The conclusion of the story is this: The work of collecting the reprints was finished. The last installment reached the famous Englishman during an illness which subsequently proved fatal. They were spread upon the coverlid of the bed, and the invalid took a great and humorous satisfaction in looking them over. Said the Bibliotaph, recounting the incident in his succinct way, ‘They reached him on his death-bed,—and made him willing to go.’
The Bibliotaph was true to the traditions of the book-collecting brotherhood, in that he read but little. His knowledge of the world was fresh from life, not ‘strained through books,’ as Johnson said of a certain Irish painter whom he knew at Birmingham. But the Bibliotaph was a mighty devourer of book-catalogues. He got a more complete satisfaction, I used to think, in reading a catalogue than in reading any other kind of literature. To see him unwrapping the packages which his English mail had brought was to see a happy man. For in addition to books by post, there would be bundles of sale-catalogues. Then might you behold his eyes sparkle as he spread out the tempting lists; the humorous lines about the corners of his mouth deepened, and he would take on what a little girl who watched him called his ‘pussy-cat look.’ Then with an indelible pencil in his huge and pudgy left fist (for the Bibliotaph was a Benjaminite), he would go through the pages, checking off the items of interest, rolling with delight in his chair as he exclaimed from time to time, ‘Good books! Such good books!’ Say to him that you yourself liked to read a catalogue, and his response was pretty sure to be, ‘Pleasant, isn’t it?’ This was expressive of a high state of happiness, and was an allusion. For the Bibliotaph was once with a newly-married man, and they two met another man, who, as the conversation proceeded, disclosed the fact that he also had but recently been wed. Whereupon the first bridegroom, marveling that there could be another in the world so exalted as himself, exclaimed with sympathetic delight, ‘And you, too, are married.’ ‘Yes,’ said the second, ‘pleasant, isn’t it?’ with much the same air that he would have said, ‘Nice afternoon.’ This was one of the incidents which made the Bibliotaph skeptical about marriage. But he adopted the phrase as a useful one with which to express the state of highest mental and spiritual exaltation.
People wondered at the extent of his knowledge of books. It was very great, but it was not incredible. If a man cannot touch pitch without being defiled, still less can he handle books without acquiring bibliographical information. I am not sure that the Bibliotaph ever heard of that professor of history who used to urge his pupils to handle books, even when they could not get time to read them. ‘Go to the library, take down the volumes, turn over the leaves, read the title-pages and the tables of contents; information will stick to you’—this was the professor’s advice. Information acquired in this way may not be profound, but so far as it goes it is definite and useful. For the collector it is indispensable. In this way the Bibliotaph had amassed his seemingly phenomenal knowledge of books. He had handled thousands and tens of thousands of volumes, and he never relinquished his hold upon a book until he had ‘placed’ it,—until he knew just what its rank was in the hierarchy of desirability.
Between a diligent reading of catalogues and an equally diligent rummaging among the collections of third and fourth rate old book-shops, the Bibliotaph had his reward. He undoubtedly bought a deal of trash, but he also lighted upon nuggets. For example, in Leask’s Life of Boswell is an account of that curious little romance entitled Dorando. This so-called Spanish Tale, printed for J. Wilkie at the Bible in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, was the work of James Boswell. It was published anonymously in 1767, and he who would might then have bought it for ‘one shilling.’ It was to be ‘sold also by J. Dodsley in Pall Mall, T. Davies in Russell-Street, Covent Garden, and by the Book-sellers of Scotland.’ This T. Davies was the very man who introduced Boswell to Johnson. He was an actor as well as a bookseller. Dorando was a story with a key. Under the names of Don Stocaccio, Don Tipponi, and Don Rodomontado real people were described, and the facts of the ‘famous Douglas cause’ were presented to the public. The little volume was suppressed in so far as that was possible. It is rare, so rare that Boswell’s latest biographer speaks of it as the ‘forlorn hope of the book-hunter,’ though he doubts not that copies of it are lurking in some private collection. One copy at least is lurking in the Bibliotaph’s library. He bought it, not for a song to be sure, but very reasonably. The Bibliotaph declares that this book is good for but one thing,—to shake in the faces of Boswell collectors who haven’t it.
The Bibliotaph had many literary heroes. Conspicuous among them were Professor Richard Porson and Benjamin Jowett, the late master of Balliol. The Bibliotaph collected everything that related to these two men, all the books with which they had had anything to do, every newspaper clipping and magazine article which threw light upon their manners, habits, modes of thought. He especially loved to tell anecdotes of Porson. He knew many. He had an interleaved copy of J. Selby Watson’s Life of Porson into which were copied a multitude of facts not to be found in that amusing biography. The Bibliotaph used to say that he would rather have known Porson than any other man of his time. He used to quote this as one of the best illustrations of Porson’s wit, and one of the finest examples of the retort satiric to be found in any language. One of Porson’s works was assailed by Wakefield and by Hermann, scholars to be sure, but scholars whose scholarship Porson held in contempt. Being told of their attack Porson only said that ‘whatever he wrote in the future should be written in such a way that those fellows wouldn’t be able to reach it with their fore-paws if they stood on their hind-legs to get at it!’
The Bibliotaph gave such an air of contemporaneity to his stories of the great Greek professor that it seemed at times as if they were the relations of one who had actually known Porson. So vividly did he portray the marvels of that compound of thirst and scholarship that no one had the heart to laugh when, after one of his narrations, a gentleman asked the Bibliotaph if he himself had studied under Porson.
‘Not under him but with him,’ said the Bibliotaph. ‘He was my coeval. Porson, Richard Bentley, Joseph Scaliger, and I were all students together.’
Speaking of Jowett the Bibliotaph once said that it was wonderful to note how culture failed to counteract in an Englishman that disposition to heave stones at an American. Jowett, with his remarkable breadth of mind and temper, was quite capable of observing, with respect to a certain book, that it was American, ‘yet in perfect taste.’ ‘This,’ said the Bibliotaph, ‘is as if one were to say, “The guests were Americans, but no one expectorated on the carpet.”’ The Bibliotaph thought that there was not so much reason for this attitude. The sins of Englishmen and Americans were identical, he believed, but the forms of their expression were different. ‘Our sin is a voluble boastfulness; theirs is an irritating, unrestrainable, all-but-constantly manifested, satisfied self-consciousness. The same results are reached by different avenues. We praise ourselves; they belittle others.’ Then he added with a smile: ‘Thus even in these latter days are the Scriptures exemplified; the same spirit with varying manifestations.’
He was once commenting upon Jowett’s classification of humorists. Jowett divided humorists ‘into three categories or classes; those who are not worth reading at all; those who are worth reading once, but once only; and those who are worth reading again and again and for ever.’ This remark was made to Swinburne, who quotes it in his all too brief Recollections of Professor Jowett. Swinburne says that the starting-point of their discussion was the Biglow Papers, which ‘famous and admirable work of American humour’ Jowett placed in the second class. Swinburne himself thought that the Biglow Papers was too good for the second class and not quite good enough for the third. ‘I would suggest that a fourth might be provided, to include such examples as are worth, let us say, two or three readings in a life-time.’
The Bibliotaph made a variety of comments on this, but I remember only the following; it is a reason for not including the Biglow Papers in Jowett’s third and crowning class. ‘Humor to be popular permanently must be general rather than local, and have to do with a phase of character rather than a fact of history; that is, it must deal in a great way with what is always interesting to all men. Humor that does not meet this requirement is not likely, when its novelty has worn off, to be read even occasionally save by those who enjoy it as an intellectual performance or who are making a critical study of its author.’ The observation, if not profound, is at least sensible, and it illustrates very well the Bibliotaph’s love of alliteration and antithesis. But it is easier to remember and to report his caustic and humorous remarks.