His alliance by marriage to the Reynells introduced another stage in our bibliographical evolution. My mother’s brother, Mr Charles Weatherby Reynell, of whom I have so much to say elsewhere, was not only a book-buyer on a modest scale, but a gentleman with a vague, undefined liking for anything which struck him as quaint and curious—a coin, a piece of china, a picture, a bit of old painted glass, a Chippendale chair—it hardly signified what it was; but books had the first place, I think, in his heart, and he knew a good deal about such as he had purchased, and thought a good deal about them too, albeit they were, as copies, hardly calculated for the meridian of the fastidious connoisseur. In short, my relative was a disciple of the Lamb school; he selected for merit rather than condition, and his petite bibliothéque was part of his very being.
My father and Mr Reynell may be regarded as my bibliographical and archæological sponsors, and they have to answer for a good deal. Instead of becoming a distinguished civil servant, a prosperous trader, or a successful professional man, they contributed, I maintain, to mould me into what I was and am—a bibliographer, a collector, an antiquary.
Books, as they were my father’s only, and my uncle’s chief, paramours, were my first love. My father often laid out money on them, when I am now sure that he could ill afford it, and when the hour of pressure arrived, it was the books to which we had to bid farewell. How many I have seen come and go, while I was a boy under my father’s roof—successive copies of the same favourite work, or little lots of different volumes. Stibbs’s, opposite Somerset House, and next door to the Morning Chronicle office, is almost the earliest shop of the kind which I remember; a second was William Brown’s, originally on the same premises. These two establishments witnessed the flux and reflux of many a brown paper parcel sent home in a moment of impulse, and launched on its backward voyage at a lower quotation in some financial dilemma—a contingency too frequent in the days before relief arrived in the shape of an official post.
I am haunted in all my maturer life by a feeling of remorse, that on two or three occasions I was betrayed into making foolish investments on my own authority, when neither my father nor myself could properly defray the expense. But the lues which was, in due course, to assume such enlarged dominion over me, and to branch into so many channels, was already an active agency; and my visits to the shop in the Strand, kept by Mr Brown, bore mischievous fruit in one instance at all events, when I secured for 24s. a set of Singer’s Select Early English Poets, in boards, uncut. My father was terribly concerned, not knowing where this sort of fancy was likely to end; but he recognised, perhaps, his own teaching, and eventually the Singer was bound by Leighton in half-blue morocco. It was a beautiful little set, I thought, and brand-new in its fresh livery. The day came when we had to say good-bye to it—not to it alone; and I should have wished never to behold it again. I did, however; I met with it at an auction; it was faded, thumbed, disreputable. I had not the courage to touch it; it was no longer mine. I mused as I left the place upon its career and its destiny, and it made me really sad.
I have spoken of Mr Reynell as one of my teachers or masters. He was a person who had a genuine love for our older literature, and enjoyed even better opportunities than my father of indulging it. But his purchases were sparing and desultory, and he never attained any distinction as a collector. He had not studied the subject, and he never became wealthy enough to secure the services of competent advisers. In fact, his want of knowledge rendered him distrustful of counsel. The result was that he accumulated, during a very prolonged life, a singular assemblage of nondescript property, of which the really valuable proportion was infinitesimal. It was perfectly fortuitous, that he had picked up an exceedingly rare Psalter, in rather ragged state, for 25s., which at his sale, a year or two back, Mr Quaritch deemed worth £24, and a folio Roman de la Rose, which fetched a good price, and cost him the same moderate sum. As a rule, he invariably, from want of training and fine instinct, bought the wrong article, or, if the right one, in the wrong condition. He had not the eye of George Daniel, R. S. Turner, or Henry Huth, for form and fitness. Yet he was my instructor in a degree and a sense, and many delightful talks we have had about old books, which one or the other of us had seen or admired. He always listened with interest to my stories of adventures up and down the book-world, of which some are reserved for a future chapter; but he felt his inability, I concluded, to enter into the field with stronger competitors, and he usually returned to the contemplation of his own humble appurtenances with a sense of contentment, if not of superiority.
He was totally different from my father in his ideas about books. He did not, in general, care for the modern side, unless it was a first edition of his life-long friend Leigh Hunt, of Hazlitt, or of some other author to whom he was personally attached. On the contrary, my father never cultivated the older editions or original copies. The best standard text was his line. I had from him a little anecdote which shews him in the light of a book-hunter; but then it was for an immediate and isolated literary purpose. While he was engaged about 1840 in editing the works of Defoe, he tried to procure a copy of the Account of the Apparition of Mrs Veal, and went, among other likely resorts, to Baker of Old Street, St Luke’s. That individual derided the notion of finding such a rarity; and my father, turning away, cast an eye on Baker’s twopenny box outside. There what should he disinter but the identical pamphlet, and he takes twopence out of his pocket, which he hands to the boy, and puts the prize into it, which he carries home in triumph. It was the only bargain of which I ever heard him speak. He was not that way built. I sometimes wish that my experiences had not been infinitely more numerous.
The seeking and winning of bargains constitute an attractive pursuit and an equally attractive topic. You have the power of regaling your less fortunate or unpractical acquaintances with the strange chances, which enabled you to become the master for a trifle of such and such treasures and you gain confidence in your continued good fortune,—
‘When a fool finds a horse-shoe,
He thinks aye the like to do.’
It has sometimes appeared to me, however, that the general public looks with modified respect on this class of venture, more especially as it does not share the profits; and what is absolutely certain is, that the whole system of treating literature from a commercial point of view is narrowing and lowering, and tends to harden, if not to extinguish, that fine sensibility which is proper to the bibliophile. Since I was led by a union of circumstances to look upon rare books as a source of advantage, I have grown sensible of a change for the worse in my nature; yet, I think, only so far as the bare ownership is concerned. The volumes which I loved as a younger man are still dear to me; I keep them in my mind’s eye; they stand in no peril at my hands of being degraded into goods or stuff; I do not hold them, because the outlay or capital which they represent is far more than I can afford to lock up; and in the nature of things I have to content myself with being the recipient of the difference, if not of feeling, that I appreciate the book and know its history better than the man to whom it passes from me.
I should be truly ashamed if I had to confess that with the actual proprietary interest in the literary or bibliographical rarities which I have had through my hands during the last forty years my substantial affection for the subject-matter and the authors began and ended. Thousands of precious volumes, which might be mine, if I had been otherwise situated, are merely as a question of form and pecuniary arrangement in the British Museum, in the Bodleian, or in some private library; they are one and all before me at any moment, when I choose to summon them. I remember how they are bound, and the story which each tells; but they are in the keeping of others. Should I be happier, were they in mine?