Part 35

The _Vindication_ was the work of Charles Leslie, the non-juror; _Pharamond_, a romance dealing with the Frankish empire, by La Calprenède; _Cassandra_ is wrong--the French work, also by La Calprenède, was _Cassandre_ (the son of Antipater); _All for Love_, Dryden's play; _Sophonisba_, by Lee; _The Innocent Adultery_, the second name of Sotherne's _The Fatal Marriage_; _Mithridates_ was by Lee, who also wrote _The Rival Queens, or The Death of Alexander the Great_, and _Theodosius_; _Aureng-Zebe_, Dryden's tragedy. (T. Arnold's _Addison_: Clarendon Press).

P. 213. _Sheridan._--The first reference to a circulating library given in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is an advertisement, June 12, 1742--'Proposals for erecting a Public Circulating Library in London.' Joseph Knight, in the Oxford edition of Sheridan's _Plays_, annotates this passage fully. Dillingham, sending his Latin translation of Herbert's _Porch_ to Sancroft, says: 'I know that if these should be once published, it would be too late then to prevent, if not to correct a fault; I therefore shall take it as a great kindness if you will please to put on your critical naile, and to give your impartial censure on these papers while they are yet in the tireing roome; and I shall endeavour to amend them with one great or more lesser blotts.' Sancroft replies: 'I greedily took your original in one hand, and your copy in the other, of which I had suffered one nayl (though it pretends not to be a critical one) to grow ever since you bespoke its service.'

Compare Herrick:--

Be bold, my book, nor be abashed, or fear The cutting thumb-nail, or the brow severe; But by the Muses swear, all here is good, If but, well read or ill read, understood.

Blonds=blond laces, produced from unbleached silk.

All the works mentioned have been identified. The _Innocent Adultery_ is the alternative title of Sotherne's _Fatal Marriage_; _The Whole Duty of Man_ was by Allestree, once Provost of Eton; the 'admirable Mrs. Chapone', an admirer of Richardson, and a contributor to the _Rambler_; 'Under the most repulsive exterior that any woman ever possessed she concealed very superior attainments and extensive knowledge'; Fordyce was Johnson's friend, and his sermons were specially addressed to young women.

P. 216. _Chaucer._--holwe=hollow; courtepy=short upper coat of a coarse material; fithele=fiddle; sautrye=psaltery; hente=borrow; yaf=gave; scoleye=to attend school; sentence=sentiment; souninge in=conducing to.

P. 216. _Brant._--Sebastian Brant's _Narrenschiff_, published in 1497, at Basle, was the first printed book that treated of contemporaneous events and living persons, instead of old German battles and French knights. Barclay's translation, Professor Max Müller points out, 'was not made from the original but from Locher's Latin translation. It reproduces the matter, but not the marrow of the original satire ... in some parts his translation is an improvement on the original.' _The Ship of Fools_ in its original form, and in numerous translations, had an enormous success, edition after edition being printed.

aparayle=apparatus.

P. 219. _Young._--T--n=Tonson.

P. 220. _Ferriar._--The first edition of this poem was issued as a quarto pamphlet in 1809. It is reprinted in the second volume of the second edition of Ferriar's _Illustrations of Sterne, and other Essays_, 1812, with some 140 additional lines.

'He, whom chief the laughing Muses own' is Aristophanes; the lines that follow refer to the fire of London. D--n=Dryden.

'On one of these occasions [a book-auction] a succession of valuable fragments of early English poetry brought prices so high and far beyond those of ordinary expensive books in the finest condition, that it seemed as if their imperfections were their merit; and the auctioneer, momentarily carried off with this feeling, when the high prices began to sink a little, remonstrated thus, "Going so low as thirty shillings, gentlemen,--this curious book--so low as thirty shillings--and _quite imperfect_!"'--J. H. BURTON. _The Book-Hunter._

Ferriar mentions incidentally most of the famous printers of olden time. Aldine editions were those printed by Aldo Manuzio and his family in Venice from 1490 to 1597. The Elzevir family became famous on account of its duodecimos.

P. 225. _Beresford._--_Bibliosophia; or Book-wisdom_, by the Rev. J. Beresford, was written as 'a feeling remonstrance against the _prose_ work, lately published by the Reverend T. F. Dibdin under the title of _Bibliomania; or Book-madness_', quoted in successive pages.

P. 226. _d'Israeli._--The verse is imitated from the Latin of 'Henry Rantzau, a Danish gentleman, the founder of the great library at Copenhagen, whose days were dissolved in the pleasures of reading', who 'discovers his taste and ardour in the following elegant effusion'.

P. 227. _d'Israeli._--'An allusion and pun which occasioned the French translator of the present work an unlucky blunder: puzzled no doubt by my _facetiously_, he translates "mettant comme on l'a _très judicieusement_ fait observer, l'entendement humain sous la clef". The book, and the author alluded to, quite escaped him.'--I. D'ISRAELI. _Curiosities of Literature: The Bibliomania, note._

P. 228. _Dibdin._--Magliabechi was born at Florence, October 29, 1633. 'He had never learned to read; and yet he was perpetually poring over the leaves of old books that were used in his master's shop. A bookseller, who lived in the neighbourhood, and who had often observed this, and knew the boy could not read, asked him one day "what he meant by staring so much on printed paper?" Magliabechi said that he did not know how it was, but that he loved it of all things. The consequence was that he was received, with tears of joy in his eyes, into the bookseller's shop; and hence rose, by a quick succession, into posts of literary honour, till he became librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany.'

P. 234. _Longfellow._--Bayard Taylor, born 1825, died 1878. The allusion is to the famous monument of the Emperor Maximilian in the Franciscan church, or Hofkirche, at Innsbruck, where a kneeling figure of Maximilian is surrounded by statues of his contemporaries and ancestors. The emperor is buried actually at Wiener-Neustadt. Taylor published _Prince Deukalion: a lyrical drama_, in 1878.

P. 236. _Browning._--Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis 'is apparently', Mrs. Orr says, without adding to our store of knowledge, 'the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book.'

P. 239. _de Bury._--J. H. Burton, in _The Book-Hunter_, tells the following story:--It was Thomson, I believe, who used to cut the leaves with his snuffers. Perhaps an event in his early career may have soured him of the proprieties. It is said that he had an uncle, a clever active mechanic, who could do many things with his hands, and contemplated James's indolent, dreamy, 'feckless' character with impatient disgust. When the first of _The Seasons_--_Winter_ it was, I believe--had been completed at press, Jamie thought, by a presentation copy, to triumph over his uncle's scepticism, and to propitiate his good opinion he had the book handsomely bound. The old man never looked inside, or asked what the book was about, but turning it round and round with his fingers in gratified admiration, exclaimed: 'Come, is that really our Jamie's doin' now? Weel, I never thought the cratur wad hae had the handicraft to do the like!'

P. 246. _H. Coleridge._--See Roscoe's poem to his books on parting with them, p. 9.

P. 247. _Dibdin._--'There are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces set to sale; who shall prohibit them? shall twenty licensers?'--MILTON. _Areopagitica._

P. 249. _Burns._--Mr. Andrew Lang states that Burns saw a splendidly bound but sadly neglected copy of Shakespeare in the library of a nobleman in Edinburgh, and he wrote these lines on the ample margin of one of its pages, where they were found long after the poet's death.

P. 250. _Parnell._--'It was supposed that a binding of Russian leather secured books against insects, but the contrary was recently demonstrated at Paris by two volumes pierced in every direction. The first bookbinder in Paris, Bozerian, told me he knew of no remedy except to steep the blank leaves in muriatic acid.'--PINKERTON'S _Recollections of Paris_. Parnell's poem is translated from Theodore Beza.

'Smith was very comical about a remedy of Lady Holland's for the bookworms in the library at Holland House, having the books washed with some mercurial preparation. He said it was Sir Humphry Davy's opinion that the air would become charged with the mercury, and that the whole family would be salivated, adding, "I shall see Allen some day, with his tongue hanging out, speechless, and shall take the opportunity to stick a few principles into him."'--_Bon-Mots_ of Sydney Smith, edited by W. Jerrold.

John Allen, M.D., was the librarian, described by Byron as 'the best informed and one of the ablest men I know--a perfect Magliabechi; a devourer, a _heluo_ of books'. His scepticism earned him the title of 'Lady Holland's atheist'.

P. 252. _King._--This is from J. Nichols's Collection of Poems, vol. iii, _Bibliotheca_, and is ascribed 'upon conjecture only' to Dr. W. King. _See_ p. 311.

P. 253. _d'Arblay._--Macaulay notes that Miss Burney 'describes this conversation as delightful; and, indeed, we cannot wonder that, with her literary tastes, she should be delighted at hearing in how magnificent a manner the greatest lady in the land encouraged literature'. The conversation took place at Windsor in December, 1785.

P. 255. _Lamb._--Walter Pater says of Charles Lamb: 'He was a true "collector", delighting in the personal finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's _Emblems_, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plates with his paints.'

P. 256. _Milton._--'The call for books was not in Milton's age what it is in the present. To read was not then a general amusement; neither traders, nor often gentlemen, thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women had not then aspired to literature nor was every house supplied with a closet of knowledge.'--DR. JOHNSON.

P. 257. _Browning._--The statue referred to is that of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, father of Cosimo de' Medici, in the Piazza San Lorenzo. The imaginative Sienese is Ademollo; the 'Frail one of the Flower' will be recognized as _La Dame aux Camélias_. Browning 'translates' the title-page of his 'find' thus:--

A Roman murder-case: Position of the entire criminal cause Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman, With certain Four the cutthroats in his pay, Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death By heading or hanging as befitted ranks, At Rome on February Twenty Two, Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight: Wherein it is disputed if, and when, Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape The customary forfeit.'

P. 260. _Eliot._--

I often wonder what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.

E. FITZGERALD. _Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám._

P. 263. _Lewis._--This is a portion of an imitation of Horace. _Ep._ 20, Bk. i.

P. 265. _Gay._--The authorship of this and the following poem cannot be decided definitely, but it is presumed that they were written by Gay and Pope respectively, and they have been so credited in the text.

P. 269. _Lamb._--This appeared originally in _The London Magazine_, and was reprinted by Hone in _The Every-Day Book_. It was in Hone's _Table Book_ that Lamb's extracts from the Elizabethan dramatists were published.

P. 269. _Goldsmith._--See Bacon, on p. 65, and the note thereon.

P. 270. _Scott._--Sir Walter was the first President of the Bannatyne Club, and he wrote these lines for the anniversary dinner in 1823. The club had been founded in the previous year with the object of printing works on the history and antiquities of Scotland. Bannatyne himself, whose name was given to the club, achieved immortality by copying out nearly all the ancient poetry of Scotland in 1568, at a time when the country was ravaged by plague, and the records of Scottish literature were also in danger of destruction. Of the other names mentioned here, Ritson had written a vegetarian book. The 'yeditur' was the name given by Lord Eldon to James Sibbald. 'Greysteel' was a romance that David Herd sought in vain, and it gave him his nickname.

P. 271. _Maginn._--Sung at the Booksellers' Annual Dinner, Blackwall, June 7, 1840. Fraser, whose name lives in his magazine, died in the following year.

It is very tempting to give more passages about booksellers but I must refrain as it would be foreign to the purpose of this volume, and the subject has been recently treated with great fullness and greater ability by Mr. Frank A. Mumby in _The Romance of Bookselling_.

P. 273. _de Bury._--'Would it not grieve a man of a good spirit to see Hobson finde more money in the tayles of 12 jades than a scholler in 200 bookes?'--_The Pilgrimage to Parnassus._ Hobson, the carrier, celebrated by Milton, is the hero of 'Hobson's choice'.

P. 274. _Lamb._--'The motto I proposed for the [_Edinburgh_] _Review_ was: Tenui Musam meditamur avena--"we cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal."'--SYDNEY SMITH.

P. 274. _Ruskin._--Mark Pattison said that nobody who respected himself could have less than 1,000 volumes, and that this number of octavo volumes could be stacked in a bookcase 13 feet by 10 feet and 6 inches deep. He complained that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary middle-class family is shamefully small, and he thought it monstrous that a man who is earning £1,000 a year should spend less than £1 a week on books. 'A shilling in the pound to be spent on books,' is Lord Morley's comment, 'by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected.'

P. 276. _Lamb._--Comberbatch was the name in which Coleridge enlisted in the Dragoons. _The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq._, was by Thomas Amory. Leigh Hunt describes Buncle as 'a kind of innocent Henry VIII of private life'.

Charles Lamb, who at last grew tired of lending his books, threatened to chain Wordsworth's poems to his shelves, adding:--'For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it.'--SIR T. N. TALFOURD.

P. 289. _Shakespeare._--Also in a later scene of the same play:--'Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.'

P. 292. _Wesley._--'Next morning he was still better: ... he desired to be drawn into the library, and placed by the central window, that he might look down upon the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should read to him, and when I asked from what book, he said--"Need you ask? There is but one."'--J. G. LOCKHART. _Life of Sir Walter Scott._

'It is our _duty_ to live among books, especially to live by ONE BOOK, and a very old one.'--JOHN HENRY NEWMAN in _Tracts for the Times_.

P. 296. _De Vere._--Addison speaks of Horace and Pindar as showing, when confronted with the Psalms, 'an absurdity and confusion of style,' and 'a comparative poverty of imagination'.

Coleridge has left on record his opinion that, 'after reading Isaiah or St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me, and Milton himself scarcely tolerable.'

Milton's own words may be recalled: 'There are no songs comparable to the songs of Sion; no orations equal to those of the Prophets.'

P. 296. _Swift._--Compare Cowper in _Hope_:--

In her own light arrayed, See mercy's grand apocalypse displayed! The sacred book no longer suffers wrong, Bound in the fetters of an unknown tongue; But speaks with plainness, art could never mend, What simplest minds can soonest comprehend.

Macaulay described the Bible as 'a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power'.

P. 297. _Arnold._--Wordsworth's opinion was that the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Bible formed 'the great storehouse of enthusiastic and meditative imagination'.

P. 297. _Faber._--Professor Huxley wrote in the _Contemporary Review_, in his famous article on 'The School Boards':--'Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso were once to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world.'

P. 299. _Eliot._--Maggie Tulliver, during the home troubles caused by her father's bankruptcy, receives a present of books, among which is the _Imitation of Christ_.

P. 304. _Gaskell._--The essay by Mrs. Gaskell, first published in _Household Words_ in 1854, was suggested by an article by Victor Cousin on Madame de Sablé in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Madame was a habitual guest at the Hôtel Rambouillet and friend of the Duchess de Longueville; her crowning accomplishment was the ability _tenir un salon_.

P. 311. _Alcuin._--Born at York in 735, Alcuin was the adviser of Charlemagne, whose court, under the Englishman's direction became a centre of culture. After fifteen years of court life at Aix-la-Chapelle Alcuin retired to Tours, where he died in 804. His English name is given as Ealwhine.

The catalogue refers to the library of Egbert, Archbishop of York. The translator is D. McNicoll.

P. 311. _King._--This is an extract from a poem of 1,500 lines preserved in vol. iii of Nichols's _Poems_, where it is said to be probably by Dr. W. King. It first appeared in 1712. See p. 252.

P. 313. _Pope._--For the fate of the bonfire the reader is referred to the _Dunciad_ itself. Pope explains that 'this library is divided into three parts; the first consists of those authors from whom he (the hero, i.e. Colley Cibber) stole, and whose works he mangled; the second, of such as fitted the shelves, or were gilded for show, or adorned with pictures; the third class our author calls solid learning, old Bodies of Divinity, old Commentaries, old English Printers, or old English Translations; all very voluminous, and fit to erect altars to Dulness'. Tibbald, or Theobald, wrote _Shakespear Restored_; Ogilby, poet and printer, is mentioned by Addison on p. 210; the Duchess of Newcastle was responsible for eight folios of poetical and philosophical works; Settle, the hero's brother Laureate 'for the city instead of the court'; Banks, his rival in tragedy; Broome, 'a serving man of Ben Jonson'; De Lyra or Harpsfield, whose five volumes of commentaries in folio were printed in 1472; Philemon Holland, 'the translator general of his age'; Cibber's Birthday Ode as Laureate.

William Caxton (1422-91), of course, printed, at Bruges, the first book printed in English--the _Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye_--in 1474. His printing press in Westminster was set up two years later. Wynkyn de Worde, his servant and successor, started business on his own account in 1491.

P. 314. _Sterne._--'Sterne has generally concealed the sources of his curious trains of investigation, and uncommon opinions, but in one instance he ventured to break through his restraint by mentioning Bouchet's _Evening Conferences_, among the treasures of Mr. Shandy's library.... I have great reason to believe that it was in the Skelton library some years ago, where I suspect Sterne found most of the authors of this class. I entertain little doubt, that from the perusal of this work, Sterne conceived the first precise idea of his _Tristram_, as far as anything can be called precise, in a desultory book, apparently written with great rapidity.'

This quotation is from Ferriar's _Illustrations of Sterne_, which was published in 1798. He seemed, Sir Walter Scott wrote, 'born to trace and detect the various mazes through which Sterne carried on his depredations upon ancient and dusty authors.' Ferriar wrote the following lines addressed to Sterne:--

Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways, Of antique wit and quibbling mazes drear, Let not thy shade malignant censure fear, Though aught of borrowed mirth my search betrays. Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days, (Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear;) Till waked by thee in Skelton's joyous pile, She flung on Tristram her capricious rays; But the quick tear that checks our wondering smile, In sudden pause or unexpected story, Owns thy true mastery--and Le Fever's woes, Maria's wanderings, and the Prisoner's throes, Fix thee conspicuous on the throne of glory.

P. 315. _Scott._--The modern poet is Crabbe, and the context will be found on p. 340; Thalaba is the name of Southey's hero.

P. 319. _Montaigne._--In another essay Montaigne tells us that his library for a country library could pass for a very fair one.

P. 320. _Southey._--This extract is from Southey's _Sir Thomas More_; a book of colloquies between Southey himself, under the name of Montesinos, and the apparition of Sir T. More: who tells him that 'it is your lot, as it was mine, to live during one of the grand climacterics of the world', and that, 'I come to you, rather than to any other person, because you have been led to meditate upon the corresponding changes whereby your age and mine are distinguished, and because ... there are certain points of sympathy and resemblance which bring us into contact.' The colloquies are upon such subjects as the feudal and manufacturing systems, the Reformation, prospects of Europe, infidelity, trade.

Chartier was the French poet whose 'eternal glory' it was 'to have announced the mission of Jeanne d'Arc'.

'Here are God's conduits,' &c., is from the first of Donne's _Satires_.

P. 324. _Barton._--The Rev. John Mitford (1781-1859) formed a large library at Benham, where he also devoted himself to gardening.