AT THE LIBRARY TABLE

Whether there are many who take much interest in books about books is a matter of doubt. Multitudes of people like to think that they are fond of books merely as books, and derive great comfort from the innocent delusion that they delight in the possession of them. A neat and imposing library is an attractive ornament of the country house as well as of the city mansion, and if the volumes are bound in a becoming fashion, by Zaehnsdorf, Rivière, Lortic, or Cobden-Sanderson, they look well on the shelves and impart to the establishment an air of dignity and refinement. But it is a portentous question whether the majority of book-owners ever find occasion or opportunity to inquire within or to inform themselves about the contents of the tomes which line the walls of the comfortable library. The toilers who are absorbed in the drudgery of daily work have little leisure to expend on the inside of their books, and the merry idlers who devote their energies to sports, athletic or otherwise, amusements, and the varied diversions which occupy the minds of the members of our modern “society”, have still less. My dear friend, the average man, deserving as he is of admiration and respect, cannot have much interest in books which are purely bookish, and my dearer friend, the average woman, who now and again plunges calmly but despairingly into the depths of “literature”,—combining with others of her kind in so-called reading clubs, so as to share her afflictionswith her fellows—secretly longs for the sweets of fiction while she pretends to be fond of such stupid performances as essays and dissertations. In the recesses of her personality she regards works of that description as bores to be avoided; and very likely she is not far wrong.

Mind, I am not talking of inhabitants of Boston, Massachusetts. It may be that my notions are derived wholly from my New York environment. A New Yorker appears to think that it is an evidence of weakness to allow any one to find out that books are dear to him, and seems to be as loath to confess the passion as he would be to proclaim at the club or upon the house-tops his fond attachment to the lady of his choice. In the goodly number of years during which I have trodden the pavements and availed of the facilities of transit afforded by the street-railways of the city whereof we are justly proud, I do not remember hearing the subject of books or of things pertaining to books discussed or even referred to by any of my neighbors. But recently in Boston, while walking on Boylston Street, I passed two lads who were still in their later teens, and distinctly heard one of them say, “the Latin derivation of that word is”—I lost the rest of it. In New York he would have been uttering something in the vulgar argot used by the youth of our times,—preserved and fostered by the newspaper—about “de cops” or “de Giants”, or the superiority of some novel brand of cigarettes. They would have blushed for shame to be discovered in the possession of any knowledge of such discreditable matters as “Latin” or “derivations” of any description. The gospel of “doing things” has been preached to them so strenuously that they have long since forgotten, if they ever knew, that there is any virtue in “knowing things”.

Sitting at the library table and letting my eyes wander with affection to the adjacent shelves, I try to fancy who buys the multitudinous books of memoirs and reminiscences, of literary, dramatic and political gossip, which are poured forth so profusely from the English presses. Now and then I encounter their titles in seductive catalogues and purchase them at large reductions from the original prices—“published at £3 10s and marked down to 7s 6d.” We have nothing quite like them in these United States, or very little, because they do not “pay”, as the phrase runs. I wonder whether these English books “pay” in England, but I am inclined to think that they must, for publishers are not usually actuated by motives of pure philanthropy; they do not print for pleasure only or for personal gratification in bringing out the screeds of ambitious authors. I like those English books; their type is large and legible; the paper has a substantial mellowness; and the simple bindings are well-fitted to be torn off and replaced by real bindings. They have the merit of what may be called “skippability”, for the writers are sadly given to deplorable diffuseness and degenerate frequently into tediousness for which I love them, as a fellow-sinner. They convey impressions of abundant leisure and unlimited vocabulary. Does an author ever become conscious that he is growing tedious? If he does, how he must revel in the thought that, despite his tediousness, some daring explorer will toil through his pages, and that in some library at least, be it that of the British Museum or of our own Congress, his book will stand triumphantly upon the shelves in the company of Lord Avebury’s One Hundred.

I do not believe that an ordinary American, at least in these days, would dream of publishing such a bookas “Gossip From Paris”, the correspondence (1864–1869) of Anthony B. North Peat, which the Kegan Paul house brought out a few years ago. Some one may say that an American could not, and I will not deny the charge if it is made. North Peat, whose name sounds like that of a station on the Grand Trunk Railway, was not by any means a famous person, but he was a clever and an observant journalist and there is much of interest in the volume mingled with much that is of no present interest whatever. One passage has given me comfort, because it contains something rarely encountered—a good word for the collector of autographs. Usually when an author is feeling a little rancor about life generally, he will go far out of his way to kick an autograph collector. I purr slightly when I quote what North Peat wrote in September, 1866.

“I know one man in Paris who has an extensive library composed exclusively of works in one volume and of the same folio; but, perhaps, among the manifold phases of the collecting mania none is more excusable than that of gathering autographs.*** To read over the names and the tariff at which signatures or letters are quoted gives a most curious insight into the place held in public opinion by the generals, diplomatists, poets, literary men, composers, and even criminals whose handwritings are eagerly sought for by amateurs. Last month the prices ran thus: George Sand, 6f.; Seward, 10f.; Jefferson Davis, 15f.; Duke of Morny, 4f. 50c.; Michelet, 1f. 75c.; McClellan, 20f.; Verdi, 3f. 50c.; Prévost Paradol, 2f. 50c.; Champfleury, 2f. Gerard de Nerval is quoted 20f., thanks to a note attached to the letter, ‘correspondance amoreuse très passionée.’ A copybook of the King of Rome is quoted 20f. Rénan, the sceptic author ofLa Vie de Jèsus, keeps up in the market, and goes for10f. A letter of Henri Latouche is to be sold for 2f. 50c.; it contains the following curious passage: ‘The only souvenirs of my literary life to which I look back with pride are, having editedAndré Chénierand having deterred George Sand from devoting her talents to water-colour drawing.’ A letter of Louis XVI is quoted at 2f. 50c., by which the King grants a sum of 2400f. (£100) to ‘La Dame Rousseau, cradle-rocker to the children of France’.”

I have quoted thus at length not only because of my pride in the compliment to autograph collectors but because the prices mentioned must bring a pang to the hearts of those who buy now-a-days and pay more than ten times as much for George Sands, Verdis, and Louis XVIs. I can imagine the sensations of a dealer of to-day if some innocent should offer fifty cents for that Louis XVI document—I am confident that it was not a letter. Mr. North Peat has overlooked the fact, as is common with those who do not belong to the inner brotherhood, that contents are of much consequence in establishing the market value of autograph letters, but his figures are not without significance. Some of us are glad to observe that even in 1866 McClellan’s autograph “fetched” twice as much as Seward’s and six times as much as Verdi’s.

Very unlike the reasonable remarks of North Peat is the autographic deliverance of that once celebrated “educator”, Mr. Horace Mann. This gem of wisdom, given to me by a Boston friend in a malicious spirit of kindly generosity, is lying on the library table. It reads thus:—

“I would rather perform one useful act for my fellow men than to be the possessor of all the autographs in the world.

Horace Mann.

“West Newton, April 23, ’50.”

It is an excellent specimen of the smug self-satisfaction, the Chadbandian cant, the affectation of altruism which marked the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly in the regions lying about West Newton. Cheap enough withal it seems to be, for as he could never by any chance become “the possessor of all the autographs in the world”, his expression of preference signifies nothing whatever. The formula is simple enough. Select something which sounds noble and unselfish and then say that you would rather do that thing than to have—all the diamonds, all the pictures, all the Caxtons, all the gold mines, all the puppy-dogs and all the tabby-cats in the universe. It is in contemporaneous vernacular, a safe “bluff”. If he had said that he would rather perform one useful act for his fellow men than to be the owner of a hundred shares of Standard Oil, it would have had some meaning, for one could then measure the precise extent of his devotion to the welfare of mankind. One may naturally inquire, why not have all the autographs in the world and do not one but many useful acts for one’s fellow men? There is no inherent incompatibility between the two ideas.

It may be suggested that the subject of books about books and the gathering of autographs are not cognate; that they have no relation to each other; that they are illegally joined together in defiance of the laws laid down in Day’s Praxis. I knew a dignified New England author, lawyer and soldier who was accustomed, when assailed by a proposition to which he did not assent, but which he was too polite to dispute, to close discussion by the sententious remark, “That indeed”. I never fully understood precisely what it meant, but it seemed to be conclusive for there was nomore to be said. It was like some of the cryptic utterances of that model of concise expression, Mr. F’s aunt. But I maintain that the man who truly covets autographs, covets books likewise for the sake of the books themselves, irrespective of style or contents. It may be one of Mr. Crother’s One Hundred Worst Books, but all the more precious for that very reason. My point is easily demonstrated by a logical device not uncommonly adopted by those who manufacture our opinions for us in the public press. The man who—to continue the locution of Mr. Joseph Surface—does not feel a fondness for books of the bookish sort, derives no gratification from the ownership of autographs. I am not referring to the pseudo-collector with his album or to the encourager of profanity who besets the living great with requests for his signature. I allude, sir, as General Cyrus Choke said in regard to the British lion, to him who finds a charm in written words penned by the hand of a warrior, a statesman, or a scholar. It is a charm that may not be defined, for when you venture upon a definition it softly and suddenly vanishes away like the Baker who encountered the Snark that was a Boojum in the Carrollian fable.

I am not ashamed to acknowledge that there is something about the exterior of books which appeals to our warmest affections. We love to sit among them and enjoy the sight of them as many rejoice in the prospect of lake, valley and mountain. Dear old R. Wilfer inOur Mutual Friendhad one darling wish, to possess at one time a complete new attire from boots to hat, but he never attained that glorious pinnacle. The late Sultan of Turkey, thirty years or more ago, had an enthusiasm for rifles, bought a lot of them at anenormous cost, and constructed for the storage of these treasures a kind of mausoleum of rifles, a grand edifice in which the muskets were arranged in serried ranks radiating from a centre where, upon a throne, the potentate who called himself Abdul Hamid Khan Sani, Sultan and Sovereign of the Ottoman Empire, was accustomed to sit in solemn and solitary state while he gloated over his acquisitions. In like spirit I would exult if I could have a library room where I could see all the books at once, reviewing the beloved brigades and cheerfully foregoing the reading of them. To marshal the regiments of books, the well-uniformed battalions, the heavy artillery of the folios, the light skirmishers of the duodecimos, would bring a joy akin to that which the pompous and patriotic soldier, the vainest of men, Brevet Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, used to feel when, sitting on his charger, he reviewed the valiant little army which conquered Mexico over sixty years ago. This recalls to me that in the innocent hours of childhood I supposed that the head which Salome demanded was brought to King Herod on just such a charger as the General bestrode according to the veracious picture which hung over the sofa in the “back parlor”, when I also firmly believed that the baskets in which the fragments were gathered after the miracle were the large, ordinary baskets used in our laundry.

Vain as he was, the old General was a good, sturdy warrior, and no one can read his egotistical memoirs without becoming aware of the fact, in spite of his enormous self conceit. When King Edward VII visited us as Prince of Wales in 1860, I saw the royal youth on the parade-ground at West Point. I remember him well, for as A. Ward observed, “I seldom forgita person”. But the General was the man I longed to gaze upon, and I regret that a facetious uncle easily persuaded me that the gorgeous drum-major who led the band was the Great Scott himself. The materiality of this reminiscence lies in the fact that a volume of Scott’s Memoirs is usually to be found on the library table, a model of what an autobiography ought not to be. Soldiers in later days learned to write the story of their battles with more good taste and modesty. Perhaps General Benjamin F. Butler was an exception, but he was not a soldier, and his battles were very few; and those of us who loved and honored McClellan regret the publishing of his “Own Story”, a deed he would never have countenanced. A man should never be judged by what he writes to his wife.

It would not be amiss if some fair-minded and competent person would give us a candid and impartial history of some of the men who have been dealt with unjustly by the merciless masses in this country. McClellan is one of these victims, although students of military affairs have begun to comprehend the truth about him; but the great majority still believe that he was a timid, dilatory and inefficient commander who quarrelled with his President without a cause. General Arthur St. Clair, of revolutionary times, was even a greater sufferer, and he has been so long dead that his record may be judged calmly. Aaron Burr has had several defenders, and it is now well established that whatever sins he may have committed, treason was not one of them. Martin Van Buren, sorely maligned by partisan historians, has been ably vindicated by Edward Morse Shepard. James K. Polk, Chief Justice Taney, and Andrew Johnson also deserve to be relieved from many of the aspersions which have been plentifully bestowedupon them. Unfortunately there is a tendency on the part of most men who undertake a work of that character to become advocates rather than judges, and to impair the influence of their arguments by an excess of ardor.

Most of us find that as the number of our years increases we are apt to pass more and more of our time at the library table, within easy reach of the shelves. I have been charged with believing that books are “the chief things in life”; I admit that they are not and ought not to be that, but I see no reason why we should not be allowed to enjoy them as we would any other innocent pleasure, in due moderation. A good many young people might as well be accused of believing that sports were the chief things in human existence; and both in England and in this country I apprehend that sports engross the attention of the multitude to the exclusion of such minor things as books; but I find no fault with them because they choose pleasures different from mine.

Youth is a pleasure in itself, but one may be allowed to have misgivings as to whether its joys are not in some degree overrated. Certainly our young people seem to work very hard to get their fun out of life, and after they have had it they do not appear to be much the better for it. We often sigh for our lost youth, and if we are lucky enough to be able to remember so much of our Horace, we whisper to ourselves “Eheu fugaces” and the rest of it, while if we were confronted by a decree that we must go over it all again, Latin included, we would beg for mercy, or, if we happened to be lawyers, ask for an adjournment. It is “a wise dispensation of Providence”—if one may be permitted to refer tothe mandates of Providence in that patronizing way—that the old have their pleasures too and that the boys and girls are not violating any congressional or legislative provisions against trusts by having a monopoly of enjoyment. Most of these pleasures are associated with books. Talleyrand’s sad, wistless old age is of no moment when compared with a sad bookless old age.

The accusation that the lover of books cares more for them than he does about life and its varied problems, is as unjust as the complaint, preferred—semi-jocosely, it must be owned—by that pertinacious bibliophile, Irving Browne, that “the book-worm does not care for nature”. He quotes the animal as saying:

“I feel no need of nature’s flowers,—Of flowers of rhetoric I have store;I do not miss the balmy showers—When books are dry I o’er them pore.No need that I should take the troubleTo go abroad to walk or ride,For I can sit at home and doubleQuite up with pain from Akenside.”

“I feel no need of nature’s flowers,—Of flowers of rhetoric I have store;I do not miss the balmy showers—When books are dry I o’er them pore.

“I feel no need of nature’s flowers,—

Of flowers of rhetoric I have store;

I do not miss the balmy showers—

When books are dry I o’er them pore.

No need that I should take the troubleTo go abroad to walk or ride,For I can sit at home and doubleQuite up with pain from Akenside.”

No need that I should take the trouble

To go abroad to walk or ride,

For I can sit at home and double

Quite up with pain from Akenside.”

The punster is such a derelict, such a scoffed-at sinner, that he may not be taken very seriously. Others than Browne however, have gravely reproached the devotee of the library for his alleged lack of affection for the outer world and its beauties. But the man who knows his Gilbert White of Selborne, and his John Burroughs of the Hudson, cannot be wholly outside the ranks of nature-lovers. We may be uttering a truism when we say that as we grow older we come closer to mother earth, and as we strike off more and more years from our calendar all the sweet things of earth are nearer to us and the trees, the flowers, the fields, and the wideexpanse of hill, river and valley take on a new meaning. A few days ago I “took a drive”, if one may avail of that wretched colloquial form of words, to the hamlet of Bedminster, name suggestive of Axminster with its carpets and Westminster with its monuments, as far as the site of the old church which was ruthlessly and needlessly destroyed by iconoclasts within a year or two. It was a delightful autumn drive, the joy of it tempered by the abominable automobile which infests our New Jersey roads with its hoots and stinks and cloudy mantle of dust: and the bookish associations surely did not detract from the pleasure. There is a good picture of the church in Melick’s “Story of an Old Farm”, a book containing a mine of information about a neighborhood filled with associations of the Revolution. When you pass by the graveyard which still remains, you cannot help thinking of the young English officer, wounded and captured at Princeton, who died on the journey to Morristown and was buried in that field where his monument remains at this day. Melick’s book is disorderly and needs condensing and arranging, but let no one tell me that the natural beauty of the country is lessened for me because I study it. It is one of those most often to be found on the library table in company with Ludwig Schumacher’s pretty story of the “Somerset Hills”.

Many of us may recall from our own experience examples of the peace and contentment, the grace and the dignity of book-lovers who have understood how to combine their pleasure with the active affairs of business. I remember affectionately one who had passed beyond the years of what Elisha Williams called “God Almighty’s statute of limitations”, and who went to his rest only a few months ago. Elbridge Goss, of Melrose, was a type of a New England gentleman, a manof business as well as a lover of literature and of historical pursuits, fond of his books and autographs, all in a mild, modest and unobtrusive way; a gentle, admirable man, deserving of esteem and honor. There was no pretense about him; he had a delightful simplicity, a true catholicity of sentiment; there was no envy, hatred or malice in his composition. His “Life of Paul Revere” has long been known favorably, and his other works, chiefly historical, were no less meritorious. His was a full, useful and well rounded life, and although his name may not be recorded among the famous, it will not be forgotten.

Some weeks before his death, he wrote to me thus: “As to your copy of Coleridge, has it the expunged verse from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’? The genial Longfellow once picked up his copy from his centre-table and read it to me as follows:

‘A gust of wind sterte up behindAnd whistled thro’ his bones,Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouthHalf whistles and half groans.’

‘A gust of wind sterte up behind

And whistled thro’ his bones,

Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth

Half whistles and half groans.’

When Coleridge saw it in print, he took his pencil, crossed it off, and wrote in the margin, ‘To be struck out. S. T. C.’ It did not appear in subsequent editions.” Coleridge did well to erase it for it is dangerously near to the ludicrous.

Whether the poet’s later emendations of his published verses are always improvements is problematical. We have been surfeited of late with examples of Tennyson’s amendments. He seems never to have been wholly satisfied with his work. In Buxton Forman’s “Keat’s Poetry and Prose”, one may perceive that apoet’s changes while sometimes making the lines smoother, almost invariably weaken the effect. It is so with Byron. The first thought and image, coming fresh from the brain, are usually more vigorous and poetic than the sober second-thoughts, and alterations appear to enfeeble the expression. It is Doctor Johnson’s “wit enough to keep it sweet” and the “putrefaction” amendment all over again. That, my friend who loves to ask “Why first editions?” is one of the reasons why.

The reference to Buxton Forman leads me to record an amusing bit of characteristic English newspaper wisdom. Some years ago in a book about autographs I ventured to make some remarks concerning Keats and Forman which drew down upon me the sneers of a London journal, the purport of which was that my observations were vulgar and peculiarly American. After I had recovered from the exaltation of spirit arising from being noticed at all by such an eminent authority, I permitted myself to indulge in justifiable mirth because it happened that I had stolen those very remarks from an old number of the LondonAthenæumin which my Keats letter had been copied and described: but according to the well known custom of plagiarists, I had accidentally omitted the quotation marks. I inferred that an English assertion becomes vulgar only when it is repeated by a despicable Yankee. Never again will I be guilty of petit larceny.

This matter of quotations is often a troublesome one. I am sorry now that I left out those neat little commas. The orator has an unfair advantage over the writer, because he is not obliged to use them, and in common justice he should be required to give some sign that the eloquent sentences he borrows are not his own: hemight be compelled to hold up two fingers. A good, well rounded quotation is a great help when ideas grow so timid that they refuse to come at your call. I suppose that a lawyer who is asked to speak before assemblages, on some legal topic, almost always consultsBartlett’s Familiar Quotations, where he finds little to aid him except that respectable old stand-by, “The seat of the law is the bosom of God; her voice, the harmony of the world”. It sounds well and it makes a sonorous finale, besides giving the impression that the quoter is accustomed to occupy himself with the works of fine old authors: although it always seemed to me that when applied to what we call “the law” in these times, it is rather highly colored. A friend who was an admirer of the sentiment once carefully prepared an “address” to be delivered before the Maryland Bar Association, and had it printed in advance, lugging in the famous lines at the close of his peroration. To his horror, the learned President of the Association, who spoke immediately before him, and who evidently had aBartlettof his own, closed an admirable speech with the same old “seat” and “bosom” story. There was nothing to be done but to pour it forth again upon the heads of those helpless Marylanders, on whom it must have had a “punch brothers” effect; but that man will never trot out the “harmony” yarn again unless he is sure that he is to have the first chance at it.

Mr. James Ford Rhodes in an entertaining paper about Edward Gibbon, expresses his belief that the historian of Rome’s decline and fall thought with Thucydides “My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten”. It is not a particularly novel observation, but a fadedpamphlet lying before me is a reminder of the fact that “prize compositions”, “prize poems”, and “poems on occasions” are always much the same as they were in the time of Thucydides, feeble things, and the wonder is why men go on encouraging them and why sane people continue to produce them, unless there is a fond hope that some of them may turn out to be as good as “The Builders” of Henry Van Dyke or the great Commemoration Ode of James Russell Lowell. Even the devoted worshipers of the Autocrat must admit that as his college class drew nearer to the front rank of the Alumni processions, his reunion-verses grew quite tiresome; but no one could go on for some seventy years writing anniversary stanzas on the same theme without degenerating into the commonplace. The pamphlet is a little one of thirteen pages, entitled “Pompeii, A Poem which obtained the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement, July, 1819; by Thomas Babington Macaulay, of Trinity College.” It was of this juvenile poem that the boyish author wrote to his father on February 5, 1819: “I have not, of course, had time to examine with attention all your criticism on ‘Pompeii’. I certainly am much obliged to you for withdrawing so much time from more important business to correct my expressions. Most of the remarks which I have examined are perfectly just; but as to the more momentous charge, the want of a moral, I think it might be a sufficient defence that, if a subject is given which admits of none, the man who writes without a moral is scarcely censurable.”[1]Poets, whether young or old, seldom take kindly to criticism of their lines, but one cannot help feeling some sympathy with theyouthful Thomas in his gentle rebellion against the unpoetic demand of his somewhat priggish parent for a “moral”, although the subject of “Pompeii” ought to be far more fruitful of “morals” than that which ten years later was inflicted upon Tennyson, whose “Timbuctoo” carried off the prize in 1829. The Laureate’s successful “piece” is less impressive than Thackeray’s biting burlesque—not of Tennyson but of everything produced on that absurd theme—beginning something like this:

“In Africa—a quarter of the world—Men’s skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled,And somewhere there, unknown to public view,A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.”

“In Africa—a quarter of the world—

Men’s skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled,

And somewhere there, unknown to public view,

A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo.”

Tennyson competed because his father wished him to, and “in place of preparing a new poem he furbished up an old one written in blank verse instead of the orthodox heroic couplet and sent it in.”[2]Milnes wrote at the time, “Tennyson’s poem has made quite a sensation; it is certainly equal to most parts of Milton!” The future Lord Houghton was a cheerful, genial person, if hewasguilty of the most abominable handwriting I ever encountered, for the celebrated scrawls of James Payn, Charles Darwin and Horace Greeley are copperplate script in comparison; and Milnes was only twenty then. I knew quite a number of Tennysons and Miltons, of the mute, inglorious sort, when I was enjoying the enthusiasms of that period of life, under the shadow of the Princeton elms; but somehow their chariots have all been transformed into motor-cars, although they have avoided the fate of Phaëthon, that mythological prototype of a chauffeur.

“Pompeii”, naturally enough, is a fair example of the stilted verse which a bright lad might well have written in 1819. He tells us, among other interesting details, how

“In vain Vesuvius groans with wrath supprest,And mutter’d thunder in his burning breast,Long since the Eagle from that flaming peakHath soar’d with screams a safer nest to seek.Aw’d by th’ infernal beacon’s fitful glareThe howling fox hath left his wonted lair;Nor dares the browzing goat in vent’rous leapTo spring, as erst, from dizzy steep to steep;”

“In vain Vesuvius groans with wrath supprest,

And mutter’d thunder in his burning breast,

Long since the Eagle from that flaming peak

Hath soar’d with screams a safer nest to seek.

Aw’d by th’ infernal beacon’s fitful glare

The howling fox hath left his wonted lair;

Nor dares the browzing goat in vent’rous leap

To spring, as erst, from dizzy steep to steep;”

the moral, which father Zachary failed to detect, being that these intelligent brutes had much more foresight than mere Man, and had wisely decided that a volcano in eruption was “no place for them”.

Poor as prize poems may be as poetry, some famous men have not disdained to enter into the competitions. Lord Selborne’s effort gained for him the Newdigate prize in 1832, and was deemed worthy of publication inBlackwood. The list of prize winners in the two great Universities might well be worth studying, even if the poetry came from the machine and not from inspiration. Byron’s Address on the opening of the new Drury Lane has not survived, but the “Rejected Addresses”, spontaneous andhors concours, will never be wholly forgotten. Indeed a grave personage is recorded as saying of them that he did not understand why they should have been rejected, as some of them were very good.

A book-lover may think that he has an affection for all books, but he surely must draw the line at law-books, books of theology and medical treatises. So many people who have a notion that a book is valuable to acollector merely because it is old, will insist on bringing to me, in the kindness of their hearts, ancient theological tomes, for example, which are in fact less desirable than old Directories and not for a moment to be compared with old Almanacs. I have a friend who is enamored of school-books and books on mathematics; a mania that has method in it and I can understand the merit of it better than I can the pursuit of first editions of Trollope. He has a remarkable collection and has printed a catalogue in two volumes, not only complete in all details but a handsome specimen of book-making. He showed me a copy once, and in a moment of hallucination I thought that he was going to give it to me, but he carried it away. I am not sure that I would be interested in the collection, and he cares as little for my autographs as I do for his arithmetics. I was silly enough to speak of my hobby while he was fussing with his catalogue and I saw his eyes assume that far-away look which meant that he heard me and that was all. When any one with feigned interest says, “I would like so much to see your autographs”, I smile inwardly, if such a feat is possible, and I know that it is only one of those polite fictions which go so far towards making life pleasant. Very few people, especially those with a pet hobby of their own, care a straw about other people’s collections, except perhaps in the matter of paintings, which, to use an abominable but familiar phrase, is “altogether a different proposition”. The other man’s collection seldom assumes importance until the auctioneer falls heir to it. For collectors seldom have much sympathy with collectors who occupy different fields from theirs: indeed I have found more true sympathy between collectors and non-collectors. Steele in one of the numbers of theTatlerdeals with the mania of collectingand makes much poor fun of one Nicholas Gimcrack, an entomologist, who spent a fortune in accumulating insects; but entomologists have their uses and perhaps Gimcrack, if such a person ever lived, might have retorted that his spiders were as well worth having as Sir Richard’s unparalleled collection of unpaid bills. There are useful features of postage-stamp collecting; there are attractions about the hoards of numismatists; one can see why even game-chickens may be profitably “collected”; but I fancy that the hobby of a lady of my acquaintance—the collecting of pianos—might be attended with inconveniences. I fear that the hapless being who confesses that he is an autograph collector receives the most general condemnation. I once had a notion of bringing together what might be called the by-products of autograph-collecting,—a collection of all the ill-natured and abusive things ever written or printed about autograph collectors from the beginning of the world to the present day, but it would probably fill a book as big as my Boydell Shakespeare, which is so unwieldy that I have had serious thoughts of hiring the tower of the Metropolitan Life Building to hold it. Yet how kind some of our busiest and greatest men have been to the wretches who “write for autographs”; the record of their long-suffering patience would fill another large volume.

There are other manifestations of the autograph fever almost as troublesome as the familiar prayer for the signature of the person addressed; there is, for example, the begging of autographs of other people which the victim is supposed to possess. Hawthorne, when applied to in this manner, became quite fierce and intimated with some vigor that the letters of his friends were valuable to him and not to be parted with. Thevenerable Bishop White was more gentle, when beset by that pioneer of American collectors, Doctor William B. Sprague. There is a pleasant, old-fashioned dignity about the Bishop’s letter which tempts me to reproduce it from the original now lying on the library table. It is a model, and if I ever wrote to men soliciting gifts of that order—which heaven forbid!—it is just the sort of reply that I would like to receive. The Bishop’s portraits always make me think of what Aldrich said of Wordsworth—that he gave him the impression of wanting milk: with his benign placidity it is no wonder that he lived until his eighty-ninth year.

“Philada, Feb. 12, 1823.

Revd& dear Sir:—

I have received your Letter of ye 23d of January, & am disposed to take Measures for compliance with your Request. I suppose that I can furnish you with some signatures, which may be embraced in your design; but, as it will require considerable examination, to distinguish between interesting Letters of former correspondents, & others which I can have no particular Reason to retain, I must defer ye Work, until I have less of pressing Business on my Hands than at present.

In ye mean Time, I am, respectfully

Your very humble servant,Wm: White.

Your very humble servant,

Wm: White.

RevdWm: B. Sprague,West Springfield,Massachusetts.”

RevdWm: B. Sprague,

West Springfield,

Massachusetts.”

The Bishop was doubtless one of the last to transport into the nineteenth century the use of frequent capitals, the archaic “ye” and the quaint long “s’s” which are not “f’s” as many believe.

The subject of autographs is to me what King Charles’s head was to Mr. Dick. That I am not alonein my infirmity is proved by a letter of James Freeman Clarke, written in 1878, in which he acknowledges the receipt of a catalogue of a German collection, and says, naively, “Notwithstanding my professed indifference to any autographs except those of the Apostle Paul, Alfred, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther and the like, I confess that my mouth watered at the sight of so many of them. It was a pleasure even to read the description and title”. These words, showing that his indifference was a mere pretense, were written by a serious and scholarly man, famous in his day as preacher, author and educator, and I am sure that even his little pretense would soon have been abandoned if I could only have been honored for a little while with his company at the library table.

Almost every one finds it hard to understand as he attains the period when juniors say to him, “Now, atyourtime of life”—a form of expression I have come to loathe—that he is really no longer—to use another wretched locution,—“up to date”. I am beginning to comprehend the feelings of some of the excellent bewigged old gentlemen of the seventeen hundreds whose lives lapped over that mysterious one-hundredth year which is just like any other year, but there is a weird something about it, indescribable, impossible of definition, which makes it different. I am certain that those of us who awoke on the morning of the first day of January in the year of grace 1900, had a consciousness of passing into a new age, although—not to revive the ancient controversy but merely to assert the indisputable fact—the new century did not begin until a year later. How painfully modern Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Shelley must have seemed to the menwho knew so well their Crabbe and their Cowper. It has always been my opinion that the unfortunates who happen to be born exactly in the middle of a century are taken at an unfair advantage by those who arrive in a century’s closing years or in its opening days. They grow old-fashioned so much sooner. In Comyn Carr’s book of reminiscences (published in 1908)—by no means one of those dull productions about which we were chatting a few pages back—he says heroically that he is not very gravely discouraged by occasionally finding himself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion, but he groans over the revelation of a “cultivated young writer of the newer school” that ‘among men of culture Dickens is now never read after the age of fourteen!’ This cultivated young writer—we must take Mr. Carr’s word as to his culture, for otherwise one would be likely to consider him what Lord Dundreary called “wather an ass”—must have been trying to impose upon the credulous old gentlemen, who frankly owns that he was born in the misty mid-region of 1849. What pained me most was the meek and submissive acquiescence of Carr in his relegation to the category of back numbers at the surely not venerable age of fifty-nine. As Thomas Bailey Aldrich said the day after his birthday, “It is unpleasant to be fifty-nine, but it would be unpleasanter not to be, having got started!” I insist, however, that it is not enough to warrant the exile of any ordinary person from the realms of contemporaneous interest. Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Tennyson, Browning, all great Victorians, if an American may be reckoned in that class, are not, I venture to say, as obsolete as the cultivated infant would have us believe; if they were, there would not be so much said of them and written of them inthis fast aging first decade of the twentieth century. Returning to Dickens, I prefer to the babe’s prattle of Carr’s young interlocutor, the dictum of Chesterton, when he tells us “that Dickens will have a high place in permanent literature there is, I imagine, no prig surviving to deny.”

In a time so remote that I shrink from mentioning the date precisely, I overheard a young prig say to the feminine companion whom he was escorting to her home after listening to a lecture by Charles Sumner, “he suits the masses”. It was a singularly inept remark as applied to the stilted and artificial oratory of the pompous Senator; but the fact that “he suits the masses” may well be cited to warrant the assurance of the lasting quality of Dickens’ fame. The lesser lights are growing pale and dim in comparison with his and with that of his illustrious compeer, who ranks higher perhaps in the estimation of the “cultured” but no higher in the favor of the general. Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Bronté, Trollope, and George Eliot, if we may group together stars of such varying magnitude, shine more feebly than they did while they were in the full blaze of their glory. But when one takes from the shelf or from the library table a volume of Dickens or of Thackeray, he may well exclaim, as was said of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, “This is no book; who touches this, touches a man.”

Many of us still retain an affection for Trollope, even if he was, as some recent compilers of literary hand-books say, “one of the most boisterous, tactless and unmetaphysical of writing men”—all the more precious to me because of his unmetaphysicality. In novels “à basmetaphysics!” If it be true, as these autocratic tyrants of taste aver, that he “keeps his nose closedown, dog-like, to the prosaic texture of life,” he pursued the game to good purpose. To all lawyers, he must ever be dear because of his delightful Old Bailey character of Chaffanbrass; to all the clergy he must be a source of joy for his innumerable bishops, rectors and curates; and to all physicians a lovable man for Doctor Thorne. Was he not as much unlike Hawthorne as one novelist may be unlike another, yet did not Hawthorne say that Trollope’s work “suited” him? “They precisely suit my taste” wrote the author of the Scarlet Letter, “solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef, and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” Yet in these days they cannot be expected to compete with such illuminating representations of real life as may be found in the pages of—let us say—Elinor Glyn, who manifestly aspires to be the Aphra Behn of modern literature.

It is some consolation to realize that we commencing patriarchs are able to get more satisfaction from our comfortable places at the library table than others get from the seats of the mighty at horse-shows, bridge tournaments, automobile contests, and golf competitions. An enthusiastic golfer once confided to me that the most charming adjunct of his sport was the shandygaff and the high ball which otherwise the stern decree of the medical man would have denied to him. Let us say it in all modesty and self-depreciation, we know so much more than is known by the modern smooth-faced devotee of the safety razor, who freely permits the unattractive contour of his mouth to betray the imperfectionsof his character. I am convinced that if the customary motor-car fiend would shroud his expression in hirsute concealment he would appear far less fierce and domineering. If language was given to us to conceal thought, surely beards were meant to hide brutality. Even these young people will come in time to the consciousness of their present ignorance and the realization of the truth that men learn by experience. Aldrich—not Nelson, the tariff-king, but Thomas, a king of modern American letters—said “I often feel sorry for actresses who are always too old to play Juliet by the time they have learned how to do it. I know how to play Hamlet and Romeo now, but my figure doesn’t fit the parts.” Sad it is to reflect that our figures are unfitted for the roles we would so hugely enjoy. Possibly it would be better for us if we ventured more in the outer world and spent less time at the library table; but we cannot always bestride the galloping horse or trifle with the fascinating brassie. It will be only a few years before riders and golfers alike will meet us in the fields where we will all be reduced to socialistic uniformity, as I am taught to believe. Then, perhaps, I may not regret that I yielded, willingly and lovingly, to the temptations of the library table.

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