(14) That Wordsworth treated books very barbarously, and used to cut the pages with a butter-smeared knife.
(15) That Wordsworth’s library was meagre and insignificant compared to Southey’s.
These are only a few of De Quincey’s remarks, digested to their naked gist; by which they lose all the amusing complexity of comment wherein they are folded. But the précis will suffice to show that, whether consciously or not, they were exactly calculated to wound, with very deep incision, the most delicate sensibilities of an austere, somewhat humourless and extremely self-regarding man.
IV
On the 13th of February, 1848, De Quincey received a letter asking him to contribute a writing of some sort for an “album,” to be sold at a Ladies’ Bazaar. This was to be held in March of that year, for the benefit of the Library of the Glasgow Athenæum, and the ladies begged him to reply by “return of post.” This incident in itself sounds contemporary enough to give us a fellow feeling with De Quincey.
He had nothing available to send to the bazaar, but there was one unfailing resource—his bathtub. Let him describe it:
In my study I have a bath, large enough to swim in, provided the swimmer, not being an ambitious man, is content with going ahead to the extent of three inches at the utmost. This bath, having been superseded (as regards its original purpose) by a better, has yielded a secondary service to me as a reservoir for my MSS. Filled to the brim it is by papers of all sorts and sizes. Every paper written by me, to me, for me, of or concerning me, and, finally, against me, is to be found, after an impossible search, in this capacious repertory. Those papers, by the way, that come under the last (or hostile) subdivision are chiefly composed by shoemakers and tailors—an affectionate class of men, who stick by one to the last like pitch-plasters.
De Quincey decided that the only thing to do was to draw something at random from the bathtub for the ladies’ album. Accordingly, he made a little ceremony of it. “Three young ladies, haters of everything unfair,” were called in as referees; and a young man to do the actual dipping. There were to be four dips into the tub, and, for some reason not quite clear to us, the young man was made to attire himself in a new potato-sack, with holes cut for his legs and only his right arm free. It would have been more to the purpose, we should have thought, to blindfold him; but he was instructed to dip at random, holding his face “at right angles to the bath.” He was to be allowed one minute to rummage at random among “the billowy ocean of papers,” and at the command Haul Up! was to come forth with whatever his fingers approved. Before the ceremony began a glass of wine was brought. De Quincey proposed the health of the ladies of the Athenæum, and pledged his honour that whatever MS. should be dredged up would be sent off to the bazaar. And this, he protested, though somewhere buried in the bath there lay a paper which he valued as equal to the half of his possessions.
But he was compelled to depart from the strict rigour of his scheme. For let us see what the young man discovered in the bathtub. The first dip brought up a letter still unopened. It proved to be a dinner invitation for the 15th of February. De Quincey was congratulating himself on the success of his raffle, which had thus enabled him to answer this letter without irreparable breach of manners, when the young lady referees discovered that the letter was four years old.
Number 2 was a “dun.” The young man was, to De Quincey’s dismay, dredging in a portion of the tub rich in overdue bills. “It is true,” he says, “that I had myself long remarked that part of the channel to be dangerously infested with duns. In searching for literary or philosophic paper, it would often happen for an hour together that I brought up little else than variegated specimens of the dun.” And so Number 3 was also a dun.