CHAPTER VII
Transmission of ancient remains—The unique fragment and unique book—Importance of the former—The St. Alban's Grammar-School find—A more recent one or two—Mr. Neal's volume—A tantalising entry in a country catalogue—The Hundred Merry Tales—Large volumes only known from small fragments—Blind Harry's Wallace—Aberdeen and other Breviaries—The Oxenden Collection of Old English Plays—The idyll of Adam Bell, 1536—John Bagford: his unsuspected services to us—Ought we to destroy the old theology?—Other causes of the disappearance of books—Unique books which still preserve their reputation—Rare books which are not rare—Books which are rare and not valuable—Ratcliff, the waste-paper dealer, who had a collection of Caxtons—The bystander's manifold experiences—Narrowness of the circle of first-class buyers—The old collector and the new one—Speculative investors.
Looking at the imperfect and unconsecutive condition in which much of our most precious early literature has been received by us, we are apt to reflect to how narrow and close an accident we owe two classes of existing remains: the unique book and the unique fragment. Of course to term a volume or production unique is a perilous business; the bookseller and the auctioneer may do so ex officio; an inexperienced amateur may resort to the term as a pleasant and harmless self-deception; but no responsible writer or critic dares to pronounce anything whatever unique without an emphatic caveat. We have personally known cases where a publication by one of the early printers was first introduced to notice, and created a sort of sensation, as a mutilated fragment rescued from the binding of another work; this revelation brought to light, after an interval, a second of a different issue; anon at some auction occurred a perfect copy; and now the poor damaged worm-eaten leaves, once so reverently and so tenderly regarded, awake no further interest; the mystery and romance have vanished; and when we examine the book as a whole, we do not find its merits so striking as when we strained our eyes to decipher the old binder's pasteboard.
The Fragment is really an unusually and more than at first credibly important feature in the elder literature. It may be taken, after all deductions for occasional discoveries of the entire work, to be the sole existing voucher for a terribly large section of the more popular books of our forefathers, just as the Stationers' Register is for another. But it is far more than one degree trustworthier and more palpable; for it is, like the torso of an ancient statue, a veritable part of the printed integer and a certificate of its publication and former existence. Many years ago there was a great stir in consequence of the detachment from the binding of another book—Caxton's Boethius—in the St. Alban's Grammar-School of a parcel of fragments belonging to books by Caxton; these are now in the British Museum. In the Huth Catalogue are noticed several relics of a similar kind; and indeed scarcely any great library, public or private, is without them. They may be accepted as provisional evidences. A rather curious circumstance seems to be associated with one of the Huth fragments—three leaves of Thomas Howell's New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets. The relic once belonged to Thomas Martin of Palgrave, and includes two leaves of signature D, which are deficient in the Capell copy of this work at Cambridge. The latter is described as a quarto; but it would be interesting to discover that from the fragment the text could be completed. The inconvenience attending the examination of rare books in provincial libraries is very great and serious.
A copy of Statham's Abridgement of the Statutes, printed at Rouen about 1491, and bound in England, had as flyleaves two sheets of Caxton's Chronicles of England, possibly some of the waste found in Caxton's warehouse after his death.
There is a weird fascination about a newly found fragment of some lost literary composition. Only a few months since, in a copy of Cicero's Rhetorica, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1546, in the possession of Mr. Neal, quite a number of pieces of wastrel were disclosed on the removal of the covers, and among them portions of English metrical effusions of the period (for the volume must have been bound here). We view this treasure trove wistfully and indulgently; there it is; no mortal eye had fallen on it in the course of three and a half centuries; and how can we be expected to judge its value or quality by the ordinary standard—on an ordinary critical principle? It has come to us like an unlooked-for testamentary windfall. We are not to look at it in the mouth too curiously or fastidiously, or we deserve to have lost it; and it is the very same thing with scores of remains of the kind, brought to light in various directions and ways from season to season, and (to the utmost extent of my power and opportunity) chronicled by me on my accustomed principle.
When I was younger by some thirty years, I received the catalogue of a provincial bookseller, and was sanguine enough to suppose that I should become the happy master at the marked price (7s. 6d.) of No. 2084, which ran as follows:—
"Pynson and others—Specimens of Early Printing, comprising Twenty Leaves of the Ballad of Robin Hood, &c. &c., taken from the cover of an old Missal."
No time was lost in giving the order; but the lot was sold, and the proprietors did not even know who had bought it. I comforted myself as the fox did. Yet such is the frailty of one's nature, that one cannot refrain, after long, long years, from sentimentalising over it. There is something so taking in the notion of a tattered, semi-illegible, unappropriated fractional relic, not a trunk even; it fascinates us like a coin of which the legend is almost beyond identification; there is mystery behind it; we may be on the track of a discovery which will help to make us famous.
We have all heard of the Hundred Merry Tales, rescued by Mr. Conybeare in the early years of the century from another book, of which the fragments assisted to form the covers, and how the treasure was prized till a complete copy occurred in a Continental library and dispelled the charm. It was pointed out many years ago by the present writer (Old English Jest-Books, 1864, i., Additional Notes) that Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584, quotes the story from this miscellany of the miller's eels, and enabled us, before the Göttingen copy was brought under notice, to complete the text, which is almost undecipherable in the Conybeare (now Huth) one.
