Part 34

That an unskilful hand had carved this print You'd say at once, seeing the living face; But, finding here no jot of me, my friends, Laugh at the botching artist's mis-attempt.

P. 106. _Fletcher._--The subject of this poem was Giles Fletcher, the author of _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 'equally beloved of the Muses and Graces.'

P. 106. _Crashaw._--From _The Flaming Heart_. 'His masterpiece, one of the most astonishing things in English or any literature, comes without warning at the end of _The Flaming Heart_. For page after page the poet has been playing on some trifling conceit ... and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet's inspiration catches fire, and then rushes up into the heaven of poetry the marvellous rocket of song: "Live in these conquering leaves," &c. The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the colourlessness of the beginning and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw's work.'--PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY. _History of Elizabethan Literature._

As an interesting example of Crashaw's conceits it may be noted that, when alluding to Mary Magdalene, he speaks of her eyes as 'Portable and compendious oceans.'

P. 107. _Voltaire._--The philosopher also remarks, in the same article, that 'there is hardly a single philosophical or theological book in which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or adding to, or subtracting from, the sense'.

P. 112. _Carlyle._--Abelard, born 1079, died 1142, is less known now as a famous teacher at the University of Paris than as the lover of Héloise.

P. 113. _Trapp and Browne._--When George I sent a present of some books, in November 1715, to the University of Cambridge, he sent at the same time a troop of horse to Oxford. This inspired Dr. Trapp and provoked the rejoinder from Sir William Browne.

P. 114. _Earle._--Mr. A. S. West, in his edition of Earle's _Microcosmographie; or a Piece of the World discovered; in Essayes and Characters_, says: 'The critic supposed that _omneis_ was the original form of the accusative plural of _omnis_, and that the forms _omnes_ and _omnis_ had taken its place. In order to adhere to the older spelling "he writes _omneis_ at length". _Quicquid_ is cited as an instance of pedantry because the ordinary man wrote the word as _quidquid_, and doubtless so pronounced it. The critic's gerund may be described as "inconformable" because it resists attraction--remains a gerund and does not become a gerundive. Or Earle may have had in view passages in which the gerund of transitive verbs with _est_ govern an object.'

P. 115. _Goldsmith._--'When Dr. Johnson is free to confess that he does not admire Gray's _Elegy_, and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the courage of their opinions?' Such is the question asked by James Payn in the _Nineteenth Century_ (March 1880), his article being entitled 'Sham Admiration in Literature'. Mr. Payn noted that 'curiously enough, it is women who have the most courage in the expression of their literary opinions', instancing the authoress of _Jane Eyre_, who 'did not derive much pleasure from the perusal of the works of the other Jane [Austen]', and Harriet Martineau, who confessed to him that she could see no beauties in _Tom Jones_.

'There is no ignorance more shameful than to admit as true that which one does not understand: and there is no advantage so great as that of being set free from error.'--XENOPHON. _Memorabilia._

P. 118. _Fielding._--'What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, _The Alchemist_, and _Tom Jones_, the three most perfect plots ever planned.... How charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is!'--S. T. COLERIDGE. _Table Talk._

P. 123. _Erasmus._--The translation is the work of Nathaniel Bailey, lexicographer and schoolmaster, who died in 1742. Desiderius and Erasmus are Latin and Greek for Gerhard 'the beloved', the name of the scholar's father.

P. 123. _Colton._--Compare R. B. Sheridan's: 'Easy writing's curst hard reading.'

P. 124. _Bacon._--Mr. A. S. Gaye, in the new Clarendon Press edition of the _Essays_, points out that on almost every page the reader will find quotations from the Bible and from the Greek and Latin classics, especially Tacitus, Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid, besides frequent allusions to biblical, classical, and mediaeval history. 'It is also remarkable that the quotations are more often than not inaccurate, not only in words but in sense.... Bacon furnished in himself an exception to the rule which he laid down in his Essay "Of Studies"; for though "reading" made him "a full man", "writing" did not make him "an exact man".'

P. 128. _Boswell._--One of Mrs. Piozzi's anecdotes of Dr. Johnson is that he asked 'Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers excepting _Don Quixote_, _Robinson Crusoe_, and the _Pilgrim's Progress_?' Johnson declared that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, 'speaking of it, I mean, as a book of entertainment.'

P. 132. _Emerson._--Shakespeare's phrase: _Taming of the Shrew_, Act I, sc. i.

P. 133. _Emerson._--O. W. Holmes applies the proverb to the Bible. 'What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.'

P. 135. _Calverley._--See Tupper's lines on page 12. The allusions are, of course, to the creations of Bulwer-Lytton.

P. 138. _Gibbon._--F. W. Robertson's opinion is worth recording: 'It is very surprising to find how little we retain of a book, how little we have really made our own, when we come to interrogate ourselves as to what account we can give of it, however we may seem to have mastered it by understanding it. Hundreds of books read once have passed as completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline of mind got by writing down, not copying, an abstract of a book which is worth the trouble, fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables one to read other books with more attention and more profit.'

P. 140. _Hamilton._--'This assumes that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us.'--LORD MORELY.

P. 145. _Addison._--Hor. _Ars Poet._ 1. 319:--

When the sentiments and manners please, And all the characters are wrought with ease, Your tale, though void of beauty, force, and art, More strongly shall delight and warm the heart; Than where a lifeless pomp of verse appears, And with sonorous trifles charms our ears.--FRANCIS.

Butler, writing of 'A small poet' (_Characters_), says: 'There was one that lined a hat-case with a paper of Benlowe's poetry: Prynne bought it by chance, and put a new demicastor into it. The first time he wore it he felt a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a vertigo.' A 'demicastor' is a hat.

P. 147. _Scott._--Mr. W. J. Courthope, in his Warton Lecture on English Poetry before the British Academy, read on October 25, 1911, observes that 'the best illustration of historic change in "romantic" temper is perhaps to be found in a comparison of Cervantes' account of the character of Don Quixote [see p. 155] with Walter Scott's representation of the romanticism of the hero of _Waverley_. Don Quixote's "fancy", says Cervantes, "grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it." ... "My intention," says Scott, "is not to follow the steps of the inimitable Cervantes in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but the more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic colouring."' Scott expatiates at length on Waverley's reading in the third chapter of his novel.

P. 148. _Boswell._--Macaulay writes in his review of Southey's edition of _The Pilgrim's Progress_: 'Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. That work was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories.'

Boswell relates that Dr. Johnson 'had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end.'

P. 149. _Chandos._--The authorship of _Horae Subsecivae_ is not absolutely known, but it is attributed to James I's favourite courtier. It was published in 1620, the year before Chandos died.

P. 149. _Waller._--'A library well chosen cannot be too extensive, but some there are who amass a great quantity of books, which they keep for show, and not for service. Of such persons, Louis XI of France aptly enough observed, that "they resembled _hunch-backed_ people, who carried a great burden, which _they never saw_".'--W. KEDDIE. _Cyclopaedia_.

P. 153. _Coleridge._--The most deadly thing that Coleridge wrote was when he classed the patrons of the circulating libraries as lower in the scale than that reading public nine-tenths of whose reading is confined to periodicals and 'Beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas [Anecdotes]'.

P. 153. _Boswell._--Dr. Birkbeck Hill points out that Boswell alludes to this opinion in one of his letters, modestly adding: 'I am afraid I have not read books enough to be able to talk from them.' Johnson particularized Langton as talking from books, 'and Garrick would if he talked seriously.'

P. 154. _S. Smith._--Bettinelli, a scholar and a Jesuit (1718-1808), who attacked the reputation of Dante and Petrarch.

Coventry Patmore wrote: 'If you want to shine as a diner-out, the best way is to know something which others do not know, and not to know many things which everybody knows. This takes much less reading, and is doubly effective, inasmuch as it makes you a really good, that is, an interested listener, as well as a talker.'--(_On Obscure Books._)

P. 154. _Colton._--'Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an index and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's treasure.'--J. GLANVILL. _The Vanity of Dogmatizing._

P. 155. _Cervantes._--A whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of Don Quixote's library. (Part i, chap, vi.) The books that, condemned by the priest, were passed into the housekeeper's hands and thence into the fire were:--_Adventures of Esplandian_; _Amadis of Greece_; _Don Olivante de Laura_; _Florismarte of Hyrcania_; _The Knight Platir_; _The Knight of the Cross_; _Bernardo del Carpio_; _Roncesvalles_; _Palmerin de Oliva_; _Diana_, called the Second, by Salmantino; _The Shepherd of Iberia_; _The Nymphs of Henares_; and _The Curse of Jealousy_. The priest, however, put by for further examination or determined to save: _Amadis de Gaul_; _The Mirror of Chivalry_, and 'all other books that shall be found treating of French matters'; _Palmerin of England_; _Don Belianis_; _Tirante the White_; _Diana_, of Montemayor, and its continuation by Gil Polo; _Ten Books of the Fortune of Love_; _The Shepherd of Filida_; _The Treasure of Divers Poems_ (de Padilla); _Book of Songs_, by Lopez Maldonado; _Galatea_, by Cervantes; _Araucana_; _Austriada_; _Monserrate_; and the _Tears of Angelica_. The curious reader will find these volumes traced in the admirable notes in J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly's edition of _Don Quixote_ in 'The World's Classics'. Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly says, devoured in his wandering youth, 'those folios of chivalrous adventures which he, and he alone, has saved from the iniquity of oblivion'. The early association of Barabbas and books will be noticed.

It is the translation by Charles Jervas, first published in 1742, which is here employed.

_The Renowned Romance of Amadis of Gaul_, by Vasco Lobeira, which was expressly condemned by Montaigne (see p. 144), was translated from the Spanish version of Garciodonez de Montalvo by Southey.

P. 159. _Ruskin._--As Mr. Frederic Harrison points out, 'Books are no more education than laws are virtue; and, just as profligacy is easy within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found with a narrow education.'

P. 159. _E. B. Browning._--This letter was written to 'Orion' Horne three years before Mrs. Browning's marriage in 1843, when she was thirty-seven. Compare Matthew Arnold in the preface to _Literature and Dogma_ (1873): 'Nothing can be truer than what Butler says, that really, in general, no part of our time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading. Still, culture is indispensably necessary, and culture is reading; but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system.'

P. 161. _Maurice._--This is better than Sydney Smith's attitude expressed in the question, 'Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?'

P. 162. _Blackie._--'Reading is seeing by proxy--is learning indirectly through another man's faculties, instead of directly through one's own faculties; and such is the prevailing bias, that the indirect learning is thought preferable to the direct learning, and usurps the name of cultivation.'--HERBERT SPENCER. _The Study of Sociology._

P. 163. _Montaigne._--'Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.'--LORD MORLEY.

P. 163. _Davies._--

What is the end of Fame? 'Tis but to fill A certain portion of uncertain paper ... To have, when the original is dust, A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.

LORD BYRON, _Don Juan_.

P. 164. _Hall._--'Hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppitations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies.'--R. BURTON. _The Anatomy of Melancholy._

P. 165. _Lytton._--'I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop, filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.'--O. W. HOLMES. _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table._

P. 169. _Walpole._--Mr. Augustine Birrell in _Obiter Dicta: The Office of Literature_ writes that the author's office is to make the reader happy:--

'Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books--these are our demands....

'Literature exists to please--to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures--and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office.'

P. 169. _Chaucer._--The book referred to is Ovid's _Metamorphoses_.

P. 169. _Digby._--Sir Kenelm Digby's 'observations' are generally printed with _Religio Medici_, although in a letter to Sir T. Browne, who had written to him on the subject, he explained that the hastily set down notes did not merit the press, and would 'serve only for a private letter, or a familiar discourse with lady-auditors'.

To Sir Thomas Browne, 'a library,' says Coleridge, 'was a living world, and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood.'

P. 170. _Boswell._--'Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, where as in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, ends, falls of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c. Plutarch therefore calls them _secundas mensas et bellaria_, the second courses and junkets, because they were usually read at noblemen's feasts.'--R. BURTON. _Anatomy_.

P. 171. _Rabelais._--

Whence is thy learning? Hath thy toil O'er books consumed the midnight oil?--J. GAY.

P. 171. _Wilson._--This is often taken to be an antique. As a matter of fact, Mr. John Wilson, a London bookseller, stated to Mr. Austin Dobson that he wrote the lines as a motto for one of his second-hand catalogues. Wilson, Mr. Dobson tells us, was amused at the vogue the lines eventually obtained.

P. 172. _Chaucer._--This is the earlier version, and to be preferred to the later, in which the passage ends:

Farwel my book and my devocioun!

wel unethe=scarcely any.

P. 175. _Tickle._--'Written in a fit of the gout.'

'And laid the storm,' &c.: the advice given to Augustus by Athenodorus the Stoic philosopher.

See Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_, Act v, sc. i. Holofernes 'teaches boys the horn-book'.

P. 181. _Richardson._--In his preface to _Pamela_ Richardson claims to give 'practical examples worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the obliging wife'. The heroine becomes Mrs. B----, and Billy is the first-born. Locke's treatise was published in 1693, or forty-seven years before Richardson's novel, and the philosopher observes 'That most Children's Constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by _Cockering and Tenderness_'. 'Mr. B.' recommended better than he knew.

P. 181. _Johnson_ ('At large in the library').--Ruskin gives the same advice. See p. 208.

P. 183. _Gibbon._--The _Autobiography_, in Sir Archibald Alison's opinion, is 'the most perfect account of an eminent man's life, from his own hand, which exists in any language'.

P. 186. _Landor._--See the poem to Wordsworth on p. 21.

P. 187. _Hunt._--The friend referred to was Shelley.

P. 188. _Dickens._--Of this passage, Forster says in the _Life of Dickens_, 'It is one of the many passages in _Copperfield_ which are literally true.... Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into _David Copperfield_; the only change in the fiction being his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by means of which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.'

Apropos of Defoe, Macaulay, who could not 'understand the mania of some people about Defoe', admitted that 'he certainly wrote an excellent book--the first part of _Robinson Crusoe_ ... my delight before I was five years old'.

P. 189. _Hazlitt._--It is reported (Dibdin relates in _Bibliomania_) that a certain man, of the name of Similis, who fought under the Emperor Hadrian, became so wearied and disgusted with the number of troublesome events which he met with in that mode of life, that he retired and devoted himself wholly to leisure and reading, and to meditations upon divine and human affairs, after the manner of Pythagoras. In this retirement, Similis was wont frequently to exclaim that '_now_ he began to _live_': at his death he desired the following inscription to be placed upon his tomb.

Here lies Similis; In the seventieth year of his age But only the seventh of his life.

In a note it is stated that 'This story is related by Dion Cassius and from him told by Spizelius in his _Infelix Literarius_'.

P. 190. _Donne._--This is the title given by Donne's editors, but is nonsense. Grosart explains that Pindar's instructress was Corinna the Theban, and that Lucan's 'help' is probably his helpmeet--Argentaria Polla, his wife who survived him.

P. 192. _Dante._--This is the famous passage in Canto V referring to Paolo and Francesca.--(Cary's translation.)

P. 196. _Moore._--

For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?

SHAKESPEARE. _Love's Labour's Lost_, Act IV. Sc. iii.

P. 198. _More._--Warton thinks it probable that Sir Thomas More--'one of the best jokers of the age'--may have written this epigram, which he considers the first pointed epigram in our language. But by some the lines are credited to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who is memorable, among other things, for introducing the sonnet from Italy into England, a distinction which he shares with Wyatt.

P. 199. _Moore._--'Mamurra was a dogmatic philosopher, who never doubted about anything, except who was his father; Bombastus, one of the names of the great scholar and quack Paracelsus. St. Jerome was scolded by an angel for reading Cicero, as Gratia tells the story in his _Concordantia discordantium Canonum_, and says, that for this reason bishops were not allowed to read the classics'.

P. 203. _Scott._--The Roxburgh Club was inaugurated on the day of the sale of the Duke of Roxburgh's library in 1812 in order to print for members rare books or manuscripts. The club had numerous offspring, including the Bannatyne Club (see p. 270, and the note thereon). The Duke of Roxburgh's library, which was celebrated for its Caxtons, sold for £23,341.

P. 205. _E. B. Browning._--

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness-- And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

E. FITZGERALD. _Omar Khayyám._

P. 207. _Macaulay._--'Neither we nor divinity require much learning in women; Francis, Duke of Brittany, son to John V, when he was spoke unto for a marriage between him and Isabel, a daughter of Scotland, and some told him she was meanly brought up, and without any instruction of learning, answered he loved her the better for it, and that a woman was wise enough if she could but make a difference between the shirt and doublet of her husband's.'--MONTAIGNE.

P. 208. _Ruskin._--Compare Johnson's advice on page 181.

P. 209. _Addison._--Virgil _Aeneid_, vii. 805:

Unused to spinning, in the loom unskilled.--DRYDEN.

The _Virgil_ of Ogilby, or Ogilvy, originally a dancing-master, was published in 1649, and was the first complete English translation (Ogilby is mentioned by Pope, see page 313); _Cassandra_, _Cleopatra_, _Astraea_, _The Grand Cyrus_ and _Clelia_ were French romances translated into English. Sidney called his pastoral romance _The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_; Sherlock's _Discourse on Death_ passed through forty editions; _The Fifteen Comforts_, a translation of a French satirical work of the fifteenth century; Sir Richard Baker's _Chronicle of the Kings of England from the time of the Romans' Government unto the Death of King James_ (1641); Mrs. Manley was tried for libelling the nobility in her _Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atlantis_ (1707); the Fielding referred to is Beau Fielding, tried at the Old Bailey in 1706 for a bigamous marriage with the Duchess of Cleveland.

In Addison's time, Dr. Johnson wrote, 'in the female world, any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.'

P. 211. _Addison._--Hor. 2 _Ep._ ii. 61:

What would you have me do, When out of twenty I can please not two?-- One likes the pheasant's wing, and one the leg; The vulgar boil, the learned roast an egg; Hard task, to hit the palate of such guests.--POPE.