Part 25
TO THE EDITOR OF 'THE EVERY-DAY BOOK'
I like you, and your book, ingenuous Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition's shown; And all that history--much that fiction--weaves.
By every sort of taste your work is graced. Vast stores of modern anecdote we find, With good old story quaintly interlaced-- The theme as various as the reader's mind.
Rome's life-fraught legends you so truly paint-- Yet kindly,--that the half-turned Catholic Scarcely forbears to smile at his own Saint, And cannot curse the candid heretic.
Rags, relics, witches, ghosts, fiends, crowd your page; Our father's mummeries we well-pleased behold, And, proudly conscious of a purer age, Forgive some fopperies in the times of old.
Verse-honouring Phoebus, Father of bright _Days_, Must needs bestow on you both good and many, Who, building trophies of his Children's praise, Run their rich Zodiac through, not missing any.
Dan Phoebus loves your book--trust me, friend Hone-- The title only errs, he bids me say: For while such art, wit, reading, there are shown, He swears, 'tis not a work of _every day_.
C. LAMB.
I love everything that is old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.--O. GOLDSMITH.
THE BANNATYNE CLUB, OR ONE VOLUME MORE
Assist me, ye friends of Old Books and Old Wine, To sing in the praises of sage Bannatyne, Who left such a treasure of old Scottish lore As enables each age to print one volume more. One volume more, my friends, one volume more, We'll ransack old Banny for one volume more.
And first, Allan Ramsay was eager to glean From Bannatyne's _Hortus_ his bright Evergreen; Two light little volumes (intended for four) Still leave us the task to print one volume more. One volume more, &c.
His ways were not ours, for he cared not a pin How much he left out, or how much he put in; The truth of the reading he thought was a bore, So this accurate age calls for one volume more. One volume more, &c.
Correct and sagacious, then came my Lord Hailes, And weighed every letter in critical scales, And left out some brief words, which the prudish abhor, And castrated Banny in one volume more. One volume more, my friends, one volume more; We'll restore Banny's manhood in one volume more.
John Pinkerton next, and I'm truly concerned I can't call that worthy so candid as learned; He railed at the plaid and blasphemed the claymore, And set Scots by the ears in his one volume more. One volume more, my friends, one volume more, Celt and Goth shall be pleased with one volume more.
As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor, And feeding on herbs as a Nebuchadnezzar, His diet too acid, his temper too sour, Little Ritson came out with his two volumes more. But one volume, my friends, one volume more, We'll dine on roast-beef and print one volume more.
The stout Gothic yeditur, next on the roll, With his beard like a brush, and as black as a coal; And honest Greysteel that was true to the core, Lent their hearts and their hands each to one volume more. One volume more, &c.
Since by these single champions what wonders were done, What may not be achieved by our Thirty and One? Law, Gospel, and Commerce we count in our corps, And the Trade and the Press join for one volume more. One volume more, &c.
Ancient libels and contraband books, I assure ye, We'll print as secure from Exchequer or Jury; Then hear your Committee and let them count o'er The Chiels they intend in their three volumes more. Three volumes more, &c.
They'll produce your King Jamie, the Sapient and Sext, And the Bob of Dumblane and her Bishops come next; One tome miscellaneous they'll add to your store, Resolving next year to print four volumes more. Four volumes more, my friends, four volumes more; Pay down your subscriptions for four volumes more.
SIR W. SCOTT.
THE BOOKSELLERS' BANQUET
Grave vendors of volumes, best friends of the Nine, Give ear to my song as to charm you I try; Other bards may in vain look for audience like mine, For the muses they chant, for the booksellers I. Their notes I have drawn, so 'tis nothing but fair That my notes should be drawn, if they please, at a beck; Undaunted I warble--I truly declare My song is most valued when met by a _cheque_.
The work we've just finished went off very well; It was set out with _plates_, such as Finden, or Heath, If even their professional feelings rebel, Must praise on account (not in spite) of their teeth. Though by Fraser cut up, and by Murray reviewed, Lovegrove's articles all fit insertion have found. We have cleared off our boards, but as business is good, We keep wetted for use, and for pleasure unbound.
But here not for pleasure alone are we stored Like holiday tomes in our gilding so bright; Some care 'tis our duty and wish to afford In the moment of need to a less lucky wight, Whose title is lost, and whose covers are torn, When the moth has gnawed through, dust or cobwebs surround, And to lift on the shelf our poor brother forlorn, As a much damaged old folio treasured by Lowndes.
Though his back stock of life may perchance weigh him down, By our aid may the old heavy pressure be moved, And new-titled we start him again on the town, As a second edition revised and improved. And for dealings like this a commission will find, And that of a date that the primest is given, The commission is--Strive to do good to mankind, And the place of its dates is no other than Heaven.
I won't keep the press waiting--my copy is gone, Having finished a lay which Bob Fisher, perhaps, May out of the head of old Caxton call one, If not of his _Drawing_, yet _Dining-room Scraps_; But as we all still think of Tom Talfourd's bill, After sixty years' date, I respectfully beg, As a knight of the quill, here to offer for _nil_, My right in this song as a present to Tegg.
W. MAGINN.
WHAT A HEART-BREAKING SHOP
But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with 'Master Pinch, Grove House Academy', inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes, neatly ranged within: what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open: tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like handposts on the outskirts of great cities, to the rich stock of incident beyond; and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name, whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any form, upon the narrow shelf beside his bed at Mr. Pecksniff's. What a heart-breaking shop it was!--C. DICKENS. _Martin Chuzzlewit._
GENTEEL ORNAMENTS
If people bought no more books than they intended to read, and no more swords than they intended to use, the two worst trades in Europe would be a bookseller's and a sword-cutler's; but luckily for both they are reckoned genteel ornaments.--LORD CHESTERFIELD.
MAMMON AND BOOKS
All who are affected by the love of books hold worldly affairs and money very cheap, as Jerome writes to Vigilantius (Epist. 54): 'It is not for the same man to ascertain the value of gold coins and of writings;' which somebody thus repeated in verse:
No tinker's hand shall dare a book to stain; No miser's heart can wish a book to gain; The gold assayer cannot value books; On them the epicure disdainful looks. One house at once, believe me, cannot hold Lovers of books and hoarders up of gold.
No man, therefore, can serve mammon and books.--R. DE BURY. _Philobiblon._
THE POOR STUDENT
In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, which insult not; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains.--C. LAMB. _Poor Relations._
NATIONAL EXPENDITURE ON BOOKS
I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad--a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine-cellars? What position would its expenditure on literature take, as compared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth _much_; nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's books out of circulating libraries!--J. RUSKIN. _Sesame and Lilies._
THE VALUE OF BOOK BORROWING
I have sent you the Philosophy--books you writ to me for; anything that you want of this kind for the advancement of your studies, do but write, and I shall furnish you. When I was a student as you are, my practice was to borrow rather than buy, some sort of books, and to be always punctual in restoring them upon the day assigned, and in the interim to swallow of them as much as made for my turn. This obliged me to read them through with more haste to keep my word, whereas I had not been so careful to peruse them had they been my own books, which I knew were always ready at my dispose.--J. HOWELL. _Familiar Letters._
ACCIDENTS TO BOOKS
Fortunate are those who only consider a book for the utility and pleasure they may derive from its possession. Those students who, though they know much, still thirst to know more, may require this vast sea of books; yet in that sea they may suffer many shipwrecks.
Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the _borrowers_, not to say a word of the _purloiners_!--I. D'ISRAELI. _Curiosities of Literature._
BORROWERS OF BOOKS
To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your _borrowers of books_--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch [Coleridge], matchless in his depredations!
That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out--(you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!)--with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing), once held the tallest of my folios, _Opera Bonaventurae_, choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,--Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs,--itself an Ascapart!--_that_ Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that 'the title to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same'. Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?
The slight vacuum in the left-hand case--two shelves from the ceiling--scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser--was whilom the commodious resting-place of Browne on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties--but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself.--Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the Fates _borrowed_ Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state.--There loitered the Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side.--In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with 'eyes closed', mourns his ravished mate.
One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend's gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory as mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalised. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am.--I charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.
To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle?--knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio:--what but the mere spirit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend?--Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the Gallican land--
Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder!
--hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all companies with thy quips and mirthful tales?--Child of the Green-room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part-French, better-part Englishwoman!--that _she_ could fix upon no other treatise to bear away in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke--of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a tittle! _Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude?_
Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C.--he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his--(in _matter_ oftentimes, and almost in _quantity_ not unfrequently, vying with the originals)--in no very clerky hand--legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands.--I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.--C. LAMB. _The Two Races of Men._
BORROWING AND LENDING
I own I borrow books with as much facility as I lend. I cannot see a work that interests me on another person's shelf, without a wish to carry it off: but, I repeat, that I have been much more sinned against than sinning in the article of non-return; and am scrupulous in the article of intention.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My Books._
WEDDED TO BOOKS
If people are to be wedded to their books, it is hard that, under our present moral dispensations, they are not to be allowed the usual exclusive privileges of marriage. A friend thinks no more of borrowing a book nowadays, than a Roman did of borrowing a man's wife; and what is worse, we are so far gone in our immoral notions on this subject, that we even lend it as easily as Cato did his spouse. Now what a happy thing ought it not to be to have exclusive possession of a book,--one's Shakespeare for instance; for the finer the wedded work, the more anxious of course we should be, that it should give nobody happiness but ourselves. Think of the pleasure of not only being with it in general, of having by far the greater part of its company, but of having it entirely to oneself; of always saying internally, 'It is my property'; of seeing it well-dressed in 'black or red', purely to please one's own eyes; of wondering how any fellow could be so impudent as to propose borrowing it for an evening; of being at once proud of his admiration, and pretty certain that it was in vain; of the excitement nevertheless of being a little uneasy whenever we saw him approach it too nearly; of wishing that it could give him a cuff of the cheek with one of its beautiful boards, for presuming to like its beauties as well as ourselves; of liking other people's books, but not at all thinking it proper that they should like ours; of getting perhaps indifferent to it, and then comforting ourselves with the reflection that others are not so, though to no purpose; in short, of all the mixed transport and anxiety to which the exclusiveness of the book-wedded state would be liable; not to mention the impossibility of other people's having any literary offspring from our fair unique, and consequently of the danger of loving any compilations but our own. Really, if we could burn all other copies of our originals, as the Roman Emperor once thought of destroying Homer, this system would be worth thinking of. If we had a good library, we should be in the situation of the Turks with their seraglios, which are a great improvement upon our petty exclusivenesses. Nobody could then touch our Shakespeare, our Spenser, our Chaucer, our Greek and Italian writers. People might say, 'Those are the walls of the library!' and 'sigh, and look, and sigh again'; but they should never get in. No Retrospective rake should anticipate our privileges of quotation. Our Mary Wollstonecrafts and our Madame de Staëls--no one should know how finely they were lettered,--what soul there was in their disquisitions. We once had a glimpse of the feelings which people would have on these occasions. It was in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The keeper of it was from home; and not being able to get a sight of the manuscript of Milton's _Comus_, we were obliged to content ourselves with looking through a wire-work, a kind of safe, towards the shelf on which it reposed. How we winked, and yearned, and imagined we saw a corner of the all-precious sheets, to no purpose! The feelings were not very pleasant, it is true; but then as long as they were confined to others, they would of course only add to our satisfaction.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _Wedded to Books._
THE ART OF BOOK-KEEPING
How hard, when those who do not wish To lend, that's lose, their books, Are snared by anglers--folks that fish With literary hooks;
Who call and take some favourite tome, But never read it through;-- They thus complete their set at home, By making one at you.
Behold the bookshelf of a dunce Who borrows--never lends: Yon work, in twenty volumes, once Belonged to twenty friends.
New tales and novels you may shut From view--'tis all in vain; They're gone--and though the leaves are 'cut' They never 'come again'.
For pamphlets lent I look around, For tracts my tears are spilt; But when they take a book that's bound, 'Tis surely extra-guilt.
A circulating library Is mine--my birds are flown; There's one odd volume left to be Like all the rest, a-lone.
I, of my Spenser quite bereft, Last winter sore was shaken; Of Lamb I've but a quarter left, Nor could I save my Bacon.
My Hall and Hill were levelled flat, But Moore was still the cry; And then, although I threw them Sprat, They swallowed up my Pye.
O'er everything, however slight, They seized some airy trammel; They snatched my Hogg and Fox one night, And pocketed my Campbell.
And then I saw my Crabbe at last, Like Hamlet's, backward go; And as my tide was ebbing fast, Of course I lost my Rowe.
I wondered into what balloon My books their course had bent; And yet, with all my marvelling, soon I found my Marvell went.
My Mallet served to knock me down, Which makes me thus a talker; And once, while I was out of town, My Johnson proved a Walker.
While studying o'er the fire one day My Hobbes amidst the smoke, They bore my Colman clean away, And carried off my Coke.
They picked my Locke, to me far more Than Bramah's patent's worth; And now my losses I deplore Without a Home on earth.
If once a book you let them lift, Another they conceal; For though I caught them stealing Swift, As swiftly went my Steele.
Hope is not now upon my shelf, Where late he stood elated; But, what is strange, my Pope himself Is excommunicated.
My little Suckling in the grave Is sunk, to swell the ravage; And what 'twas Crusoe's fate to save 'Twas mine to lose--a Savage.
Even Glover's works I cannot put My frozen hands upon; Though ever since I lost my Foote My Bunyan has been gone.
My Hoyle with Cotton went; oppressed, My Taylor too must sail; To save my Goldsmith from arrest, In vain I offered Bayle.