Nor need we go to ancient Greece or Rome for such instances. Several poems by Shelley have completely disappeared already, and some of Byron's have been, more than once, at their last gasp. Old English ballads and songs have been 'lost' by hundreds at a time, and nearly all the records dealing with the private life of Oliver Cromwell are missing. The story of Carlyle's 'Squire Papers' is a characteristic one, and distinctly to the point. While that author was laboriously collating the scraps of evidence relative to the great Protector that had survived the honest but mistaken zeal of triumphing Royalists, he received a letter from an unknown correspondent, who stated that he possessed a mass of Parliamentary documents, among them the diary of an ancestor, one Samuel Squire, a subaltern in the 'Stilton Troop' of Ironsides. The letter was accompanied by extracts from this diary and other papers, and went on to say that the writer, who had been brought up to regard Cromwell in the very worst possible light, and his own ancestor with shame as the aider and abettor of an atrocious crime, was undecided what to do with the originals. Several letters passed, and at last Carlyle wrote to a friend living in the neighbourhood, asking him to see his correspondent, and persuade him of his undoubted duty, which was at least to submit documents of such great importance to examination.
Unfortunately, the friend was absent, and by the time he returned the papers had been destroyed. They may, of course, have had no existence, but Carlyle himself was of a contrary opinion, for later on he received a heavy packet containing copies of thirty-five letters of Oliver Cromwell, written in a style apparently contemporary, and referring to incidents that no one who had not made a careful and exhaustive study of his life and times, and who was not thoroughly conversant with all the available material, would have been in the least able to reproduce.
The records were destroyed because, as the owner said, he felt that, one way or another, the manuscripts would be got from him and made public, and 'what could that amount to but a new Guy Fawkes cellar and infernal machine to explode the cathedral city where he lived, and all its coteries, and almost dissolve Nature for the time being?' Either this man was a learned forger or a singularly narrow-minded and obstinate type of destroyer whose ravages can be traced through the centuries, and whose example will never cease to be followed so long as paper remains unable to resist the assaults of the bigot and the outrages of the Goth.
That will be ever, and hence it is that in all things literary preservation is the greatest of the virtues. What part of a century's product to preserve and what to destroy is a problem, not for us, but for the century to come, and for many centuries after that. In fact, it is Time's problem, which Time alone can solve.
CHAPTER V.
SOME HUNTING-GROUNDS OF LONDON.
At the present time there are, if the Post-Office Directory is to be believed, about 450 booksellers in London; but in this computation are included publishers, stationers, and even bookbinders—in fact, almost everyone who has anything whatever to do with books—so that the figures are by no means to be relied upon. The number of booksellers who make a speciality of second-hand volumes is very much less than 450, if we include only those who follow a single business, namely, that of buying and selling books, and very much greater if we add to the list the army of general dealers who sell books occasionally, or as an adjunct to some other occupation.
The real book-hunter does not follow the Directory, but his nose, which frequently leads him into strange places where there are no recognised booksellers, yet booksellers in plenty—a seeming paradox, which is readily explained by the fact that there are multitudes of what may, without offence, be called 'book-jobbers,' whose names are either not in the Directory at all, or appear there under some other designation.
A man may buy up a roomful of furniture, taking the books of necessity; or a houseful, and with the mass of goods and chattels perhaps hundreds of volumes which are not thought good enough to be disposed of separately, and are therefore cleared out at a nominal figure, and retailed anywhere and everywhere as circumstance and opportunity suggest. Are these dealers, brokers, and what not, booksellers? Heaven save the mark, no! not in a specific sense; but they sell books, notwithstanding, and their shops are, in very truth, recognised hunting-grounds of the Metropolis. There are literally hundreds of them, and they are to be met with, as a rule, close together, where rents are low and the footsteps of the income-tax fiend are unknown.
This is one description of bookseller, but there are several others: the man with the barrow, for instance, who works at his trade all the week, and comes out on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings in certain localities, to do what bartering he can with casual passers-by.