannot get books from theirs—and by going to the Reading Room at the British Museum, I can use the books in the immense collection there. That was all I needed when I had a house in town: if I wanted a book down here, I had only to wait till I went up. Now that I am always here, I feel the loss of it, and have to buy extensively. I have about four thousand books, and find I want quite eight or ten. If you have only a single subject, you may perhaps get the necessary books; but you can hardly manage that, if you have several subjects, and do not want mere books-of-reference or text-books, but the books containing the material on which such works are based. These books cannot always be obtained without delay, and therefore must be ordered in advance, as soon as you foresee that you will need them. And then, before a book arrives, you may perceive another way of dealing with the subject, and find you do not need the book at all.
I have tried to arrange my books by subjects, or alphabetically by author’s names—with Roger Ascham next to Daisy Ashcroft—but it always ends in my arranging them by sizes. If a book is higher or wider than the book alongside, it bulges at the edges where the other does not hold it in; and the slightest bulging lets the dust creep in between the leaves. Books are classed as 4to, 8vo, 16mo, &c., according to the folding of the sheets; but the sheets themselves are of all shapes and sizes, crown, royal, demy, and so on. And books come out in dozens of different heights and widths, as if they never were intended to stand in rows on shelves.