Chapter 23

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 ofWaverley. 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 romanticcolouring."' 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 ofThe 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 ofThe 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 ofHorae Subsecivaeis 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 resembledhunch-backedpeople, who carried a great burden, whichthey 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 handsand 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; andThe 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 theTears of Angelica. The curious reader will find these volumes traced in the admirable notes in J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly's edition ofDon Quixotein '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 toLiterature 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 neverknown 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 fillA certain portion of uncertain paper ...To have, when the original is dust,A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.Lord Byron,Don Juan.

What is the end of Fame? 'Tis but to fillA 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 inObiter Dicta: The Office of Literaturewrites 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'sMetamorphoses.

P. 169.Digby.—Sir Kenelm Digby's 'observations' are generally printed withReligio 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 themsecundasmensas 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 toilO'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'sLove's Labour's Lost, Act v, sc. i. Holofernes 'teaches boys the horn-book'.

P. 181.Richardson.—In his preface toPamelaRichardson 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, byCockering 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.—TheAutobiography, 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 theLife of Dickens, 'It is one of the many passages inCopperfieldwhich are literally true.... Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way intoDavid 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 certainlywrote an excellent book—the first part ofRobinson Crusoe... my delight before I was five years old'.

P. 189.Hazlitt.—It is reported (Dibdin relates inBibliomania) 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 'nowhe began tolive': at his death he desired the following inscription to be placed upon his tomb.

Here lies Similis;In the seventieth year of his ageBut 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 hisInfelix 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 worldTeaches such beauty as a woman's eye?Shakespeare.Love's Labour's Lost, ActIV. Sc. iii.

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

Shakespeare.Love's Labour's Lost, ActIV. 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 hisConcordantia 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 ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness—And Wilderness is Paradise enow.E. FitzGerald.Omar Khayyám.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and ThouBeside 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 page181.

P. 209.Addison.—VirgilAeneid, vii. 805:

Unused to spinning, in the loom unskilled.—Dryden.

TheVirgilof Ogilby, or Ogilvy, originally a dancing-master, was published in 1649, and was the first complete English translation (Ogilby is mentioned by Pope, see page313);Cassandra,Cleopatra,Astraea,The Grand CyrusandCleliawere French romances translated into English. Sidney called his pastoral romanceThe Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Sherlock'sDiscourse on Deathpassed through forty editions;The Fifteen Comforts, a translation of a French satirical work of the fifteenth century; Sir Richard Baker'sChronicle 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 herSecret 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. 2Ep.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.

TheVindicationwas the work of Charles Leslie, the non-juror;Pharamond, a romance dealing with the Frankish empire, by La Calprenède;Cassandrais wrong—the French work, also by La Calprenède, wasCassandre(the son of Antipater);All for Love,Dryden's play;Sophonisba, by Lee;The Innocent Adultery, the second name of Sotherne'sThe Fatal Marriage;Mithridateswas by Lee, who also wroteThe Rival Queens, or The Death of Alexander the Great, andTheodosius;Aureng-Zebe, Dryden's tragedy. (T. Arnold'sAddison: Clarendon Press).

P. 213.Sheridan.—The first reference to a circulating library given in theOxford English Dictionaryis an advertisement, June 12, 1742—'Proposals for erecting a Public Circulating Library in London.' Joseph Knight, in the Oxford edition of Sheridan'sPlays, annotates this passage fully. Dillingham, sending his Latin translation of Herbert'sPorchto 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 fearThe 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. TheInnocent Adulteryis the alternative title of Sotherne'sFatal Marriage;The Whole Duty of Manwas by Allestree, once Provost of Eton; the 'admirable Mrs. Chapone', an admirer of Richardson, and a contributor to theRambler; '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'sNarrenschiff, 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 Foolsin its original form, andin 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'sIllustrations 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—andquite 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 theprosework, lately published by the Reverend T. F. Dibdin under the title ofBibliomania; 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 myfacetiously, he translates "mettant comme on l'atrès judicieusementfait 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 publishedPrince 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, inThe 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 ofThe Seasons—Winterit 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'sRecollections 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 SirHumphry 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-Motsof 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, aheluoof 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.Seep. 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'sEmblems, "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 asLa Dame aux Camélias. Browning 'translates' the title-page of his 'find' thus:—

A Roman murder-case:Position of the entire criminal causeOf Guido Franceschini, nobleman,With certain Four the cutthroats in his pay,Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to deathBy 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 'scapeThe customary forfeit.'

P. 260.Eliot.—

I often wonder what the Vintners buyOne half so precious as the stuff they sell.E. FitzGerald.Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám.

I often wonder what the Vintners buyOne 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 inThe London Magazine, and was reprinted by Hone inThe Every-Day Book. It was in Hone'sTable Bookthat 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 inThe 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]Reviewwas: 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 theordinary 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 ourdutyto live among books, especially to live byONE BOOK, and a very old one.'—John Henry NewmaninTracts 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 inHope:—

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 theContemporary 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 theImitation of Christ.

P. 304.Gaskell.—The essay by Mrs. Gaskell, first published inHousehold Wordsin 1854, was suggested by an article by Victor Cousin on Madame de Sablé in theRevue des Deux Mondes. Madame was a habitual guest at the Hôtel Rambouillet and friend of the Duchess de Longueville; her crowning accomplishment was the abilitytenir 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'sPoems, 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 theDunciaditself. 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, wroteShakespear 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—theRecuyell 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'sEvening 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 hisTristram, as far as anything can be called precise, in a desultory book, apparently written with great rapidity.'

This quotation is from Ferriar'sIllustrations 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:—

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