Part 33

'No praise of Addison's style,' Lord Lytton declares, 'can exaggerate its merits. Its art is perfectly marvellous. No change of time can render the workmanship obsolete. His manner has that nameless urbanity in which we recognize the perfection of manner--courteous, but not courtier-like; so dignified, yet so kindly; so easy, yet so high-bred. Its form of English is fixed--a safe and eternal model, of which all imitation pleases--to which all approach is scholarship--like the Latin of the Augustan age.'

So much for style. For the rest Hazlitt remarks that 'it is the extremely moral and didactic tone of the _Spectator_ which makes us apt to think of Addison (according to Mandeville's sarcasm) as "a parson in a tie-wig"'. How often history repeats itself.

P. 15. _Dodd._--His _Beauties of Shakespeare_, published in 1752, is still well known. Dodd was hanged for forgery, despite many efforts, including those of Dr. Johnson, on his behalf.

P. 16. _Hunt._--The periods referred to by Leigh Hunt are 'the dark ages, as they are called', and 'the gay town days of Charles II, or a little afterwards'. In the first the essayist imagines 'an age of iron warfare and energy, with solitary retreats, in which the monk or the hooded scholar walks forth to meditate, his precious volume under his arm. In the other, I have a triumphant example of the power of books and wit to contest the victory with sensual pleasure:--Rochester staggering home to pen a satire in the style of Monsieur Boileau; Butler, cramming his jolly duodecimo with all the learning that he laughed at; and a new race of book poets come up, who, in spite of their periwigs and petit-maîtres, talk as romantically of "the bays" as if they were priests of Delphos.'

In Chapman's translation of Homer occur the words: 'The fortresses of thorniest queaches.' A queach is a thick bushy plot, or a quickset hedge.

You will see Hunt--one of those happy souls Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom This world would smell like what it is--a tomb.

SHELLEY. _Letter to Maria Gisborne._

P. 17. _Lamb._--

What youth was in thy years, What wisdom in thy levity, what truth In every utterance of that purest soul! Few are the spirits of the glorified

W. S. LANDOR.

Encumbered dearly with old books, Thou, by the pleasant chimney nooks, Didst laugh, with merry-meaning looks, Thy griefs away.--LIONEL JOHNSON.

P. 18. _Burton._--Compare the remark of the 'Hammock School' reviewers in Mr. G. K. Chesterton's _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_--'Next to authentic goodness in a book (and that, alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness.'

P. 19. _Channing._--An address introductory to the Franklin lectures delivered at Boston, 1838. Channing's influence increased after his death, which occurred in 1842. In the seventies nearly 50,000 copies of his _Complete Works_ were circulated in America and Europe.

P. 20. _Hunt._--The novel _Camilla_ is Madame D'Arblay's; the entire passage relating to the Oxford scholar's books is given on page 216. Petrarch is quoted on pages 1 and 369.

P. 21. _Landor._--See 'Old-Fashioned Verse' on p. 186.

P. 26. _Burton._--Lord Byron is reported by Moore to have said: 'The book, in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble, is Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him. If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted, at least in the English language.'

Dr. Johnson, while admitting that the _Anatomy_ is a valuable work, suggests that it is overloaded with quotation. But he adds, 'It is the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise.'

P. 28. _Southey._--'Southey's appearance is _Epic_; and he is the only existing entire man of letters. All the others have some pursuit annexed to their authorship'.--LORD BYRON.

Ye, loved books, no more Shall Southey feed upon your precious lore, To works that ne'er shall forfeit their renown, Adding immortal labours of his own.--WORDSWORTH. (Inscription for a monument in Crosthwaite Church).

P. 32. _Montaigne._--Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, began to write his essays in his château at Montaigne in Périgord in 1572, at the age of thirty-nine. The essays were published in 1580, and five editions had appeared before his death in 1592.

_The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne_ translated by John Florio were first published in 1603. The translator was born in London about 1553, and he died in 1625. It is this translation from which my excerpts are given, and it is the only book known to have been in Shakespeare's library; the volume contains his autograph, and is now in the British Museum.

Emerson classes Montaigne in his _Representative Men_ as the Sceptic. He calls to mind that Gibbon reckoned, in the bigoted times of the period, but two men of liberality in France--Henry IV and Montaigne--and adds, 'Though a Biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence is superficial.... I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.'

P. 33. _Denham._--Dominico Mancini wrote the _Libellus de quattuor Virtutibus_, published in Paris, 1484.

P. 37. _Johnson._--The excerpts from Johnson and from Boswell's _Life_ are taken, where possible, from Dr. Birkbeck Hill's Oxford edition.

P. 41. _Rabelais._--The translation is that of Peter Anthony Motteux (1660-1718) and of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660).

It may be remembered that Pantagruel on his travels found in Paris 'the library of St. Victor, a very stately and magnificent one, especially in some books which were there', of which the Repertory or Catalogue is given. A few of the titles are:--_The Pomegranate of Vice_, _The Henbane of the Bishops_, _The Crucible of Contemplation_, _The Flimflams of the Law_, _The Pleasures of the Monachal Life_, _Sixty-nine fat Breviaries_, and _The Chimney-sweeper of Astrology_. Some of the titles are too 'Rabelaesian', or what some booksellers call 'curious', to print. A certain number of the books appear to have actually existed outside the author's imagination.

P. 45. _Herrick._--These are, of course, separate poems, scattered fruit of the _Hesperides_. See also the note on page 390.

'Absyrtus-like': an allusion, of course, to the story of Medea, who took her brother Absyrtus with her when she fled with Jason. Being nearly overtaken by her father, Medea murdered Absyrtus, and strewed the road with pieces of his body so that the pursuit might be stayed.

P. 46. _Daniel._--This sonnet was prefaced to the second edition of Florio's _Montaigne_ (1613), and is often ascribed to the translator; but the weight of criticism credits the authorship to Daniel. Mr. Locker-Lampson was tempted to write a couple of verses for the fly-leaf of the Rowfant Montaigne, which not only belonged to Shakespeare, but was also given by Pope to Gay and enjoyed by Johnson:

For me the halycon days have passed, I'm here and with a dunce at last.

See note on previous page.

P. 47. _Milton._--Milton's prose masterpiece was printed, in a modified form, by Mirabeau, under the title _Sur la Liberté de la Presse_, imité de l'Anglais, de Milton.

P. 49. _Leighton._--

Methinks in that refulgent sphere That knows not sun or moon, An earth-born saint might long to hear One verse of 'Bonnie Doon'.--O. W. HOLMES.

P. 49. _Hazlitt._--'Because they both wrote essays and were fond of the Elizabethans,' Mr. Augustine Birrell says, 'it became the fashion to link Hazlitt's name with Lamb's. Hazlitt suffered by the comparison.'

P. 50. _Hunt._--The poet is Wordsworth and the lines 'Oh that my name' are found in 'Personal Talk'. See page 21.

P. 52. _Carlyle._--In _The Hero as Priest_ Carlyle wrote of Luther's written works: 'The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest; his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He flashes-out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humour too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to _work_ an Epic Poem, not write one.'

Beneath the rule of men entirely great The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold The arch-enchanter's wand!--itself a nothing.-- But taking sorcery from the master-hand To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike The loud earth breathless!--Take away the sword-- States can be saved without it!

LYTTON. _Richelieu_, Act II, sc. ii.

P. 53. _Macaulay._--'Macaulay is like a book in breeches.'--SYDNEY SMITH.

P. 53. _Maurice._--The first Ptolemy founded the famous Alexandrian Library which is supposed to have been partly destroyed by Christian fanatics in 391 A.D., the Arabs in 641 completing the work of destruction.

P. 57. _Fuller._--'Fuller's language!' Coleridge writes: 'Grant me patience, Heaven! A tithe of his beauties would be sold cheap for a whole library of our classical writers, from Addison to Johnson and Junius inclusive. And Bishop Nicolson!--a painstaking old charwoman of the Antiquarian and Rubbish Concern! The venerable rust and dust of the whole firm are not worth an ounce of Fuller's earth!'

The rest of this essay will be found on page 79. The learned man referred to in the last paragraph is Erasmus.

P. 58. _Browne._--Pineda in _Monarchica Ecclesiastica_ mentions 1,040 authors. See the note above on Maurice.

P. 60. _Addison._--'The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of loaves. On the day when Christ created that symbol, he caught a glimpse of printing. His miracle is this marvel. Behold a book. I will nourish with it five thousand souls--a million souls--all humanity. In the action of Christ bringing forth the loaves, there is Gutenberg bringing forth books. One sower heralds the other.... Gutenberg is for ever the auxiliary of life; he is the permanent fellow-workman in the great work of civilization. Nothing is done without him. He has marked the transition of the man-slave to the free man. Try and deprive civilization of him, you become Egypt.'--VICTOR HUGO on Shakespeare.

P. 61. _De Quincey._--'The few shelves which would hold all the true classics extant might receive as many more of the like as there is any chance that the next two or three centuries could produce, without burthening the select and leisurely scholar with a sense of how much he had to read.'--C. PATMORE. _Principle in Art: William Barnes._

P. 63. _Temple._--Sir William Temple's historic dispute with Wotton and Bentley, in which he had the assistance of Charles Boyle, afterwards Earl of Orrery, provoked Swift's _Battle of the Books_. Compare Boileau's _La Lutrin_.

P. 63. _Swift._--'"The Battle of the Books" is the fancy of a lover of libraries.'--LEIGH HUNT.

The royal library at St. James's alluded to was one of the nine privileged libraries which received copies of new books under the Copyright Act of Anne. The privilege passed to the British Museum in 1757, when George II made over the royal collection to the nation.

P. 65. _Bacon._--Sir William Temple in his _Essay on the Ancient and Modern Learning_ (pp. 59, 63, 110) concludes 'with a Saying of Alphonsus Sirnamed the Wise, King of Aragon: That among so many things as are by Men possessed or pursued in the Course of their Lives, all the rest are Bawbles, Besides Old Wood to Burn, Old Wine to Drink, Old Friends to Converse with, and Old Books to Read'.

P. 67. _Goldsmith._--Horace Walpole wrote to the Rev. William Cole (Letter 2337; Oxford edition): 'There is a chapter in Voltaire that would cure anybody of being a great man even in his own eyes. It is the chapter in which a Chinese goes into a bookseller's shop, and marvels at not finding any of his own country's classics.'

P. 69. _Hazlitt._--'William Hazlitt, I believe, has no books, except mine; but he has Shakespeare and Rousseau by heart.'--LEIGH HUNT.

P. 71. _Hazlitt._--Hazlitt wrote this essay in Florence, on his honeymoon, and it opens with a quotation from Sterne: 'And what of this new book, that the whole world make such a rout about?' Lord Byron had died in the previous year, 1824.

'Laws are not like women, the worse for being old.'--The Duke of Buckingham's speech in the House of Lords in Charles the Second's time (Hazlitt's note).

P. 72. _Dudley._--Rogers is reported to have said, 'When a new book comes out I read an old one.'

P. 73. _Macaulay._--Pyrgopolynices (Plautus: _Miles Gloriosus_); Thraso (Terence: _Eunuch_); Bobadil (Ben Jonson: _Every Man in his Humour_); Bessus (Beaumont and Fletcher: _A King and no King_); Pistol (_The Merry Wives of Windsor_); Parolles (_All's Well that Ends Well_); Nephelococcygia (Aristophanes: _The Birds_--the cuckoos' town in the clouds); Lilliput (Swift: _Gulliver's Travels_--the pygmies' country).

P. 77. _Ascham._--Thomas Blundeville wrote some lines in praise of Roger Ascham's Latin grammar:--

Of English books as I could find, I have perused many a one: Yet so well done unto my mind, As this is, yet have I found none.

The words of matter here do rise, So fitly and so naturally, As heart can wish or wit devise, In my conceit and fantasy.

The words well chosen and well set, Do bring such light unto the sense: As if I lacked I would not let To buy this book for forty pence.

This was published in 1561.

P. 78. _Wither._--Bevis of Hampton, a hero of early mediaeval romance. The story has been published by the Early English Text Society.

Compare 'The common rabble of scribblers and blur-papers which nowadays stuff stationers' shops.'--MONTAIGNE.

P. 79. _Fuller._--The other portion of this essay will be found on page 57. Arius Montanus was the court chaplain of Philip II of Spain, and he personally superintended the printing of the _Biblia Polyglotta_ (8 vols., 1569-73), the most famous of the books printed by Christophe Plantin. The printing office is one of the sights of Antwerp, whose council bought the property from Plantin's descendants in 1876 for £48,000.

Compare also: 'Evil books corrupt at once both our manners and our taste.'--FIELDING.

P. 80. _Addison._--Addison 'takes off the severity of this speculation' with an anecdote of an atheistical author who was sick unto death. A curate, to comfort him, said he did not believe any besides the author's particular friends or acquaintance had ever been at the pains of reading his book, or that anybody after his death would ever inquire after it. 'The dying Man had still so much the Frailty of an Author in him, as to be cut to the Heart with these Consolations; and without answering the good Man, asked his Friends about him (with a Peevishness that is natural to a sick Person) where they had picked up such a Blockhead?' It seems that the author recovered, 'and has since written two or three other Tracts with the same Spirit, and very luckily for his poor Soul with the same success.'

P. 83. _Milton._--'For he [Pliny the Elder] read no book which he did not make extracts from. He used to say that "no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it."'--PLINY THE YOUNGER.

P. 84. _Baxter._--'Richard, Richard, dost thou think we will let thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old knave. Thou hast written books enough to load a cart, and every book as full of sedition as an egg is full of meat.'--Judge Jeffreys' address at Baxter's trial.

P. 85. _Athenian Mercury._--An 'answer to correspondents'--the question 'Whether 'tis lawful to read Romances?' being asked in _The Athenian Mercury_. This, the first popular periodical published in this country, was started in 1691, and written by John Dunton, R. Sault, and Samuel (the father of John) Wesley; the last number appeared in 1697, and Dunton collected into three volumes the most valuable questions and answers under the title of _The Athenian Oracle_.

Gray's wish was to be always lying on sofas, reading 'eternal new novels of Crébillon and Marivaux'.

P. 86. _Cobbett._--Cobbett attacks Dr. Johnson, because in a pamphlet he urged war on the American colonies; Burke, because in another pamphlet he urged war on revolutionary France. 'The first war lost us America, the last cost us six hundred millions of money, and has loaded us with forty millions a year of taxes.'

P. 86. _More._--Tom Hickathrift, who killed a giant at Tylney, Norfolk, with a cartwheel. He dates from the Conquest, and was made governor of Thanet.

P. 87. _Austen._--_Cecilia_ and _Camilla_, both by Mme. D'Arblay; _Belinda_, by Miss Edgeworth.

'She [Diana] says of Romance: "The young who avoid that region escape the title of Fool at the cost of a celestial crown."'-GEORGE MEREDITH. _Diana of the Crossways._

P. 87. _Herschel._--'The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.'--R. L. STEVENSON.

P. 89. _Burton._--'They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.'--BURTON.

P. 90. _Milton._--South said that _Eikon Basilike_ was 'composed with such an unfailing majesty of diction, that it seems to have been written with a sceptre rather than a pen'.

Milton condemns the king for having 'so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself, or to his friends, or sense of his afflictions, or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop [Juxon] who attended him, for a special relic of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_'.

P. 91. _Dryden._--Hazlitt, who could not 'much relish Ben Jonson', describes him as 'a great borrower from the works of others, and a plagiarist even from nature; so little freedom is there in his imitations of her, and he appears to receive her bounty like an alms'. J. A. Symonds, stating that Jonson 'held the prose writers and poets of antiquity in solution in his spacious memory', points out that such looting on his part of classical treasuries of wit and wisdom was accounted no robbery in his age.

P. 91. _Sheridan._--Churchill has the same thought in _The Apology_:

Like gypsies, lest the stolen brat be known, Defacing first, then claiming for their own.

P. 93. _Pattison._--Matthew Arnold, in the preface to _Literature and Dogma_ (1873), points out that 'To read to good purpose we must read a great deal, and be content not to use a great deal of what we read. We shall never be content not to use the whole, or nearly the whole, of what we read, unless we read a great deal.'

P. 96. _Mitford._--'Every abridgement of a good book is a stupid abridgement.'--MONTAIGNE.

P. 98. _Tennyson._--J. J. Jusserand, in the first annual Shakespeare lecture before the British Academy (July 5, 1911), used eloquent language which might be said to justify bibliographies:--'Books, like their authors, have their biography. They live their own lives. Some behave like honourable citizens of the world of thought, do good, propagate sound views, strengthen heart and courage, assuage, console, improve those men to whose hearths they have been invited. Others corrupt or debase, or else turn minds towards empty frivolities. In proportion to their fame, and to the degree of their perenniality, is the good or evil that they do from century to century, eternal benefactors of mankind or deathless malefactors. Posted on the road followed by humanity, they help or destroy the passers-by; they deserve gratitude eternal, or levy the toll of some of our life's blood, leaving us weaker; highwaymen or good Samaritans. Some make themselves heard at once and continue to be listened to for ever; others fill the ears for one or two generations, and then begin an endless sleep; or, on the contrary, long silent or misunderstood, they awake from their torpor, and astonished mankind discovers with surprise long-concealed treasures like those trodden upon by the unwary visitor of unexplored ruins.'

P. 99. _Helps._--'My desire is ... that mine adversary had written a book.'--The Author of Job, ch. 31.

'Curll, Pope's victim and accomplice ... hit on one of those epoch-making ideas which are so simple when once they are conceived, so difficult, save for the loftiest genius, in their first conception. It occurred to him that, in a world governed by the law of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another's remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate _Lives_, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, of famous and notorious persons who had the ill-fortune to die during his lifetime.... His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.'--SIR W. RALEIGH. _Six Essays on Johnson._

It is related in _The Percy Anecdotes_ that 'A gentleman calling on Archbishop Tillotson observed in his library one shelf of books of various forms and sizes, all richly bound, finely gilt and lettered. He inquired what favourite authors these were that had been so remarkably distinguished by his Grace. "These," said the Archbishop, "are my own personal friends; and what is more I have made them such (for they were avowedly my enemies), by the use I have made of those hints which their malice had suggested to me. From these I have received more profit than from the advice of my best and most cordial friends; and therefore you see I have rewarded them accordingly."'

P. 99. _Disraeli._--Compare Emerson: 'There is properly no history, only biography; and Carlyle: 'History is the essence of innumerable biographies.'

'Those that write of men's lives,' says Montaigne, 'forasmuch as they amuse and busy themselves more about counsels than events, more about that which cometh from within than that which appeareth outward; they are fittest for me.'

P. 102. _Glanvill._--An original Fellow of the Royal Society, and in many ways an interesting divine, probably best known in these days through Matthew Arnold's 'Scholar-Gypsy', whose story is told in _The Vanity of Dogmatizing_ (1661), from which this quotation and that on page 118 are made.

P. 103. _Jonson._--The poem 'To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us' appeared in 1623.

P. 105. _Jonson._--This was printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, 1623, on the page opposite the Droeshout portrait.

P. 105. _Milton._--These lines were printed anonymously in the Second Folio Shakespeare, 1632, and, it is believed, this was Milton's first appearance as a poet.

P. 106. _Dryden._--This was printed under the engraving in Tonson's folio edition of _Paradise Lost_ (1688). Mr. F. A. Mumby, in _The Romance of Bookselling_, recalls that in Moseley's first edition of Milton's poems there was an atrocious portrait of the poet by William Marshall. Milton wrote four lines in Greek, which the artist, innocent of that language, gravely cut into the plate, lines that Dr. Masson has thus translated: