Whatever may be thought of this branch of the theological library, there is an undoubted market for it, or some portions of it, as stocks are kept both here and abroad, although on a more restricted scale, perhaps, than formerly. It is extremely probable that, if any one who was learned enough and dexterous enough should make a decoction of all the uncountable folios which exist up and down the globe, the result might be a single volume of not very ample dimensions, affording its share of insight and edification.

The call on the part of a narrow coterie of churchmen for the Catholic literature of the sixteenth and succeeding centuries, more especially the books produced at Continental presses, necessarily resulted in the rapid inflation of the value, while it brought to light from numberless recesses a vast assemblage of works previously undescribed and unknown. Many of these works were produced at obscure localities in France and the Netherlands; but Paris, Douay, Brussels, Antwerp, Mecklin, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Breda, are responsible for a majority. Besides the purely religious publications, quite a large number of secular books, and those of permanent and striking interest, owed their origin to the same region, particularly to Amsterdam, the Hague, Middelburg, Dort. The source of all this foreign production was mainly either the employment of Englishmen and Scots abroad on military service, or their residence there in exile or for other purposes. Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and even Poland, lent their presses to the British author; the scarce tracts by James Crichton (the Admirable) proceeded from Milan or Venice. We know what important centres for English controversial divinity and political pamphleteering were Geneva, Basle, and Zuerich, and the last-named place is particularly associated with the name of Christopher Froeschover, printer of the Bible of 1550. A distinct feature in this vast body of Continental typography connected with us is the curious and often unique light which it incidentally throws on the lives of our countrymen and countrywomen, segregated by their employments or opinions from their compatriots at home, and obliged to resort to printers ignorant of the language which they committed to type. A tolerably exhaustive estimate may be found of this branch of the subject by a reference to the General Index of Hazlitt's COLLECTIONS (1867-91).

To the Duke of Sussex's Catalogue, and those of Lea Wilson, George Offor, Francis Fry, William Maskell, W. J. Loftie, W. J. Blew, Farmer-Atkinson, Lord Ashburnham, and the Rev. W. Makellar of Edinburgh, we must go for the means of bibliographically estimating the editions of the Scriptures and the Prayer-Book; and the Huth and Caxton Exhibition Catalogues should be consulted. The ordinary English and American collector seldom goes beyond English, French, German, and Latin Bibles. Of all these, not even excepting the Fust and Gutenberg or Mazarin, the original impression of the Scriptures in French, published at Paris and Antwerp in six volumes between 1523 and 1528, is by far the rarest; and the next place or rank is perhaps due to the German one, printed at Zuerich in the same number of volumes, 1527-29, of which an imperfect copy is in the Huth Library. The Mazarin Bible has grown rather commoner of late years. It is certainly much more so than Coverdale's English one of 1535 in a perfect state, or Tyndale's New Testament of 1526. It is a point about it not generally known, that the extant copies on vellum and on paper differ.

For History, Genealogy, Topography, and well-nigh all other branches of human science, the student finds himself referred to the Middle-Hill Library, now in course of gradual dispersion; but this is far richer in the manuscript than in the printed book department. He may also profitably consult the catalogues of Mr. Hartley and Mr. Tyrrell (City Remembrancer), of whom the second collected largely on London.

Mr. Bolton Corney, Mr. Grenville, and Mr. Jadis made voyages and travels, books relating to America, and the first-named literary adversaria, distinct features in their enormous aggregate of volumes.

Information on early English poetry and the drama may be sought in the catalogues of Sykes, Perry, Caldecott, Heber, Chalmers, Jolley, Wolfreston, Way, Daniel, Corser, Collier, Frere, Bliss, Bright, Mitford, Ouvry, Bandinel, Halliwell-Phillipps, and of course Huth.

Mr. Brook Pulham concentrated his attention on the writings of George Wither, Mr. Bragge on works illustrative of Smokers and Tobacco, and Major Irwin on the occult and supernatural.

Mr. Henry Pyne during a long series of years made an extensive collection, restricted to English books dated prior to the year 1600, and as a rule, it must be added, to the commoner class of publications.



CHAPTER V

Voyages and travels—Their strong American interest—Maryland and Pennsylvania—New Plymouth—Sir John Mandeville—Columbus and Vespucci—Early medical literature—Harvey and the circulation of the blood—Occult literature—Phenomena—Technical works—The paddle-wheel—Books printed in a special manner—Chapbooks—Garlands—Ballads—Broadsides—Street advertisements—General or miscellaneous collections—Omnivorous buyers—Richard Heber, Sir Thomas Phillipps, James Crossley—A moral deduced—Most interesting types of collector—Advantages connected with restriction to personal tastes or wants—Dangers of emulation and servility—Mr. Quaritch's Dictionary of Collectors—Various sorts of genuine collector.

VOYAGES and Travels have always engaged a large share of attention and study, and comprise the central and very interesting feature of almost the entire body of early Americana, dealing with the discovery and colonisation of that continent. This part of the subject before us has received, owing to recent political occurrences, a further development in the direction of Africa. To the purely American collector, who of course takes in Canada, his own literary heirlooms are unexceptionally material; and if he works on a comprehensive principle, he admits every item relevant to the series, however costly and however individually trivial. An Englishman, as a rule, is content with typical or representative examples. The late Mr. Huth long remained unpersuaded that books of this character were desiderata.

There can be no doubt, however—and Mr. Huth concurred so far from the outset—that there are certain Anglo-American works which are, so to speak, indispensable to a library of any pretensions. For instance, it must not be without such capital productions as those written or published in elucidation of the history of the New World by Drake, Cavendish, Hakluyt, and Purchas; or such, again, as contribute to throw light on the settlement of New England and the progress of the Pilgrim Fathers. This group of literature has grown within the last twenty years almost unattainable by the less opulent bibliophile; its commercial value has risen to four times that to which the previous generation was accustomed. The most signal feature in the whole series is, however, out of the pale of commerce. The precious manuscript found at Fulham Palace in 1896, giving a detailed account of the settlement of New Plymouth, has by a graceful international act been restored, as it were, to its fittest home, although many of us in Old England would have, no doubt, preferred to see it deposited in Great Russell Street.

There is another source of association with the mother country which commends to the notice of many, not exclusively American in their tastes or objects, the literary memorials of Maryland and Pennsylvania, so intimately associated with the English families of Calvert and Penn. There is no rarer volume among the first Anglo-American monuments than Hariot's Virginia, 1588, which is worth from L100 to L120.

Among the favourite books of travel are Sir John Mandeville's Voyages, of which there are ancient editions in English, French, Italian, and German, and which is being constantly reproduced with the quaint illustrations. The narratives of Pinto, "prince of liars," and Bruce are gaining increased credit and confidence. Leo's Description of Africa, in the English version of 1600, has a map already showing the source of the Nile in an inland lake. The labours of the Hakluyt and Geographical Societies have conferred respectively great benefits on the cause of discovery and verification.

In the famous Letter of Columbus, 1493, in its various forms, the Mundus Novus and Paesi Retrovate (1507) of Vespucci, and a few other leading publications, there is a recognised interest regardless of the countries of origin.

We owe to the entrance into the lists of sundry members of the medical profession a temporary emergence from oblivion and respite from the waste-basket of what the booksellers describe in their catalogues as "Rare Early Medical." There is no doubt that among these obsolete publications may be detected many curious points and many evidences of former acquaintance with supposed latter-day inventions or ideas. A prominent feature in the series is Harvey's Latin treatise on the circulation of the blood, of which he was the (rather late British) discoverer. But, on the whole, the group of early works dealing with medicine and surgery is of questionable interest outside the purely practical range as a comparative study, and those which treat of anatomy and other cognate topics are in the last degree gruesome. They are the antipodes to the belles lettres.

Occult Literature is susceptible of a division into several classes or sections: Religious Cults, Necromancy, Magic, Second Sight, Divination, Astrology, Palmistry, of which all have their special literatures and bibliographies. Major Irwin recently sold an extensive series of works on these and kindred topics. Cornelius Agrippa, Ashmole, Bulwer, Lilly, Partridge, Gadbury are among the foremost names of older writers in the present categories. But for the faiths and worships of antiquity which may be ranked in the first order of importance and solid interest, we chiefly depend on modern books, such as Payne, Knight, Inman, Davies, Forlong; and there is quite a small library on that branch which touches on theosophy and similar speculations—all having a common source in the grand principle of Agnosticism. Further information will be found collected on this and the topics which we notice below in Hazlitt's Popular Antiquities, 1870.

For those who are interested in Portents, Phenomena, Lusus Naturae, Murders, Earthquakes, Fires, there is the catalogue of MR. NASSAU, 1824. The British Museum has in recent times grown more complete in the same direction. The founders and earlier curators of the institution appear to have regarded such nugae as beneath the dignity of a national library; but in fact the information which they, and possibly they alone, convey, is frequently of historical, biographical, or topographical relevance.

There has been a rather marked tendency to a rise in the value of a section of technical publications which deals with the earliest notices in English literature of such subjects as Electricity, the Microscope, the Steam-Engine, the Paddle-Wheel, and the Telephone, and the books identified with these subjects are now commanding very high prices. An uncut copy of Thomas Savery's Navigation Improved, 1698, where the principle of the paddle-wheel is discussed, fetched at Sotheby's in June 1896, L16, 15s.

This is a somewhat fresh departure, but it is not an unsound or unreasonable one, and the series is limited. An almost invariable incidence of these artificial figures is to draw out other copies, and then the barometer falls.

The name of MR. EYTON is identified with copies of books printed on vellum or on some special paper, not unfrequently for his own use or pleasure; and this gentleman's catalogue is serviceable to such as desire to follow his precedent, of which the modern Edition de Luxe is an outgrowth. Eyton would have proved an invaluable friend to Japanese vellum, had he belonged to a later decade of the century.

The CHAP-BOOK, which dates from the reign of Elizabeth, and was sold for a silver penny of her Highness, becomes less rare under the Stuarts, and common to excess at a later period down to our own days. A large proportion of this species of literature consists of abridgments of larger works or of new versions on a scale suited to the penny History and Garland. Pepys was rather smitten with those which appeared in and about his own time, and at Magdalen, Cambridge, with the rest of his library, a considerable number of them is bound up in volumes, lettered Penny Merriments and Penny Godlinesses respectively. The Huth Collection possesses many which were formerly in the Heber and Daniel libraries. All these productions share the common attributes of very coarse paper, very rough cuts, and very poor type. They are interesting as eminently folk-books—books printed for the multitude, and now, especially when the article happens to be of unusual importance and rarity, worth several times their weight in gold. Two catalogues of Chap-Books and Popular Histories were edited by Mr. Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1848-49.

In the present writer's bibliographical works, to which there is a General Index, will be found an account of all that have come into the market between 1866 and 1892. Thousands upon thousands have unquestionably perished.

The most fascinating member of the Chap-Book series is undoubtedly the Garland—not so much a volume by a given author, such as the Court of Venus (1558) and Deloney's Garland of Good Will, 1596, as a miscellany by sundry hands. The next earliest of these collections known to us at present are the Muses' Garland, 1603, and Love's Garland, 1624. Those in Pepys's library at Cambridge are of much later date, yet of some no duplicates can be quoted, so vast has been the destruction of these ephemerides. Of the Pepysian Garlands a certain proportion are reprints of older editions or repositories of songs and ballads belonging to an anterior date, and here and there we meet with lyrics extracted from contemporary dramatic performances.

Besides Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell the Diarist displayed a taste for fugitive and popular publications, and the copies acquired by him eventually found their way, for the most part, into Heber's hands, whence they have drifted in large measure either into the British Museum or the Miller and Huth collections. Numerous unique examples of the popular literature of his own day, again, are preserved among Robert Burton's books in the Bodleian.

Allied to the chap-book are the broadsides of various classes, including the Ballad, popular and political, the Advertisement and the Proclamation. So far as we know, the second division exhibits the most ancient specimen in our own literature, and is a notification on a single leaf by Caxton respecting Picas of Salisbury use. This precious relic, of which only two copies are recorded, appeared about 1480. It must have been soon after the introduction of printing into London and Westminster that resort was had to the press for making public at all events matters of leading importance; but we do not seem to possess any actual evidence of the issue of such documents save in isolated instances till toward the end of the century, and they are chiefly in the shape of indulgences and other ecclesiastical manifestos, circulated in all probability in the most limited numbers and peculiarly liable to disappearance.

The Ballad proper cannot be said to be anterior to the closing years of Henry VIII., subsequently to the fall of Cromwell, Earl of Essex, when the composition relative to that incident printed in the collections appeared, and was followed by the series preserved in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and reprinted in the writer's Fugitive Tracts, 1875. From the time of Elizabeth onward the broadside in its varied aspects grew abundant, and served as a substitute for newspaper notices, so long as the press remained an insufficient medium. The British Museum and Society of Antiquaries possess large collections of this kind. Lord Crawford has printed a catalogue of his Proclamations, and in the writer's Collections, 1867-92, occur thousands of these ephemerides arranged under what appeared to be their appropriate heads.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sheet format lent itself largely and conveniently to teachers, quack doctors, astrologers, announcing their addresses, qualifications, and terms, no less than to the official, municipal, or parochial authorities, and to private persons who desired to give publicity to some current matter by the exhibition of the placard on a wall or a church door. There was yet another purpose which the broadside was made to serve: prospectuses of schemes and reports of companies' or societies' proceedings. The purely temporary interest of such publications accounts for their survival in unique examples and even fragments.

There is a general notion that the Harleian Miscellany and the Somers Tracts represent between them a very large proportion of the extant pamphlets and broadsheets published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, as a matter of fact, they do nothing of the sort. Even in or about 1695 William Laycock of the Inner Temple drew attention to the unsuspected importance of these fugitive publications in his printed proposal for buying them up by a public subscription; but even in the National Library, with all its immense accumulations, and in Hazlitt's Collections, many thousands of items are probably deficient; while the two sets of books above mentioned contain a very slender percentage of the whole—in fact, mere representative selections.

There have been men who coupled with a general plan a speciality or two. For instance, Dyce, who laid a collateral stress on Shakespeariana; Ireland, who made himself strong in Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt; Crossley, who had a peculiar affection for Defoe; Bliss, who collected books of characters and books printed at Oxford or just before the Great Fire of 1666; Bandinel, who was smitten by the charms of the Civil War literature; Corser, whose bibliographical sweethearts were Nicholas Breton and Richard Brathwaite; and Rimbault, who had two, Old Music and Old Plays. Mr. G. L. Gomme is similarly situated: anthropology and folklore are his foibles. It goes without saying that the Shakespearian and dramatic student, from Sir Thomas Hanmer downward, has usually made a stand on the literary remains and works tending to illustrate their own labours; but of course the relevance may be direct or indirect, and in the latter case the specialist is found to cast his net surprisingly wide.

Specialism, whether on the principle of personal taste or of particular studies, has manifest advantages in an age where the multitude and choice of books are so bewildering, where of every work of any sort of value or interest a man may have, not a single edition—all that in a majority of instances was once available—but a hundred or a thousand in all sorts of sizes and at all sorts of prices. With the discontinuance of the older paucity of literature, the facilities for lodging within a modest bookcase a coterie of literary favourites have sorrowfully decreased, and a collector finds it imperative to draw the line more and more rigidly, if he does not care to fall into one of two perils—excessive outlay or excessive bulk. For we have not, as regards the former, to go very far before we incur a serious expense, if it happens that the run is on the rarer English section or on what constitutes a picked library of the French type.

Of the miscellaneous group there are graduated and varying types. The omnivorous accumulator, especially where he does not insist on condition or binding, is the dealer's idol. In the forefront of this class stand facile principes Richard Heber and Sir Thomas Phillipps, for the reason that they bought everything—whole libraries and catalogues at a swoop. Yet both these distinguished men have to be placed on a distinct footing from the normal promiscuous buyer, such as Thomas Jolley, Joseph Tasker, Edward Hailstone, Edward Solly, and a legion of others, to whom anything in the guise of a book was a sure bait, and who spurned Evelyn's motto: "Meliora retinete." Ascending a step or two higher, we come to the men who repudiate specialism as narrowing and troublesome, and who impose on themselves no restraint save perchance in the direction of theology, science, and arcana. They stop peremptorily at the belles lettres. Singer, Mitford, Bliss, Bandinel, Forster, Cosens, Ireland, Crossley, Sir John Simeon, were more or less of this school. At a still greater altitude we meet with a yet stronger tendency to draw the line at character or condition, and there occur to us the names, under the former head, of Capell, Malone, Douce, Bright, Chalmers, Collier, Ouvry, Bolton Corney, David Laing, E. F. Rimbault, Halliwell-Phillipps, Frederick Locker, W. H. Miller, Henry Cunliffe, R. S. Turner, and Henry Huth. From the same point of view, nearly in the clouds are discovered a small knot of fastidious dilettanti, who purchase a volume in the same spirit as they might do a picture or a piece of majolica; and of this minority Sir Andrew Fountaine, Sir David Dundas, and Samuel Addington may perhaps be accepted as types.

The most interesting, and it may with permission be added, intelligent type of book-collector, however, seems to be that where, after a certain measure of preparatory thought and training, one confines acquisitions for permanent ownership to volumes for which the acquirer has a genuine personal relish. In general, the principle of forming a library on this wholesome basis would be found not only more useful, but more economical, since the rarest and costliest articles are by no means, on the whole, the most interesting or the most instructive. In any case, the inconsiderate emulation by one collector of others, who may have different objects and perhaps ampler resources, is a course to be avoided. Even here there is more than a single source or ground of inducement to purchase. Setting aside the mere book of reference, which has to be multiplied to suit various exigencies, there may be said to be three classes of literary property which rationally appeal to our sympathy: (i) the volume which commends itself by its intrinsic value and charm; (ii) that which has grown dear from lengthened companionship and possibly hereditary link; (iii) and that which, unimportant so far as its internal claims and merits are concerned, bears on its face the evidence of having once belonged to a favourite of our own or a world's hero.

One persuasive argument in favour of adopting the miscellaneous or typical course in the choice of a library is the rapid growth of the difficulty of meeting with the rarer items in all important specialities. It is the general plan on the part of every follower of particular lines to commence, very often casually, by bringing home from time to time a few volumes on a certain topic, or in a given class of literature, or by one or two of a school of writers; and such a proceeding succeeds tolerably well, till the owner makes discovery of volumes positively essential to his object, and unattainable save by a heavy outlay—perchance not even to be had at any price. It is nearly always the lacunae for which we yearn; one or two of our richer friends have them, and we have not. What we possess anybody can get in a morning's walk; we find that we have travelled a long distance, and have come to an impasse. It is very seldom indeed that a man is satisfied with the cheaper and commoner articles in a series, if he is aware of the existence of those which just constitute the corner-stones of such a collection as his.

On the contrary, by the process of sampling or picking out here and there, now and again, a book or a set of books which chance or circumstances may throw in our path, we may gradually acquire a caseful of most desirable specimens, against which it is out of the question to raise any charge of incompleteness, where incompleteness is the governing aim. Book-buying under these conditions is a humour. We are at liberty to take or leave. Because we conceive a fancy for a work by this or that author, we feel under no obligation to accommodate every scrap which he has printed, or which his friends or followers have penned. The object of our personal selection suffices us; and there perhaps we begin and we end. It is our humour.

The auctioneers' and booksellers' catalogues of the present day supply an instructive demonstration of the gradual withdrawal from the market of many thousands of articles, in Early English literature more particularly, which at one time seemed to be of fairly frequent recurrence. They have been taken up into public collections all over the world; and the very few copies, not to speak of unique examples, which time had spared, are beyond the reach of the private purchaser of to-day. We have only to study with attention the Heber and other leading records of former libraries existing in this and other countries to become convinced that the facilities for acquiring an approximately complete library of the rarer books grow narrower year by year.

There is, I submit, far too prevalent a tendency in collectors to follow suit, to attach themselves to leaders of temporary fashions. I plead for a greater independence of opinion, where the taste is in any reasonable measure cultivated and developed, or, again, where an individual knows what pleases himself. By all means, if it happens that he does not admire Shakespeare and Bacon, Sydney and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Byron and Shelley, Scott's novels or Lamb's Elia, let him leave them alone, and make his own free choice, even if it be to go in for John Buncle, the Adventures of a Guinea, or Luttrell's Letters to Julia. There is always the room for hope that he may quit those pastures after a time and seek more fruitful ones. What is important and desirable, however, is that each person should be his own caterer. Schools are only useful where some writer of real genius has been neglected or overlooked, or been boycotted by the press, and attention to his works is only a fair service to him, or a becoming, if tardy, tribute to his memory.

Apropos of the increasing difficulty of obtaining certain old books noted above, the extensive scale on which reproductions of original editions of Early English literature have of recent years been made is certainly a boon to literary inquirers, since the presence of such reissues in our circulating libraries, if we do not choose to buy them, tends at every step in many branches of work to help us, and to render our undertakings more complete. It frequently occurs that volumes and tracts, which are of very slight literary or intrinsic value, contain valuable allusions and illustrations, which we might miss in the absence of available copies. It is worth while to take in one's hand even some puerile trifle by the author of Adonais, if one is not obliged to buy it or asked to become the possessor. One feels a curiosity to glance for a moment at a volume which, we are constantly assured in the catalogue, the writer did his utmost to obliterate; and we sometimes wish that he had fully succeeded.

Any of us, taking in his hands the series of English Book-Collectors in course of issue by Mr. Quaritch (Nos. 1-12), will perceive without difficulty, if he go no farther, the two distinct camps, so to speak, into which the collecting fraternity may be, and is, broadly divided and classifiable. You have, on the one hand, the men who followed their personal taste, and amused their leisure in late years after a busy life by purchasing such works or such descriptions of literature as appealed to them and fell within their resources; again, the scholar or investigator who assembled round him what illustrated his studies, not merely with an aim at emulating others; or, once more, the gentleman of fortune, who evolved from his school-day acquisitions a feeling or a passion for higher things, and made it the business of his maturer time—even made it his career—to carry out on a scale and on lines dictated and governed by circumstances the predilection formed in boyhood. On the contrary, there are for our consideration and instruction the libraries which owed their existence to less interesting motives, to the vague and untrained pursuit of rare and expensive books and MSS., on the judgment of others in rivalry of others, and the enterers into the field of competition with a practical eye and a financial side-look. Of all these great divisions there are varieties naturally arising from personal character; but of the collector pure and simple of the older school, that type, we avow, most warmly and potently attracts us which limited itself to the small and unpretentious book-closet, with just those things which the master loved for their own sakes or for the sakes of the donors—where the commercial element was wanting, and where the library was not viewed in the same light as railway or mining stock. It is a famous principle to invest money prudently and well; but happy is he who is wise enough to keep his library within narrow limits, and rich enough to leave it, such as it may be, out of the category of realisable assets.

Mr. Quaritch's project possesses in our eyes the incidental merit of providing us with personal accounts in a succinct form of many of the past proprietors of English and American libraries, and enables us to see at once how varied and fortuitous were the conditions under which the task was begun and accomplished, with what different measures of success and financial means; and in what a preponderance of instances it was an individual rather than an hereditary trait. Broadly speaking, we recognise two varieties of collector from all time: the one who confers his name on a library, and the other whose library confers a name on him.

Even the family of genuine book-lovers—neither virtuosos nor speculators—presents more than a single type to our notice. We have the student who takes a subject for treatment, and forms a small gathering of the literary material necessary for his purpose, shooting it back perchance into the market, his immediate task accomplished. There is the man like Coleridge, who regarded the volumes which fell in his way as casual and welcome visitors, of whom he asked questions, or who answered his, and whose margins gave themselves up to his untiring habit of registering whatever occurred to him, before the passing—possibly borrowed—volume went on its way again. There is Lamb, who was less addicted to annotating his acquisitions, but who gave them a permanent home, if they had come to him jure emptionis, and were of the elect—not presentation—copies, cold and crude, thrust into his hand by some well-meaning acquaintance. There is Edward Fitzgerald, dissimilar from all these, yet so far cognate that he bought only the books which struck him as worth reading, if not turning to some practical account. Nor should we in strict fairness refuse admittance within this highest circle even to such as Selden, Burton, Pepys, and others who might be easily enumerated, who may have been little more than curiosity-hunters, but who had a genuine relish for pieces of old popular literature, the greatest rarities in the language inclusive, when there was barely any competition for them. The man of the old school, who ransacked the shops and the stalls, and even attended the auction, may have been a faddist and a superficial student; but his was an honest sort of zeal and affection; there was no vanity or jealousy; and we meet with cases where one collector would surrender to another an acquisition which the latter happened to have missed, and to want very badly indeed. So Isaac Reed gave up to George Steevens Marlowe's Dido, and so George III. enjoined his agent not to bid for him against a student or a scholar.

I have not yet quite done with this aspect of the matter. I have to speak of the personages who have thought fit to impose on themselves a chronological or a financial limit, who drew the line at a given year, or would not go beyond a certain figure. Mr. Henry Pyne laid down 1600 as the latest date which he would admit, and rarely exceeded a sovereign or two for a single article (Dr. Doran gave me to understand that fourpence was his maximum). It may appear strange to suggest that the higher the sum paid for a book (assuming it to be worth the money), the slighter the risk grows of the purchase proving pecuniarily unprofitable. Yet at the same time outlay on a library is a relative term, and one individual may account himself as frugal in expending L30,000 in the course of a lifetime, as another may do in expending L300. The late Earl of Ashburnham bought in chief measure during the forties and fifties, when the reaction from the bibliomania still more or less sensibly prevailed, and considering his Lordship's position and resources, he was not much more lavish than the above-mentioned Mr. Pyne, or indeed any other amateur of average calibre, while he was to the full extent as genuine a follower of the pursuit for its mere sake as anybody whom we could name—as the Duke of Roxburghe, Mr. Heber, Mr. Corser, or Mr. Crossley.

In my Rolls of Collectors I specify a type under the designation of Book-Recipients, and I instance such cases as Dickens and Thackeray; but in fact there are many who would never go in pursuit of anything of the kind beyond a work of reference, and whose utmost exploit is the payment of a friendly subscription. The only title to admittance into my category of such doubtful enthusiasts is the sentimental enhancement of value arising from the transformation of the margins of a common-place volume into a repository for manuscript remarks or graphic embellishments, which may send it back into the market some day a three-figure item in a catalogue.

In attempting to indicate in a sort of tentative manner the publications to which a private collection might be advantageously and comfortably limited, one does not contemplate the shelf or so of mere works of reference, which have to be obtained even by such as are not amateurs in this direction, and, moreover, there is an obvious difficulty in prescribing for persons of infinitely varied ideas and prepossessions. Now, as to volumes for reference, the class and extent of course depend on individual requirements, and the books outside this radius are apt to be subject in their selection to local circumstances, since a man associated with a district or county naturally contracts a sympathy with its special history or its archaeological transactions, as well as any miscellaneous monographs relating to particular places or celebrated persons. With such specialities and preferences we cannot presume to interfere; but, as a rule, the aggregate body comprised in them need not be large or very expensive, and in catholic or general literature it becomes almost surprising when we have taken the pains to winnow from literary remains of real and permanent interest the preponderant mass, of which the facilities for occasional examination at a public library ought to suffice, how comparatively slender the residuum is.



CHAPTER VI

The safest course—Consideration of the relative value and interest of books in libraries—The intrinsic and extrinsic aspects—Consolation for the less wealthy buyer—The best books among the cheapest—A few examples—Abundance of printed matter in book-form—Schedule of Books which are Books—Remarks on English translations of foreign literature.

WHEN we inspect a great library, filling three or four apartments lined with cases, the first impression is that the possession of such an assemblage of literary monuments is a privilege reserved for the very wealthy; and to some extent so it is. But certain elements enter into the constitution of all extensive accumulations of property of any kind, whether it be books, prints, medals, or coins, which inevitably swell the bulk and the cost without augmenting in anything approaching an equal ratio the solid value. Not to wander from our immediate field of inquiry and argument, the literary connoisseur, starting perhaps with a fairly modest programme, acquires almost insensibly an inclination to expand and diverge, until he becomes, instead of the owner of a taste, the victim of an insatiable passion. He not merely admits innumerable authors and works of whom or which he originally knew nothing, but there are variant impressions, copies with special readings or an unique provenance, bindings curious or splendid; and nothing at last comes amiss, the means of purchase presumed.

Yet, at the same time, he does not substantially possess, perhaps, much more than the master of a petite bibliotheque, on which the outlay has not been a hundredth part of his own. A considerable proportion of his shelf-furniture are distant acquaintances, as it were, and those acquisitions with which he is intimate are not unlikely to prove less numerous than the belongings of his humbler and less voracious contemporary.

Even where the object and ruling law are strict practical selections of what pleases the buyer, the range of difference is very wide. One man prefers the modern novelists, prose essayists, or verse writers; a second, collections of caricatures and prints in book-form; a third, topography; a fourth, the occult sciences, and so forth. I offer no objection to these partialities; but I entertain an individual preference for volumes chosen from nearly all branches of the belles lettres, each for its own sake. I do not vote of necessity in all cases for a book because it is rare, or because it is old, or because it is the best edition; but I do not think that I should like any scholar my friend to have the opportunity of pointing out to me (as he would, wouldn't he?) that I lacked any real essential, as the child tried to satisfy Longfellow that his shelves were not complete without a copy of the undying romance of Jack the Giant-killer.

It cannot fail to strike any one opening such books as Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum or Markham's Way to Get Wealth, for how comparatively, indeed absolutely, small a consideration it is possible to obtain two works so brimful of interest and curiosity on all subjects connected with gardening, agriculture, and rural pursuits or amusements. But both these works long remained—the Bacon yet does so—outside the collector's pale and cognisance, and the real cause was that they were alike common; they had been the favourites of successive generations; edition upon edition had been demanded; and the survival of copies was too great to suit the book-hunter, who aims at shyer quarry.

Take again, as a sample, a noble old work like the English Bayle, five substantial folios; it was a question of more than a five-pound note to become the master of a good, well-bound copy; one in morocco or russia by Roger Payne twice that amount could once scarcely have brought down; and now it is articulo mortis. The connoisseur finds it too bulky, and he hears that its matter has been superseded. At any rate, it is no longer the mode, and the mill begins to acquire familiarity with it. Let the taste return for such big game, and copies will be as Caxtons are. Most part of the editions will ere then have been served up again in the form of cheap book-drapery.

The ne plus ultra of interest and respect seems to us to centre in such collections of books as those of Samuel Pepys, Narcissus Luttrell, the Rev. Henry White of Lichfield, and Charles Lamb, where the volumes reflect the personal tastes of their owners, and are, or have been, objects to them of personal regard. What is to be thought or said of the man who simply buys works which happen to be in the fashion for the moment, and for which he competes with others as wise as himself, till the prices become ridiculous? English and American millionaires acquire specimens of early typography, poetry, binding, or what not, because they hear that it is the thing to do. One gentleman will give L100 more for a copy, because he is credibly informed that it is three-eighths of an inch taller than any other known; and a second will take something from the vendor on the assurance that no library of any pretensions is complete without it. This sort of child's-play is not Book-Collecting. The true book-closet and its master have to be kinsfolk, not acquaintances introduced by some bookseller in waiting. Humanly speaking, the poor little catalogue made by Hearne of his own books and MSS. comes nearer home to our affections than those of Grenville and Huth.

In speaking and thinking of real books, it is necessary again to distinguish between articulate productions of two classes—between such a work, for example, as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and such an one as Thoreau's Walden, or between Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Sir Thomas Browne's Urn-Burial. The present is an enterprise directed toward the indication to collectors of different views and tastes of the volumes which they should respectively select for study or purchase. There are millions who have passed through life unconsciously without having read a book, although they may have seen, nay, possessed thousands. Those which might have been recommended to them with advantage, and perused with advantage, were too obscure, too dull, too cheap, too unfashionable. It is of no use to read publications with which your acquaintances have no familiarity, and to the merits of which it might be a hard task to convert them. But, as we have said, we want space to enter into these details, and we can only generalise bibliographically, repeating that literature is broadly classifiable into Books and Things in Book-Form—Specimens of Paper, Typography and Binding, or counterfeit illusory distributions of printer's letter into words and sentences and volumes by the passing favourites of each succeeding age—what Thoreau call its "tit-men."

We might readily instance masterpieces of erudition or industry which leave nothing to be desired in the way of information and safe guidance, and which, at the same time, do not distantly realise our conception of Books—real bona fide Books. They may be the best editions by the best binders, or they may be antiquarian periodicals or sets of Learned Transactions, reducing much of the elder lore cherished and credited by our ancestors to waste-paper; we feel that it is a sort of superstition which influences us in regarding them; but we fail to shake off the prejudice, or whatever it may be, and we hold up, on the contrary, to the gaze of some sceptical acquaintance a humble little volume in plain mellow sheep—say, a first Walton, or Bunyan, or Carew, nay, by possibility a Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde—which a roomful of perfectly gentlemanly books should not buy from us. It may strike the reader as a heresy in taste and judgment to pronounce the four Shakespeare folios of secondary interest from the highest point of view, as being posthumous and edited productions. But so it is; yet Caxton's first impression of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, if we were to happen upon it by accident, is a possession which we should not be easily persuaded to coin into sovereigns, and such a prize as the Evelyn copy of Spenser's Faery Queen, 1590, with the Diarist's cypher down the back and his note of ownership inside the old calf cover, is worth a library of inarticulate printed matter. So, again, Aubrey, in his Miscellanies, Remains of Gentilism and Judaism, History of Surrey, and Natural History of Wiltshire, presents us with works very imperfect and empirical in their character—even foolish and irritating here and there; but between those undertakings and such as Manning and Bray's or Brayley and Britton's Surrey there is the difference that the latter are literary compilations, and the former personal relics inalienably identified with an individual and an epoch.

It is the same with certain others, ancient as well as modern writers. Take Herodotus, Athenaeus, and Aulus Gellius on the one hand, and Bishop Kennett's Parochial Antiquities, White's Selborne, Knox's Ornithological Rambles in Sussex, or Lucas's Studies in Nidderdale on the other. All these equally tell you, not what some one else saw or thought, but what they saw or thought themselves, and in a manner which will never cease to charm.

There are works, again, which, without professing to entertain for the authors any strong personal regard, we read and re-peruse, as we admire a fine piece of sculpture or porcelain, an antique bronze or cameo, as masterpieces of art or models of style. We are perfectly conscious, as we proceed, that they are not to be trusted as authorities, and perhaps it is so on the very account which renders them irresistibly attractive. Some of the most celebrated literary compositions in our language are more or less strongly imbued with the spirit of partisanship or a leaven of constitutional bias; yet we like to have them by us to steal half-an-hour's delight, just as we resort sometimes to alluring but dangerous stimulants. We have in our mind, not volumes of fiction, not even the historical novel, but serious narratives purporting to describe the annals of our country and the lives of our countrymen and countrywomen. We take them up and we lay them down with pleasure, and it is agreeable to feel that they are not far away; and they will not do us greater harm, if we combine an acquaintance with their deficiencies and faults as well as with their beauties, than the fascinating associates with whom we exchange civilities in the drawing-room or at the club, and with whose haunts and opinions we are alike unconcerned. Of the romances under the soberer names of history, biography, and criticism, which abound in all the literatures of nearly all times, we are at liberty to credit as much or as little as we choose; but in how many instances we should regret to lose, or not to have inherited, these; and the personal partiality which constitutes the blemish here and there equally constitutes the merit.

What makes us return again and again to certain books in all literatures, forgetful of chronology and biographical dictionaries? What draws us irresistibly for the twentieth time to works of such different origin and character as Herodotus, Caesar, Aulus Gellius, Browne's Urn-Burial and Religio Medici, Pepys's Diary, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and a handful of authors nearer to our own day? Is it not their breadth, catholicism, and sincerity? Is it not precisely those qualities which no sublunar systems of computing time can affect or delimit? If we take successively in hand the Odyssey, the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Gil Blas de Santillane, and Robinson Crusoe, do we without some reflection realise that between the first and the last in order of production thousands of years intervened? Most of the romances of chivalry and the Faery Queen strike us as more antiquated than Homer, assuredly more so than Chaucer. The secret and the charm seems to lie in the fact that all great books are pictures of human nature, which is and has been always the same; and we are able to account in a similar manner for the stupendous popularity of such works as the Imitatio Christi and the Pilgrim's Progress. Above all things, they are strictly bona fide. They are no catch-pennies.

We find ourselves with hundreds, nay, thousands of other books at our elbow or at our command, living in communion with half-a-dozen minds. We read our favourite books, and when we have reached the end of our tether, we recommence as if we were in the Scilly Islands, and there were no more obtainable or permissible. We never wax tired of conning over Bayle St. John's Montaigne the Essayist, Thoreau's Walden, Howell's Venetian Life and Italian Journeys. Cuique suum. We have known those who never let the sun set without dipping into Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or who have some pet volume with which they renew their intimacy every year, as Francis Douce did with Reynard the Fox. There must usually be an unconscious sympathy in these cases, a pleasing revelation of extended identity, as if these other productions were what we should have liked to claim as our own, and as if we felt we should have said the same things and thought the same thoughts, if they had been ours.

It is the same with some parts of some writers' labours, to be had separately, as Hamlet, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, and the Merchant of Venice; and with a few detached or select compositions to which one has to thread one's way in a larger volume: a few songs scattered through the early dramatists and lyrists; Gray's Elegy; Tennyson's May Queen (without the sequel), and Locksley Hall and In Memoriam (missing the tags).

In the present aspect of our inquiry, Famous Books and the Best are by no means convertible terms. There are such, it is true, as fall under both categories: the Hebrew Scriptures, Homer, Herodotus, Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, Montaigne's Essays, Shakespeare, Gibbon. Famous literary compositions at different levels or in their various classes are Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Aretino, Spenser's Faery Queen, Rabelais, Pilgrim's Progress, La Fontaine's Tales, Rousseau's Confessions, Tristram Shandy, Candide, Don Juan; and even among these how fair a proportion depends for its value and fruitfulness on the student? And, again, on his training. For we are aware of readers who prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, and Byron before both, and not a few who have emerged with profit and without pollution from the perusal of the labours of Rabelais and Aretino. There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, on the contrary, from which even the average modern reader comes away only with an uncomfortable sense of waste of time and eyesight.

Of printed matter in book-shape there is no end. The mass grows day by day, almost hour by hour. Yet the successful candidates for admission to our inner circle of publications of all ages and countries, which so far meet on common ground in being provided with a passport to succeeding times requiring and recognising no critical vise, increase in numbers slowly, O so slowly! It would be presumptuous and unsafe to attempt to discount the ultimate verdict on many now popular names; but it is to be apprehended that, looking at the much more numerous body of writers, the calls to immortality will hereafter be in a relatively diminishing ratio. The influences and agencies by which certain schools of thought and work are artificially forced to the front are too often temporary, and their life is apt to be, Hamadryad-like, conterminous with that of their foster-parents. It has been my lot to witness the rise, decline, and evanescence of groups of authors and artists, whom it was almost sacrilegious to mention even with qualification. Adverse criticism was out of the question for any one valuing his own repute.

How various all the afore-mentioned standard or permanent books are, and still in one respect how similar! Similar, inasmuch as they or their subject-matter are surrounded by an atmosphere which preserves them as in embalmed cerements. In strict truth, there may be some among the number which are far indeed from being individually important or costly, while others in a critical sense have long been entirely obsolete, or perhaps never possessed any critical rank. It does not signify. Their testimonials are independent of such considerations. Many, most of them, are on ever-living topics; many, again, in their essence and material properties are sanctified and odorous.

I find myself possessed by a theory, possibly a weak and erroneous one, in favour of such a book, for instance, as Johnson's Lives of the Poets, as Johnson published it, with all its imperfections, with the full consciousness that improved editions exist. For the original output represents a genuine aspect of the author's mind, prejudices inclusive; and I am not sure that, had he lived to bring out a revised and enlarged impression, I should have looked upon it as so characteristic and spontaneous; and the same criticism applies to a number of other productions, dependent for their appreciation by us not upon their substantial, so much as on their sentimental, value.

What is not unapt to strike an average mind is that, with such a caseful of volumes as my cursory and incomplete inventory represents and enumerates, how much, or perhaps rather how little, remains behind of solid, intrinsic worth, and what a preponderance of the unnamed printed matter resolves itself into bric-a-brac, unless it amounts to such publications, past and present, as one is content to procure on loan from the circulating library or inspect in the show-cases of our museums.

Happy the men who lived before literary societies, book-clubs, and cheap editions, which have between them so multiplied the aggregate stock or material from which the collector has to make his choice! There are occasional instances where co-operation is useful, and even necessary; but the movement has perhaps been carried too far, as such movements usually are. Our forefathers could not have divined what an unknown future was to yield to us in the form of printed matter of all sorts and degrees. But they already had their great authors, their favourite books, their rarities, in sufficient abundance. It was a narrower field, but a less perplexing one; and from the seeing-point of the amateur, pure and simple, our gain is not unequivocal.

I shall now proceed to draw up an experimental catalogue of works which appear to possess a solid and permanent claim to respect and attention for their own sakes, apart from any critical, textual, or other secondary elements. Others without number might be added as examples of learning, utility, and curiosity; but they do not fall within this exceedingly select category:—

AEsop's Fables. # In a form as near as may be to the original work. Antoninus, Itinerary. Arabian Nights. Arthur of Little Britain. Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum. Athenaeus. Aulus Gellius. Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum. Bacon's Essays. Bayle's Dictionary, in English. Bidpai or Pilpay [so called], Fables of. # A genuine English text. Boccaccio's Decameron. Boswell's Life of Johnson and Tour in the Hebrides. Bradbury's Nature-printed Ferns and Seaweeds. Brand's Popular Antiquities. # Latest recension, not Ellis's. Browne's Religio Medici. Browne's Urn-Burial. # The latter reminds us of Lamb's style, allowing for difference of time. Browne's Vulgar Errors. Browning's Early Poems. # A moderate volume would hold all worth perpetuation. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. # A book of academical cast, abounding in quaint conceits and curious extracts; full of false philosophy and morality. Butler's Hudibras. Byron's Scotish Bards. Byron's Childe Harold. Byron's Don Juan. Caesaris Commentarii. Carew, Thomas, Poems. Cervantes' Don Quixote, by Jervis, 2 vols. 4to. Chappell's Popular Music. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chronicles (English) Series of. # Including Froissart and Monstrelet, with the original illuminated illustrations to former. Cicero, De Senectute et De Amicitia. # In the original Latin. Cobbett's Rural Rides. Coleridge's Table-Talk. Cotgrave's French Dictionary. Couch's British Fishes. Coventry, Chester, Towneley, and York Mysteries. Cunningham's London, by H. B. Wheatley. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Delany, Diary and Correspondence. Diogenes Laertius. Dodsley's Old Plays. Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare, 2 vols. Dunlop's History of Fiction. Sir H. Ellis's Original Letters, three series. George Ellis's Specimens of Early English Romances. Elton's Specimens of the Classic Poets, 3 vols. 1814. # Elton's versions of portions of Homer appear to be superior to Chapman, and to make it regrettable that he did not complete the work. Epinal Glossary, by Sweet. # For the earliest English extant. Evelyn's Diary. Evelyn's Sylva. Fairholt's Costume, 1860. Fielding's Tom Jones. Fox's Book of Martyrs. Fournier's Vieux-Neuf, 1877. Gayton's Festivous Notes on Don Quixote. Gesta Romanorum, in English. Gilchrist's Blake. Gilpin's Forest Scenery. Golden Legend, in English. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. Grimm's Popular Stories. Hakluyt's Voyages. Harleian Miscellany. Hearne's Diary, 2nd edition. Rawlinson's Herodotus. Herrick's Hesperides. Holland's Heroeologia, 1620. Homer, by Chapman. # But better in the original. Hone's Popular Works. # An original copy. Horace, Satires and Epistles, by Keightley. Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis. # A printed edition for the engravings. James Howell's Letters. Howells' Italian Journeys. Howells' Venetian Life. Hundred Merry Tales, 1526. Hunter's New Illustrations of Shakespeare. Hunter's Historical Tracts. Hunter's Account of New Plymouth, 2nd edition. Irving's Scotish Poetry. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Johnson's Rasselas. # For the sake of its story, not of the book. Junius, Letters of. Keightley's Mythology of Greece and Italy. # Some of the matter anticipated by Sir T. Browne in his Vulgar Errors. Keightley's Histories of Greece, Rome, and England (last editions). Knox's Ornithological Rambles in Sussex. Lamb's Elia. Lamb's Letters. Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses. Lamb's Rosamund Gray. Langland's Piers Ploughman. Latimer's Sermons. Lazarillo de Tormes, in English. Le Houx, Vaux de Vire, in French. Leland's Itinerary and Collectanea, 1770. Le Sage's Gil Blas, IN FRENCH. Lord Lindsay's Lives of the Lindsays. # See that passage where the opinion of James, Earl of Balcarres, is quoted in regard to the duty of men to leave behind them some trace or record of their mind. Edit. 1849. Lockhart's Life of Scott. Lodge's Portraits. # An early edition. Lovelace's Poems. Lucas, Studies in Nidderdale. Lysons, Magna Britannia, 6 vols. Lysons, Environs of London, 2nd edition. Malory's Morte Arthur. Montaigne's Essays, IN FRENCH. Morris's Works on Birds, Birds' Eggs, &c. Nuernberg Chronicle, 1493. # The Latin text. As a very early picture-book. Olaus Magnus. # Original Latin, with the woodcuts. Ovid. # Partly as in all appearance a favourite in some shape with our Shakespeare. Paston Letters. Pennant's Tours in Wales and Scotland, and Journey to London. # On account of their personality. You know that much is obsolete, and other men have improved on them; but there is somehow the same charm. Pepys's Diary, by Wheatley. Percy's Reliques. Phillips's English Dictionary. Photii Bibliotheca. Plato's Dialogues. # Perhaps the French version by Cousin is preferable. Plinii Epistolae. Plutarch's Lives. Popular (Early) Poetry of England, 4 vols. Popular (Early) Poetry of Scotland and the Border, 2 vols. Poets. Select British Poets, 1824. # Includes ample selections from writers hardly worth possessing in a separate shape, including many even great and distinguished names. Poets. Corpus Poetarum Latinorum et Graecorum. # The same remark applies. Rabelais. Randolph's Plays and Poems. Retrospective Review. Reynard the Fox, in English. Richardson's Clarissa. Robin Hood Ballads. Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft. Selden's Table-Talk. Shakespeare's Works. Shakespeare's Library, 6 vols. Songs of the Dramatists. Southey's Commonplace Book. Southey's Select Letters. # More especially for his delightful letters to children. Spence's Anecdotes. Spenser's Works. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. St. John's (J. A.) Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, 1842. # A lifelong labour, and most delightful and instructive work. St. John's (Bayle) Montaigne the Essayist. St. John's English version of Saint Simon. Stow's Annals. Stow's Survey of London, 1720. Strutt's Costume, by Planche. Suckling's Works. Swift's Gulliver. Sydney's Arcadia. Tennyson's Lyrical Poems. # A judicious one-volume selection preferable. Thoreau's Walden, 1854. Thorne's Environs of London. Tottell's Miscellany. Virgil, Bucolics and Georgics, by Keightley. Voltaire's Candide, in French. Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. Walton's Angler. Warton's English Poetry, 1871. Walpole's Letters. Wise's New Forest. # Best edition for engravings. White's Selborne, 1st edition. Wodroephe's Spare Hours of a Soldier, 1623. Yarrell's British Birds.

How passing rich one would be with all these, and no more—rich beyond the greatest bibliomaniacs, and beyond the possessors of the rarest and costliest treasures in book-form! Turn over the pages of the most splendid catalogues, and how few one would find to add! Nor would all the before-recited productions appeal to all book-lovers. There are many who would excuse themselves from admitting Rabelais. Some might not particularly care for the works of foreign origin. Some might be courageous enough to avow an indifference to Milton and Spenser, and even a dislike to Bunyan. Still the rule holds good, we think, that all our chosen authors or books have more or less powerful credentials. There remain to be added Books of Reference, as we have pointed out, curiosities, and this or that person's specialisms.

From a strictly practical point of view, the language and sense of any great writer, ancient or modern, may be as well, nay, better, appreciated in a volume bought for a trifle than in a rare and luxurious edition, where the place and time of origin, the type, the paper, and the binding are adventitious accessories—almost impedimenta—and the book itself a work of art like a picture or a coin. But with either of the latter it is different, for there the canvas or the metal is an integral portion of the object. For instance, take the better parts of Tennyson. Is it not sufficient to read them in a modest foolscap octavo? Do we require external aids? The poet is his own best illustrator, and if we purchase a pictorial edition, we are apt to find that the author and the artist are at variance in their interpretations.

Translations are always to be carefully avoided by all who can more or less confidently read the author in the original language. We have yet to meet with a version, whether of an ancient or of a modern classic, which is thoroughly appreciative and satisfactory. The majority are utterly disappointing and deceptive. It is in the transfer of the idiom and costume that the difficulty and consequent failure lie. No one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for Gil Blas), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupassant, Balzac, can have had an opportunity of forming an adequate and just estimate of those authors. You might nearly as soon expect a Frenchman to relish Butler or Dickens in their Parisian habiliments.

Such a fact—for a fact it undoubtedly is—opens to our consideration a very large and a very grave problem, since the very limited extent to which the English public is conversant with Greek and Latin, and with even the Latin family of modern languages, makes the admission that so many works of the highest importance and interest are only properly and truly readable in their own tongues tantamount to one that they are not properly and truly readable at all.

Of all forms of translation, the paraphrase is perhaps the worst, so far as an interpretation of the original sense goes, but not the most dangerous if we know it to be what it is, and do not look for more than a general idea of the meaning and plan of the author. To be practically serviceable, an English version of any classical or foreign work should be literal, and with the literalness as idiomatic as may be; and if the text to be rendered is in verse, the English equivalent should preferably be in verse without rhyme or in prose. The object to be attained in these cases is a transfer of the conceptions, notions, or theories of writers from languages which we do not understand to one which we do; and therefore the best translator is he who has absolutely no higher aim than this, and does not aspire to make his task a stalking-horse for his own literary ambition.

There is scarcely an end of the various schemes adopted to convey to us intelligibly and successfully the sentiments and conceits of ancient authors as well as of those of other countries, and, all things considered, a literal version in prose appears to present the fewest disadvantages, for it disarms the translator of the temptation to poetical flights and metrical ingenuity, and brings us nearer to the man and the age to be immediately and primarily studied.

At best, a translation is an indifferent substitute for the book itself, as it was delivered to the world by some renowned hand, or even by some personage whose individuality is stamped, as in the case of the Imitatio Christi or the Essays of Montaigne, on every sentence indelibly and untransferably, and seems part of the very Latin or French type. An amusing instance occurred in which a gentleman, having heard of the fine style of A Kempis, bought as a present to a friend a copy of the latest English translation! And it is equally futile to look for the essence and spirit of the great Gascon writer in the pages of Florio or Cotton, both of whom, though in unequal measure, to the exigencies of diction or an imperfect conversance with the dialect in which Montaigne wrote sacrificed precious personal idiosyncrasies.

The majority of the popular and current versions of the classics are unsatisfying and treacherous, because they have been executed either by under-paid scholars, like Bohn's Series, or by persons who have had a tendency to put themselves in the place of their author.

We may not be very willing to part with our old favourites, such as Chapman's Homer, Florio's Montaigne, North's Plutarch, Shelton's Don Quixote, Urquhart's Rabelais, and Smollett's Gil Blas; but it is to be feared that they must be prized as curiosities and rarities rather than as interpreters and guides. If a thoroughly reliable library of classical translations, on as literal a plan as possible, could be formed, it would be a real boon to the public—it would be what Bohn's Series ought to have been. Of course, in the department of translation there are two leading divisions—the ancient and the modern classics; and for much the same reason that a story or a jeu d'esprit seldom bears transplanting from one soil to another, both these branches of literature are apt to suffer when they change their garb. Almost every man who writes is influenced by dominant environments, whether he be Greek or Roman, or Oriental, or modern European of whatever nationality; and his mere expressions or sense rendered into a foreign tongue are usually like a painting without a background or an atmosphere. We may range over the whole field from the most ancient times to the most modern, and the same thing manifests itself. Open before me is an illustration which will answer the purpose as well as any other, in the shape of Muirhead's version of the Vaux de Vire of Jean le Houx. At page 105 we have the following stanza:—

"Lorsque me presse l'heure, Je retourne au logis; Ma femme est la qui pleure, Ainsi qu'il m'est aduis, Et me dict en cholere: 'Que fay ie seule au lict? Est il seant de boire Ainsi jusqu'a minuict?'"

Mr. Muirhead translates thus—

"When late the hour appears, Returning to my home, My wife is there in tears, As I hear when I come. She greets me testily: 'I lie a-bed alone: Do you thus shamelessly Carouse till midnight's gone?'"

The same kind of paraphrastic dilution runs through the volume; nor is Mr. Muirhead wholly to blame. The original is idiomatic and terse, and he could not find exact equivalents in numerous cases. Ab uno disce omnes. But what a privilege it becomes to be able to dispense with interpreters! My admiration of these festive chansons arises from my appreciation of them in their native costume and diction. The Knight of La Mancha was of my opinion herein, for he likened a translation to a piece of Flemish tapestry seen on the wrong side.

A corollary which naturally suggests itself to my mind is that if a familiarity—say, even with Latin and French alone—is expedient on no other account, it is eminently so on this one; and the mastery of the inner sense of a great and famous writer constitutes an ample reward for any expenditure of labour and time in acquiring the language in which he wrote, in making yourself as nearly his countryman as you can. I remember a saying, which may have been a wicked epigram, that the only book in Bohn's Classical Library worthy of purchase or perusal was a version of one of Aristotle's works which a gentleman had executed con amore and presented to the publisher.

A voluminous and not very well known body of literary material consists of foreign translations of contemporary English pamphlets of a historical or religious character, from the time of Henry VIII. to the Revolution of 1688, covering the entire Stuart period. They cannot be said to be of primary consequence beyond the proof which they furnish of the interest felt abroad in passing transactions in this country, even in such incidents of minor moment as the trial of Elizabeth Cellier in 1680 for an obscure political libel, and the occasional value which they have acquired through the apparent loss of the English originals. We have, for example, a French account of a London ferryman, who, under pretence of conveying passengers across the river, strangled them (1586); a second, of the misdoings of a minister at Malden in Essex (1588); and a third, of the execution of two priests and two laymen at Oxford in 1590, the last existing also in Italian, but none of them known in English.



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 Goettingen copy was brought under notice, to complete the text, which is almost undecipherable in the Conybeare (now Huth) one.

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 morceau 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 L300, 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 L3 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.