Part 5
The Cambridge wit who some vast amount of years ago sang of Bohn’s publications, ‘so useful to the student of Latin and Greek,’ hit with unerring precision the main characteristic of those very numerous volumes. Utility was the badge of all that tribe, save, indeed, of those woeful ‘Extra Volumes’ which are as much out of place amongst their grave brethren as John Knox at a ballet. There was something in the binding of Messrs. Bohn’s books which was austere, and even forbidding; their excellence, their authority, could not be denied by even a youthful desperado, but reading them always wore the stern aspect of duty. The binding had undoubtedly a good deal to do with this. It has now been discarded by Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the present proprietors, in favour of brighter colours. The difference thus effected is enormous. The old binding is kept in stock because, so we are told, ‘it is endeared to many book-lovers by association.’ The piety of Messrs. Bell has misled them. No book-lover, we feel certain, ever held one of Messrs. Bohn’s publications in his hands except to read it.
A valuable addition has lately been made to the ‘Standard Library’ by the publication--in three bright and cheerful volumes--of Roger North’s well-known ‘Lives of the Norths,’ and also--and this practically for the first time--of Roger North’s Autobiography, a book unknown to Macaulay, and which he would have read with fierce interest, bludgeon in hand, having no love for the family.
Dr. Jessopp, who edits the volumes with his accustomed skill, mentions in the Preface how the manuscript of the Autobiography belonged to the late Mr. Crossley, of Manchester, and was sold after the death of that bibliophile, in 1883, and four years later printed for private circulation. It now comes before the general public. It is not long, and deserves attention. The style is gritty and the story far from exciting, but the book is interesting, particularly for lawyers, a deserving class of readers for whose special entertainment small care is usually taken.
Roger North was born at Tostock, in Suffolk, in 1653--the youngest of his brothers. Never was man more of a younger brother than he. This book of his might be called ‘The Autobiography of a Younger Brother.’ The elder brother was, of course, Francis, afterwards Lord Guilford, a well-hated man, both in his own day and after it, but who at all events looked well after Roger, who was some sixteen years his junior.
In 1669 Roger North was admitted a student of the Middle Temple, Francis being then a Bencher of that learned society. Roger had chambers on the west side of Middle Temple Lane, and £10 wherewith to furnish them and buy a gown, and other necessaries. He says it was not enough, but that he managed to make it serve. His excellent mother, though she had some ten children and a difficult husband, produced £30, with which he bought law books. His father allowed him £40 a year, and he had his big brother at hand to help him out of debt now and again.
He was, we feel as we read, a little uneasy under his brother’s eye. The elder North had a disagreeable fashion of putting ‘little contempts upon his brother,’ and a way of raising his own character by depressing Roger’s, which was hard to bear. But Roger North bore it bravely; he meant sticking to his brother, and stick he did. In five years he saw Francis become King’s Counsel, Solicitor, and Attorney-General. ‘If he should die, writes Roger, ‘I am lost.’ But Francis did not die, which was as well, for he was much better suited for this world than the next.
Roger North was no great student of the law. He was fond of mathematics, optics, mechanics, architecture, music, and of sailing a small yacht--given him by Mr. Windham, of Felbrigge--on the Thames; and he gives in his Autobiography interesting accounts of these pastimes. He was very anxious indeed to get on and make money, but he relied more upon his brother than upon either his own brains or his own industry.
In 1674 Francis North became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, succeeding Sir John Vaughan, the friend of Selden; and Roger at once got himself called to the Bar, and thenceforward, so far as possible, whenever Francis was on the Bench, there was Roger pleading before him. Indeed, it went much further than this. ‘I kept so closely to him that I can safely say I saw him abed every night without intermission for divers years together, which enables me to contradict the malicious report a relation raised of him, that he kept a mistress as the mode of that time was.’ The morals of a Chief Justice two centuries after his death having no personal concern for this generation, I feel free to confess that I am rather sorry for Francis with Roger ever by his side in this unpleasantly pertinacious fashion. The younger North, so he tells us, always drove down to Westminster with the Chief Justice, and he frankly admits that his chief _appui_ was his brother’s character, fame, and interest. Not being a Serjeant, Roger could not actually practise in the Common Pleas, but on various circuits, at the Guildhall, at the Treasury, and wherever else he could lawfully go before the Chief Justice, there Roger went and got a business together. He also made money, sometimes as much as £9 a day, from court-keeping--that is, attending manor courts. This was a device of his elder brother’s, who used to practise it before he was called to the Bar. It savours of pettifogging. However, it seems in Roger’s case to have led to his obtaining the patent office of Temporal Steward to the See of Canterbury, to which he had the courage to stick after the deprivation of Archbishop Sancroft. This dogged devotion to the Church redeems North’s life from a commonplacedness which would otherwise be hopeless. The Archbishop left his faithful steward £20 for a ring, but North preferred, like a wise man, to buy books, which he had bound in the Archbishop’s manner.
In 1682 Roger North ‘took silk,’ as the phrase now goes, and became one of the Attorney-General’s devils, in which capacity his name is to be found in the reports of the trial of Lord William Russell. What he says about that trial in the Autobiography is just what might be expected from an Attorney-General’s devil--that is, that never before was a State trial conducted with such candour and fairness. He admits that this is not the judgment of the world; but then, says he, ‘the world never did nor will understand its true good, or reward, encourage, or endure its true patriots and friends.’
At the end of 1683 Francis North came home one night with no less remarkable a companion in his coach than the Great Seal. Roger instantly transposed himself to the Court of Chancery, where he began coining money. ‘My whole study,’ he says, ‘is causes and motions.’ He found it hard work, but he buckled to, and boasts--like so many of his brethren, alive as well as dead--that he, at all events, always read his briefs. In the first year his fees amounted to £4,000, in the second to nearly as much, but in the third there was a falling off, owing to a smaller quantity of business in the Court. A new Lord Keeper was always the occasion of the rehearing of old causes. The defeated litigants wished to try their luck before the new man.
North was at first astonished with the size of the fees he was offered; he even refused them, thinking them bribes: ‘but my fellow-practisers’ conversation soon cured me of that nicety.’ And yet the biggest fee he ever got was twenty guineas. Ten guineas was the usual fee on a ‘huge’ brief, and five ‘in the better sort of causes.’ In ordinary cases Roger North would take two or three guineas, and one guinea for motions and defences.
In the Long Vacations Roger still stuck to his brother, who, no doubt, found him useful. Thus when the Mayor, Aldermen, and Council of Banbury came over to Wroxton to pay their respects to the Lord Keeper, they were handed over to the charge of Roger, who walked them all over the house to show the rooms, and then made them drunk at dinner ‘and dismissed them to their lodgings in ditches homeward bound.’ But the effort was too much for him, and no sooner were they gone than he had to lie down, all on fire, upon the ground, from which he rose very sick and scarce recovered in some days. As a rule he was a most temperate man, and hated the custom and extravagance of drinking. He had not enough understanding to obfuscate it by drink.
All went well with the brothers until the death of Charles II. Then the horizon grew troubled--but still Roger was being talked of as a Baron of the Exchequer, when the Lord Keeper died on September 5, 1685. With him ended the public life of his younger brother. Roger North was only thirty-two. He was a King’s Counsel, and in considerable practice, but he had not the will--perhaps he had not the force--to stand alone. At the Revolution he became a non-juror, and retired into the country. His Autobiography also ceases with his brother’s death.
He had much private family business to transact, and in 1690 he bought the Rougham estate in Norfolk, where he carried on building and planting on a considerable scale. He married and had children, bought books, restored the parish church, and finally died on March 1, 1734, in his eighty-first year.
Dr. Jessopp tells us very little is left of Roger North--his house has been pulled down, his trees pulled up, and his books dispersed. But his Lives of his three brothers, and now his own Autobiography, will keep his memory green. There is something about him one rather likes, though were we asked what it is, we should have no answer ready.
BOOKS OLD AND NEW.
Now that our century has entered upon its last decade, and draws near the hour which will despatch it to join its too frequently and most unjustly despised predecessor, it is pleasing to note how well it has learnt to play the old man’s part. One has only to compare the _Edinburgh Review_ of, say, October, 1807, with its last number, to appreciate the change that has come over us. Cocksureness, once the badge of the tribe of critics, is banished to the schoolroom. The hearty hatreds of our early days would ill befit a death-bed. A keen critic has observed what a noisy place England used to be. Everybody cried out loud in the market-place, in the Senate-house, in the Law Courts, in the Reviews and Magazines. In the year 1845 the _Times_ newspaper incurred the heavy and doubtless the just censure of the Oxford Union for its unprincipled tone as shown in its ‘violent attempts to foment agitation as well by inflammatory articles as by the artifices of correspondents.’ How different it now is! We all move about as it were in list slippers. Our watchword is ‘Hush!’ Dickens tells us how, at Hone’s funeral, Cruikshank, being annoyed at some of the observations of the officiating minister, whispered in Dickens’ ear as they both moved to kneel at prayer, ‘If this wasn’t a funeral I would punch his head.’ It was a commendable restraint. We are now, all of us, exercising it.
A gloomy view is being generally taken of our literary future in the next century. Poetry, it is pretty generally agreed, has died with Lord Tennyson. Who, it is said, can take any pride or pleasure in the nineties, whose memory can carry him back to the sixties? What days those were that gave us brand-new from the press ‘Philip’ and ‘The Four Georges,’ ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner,’ ‘Evan Harrington’ and ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ ‘Maud,’ ‘The Idylls of the King,’ and ‘Dramatis Personæ,’ Mr. Arnold’s New Poems, the ‘Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ,’ and ‘Verses on Various Occasions,’ four volumes of ‘Frederick the Great,’ and ‘The Origin of Species’! One wonders in the retrospect how human stupidity was proof against such an onslaught of wit, such a shower of golden fancies. Why did not Folly’s fortress fall? We know it did not, for it is standing yet. Nor has any particular halo gathered round the sixties--which, indeed, were no better than the fifties or the forties.
From what source, so ask ‘the frosty pows,’ are you who call yourselves ‘jolly candidates’ for 1900, going to get your supplies? Where are your markets? Who will crowd the theatre on your opening nights? What well-graced actors will then cross your stage? Your boys and girls will be well provided for, one can see that. Story-books and handbooks will jostle for supremacy; but your men and women, all a-hungered, how are you going to feed them and keep their tempers sweet? It is not a question of side dishes, but of joints. Sermons and sonnets, and even ‘clergy-poets,’ may be counted upon, but they will only affront the appetites they can never satisfy. What will be wanted are Sam Wellers, Captain Costigans, and Jane Eyres--poetry that lives, controversy that bites, speeches that stir the imagination.
Thus far the aged century. To argue with it would be absurd; to silence it cruel, and perhaps impossible. Greedy Time will soon do that.
But suppose it should turn out to be the fact that we are about to enter upon a period of well-cultivated mediocrity. What then? Centuries cannot be expected to go on repeating the symptoms of their predecessors. We have had no Burns. We cannot, therefore, expect to end with the beginnings of a Wordsworth and a Coleridge; there may likely be a lull. The lull may also be a relief. Of all odd crazes, the craze to be for ever reading new books is one of the oddest.
Hazlitt may be found grappling with this subject, and, as usual, ‘punishing’ it severely in his own inimitable style. ‘I hate,’ says he, in the second volume of ‘The Plain Speaker’--in the essay entitled ‘On Reading Old Books’--‘to read new books;’ and he continues, a page further on, ‘Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes--one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merit of either. One candidate for literary fame who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely and like a man of genius, but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage; another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections.’
Hazlitt was no doubt a good hater. We are now of milder mood. It ought not to be difficult for any of us, if we but struggle a little, to keep a man’s nose out of his novel. But, for all that, it is certain that true literary sway is borne but by the dead. Living authors may stir and stimulate us, provoke our energies, and excite our sympathy, but it is the dead who rule us from their urns.
Authority has no place in matters concerning books and reading, else it would be well were some proportion fixed between the claims of living and dead authors.
There is no sillier affectation than that of old-worldism. To rave about Sir Thomas Browne and know nothing of William Cobbett is foolish. To turn your back upon your own time is simply to provoke living wags, with rudimentary but effective humour, to chalk opprobrious epithets upon your person. But, on the other hand, to depend upon your contemporaries for literary sustenance, to be reduced to scan the lists of ‘Forthcoming Works’ with a hungry eye, to complain of a dearth of new poems, and new novels, and new sermons, is worse than affectation--it is stupidity.
There was a time when old books were hard to procure and difficult to house. With the exception of a few of the greatest, it required as much courage to explore the domains of our old authors as it did to visit Wast Water or Loch Maree before the era of roads and railways. The first step was to turn the folios into octavos, and to publish complete editions; the second was to cheapen the price of issue. The first cheap booksellers were, it is sometimes alleged, men of questionable character in their trade. Yet their names should be cherished. They made many young lives happy, and fostered better taste than either or both the Universities. Hogg, Cooke, Millar, Donaldson, Bell, even Tegg, the ‘extraneous Tegg’ of Carlyle’s famous Parliamentary petition, did good work in their day. Somehow or another the family libraries of the more respectable booksellers hung fire. They did not find their way about. Perhaps their authors were selected with too much care.
‘He wales a portion with judicious care.’
The pious Cottar did well, but the world is larger than the family; besides which it is not always ‘Saturday Night.’ Cooke had no scruples. He published ‘Tom Jones’ in fortnightly, and (I think) sixpenny parts, embellished with cuts, and after the same appetising fashion proceeded right through the ‘British Novelists.’ He did the same with the ‘British Poets.’ It was a noble enterprise. You never see on a stall one of Cooke’s books but it is soiled by honest usage; its odour speaks of the thousand thumbs that have turned over its pages with delight. Cooke made an immense fortune, and deserved to do so. He believed both in genius and his country. He gave the people cheap books, and they bought them gladly. He died at an advanced age in 1810. Perhaps when he came to do so he was glad he had published a series of ‘Sacred Classics,’ as well as ‘Tom Jones.’
We are now living in an age of handsome reprints. It is possible to publish a good-sized book on good paper and sell it at a profit for fourpence halfpenny. But of course to do this, as the profit is too small to bear division, you must get the Authors out of the way. Our admirable copyright laws and their own sedentary habits do this on the whole satisfactorily and in due course. Consequently dead authors are amazingly cheap. Not merely Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan and Burns, but Scott and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens. Living authors are deadly dear. You may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of one work by a living man. The odds are fearful. For my part, I hope a _modus vivendi_ may be established between the publishers of the dead and those of the living; but when you examine the contents of the ‘Camelot Classics,’ the ‘Carisbrooke Library,’ the ‘Chandos Classics,’ the ‘Canterbury Poets,’ the ‘Mermaid Series of the Old Dramatists,’ and remember, or try to remember, the publishing lists of Messrs. Routledge, Mr. Black, Messrs Warne, and Messrs. Cassell, it is easy for the reader to snap his fingers at Fate. It cannot touch him--he can dine for many a day. Even were our ‘lyrical cry’ to be stifled for half a century, what with Mr. Bullen’s ‘Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘More Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Dramatists,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Romances,’ and Mr. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ ‘a man,’ as Mr. Markham observes in ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘might get on very well here,’ even though that man were, as Markham asserted himself to be, ‘hungry all day long.’ A British poet does not cease to be a poet because he is dead, nor is he, for that matter, any the better a poet for being alive.
As for a scarcity of living poets proving national decadence, it would be hard to make out that case. Who sang Chatham’s victories by sea and land?
BOOK-BINDING.
There is a familiar anecdote of the ingenious author of ‘The Seasons,’ ‘Rule, Britannia,’ and other excellent pieces, that when he sent a well-bound copy of his poems to his father, who had always regarded him, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘feckless loon,’ that canny Scot handled the volume with unfeigned delight, and believing that his son had bound it, cried out admiringly, ‘Who would have thought our Jamie could have done the like of this?’ This particular copy has not been preserved, and it is therefore impossible for us to determine how far its bibliopegic merits justified the rapture of the elder Thomson, whose standard is not likely to have been a high one. Indeed, despite his rusticity, he was probably a better judge of poetry than of binding.
This noble craft has revived in our midst. Twenty years ago, in ordinary circles, the book-binder was a miscreant who, by the aid of a sharp knife, a hideous assortment of calf-skins and of marbled papers, bound your books for you by slaughtering their margins, stripping their sides, and returning them upon your hands cropped and in prison garb, and so lettered as to tell no man what they were. And the worst of it was we received them with complacency, gave them harbourage upon our shelves, and only grumbled that the price was so high as four shillings a volume. Those days are over. Yet it is well to be occasionally reminded of the rock from whence we were hewn, and the pit out of which we were digged. I have now lying before me a first edition of the essays of Elia which, being in boards, I allowed to be treated by a provincial called Shimmin, in the sixties. I remember its coming home, and how I thought it was all right. Infancy was no excuse for such ignorance.
The second-hand booksellers, a race of men for whom I have the greatest respect, are to blame in this matter. They did not play the part they might have been expected to do. They gave no prominence in their catalogues, which are the true text-books of literature, to specimens of book-binding, nor did they instil into the minds of their young customers the rudiments of taste. Worse than this, some of the second-hand booksellers in the country were themselves binders, and, for the most part, infamous ones.
One did, indeed, sometimes hear of Roger Payne and of the Harleian style, but dimly, and as a thing of no moment, nor were our eyes ever regaled in booksellers’ catalogues with facsimiles of the exquisite bindings of the French and English masters. Nor was it until we went further afield, and became acquainted with the booksellers of Paris, that this new world swam into our ken. It was a great day when a stray copy of a ‘Bulletin Mensuel’ of Damascene Morgand, the famous bookseller in the Passage des Panoramas, fell into the hands of a mere country book-buyer. Then he knew how brutally he had been deceived--then he looked with loathing on his truncated tomes and their abominable devices. The first really bound book I ever saw was a copy of the works of Pierre de Ronsard bearing the devices of Marguerite de Valois. The price was so far beyond my resources that I left the shop without a touch of envy, but the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I walked down the Passage des Panoramas as one who had awakened from a dream.
Nowadays it is quite different. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition did much, and the second-hand booksellers, in quite ordinary places, are beginning to give in their catalogues reproductions of noble specimens. Nothing else is required. To see is enough. There was recently, as most people know, a wonderful exhibition of bindings to be seen at the Burlington Fine Art Club, but what is not so generally known is that the Club has published a magnificent catalogue of the contents of that Exhibition, with no less than 114 plates reproducing with the greatest possible skill and delicacy some of the finest specimens. Mr. Gordon Duff, who is credited with a profounder knowledge of pigskins than any living man, has contributed a short preface to the volume, whilst Miss Prideaux, herself a binder of great merit, has written a general introduction, in which she traces the history of the craft, and duly records the names of the most famous binders of Europe. A more fascinating picture-book cannot be imagined, for to the charm of colour and design is added all the feeling which only a book can impart. Such a book as this marks an epoch, and ought to be the beginning of a time when even sale-catalogues shall take pains to be splendid.