Part 28
The great consulting room of a wise man is a library. When I am in perplexity about life, I have but to come here, and, without fee or reward, I commune with the wisest souls that God has blessed the world with. If I want a discourse on immortality Plato comes to my help. If I want to know the human heart Shakespeare opens all its chambers. Whatever be my perplexity or doubt, I know exactly the great man to call to me, and he comes in the kindest way, he listens to my doubts and tells me his convictions. So that a library may be regarded as the solemn chamber in which a man can take counsel with all that have been wise and great and good and glorious amongst the men that have gone before him. If we come down for a moment and look at the bare and immediate utilities of a library we find that here a man gets himself ready for his calling, arms himself for his profession, finds out the facts that are to determine his trade, prepares himself for his examination. The utilities of it are endless and priceless. It is too a place of pastime; for man has no amusement more innocent, more sweet, more gracious, more elevating, and more fortifying than he can find in a library.--GEORGE DAWSON. _Address at the opening of the Birmingham Free Reference Library_, 1866.
THE LIBRARY A KEY TO CHARACTER
The first thing, naturally, when one enters a scholar's study or library, is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his bookshelves.
Of course, you know there are many fine houses where a library is a part of the upholstery, so to speak. Books in handsome binding kept locked under plate-glass in showy dwarf bookcases are as important to stylish establishments as servants in livery, who sit with folded arms, are to stylish equipages. I suppose those wonderful statues with the folded arms do sometimes change their attitude, and I suppose those books with the gilded backs do sometimes get opened, but it is nobody's business whether they do or not, and it is best not to ask too many questions.
This sort of thing is common enough, but there is another case that may prove deceptive if you undertake to judge from appearances. Once in a while you will come on a house where you will find a family of readers and almost no library. Some of the most indefatigable devourers of literature have very few books. They belong to book clubs, they haunt the public libraries, they borrow of friends, and somehow or other get hold of everything they want, scoop out all it holds for them, and have done with it.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._
THE SCENT OF BOOKS
I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its _scent_, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but the scent of the noble pages restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand. For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.--G. GISSING. _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft._
Of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me, From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
W. SHAKESPEARE. _The Tempest._
AN EPISCOPAL LIBRARY
Here, duly placed on consecrated ground, The studied works of many an age are found, The ancient Fathers' reverend remains; The Roman Laws, which freed a world from chains; Whate'er of law passed from immortal Greece To Latin lands, and gained a rich increase; All that blessed Israel drank in showers from heaven, Or Afric sheds, soft as the dew of even.
ALCUIN.
A MODERN LIBRARY
The Doctor with himself decreed To nod--or, much the same, to read. He always seemed a wondrous lover Of painted leaf and Turkey cover, While no regard at all was had To sots in homely russet clad, Concluding he must be within A calf, that wore without his skin.
But, though his thoughts were fixed to read, The treatise was not yet decreed: Uncertain to devote the day To politics or else to play; What theme would best his genius suit, Grave morals or a dull dispute, Where both contending champions boast The victory which neither lost; As chiefs are oft in story read Each to pursue, when neither fled. He enters now the shining dome Where crowded authors sweat for room; So close a man could hardly say Which were more fixed, the shelves or they.
* * * * *
To please the eye, the highest space A set of wooden volumes grace; Pure timber authors that contain As much as some that boast a brain; That Alma Mater never viewed, Without degrees to writers hewed: Yet solid thus just emblems show Of the dull brotherhood below, Smiling their rivals to survey, As great and real blocks as they. Distinguished then in even rows, Here shines the Verse and there the Prose; (For, though Britannia fairer looks United, 'tis not so with books): The champions of each different art Had stations all assigned apart, Fearing the rival chiefs might be For quarrels still, nor dead agree. The schoolmen first in long array Their bulky lumber round display; Seemed to lament their wretched doom, And heave for more convenient room; While doctrine each of weight contains To crack his shelves as well as brains; Since all with him were thought to dream, That flagged before they filled a ream: His authors wisely taught to prize, Not for their merit, but their size; No surer method ever found Than buying writers by the pound; For heaven must needs his breast inspire, That scribbling filled each month a quire, And claimed a station on his shelves, Who scorned each sot who fooled in twelves.
W. KING. (?) _Bibliotheca._
SAFE AND UNTOUCHED
'In another century it may be impossible to find a collection of the whole [Greek tragedies] unless some learned and rich man, like Pericles, or some protecting King, like Hiero, should preserve them in his library.' 'Prudently have you considered how to preserve all valuable authors. The cedar doors of a royal library fly open to receive them: aye, there they will be safe ... and untouched.'--W. S. LANDOR. _Pericles and Aspasia._
CIBBER'S LIBRARY
Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole, How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug, And sucked all o'er, like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucified Moliere; There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wished he had blotted for himself before. The rest on outside merit but presume, Or serve (like other fools) to fill a room; Such with their shelves as due proportion hold, Or their fond parents dressed in red and gold; Or where the pictures for the page atone And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own. Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great; There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines complete: Here all his suffering brotherhood retire, And 'scape the martyrdom of jakes and fire: A Gothic Library! of Greece and Rome Well purged, and worthy Settle, Banks, and Broome. But, high above, more solid learning shone, The classics of an age that heard of none; There Caxton slept, with Wynkyn at his side, One clasped in wood, and one in strong cow-hide; There saved by spice, like mummies, many a year, Dry Bodies of Divinity appear; De Lyra there a dreadful front extends, And here the groaning shelves Philemon bends. Of these twelve volumes, twelve of amplest size, Redeemed from tapers and defrauded pies, Inspired he seizes; these an altar raise; An hecatomb of pure unsullied lays That altar crowns; a folio Commonplace Founds the whole pile, of all his works the base; Quartos, octavos, shape the lessening pyre; A twisted birthday ode completes the spire.
A. POPE. _The Dunciad._
MR. SHANDY'S LIBRARY
Few men of great genius had exercised their parts in writing books upon the subject of great noses: by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing is incredible! and I am quite lost in my understanding, when I am considering what a treasure of precious time and talents together has been wasted upon worse subjects--and how many millions of books in all languages, and in all possible types and bindings, have been fabricated upon points not half so much tending to the unity and peace-making of the world. What was to be had, however, he set the greater store by; and though my father would ofttimes sport with my uncle Toby's library--which, by the by, was ridiculous enough--yet at the very same time he did it, he collected every book and treatise which had been systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care as my honest uncle Toby had done those upon military architecture.... My father's collection was not great, but, to make amends, it was curious; and consequently he was some time in making it ... he got hold of Prignitz--purchased Scroderus, Andrea Paraeus, Bouchet's Evening Conferences, and above all, the great and learned Hafen Slawkenbergius.... To do justice to Slawkenbergius, he has entered the list with a stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it than any one man who had ever entered it before him--and indeed, in many respects, deserves to be en-niched as a prototype for all writers, of voluminous works at least, to model their books by--for he has taken in, Sir, the whole subject--examined every part of it dialectically----then brought it into full day; dilucidating it with all the light which either the collision of his own natural parts could strike--or the profoundest knowledge of the sciences had empowered him to cast upon it--collating, collecting, and compiling--begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled thereupon in the schools and porticoes of the learned: so that Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered, not only as a model--but as a thorough-stitched digest and regular institute of noses, comprehending in it all that is or can be needful to be known about them.
For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise) valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either, plump upon noses--or collaterally touching them;----such for instance as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in Silesia, which he had rummaged----has informed us, that the mensuration and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are all crushed down by the thumb, so that no judgement can be formed upon them--are much nearer alike, than the world imagines.--L. STERNE. _Tristram Shandy._
DOMINIE SAMPSON IN THE LIBRARY
Dominie Sampson was occupied, body and soul, in the arrangement of the late bishop's library, which had been sent from Liverpool by sea, and conveyed by thirty or forty carts from the seaport at which it was landed. Sampson's joy at beholding the ponderous contents of these chests arranged upon the floor of the large apartment, from whence he was to transfer them to the shelves, baffles all description. He grinned like an ogre, swung his arms like the sails of a windmill, shouted 'Prodigious' till the roof rung to his raptures. 'He had never,' he said, 'seen so many books together, except in the College Library;' and now his dignity and delight in being superintendent of the collection, raised him, in his own opinion, almost to the rank of the academical librarian, whom he had always regarded as the greatest and happiest man on earth. Neither were his transports diminished upon a hasty examination of the contents of these volumes. Some, indeed, of belles lettres, poems, plays, or memoirs, he tossed indignantly aside, with the implied censure of 'psha', or 'frivolous'; but the greater and bulkier part of the collection bore a very different character. The deceased prelate, a divine of the old and deeply-learned cast, had loaded his shelves with volumes which displayed the antique and venerable attributes so happily described by a modern poet:
That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid; Those ample clasps, of solid metal made; The close-pressed leaves unoped for many an age; The dull red edging of the well-filled page; On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled, Where yet the title stands in tarnished gold.
Books of theology and controversial divinity, commentaries, and polyglots, sets of the Fathers, and sermons, which might each furnish forth ten brief discourses of modern date, books of science, ancient and modern, classical authors in their best and rarest forms; such formed the late bishop's venerable library, and over such the eye of Dominie Sampson gloated with rapture. He entered them in the catalogue in his best running hand, forming each letter with the accuracy of a lover writing a valentine, and placed each individually on the destined shelf with all the reverence which I have seen a lady pay to a jar of old china. With all this zeal his labours advanced slowly. He often opened a volume when half-way up the library-steps, fell upon some interesting passage, and, without shifting his inconvenient posture, continued immersed in the fascinating perusal until the servant pulled him by the skirts to assure him that dinner waited. He then repaired to the parlour, bolted his food down his capacious throat in squares of three inches, answered aye or no at random to whatever question was asked at him, and again hurried back to the library as soon as his napkin was removed, and sometimes with it hanging round his neck like a pinafore--
How happily the days Of Thalaba went by!
SIR W. SCOTT. _Guy Mannering._
Me, poor man,--my library Was dukedom large enough.
W. SHAKESPEARE. _The Tempest._
THE PEASANT'S LIBRARY
On shelf of deal beside the cuckoo-clock, Of cottage-reading rests the chosen stock; Learning we lack, not books, but have a kind For all our wants, a meat for every mind: The tale for wonder and the joke for whim, The half-sung sermon and the half-groaned hymn. No need of classing; each within its place, The feeling finger in the dark can trace; 'First from the corner, farthest from the wall,' Such all the rules, and they suffice for all. There pious works for Sunday's use are found; Companions for the Bible newly bound; That Bible, bought by sixpence weekly saved, Has choicest prints by famous hands engraved; Has choicest notes by many a famous head, Such as to doubt have rustic readers led; Have made them stop to reason _why_? and _how_? And, where they once agreed, to cavil now. Oh! rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun; Who simple truth with nine-fold reason back, And guard the point no enemies attack. Bunyan's famed Pilgrim rests the shelf upon; A genius rare but rude was honest John: Not one who, early by the Muse beguiled, Drank from her well the waters undefiled; Not one who slowly gained the hill sublime, Then often sipped and little at a time; But one who dabbled in the sacred springs, And drank them muddy, mixed with baser things. Here to interpret dreams we read the rules, Science our own! and never taught in schools; In moles and specks we Fortune's gifts discern, And Fate's fixed will from Nature's wanderings learn. Of Hermit Quarle we read, in island rare, Far from mankind and seeming far from care; Safe from all want, and sound in every limb; Yes! there was he, and there was care with him. Unbound and heaped, these valued works beside, Lay humbler works, the pedlar's pack supplied; Yet these, long since, have all acquired a name; The Wandering Jew has found his way to fame; And fame, denied to many a laboured song, Crowns Thumb the great and Hickerthrift the strong. There too is he, by wizard-power upheld, Jack, by whose arm the giant-brood were quelled: His shoes of swiftness on his feet he placed; His coat of darkness on his loins he braced; His sword of sharpness in his hand he took, And off the heads of doughty giants stroke: Their glaring eyes beheld no mortal near; No sound of feet alarmed the drowsy ear; No English blood their pagan sense could smell, But heads dropped headlong, wondering why they fell. These are the peasant's joy, when, placed at ease, Half his delighted offspring mount his knees.
G. CRABBE. _The Parish Register._
THE LIBRARY IN THE GARRET
Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
E. B. BROWNING. _Aurora Leigh._
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads.--O. W. HOLMES. _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table._
MONTAIGNE'S LIBRARY
At home I betake me somewhat the oftener to my library, whence all at once I command and survey all my household. It is seated in the chief entry of my house, thence I behold under me my garden, my base court, my yard, and look even into most rooms of my house. There without order, without method, and by piece-meals I turn over and ransack, now one book and now another. Sometimes I muse and rave; and walking up and down I indite and enregister these my humours, these my conceits. It is placed on the third story of a tower. The lowermost is my chapel; the second a chamber with other lodgings, where I often lie, because I would be alone. Above it is a great wardrobe. It was in times past the most unprofitable place of all my house. There I pass the greatest part of my life's days, and wear out most hours of the day. I am never there a nights. Next unto it is a handsome neat cabinet, able and large enough to receive fire in winter, and very pleasantly windowen. And if I feared not care more than cost (care which drives and diverts me from all business), I might easily join a convenient gallery of a hundred paces long and twelve broad on each side of it, and upon one floor; having already, for some other purpose, found all the walls raised unto a convenient height. Each retired place requireth a walk. My thoughts are prone to sleep if I sit long. My mind goes not alone, as if ledges did move it. Those that study without books are all in the same case. The form of it is round, and hath no flat side, but what serveth for my table and chair: in which bending or circling manner, at one look it offereth me the full sight of all my books, set round about upon shelves or desks, five ranks one upon another. It hath three bay-windows, of a far-extending, rich and unresisted prospect, and is in diameter sixteen paces void. In winter I am less continually there: for my house (as the name of it importeth) is perched upon an over-peering hillock; and hath no part more subject to all weathers than this: which pleaseth me the more, both because the access unto it is somewhat troublesome and remote, and for the benefit of the exercise which is to be respected; and that I may the better seclude myself from company, and keep encroachers from me: There is my seat, that is my throne. I endeavour to make my rule therein absolute, and to sequester that only corner from the community of wife, of children, and of acquaintance. Elsewhere I have but a verbal authority, of confused essence. Miserable in my mind is he who in his own home hath nowhere to be to himself; where he may particularly court, and at his pleasure hide or withdraw self.--MONTAIGNE.
A COLLOQUY IN A LIBRARY
I was in my library, making room upon the shelves for some books which had just arrived from New England, removing to a less conspicuous station others which were of less value and in worse dress, when Sir Thomas entered. You are employed, said he, to your heart's content. Why, Montesinos, with these books, and the delight you take in their constant society, what have you to covet or desire?
_Montesinos_
Nothing, ... except more books.
_Sir Thomas More_
Crescit, indulgens sibi, dirus hydrops.
_Montesinos_
Nay, nay, my ghostly monitor, this at least is no diseased desire! If I covet more, it is for the want I feel and the use which I should make of them.
'Libraries,' says my good old friend George Dyer, a man as learned as he is benevolent, ... 'libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.' These books of mine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however much the pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them; they are on actual service. Whenever they may be dispersed, there is not one among them that will ever be more comfortably lodged, or more highly prized by its possessor; and generations may pass away before some of them will again find a reader.... It is well that we do not moralize too much upon such subjects, ...
For foresight is a melancholy gift, Which bares the bald, and speeds the all-too-swift.
But the dispersion of a library, whether in retrospect or in anticipation, is always to me a melancholy thing.
_Sir Thomas More_
How many such dispersions must have taken place to have made it possible that these books should thus be brought together here among the Cumberland mountains!
_Montesinos_
Many, indeed; and in many instances most disastrous ones. Not a few of these volumes have been cast up from the wreck of the family or convent libraries during the late Revolution. Yonder Acta Sanctorum belonged to the Capuchines, at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget's Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from the Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges. That copy of Alain Chartier, from the Jesuits' College at Louvain; that _Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis_, from their college at Ruremond. Here are books from Colbert's library; here others from the Lamoignon one.... A book is the more valuable to me when I know to whom it has belonged, and through what 'scenes and changes' it has past.
_Sir Thomas More_