Listen to the vaticinator! “As conservatories of mental treasures, their value in times of darkness and barbarity was incalculable; and even in these happier days, when men are incited to explore new regions of thought, they command respect as depots of methodical and well-ordered references for the researches of the curious. But what in one state of society is invaluable, may at another be worthless; and the progress which the world has made within a very few centuries has considerably reduced the estimation which is due to such establishments. We will say more—”[231] but enough! This idea of striking into dust “the god of his idolatry,” the Dagon of his devotion, is sufficient to terrify the bibliographer, who views only a blind Samson pulling down the pillars of his temple!
This future universal inundation of books, this superfluity of knowledge, in billions and trillions, overwhelms the imaginnation! It is now about four hundred years since the art of multiplying books has been discovered; and an arithmetician has attempted to calculate the incalculable of these four ages of typography, which he discovers have actually produced 3,641,960 works! Taking each work at three volumes, and reckoning only each impression to consist of three hundred copies, which is too little, the actual amount from the presses of Europe will give to 1816, 3,277,764,000 volumes! each of which being an inch thick, if placed on a line, would cover 6069 leagues! Leibnitz facetiously maintained that such would be the increase of literature, that future generations would find whole cities insufficient to contain their libraries. We are, however, indebted to the patriotic endeavours of our grocers and trunkmakers, alchemists of literature! they annihilate the gross bodies without injuring the finer spirits. We are still more indebted to that neglected race, the bibliographers!
The science of books, for so bibliography is sometimes dignified, may deserve the gratitude of a public, who are yet insensible of the useful zeal of those book-practitioners, the nature of whose labours is yet so imperfectly comprehended. Who is this vaticinator of the uselessness of public libraries? Is he a bibliognoste, or a bibliographe, or a bibliomane, or a bibliophile, or a bibliotaphe? A bibliothecaire, or a bibliopole, the prophet cannot be; for the bibliothecaire is too delightfully busied among his shelves, and the bibliopole is too profitably concerned in furnishing perpetual additions to admit of this hyperbolical terror of annihilation![232]
Unawares, we have dropped into that professional jargon which was chiefly forged by one who, though seated in the “scorner’s chair,” was the Thaumaturgus of books and manuscripts. The Abbé Rive had acquired a singular taste and curiosity, not without a fermenting dash of singular charlatanerie, in bibliography: the little volumes he occasionally put forth are things which but few hands have touched. He knew well, that for some books to be noised about, they should not be read: this was one of those recondite mysteries of his, which we may have occasion farther to reveal. This bibliographical hero was librarian to the most magnificent of book-collectors, the Duke de la Vallière. The Abbé Rive was a strong but ungovernable brute, rabid, surly, but très-mordant. His master, whom I have discovered to have been the partner of the cur’s tricks, would often pat him; and when the bibliognostes, and the bibliomanes were in the heat of contest, let his “bull-dog” loose among them, as the duke affectionately called his librarian. The “bull-dog” of bibliography appears, too, to have had the taste and appetite of the tiger of politics, but he hardly lived to join the festival of the guillotine. I judge of this by an expression he used to one complaining of his parish priest, whom he advised to give “une messe dans son ventre!” He had tried to exhaust his genius in La Chasse aux Bibliographes et aux Antiquaires mal avisés, and acted Cain with his brothers! All Europe was to receive from him new ideas concerning books and manuscripts. Yet all his mighty promises fumed away in projects; and though he appeared for ever correcting the blunders of others, this French Ritson left enough of his own to afford them a choice of revenge. His style of criticism was perfectly Ritsonian. He describes one of his rivals as l’insolent et très-insensé auteur de l’Almanach de Gotha, on the simple subject of the origin of playing-cards!
The Abbé Rive was one of those men of letters, of whom there are not a few who pass all their lives in preparations. Dr. Dibdin, since the above was written, has witnessed the confusion of the mind and the gigantic industry of our bibliognoste, which consisted of many trunks full of memoranda. The description will show the reader to what hard hunting these book-hunters voluntarily doom themselves, with little hope of obtaining fame! “In one trunk were about six thousand notices of MSS. of all ages. In another were wedged about twelve thousand descriptions of books in all languages, except those of French and Italian; sometimes with critical notes. In a third trunk was a bundle of papers relating to the History of the Troubadours. In a fourth was a collection of memoranda and literary sketches connected with the invention of arts and sciences, with pieces exclusively bibliographical. A fifth trunk contained between two and three thousand cards, written upon each side, respecting a collection of prints. In a sixth trunk were contained his papers respecting earthquakes, volcanoes, and geographical subjects.”[233] This Ajax flagellifer of the bibliographical tribe, who was, as Dr. Dibdin observes, “the terror of his acquaintance, and the pride of his patron,” is said to have been in private a very different man from his public character; all which may be true, without altering a shade of that public character. The French Revolution showed how men, mild and even kind in domestic life, were sanguinary and ferocious in their public.
The rabid Abbé Rive gloried in terrifying, without enlightening his rivals; he exulted that he was devoting to “the rods of criticism and the laughter of Europe the bibliopoles,” or dealers in books, who would not get by heart his “Catechism” of a thousand and one questions and answers: it broke the slumbers of honest De Bure, who had found life was already too short for his own “Bibliographie Instructive.”
The Abbé Rive had contrived to catch the shades of the appellatives necessary to discriminate book amateurs; and of the first term he is acknowledged to be the inventor.
A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiæ of a book.
A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.
A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained, and purse-heavy!