Richard Ashmole, the founder of the Ashmolean Museum, was an intimate of the astrologer Lilly, and one of the queerest of bookworms. His life was grotesquely checkered by family jars. He had a termagant wife, who, it appears, was continually "taking the law of him in return for neglect, cruelty," &c. Whether Ashmole was proof or not proof against this peculiar kind of henpecking, we can not report; but it is certain that his bodily health failed him in the course of his wife's persecution; he sought to tinker up his constitution with quack medicines, of which he became the victim.
The Bodleian and Ashmolean collections are emulated by the Harleian. Harley, Earl of Oxford's attachment to books, and the large sums he expended in forming the collection of MSS., have rendered the name celebrated. The Harleian collection of MSS. was purchased by government for the National Library; the purchase-money amounted to £10,000. Harley lived in the middle of the seventeenth century.
A remarkable individual of the order of bookworm, was the musical bibliomaniac, Thomas Britton. This curious character lived in the Augustan age of Queen Anne. He came to London from a northern county, and, after serving an humble apprenticeship, embarked in business as a kind of costermonger; he was in the habit of actually crying his coals about the street. His attire was a Guernsey frock; he carried a black sack on his shoulders, and a coal measure in his hands. In this style he was painted by Woollaston. Britton lived in Aylesbury-street, Clerkenwell, where he fitted up a concert-room, the progenitor of the great philharmonic and ancient nobility concerts of the present day. Sir Robert l'Estrange was one of Britton's first patrons, and by his reputation and example induced the fashionable world of those days to patronize Britton's concerts, at which Handel, Phil Hart, Banister, Dubourg the violinist, and others, performed to the genteelest of audiences. The concert-room was literally but one floor over a coal-shed; and the visitors had to climb up to it by a ladder fixed outside of the house, and to sit under a low roof, against which they could not avoid knocking their heads soundingly. Britton was no composer, only a musician and book-collector. He collected works on the occult art chiefly, and on music; his library sold for a large sum of money in those times. He was quite a notoriety on account of the humble trade he so openly followed, and the refined tastes he was known to cultivate. One day passing nigh the house of Woollaston the painter, in Warwick-lane, Britton, being in his work-a-day attire, gave out lustily his well-known cry of "Small-coal." Woollaston's attention was attracted, and he recognized in the voice that of his musical acquaintance Britton, whom he had never seen in the pursuit of his ordinary trade. The artist at once beckoned Britton in, and there and then took his portrait as he sat, a veritable itinerant coal-dealer. The portrait is most characteristic, and is now to be seen in the collection of paintings of the British Museum. But we must notice the small-coal man under his bibliopolic phase. A bibliomania raged among Queen Anne's nobility. The Earls of Oxford, Pembroke, Sunderland, and Winchelsea, and the Duke of Devonshire, were among the smitten. These personages, on Saturdays, during the winter season, used to resort to the city, and, there separating, take several routes to the booksellers' shops in different parts of the town, to search out old volumes and MSS. Some time before noon, they would assemble at the shop of Christopher Bateman, a bookseller, at the corner of Ave Maria-lane, in Paternoster-row (query, Little Britain?), where they were frequently met by other persons engaged in the same pursuits, and a conversation commenced on the subject of their inquiries. As nearly as possible to the hour of twelve by St. Paul's clock, Britton (uniquely, the "Literary Dustman" of his age), who by that time had finished his round, clad in his blue frock, and pitching his sack of small coal on the bulk of Mr. Bateman's shop window, used to go in and join them. After about an hour's chat, the noblemen adjourned to the Mourning Bush Tavern at Aldersgate (probably the site of the present Albion Tavern), where they dined, and spent the remainder of the day. Poor Britton was indeed a singular character, and died a death as singular as his life. He was, we are told, of an excessively nervous temperament, which rendered him the object occasionally of villainous practical jokes. Unfortunately he incurred the enmity of Honeyman, the ventriloquist. On a certain day, when Britton gave one of his nobility concerts in Aylesbury-street, Honeyman attended. An opportunity occurring, a voice was heard at a distance, which announced that Thomas Britton's hour was near and that he had but a short time to remain in this world. Poor Britton was not proof against the art of the malicious mimic. He felt the ventriloquist's words as though they were a sacred augur; so deep an impression did the incident make upon him, that he died, almost as predicted, in a brief period, aged fifty-eight, 1714.
Browne Willis was another original of whom we are enabled to furnish a few whimsical anecdotes. But we would reserve this respectful remark, that the doctor was, notwithstanding oddities in externals and manners, nevertheless a learned antiquary, and a good man. So were they all, all learned antiquaries, and excellent men. His tastes led him chiefly to the study of ecclesiastical relics. He visited every cathedral in England and Wales. To these journeys he himself gave the name of pilgrimages. Browne Willis lived in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He was grandson of Dr. Thomas Willis, a celebrated physician, and the first to reduce the theory of phrenology to order and system. His person and dress are described by one who knew him well; they were "so singular that, though a gentleman of £1000 per annum, he was often taken for a beggar. An old leathern girdle or belt always surrounded the two or three coats he wore, and over them an old blue cloak. He wrote the worst hand of any man in England, such as he could with difficulty read himself. His boots, which he almost always appeared in, were not the least singular part of his dress. I suppose it would not be falsity to say they were forty years old, patched and vamped up at various times. They were all in wrinkles, and did not come up above half-way of his legs. He was often called, in the neighborhood of Buckingham, 'Old Wrinkle Boots.' The chariot of Mr. Willis was so singular, that from it he was called himself, the 'Old Chariot.' It was his wedding chariot, and had his arms on brass plates about it, not unlike a coffin, and painted black." This rare antiquary was satirized by Dr. Darrell, in some humorous and highly descriptive verses, of which the subjoined couplets are a specimen:
"High on a hill his mansion stood
But gloomy dark within.
Here mangled books, as bones and blood,
Lie in a giant's den:
"Crude, undigested, half-devoured,
On groaning shelves they're thrown;
Such manuscripts no eye could read,
Nor hand write, but his own."
His wife having written a serious book, Browne Willis wrote on his own copy of the work, "All the connection in this book is owing to the book-binder." He delighted to joke upon Mrs. Willis's book and her authorship.
[INCIDENTS OF DUELING.]
Dueling has fallen into desuetude, and very properly. Times have changed marvelously. Fifty years ago, gentlemen by descent, by property, or by profession, were only esquired; now, if you mistered an attorney's clerk, the letter would be sent repudiated to the dead office. To him only who was entitled to bear arms, an appeal to arms was allowed; and had a man in trade, though worth a plum, in those days presumed to send a message to a gentleman not in trade, nor worth a penny, the odds would be considerable that the bearer of the cartel would have been horsewhipped on the spot. Even liberty to share in certain amusements was considered great condescension on the part of the aristocracy to men who had founded their own fortunes, and accidental meetings at the cover-side were never supposed to warrant aught beyond a field acquaintance. A brutal, but striking anecdote which marked this then prevailing feeling of exclusiveness, is told of the too-celebrated George Robert Fitzgerald. One hunting day, when drawing a fox cover, he observed a well-mounted and smartly-dressed young man join the company; and on inquiring his name from the whipper, was informed that the stranger was a neighboring apothecary.
"An apothecary!" exclaimed the master of hounds. "By Heaven! men's impudence every day becomes more audacious! Why, it would not surprise me after this, that an attorney should join our meeting next. Come, it is time that this dealer in drugs should be taught that fox-hunting is a trade practiced only by gentlemen;" and riding up to the unoffending dabbler in Galenicals, he savagely flogged him off the field.