The fragmentary state by no means restricts itself to literary items of insignificant bulk. For, as we see, a potential factor in the creation of rare books has been a vast temporary popularity, succeeded by a prolonged period of neglect. The result is before us in the almost total evanescence of thousands of books extending to hundreds of pages. Look at Blind Harry's Wallace, a large volume, first printed in folio about 1520; a few leaves are all that remain of the editio princeps; and others have totally vanished. Many of us are familiar with the tolerably ample dimensions of the service-books of various uses in the English Church; and yet those of Aberdeen, Hereford, and York survive only in fragments or torsi; and the modern reprint of the first was formed from a combination of several imperfect originals. A similar fate has all but overtaken such excessively popular works as Coverdale's Bible, 1535, and Fox's Martyrs, 1563, an absolutely perfect copy of either of which I have never beheld.
Henry Oxinden, of Barham in Kent, was the earliest recorded collector of old English plays, and bound up his 122 dramatic possessions in six volumes before 1647. He has left a list of them in his manuscript common-place book. Tears almost steal into our eyes as we read the titles: the Hamlet of 1603, the Taming of the Shrew, 1594, Ralph Roister Doister. Of the first we know well enough the history to date: two copies, both imperfect. The second exists in the unique Inglis, Heber, and Devonshire example; it is mentioned in Longman's Catalogue for 1817, from which it was purchased by Rodd, and sold to Mr. Inglis; it is reputed to have once belonged to Pope. The remaining item survives in the titleless copy at present in the library of Eton College, to which Mr. Briggs presented it in 1818, not on account of the association of Udall the author with that seminary of learning, but, curiously enough, by mere accident.
Among Bagford's collections there is a single leaf of an otherwise unknown impression of Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delights, a 1565 book only hitherto extant in a 1584 reprint. This precious little morçeau altogether differs, so far as it goes, from the corresponding portion of the volume now preserved in the National Library.
Let me insist a little on the instructive progress of knowledge in one or two cases. A fragment of a small tract in verse by Lydgate, from the prolific press of Wynkyn de Worde, was proclaimed as an extraordinary and unique accession to our literary stores some eighty years since; it was called The Treatise of a Gallant, and had been taken from the covers of a volume of statutes in the library at Nash Court. Some time after, a complete copy of another impression turned up, and ultimately a third, quite distinct from either of the previous two, was discovered in a volume of marvellously rare pieces sold by a Bristol bookseller to the late Mr. Maskell for £300, and by him to the British Museum. Take another case connected with the same press. A piece entitled The Remorse of Conscience, by William Lichfield, parson of All Hallows, Thames Street, who died in 1447, leaving a larger number of MSS. behind him than Lamb once humorously made Coleridge do, long enjoyed the reputation of being a solitary survivor; but at present the world holds four, two recovered from bindings, and a third titleless, and all, in fact, more or less dilapidated by unappreciative or over-appreciative handlers. Last, not least, the delightful idyll of Adam Bell, of which we were so glad on a time to follow the Garrick exemplar, is now proved to have been in type in the reign of Henry VIII.; and a piece of a pre-Reformation issue luckily preserves enough to show how, even in a production probably sold at a penny, it was thought worth while to alter a passage where the Pope was originally alluded to.
There are instances where we are deprived of the gratification of beholding so much as a morsel of a book sufficient to establish its former existence in hundreds, if not thousands, of copies. Of the Four Sons of Aymon, from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, 1504, not a vestige has so far accrued; yet it once existed, as it is expressly cited in a later issue. So it is, again, with Skelton's Nigramansir, printed by De Worde in 1504, which was actually seen by Weston the historian in the hands of Collins the poet, and with Peter Fabyl's Ghost (the Merry Devil of Edmonton) from the same press.
We are accustomed to associate with the black-letter fragment the name of John Bagford, who, in the closing years of the seventeenth and beginning of the next century, distinguished himself by the zeal with which he collected typographical specimens and memorials. In Bagford's day, the relative value of old books was scarcely at all understood; there was no adequate discrimination between the productions of Caxton and his immediate successors and those of living or recent printers; and, again, which was more excusable, volumes by early divines or by writers of established repute were more generally sought than those by schools of poetry and fiction, which at present command chief attention and respect. If we turn over the pages of an auctioneer's catalogue belonging to that era, we perceive, side by side, items estimated at about the same figure, of which many have become worth perhaps even less, while a few have left their former companions immeasurably behind, and one or two rank among the livres introuvables. Those were the days when the classics were preserved with the most jealous care, and acquired at extravagant prices, and when our vernacular literature, from the introduction of typography down to the Restoration, was an object of attention to an extremely limited constituency, and could be obtained for a song.
The Bagford collection of title-pages and fragments formerly constituted part of the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum, but has been chiefly transferred to the printed book department of recent years. It resembles a Typographical Cemetery, a charnel-house of books crowded together without respect to their subject-matter or their literary rank: the leaf of a Caxton, another of a valueless legal treatise, the title-page of Romeus and Julietta, on which Shakespeare founded, as the phrase goes, his own play, and a broadsheet preserved entire, there being no more of it. But Bagford, who helped Dr. Moore, Bishop of Ely, and perchance Lord Oxford, to some of their rarities, does not stand alone. He had many followers; but the scale of operations diminished as the orthodox collector multiplied and prices rose. Sir John Fenn, editor of the Paston Letters, whom we have named above, was a disciple, however, and Martin of Palgrave was another. Many years since, for a proposed new Biographia Britannica by Murray of Albemarle Street, the present writer collected all the known particulars of Bagford himself, who spent his last days in the Charterhouse. His episcopal client or patron died in 1714.
Before we condemn these biblioclasts, let us recollect one thing. It is not so much that they have rendered books imperfect by the abstraction of leaves or title-pages, as that they have actually preserved the sole testimony for the existence of hundreds of books, tracts, and broadsheets of which we should have otherwise known nothing, amid the wholesale destruction of early literature, which was not arrested till the close of the last century, and still proceeds in a modified form and degree. Not many years since the Troy-Book printed by Caxton was discovered hanging up in a water-closet at Harrogate; a portion had disappeared, but the remainder was secured, and was sold to a dealer in Manchester for thirty guineas. It must be, and is, Bagford's apology that he sacrificed to his typographical scheme material which was almost universally neglected, and for which there might seem, two hundred years ago, scarcely any prospect of a future call. Yet, oddly enough, this very person was one of the pioneers, by his labours and example, in bringing back a taste for the older English school; he appeared at a juncture when sufficient time had elapsed for the destruction by various agencies of a vast proportion of the products of the press; but until the fashion, which he and others set, had begun to spread, it remained unknown how much was reduced from its original volume, and how much had perished. We have the less pretence for censuring the biblioclasts of the past, who could only use the eyes and experience of their own epoch, when instances are reported from time to time of the same ruthless practices even by those who might have been expected to know better; and there is more than one way of viewing the present notorious tendency to exterminate the old theology on the plea that it is worthless, since a generation may arise which will upbraid us for having converted to pulp this part of our inheritance, till it comes at last to survive in a stray leaf here or a mangled fragment there. An altogether different quarter from which a result conducive to the shrinkage or disappearance of copies of early works has arisen is the print-collecting movement, involving the devastation of the innumerable volumes which contain portraits, frontispieces, and other engravings, and the more than incidental risk of the consignment of the unvalued residue to the waste-basket; and it may be mentioned that within our personal knowledge hundreds upon hundreds of scarce old books have been destroyed by editors, lexicographers, and other literary workers, to save the trouble of transcribing extracts. It might be impossible to exhaust the variety of ways in which an extraordinarily large body of publications of former days has been reduced or raised to the position of rarities of graduated rank.
After all these ages, all the indefatigable researches which have been undertaken for profit or for pleasure, all the libraries which have been formed and dispersed, true it is that the Unique volume, which of course enjoys its designation only till a second copy is producible, still survives in such abundance, that one, if it were otherwise feasible, might form a library composed of nothing else. Does it not become curious to consider to what lottery, as it were, we owe them—owe their arrest just at the dividing line between living and lost literature? Whatever may be the cause, we have hitherto failed to trace duplicates of the metrical Ship of Fools, 1509, Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-Book, 1569, Watson's Teares of Fancie, 1593, Venus and Adonis, 1593, 1599, and 1617, and of Lucrece, 1598. Copies of these later productions must have found their way to Shakespeare's country at the time. Malone met with the Venus and Adonis of 1593 at Manchester in 1805, and another collector with that of 1594 in the same shire; and the Florio's Montaigne of 1603, the only volume with the poet's autograph yet seen, was long preserved at Smethwick, near Birmingham. It was at Manchester, too, that the copy of the Tragedy of Richard III., 1594, came to light as recently as 1881. Several of the works of Nicholas Breton and Samuel Rowlands survive in isolated copies. Upwards of a century has elapsed since a medical man picked up in Ayrshire in 1788 an assemblage of quarto tracts belonging to the ancient vernacular literature of Scotland and to the parent press of Edinburgh; and not a whisper has been raised to suggest the existence of a second copy of any of them, which is to be regretted so far, as some are imperfect. During years on years, the authorities at the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, kept this inestimable relic in a cupboard under the stairs. In the find at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, thirty or forty years since, there were items upon items utterly unknown. It was the same at the Wolfreston sale in 1856. It goes without saying that among the Heber stores the uniques were barely numerable; and many yet preserve their reputation as such. Mr. Caldecott, Mr. Jolley, and Mr. Corser were lucky in falling in with scores of tracts of the first order of rarity. No one has beheld the double of the Jests of the Widow Edith, purchased by Lord Fitzwilliam for £3 10s. at West's sale in 1773, and formerly Lord Oxford's; and the citation of the last name prompts the remark that many a book in the Harleian Library still awaits recovery, assuming the description in the catalogue to be correct. On the contrary, there are serious warnings to enthusiasts not to rely too implicitly on the reputation of a volume for uniqueness or high rarity in view of such phenomena as the occurrence within a short period of each other at the same mart in 1896 of two copies of the first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, printed by Caxton. Here was a case where the publicity afforded to these matters brought out a second example, which the owner found to be worth a small estate.
The writer's publication, Fugitive Tracts, 1493-1700, 2 vols., 1875, very aptly and powerfully illustrates the present bearings of our subject. Of the sixty pieces there reproduced, two-thirds appear to be unique, and only four are traceable in the Heber Catalogue. Yet many of the items are of historical or biographical importance, and were, in fact, selected from a much larger number with that view; which seems to be tantamount to a recognition of the truth, that, enormous as is the total surviving body of early English and Scotish Literature, it represents in some sections or classes only a salvage of what was once in type, or, to speak more by the card, of what we have so far been able to recover.
