Title: The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
Author: Field, Eugene, 1850-1895
Language: English
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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF A BIBLIOMANIAC


BY

EUGENE FIELD



Introduction

The determination to found a story or a series of sketches on the
delights, adventures, and misadventures connected with bibliomania did
not come impulsively to my brother.  For many years, in short during
the greater part of nearly a quarter of a century of journalistic work,
he had celebrated in prose and verse, and always in his happiest and
most delightful vein, the pleasures of book-hunting.  Himself an
indefatigable collector of books, the possessor of a library as
valuable as it was interesting, a library containing volumes obtained
only at the cost of great personal sacrifice, he was in the most active
sympathy with the disease called bibliomania, and knew, as few
comparatively poor men have known, the half-pathetic, half-humorous
side of that incurable mental infirmity.

The newspaper column, to which he contributed almost daily for twelve
years, comprehended many sly digs and gentle scoffings at those of his
unhappy fellow citizens who became notorious, through his
instrumentality, in their devotion to old book-shelves and auction
sales.  And all the time none was more assiduous than this same
good-natured cynic in running down a musty prize, no matter what its
cost or what the attending difficulties.  "I save others, myself I
cannot save," was his humorous cry.

In his published writings are many evidences of my brother's
appreciation of what he has somewhere characterized the "soothing
affliction of bibliomania."  Nothing of book-hunting love has been more
happily expressed than "The Bibliomaniac's Prayer," in which the
troubled petitioner fervently asserts:

    "But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee
    To keep me in temptation's way,
    I humbly ask that I may be
    Most notably beset to-day;
    Let my temptation be a book,
    Which I shall purchase, hold and keep,
    Whereon, when other men shall look,
    They'll wail to know I got it cheap."

And again, in "The Bibliomaniac's Bride," nothing breathes better the
spirit of the incurable patient than this:

    "Prose for me when I wished for prose,
    Verse when to verse inclined,--
    Forever bringing sweet repose
    To body, heart and mind.
    Oh, I should bind this priceless prize
    In bindings full and fine,
    And keep her where no human eyes
    Should see her charms, but mine!"

In "Dear Old London" the poet wailed that "a splendid Horace cheap for
cash" laughed at his poverty, and in "Dibdin's Ghost" he revelled in
the delights that await the bibliomaniac in the future state, where
there is no admission to the women folk who, "wanting victuals, make a
fuss if we buy books instead"; while in "Flail, Trask and Bisland" is
the very essence of bibliomania, the unquenchable thirst for
possession. And yet, despite these self-accusations, bibliophily rather
than bibliomania would be the word to characterize his conscientious
purpose.  If he purchased quaint and rare books it was to own them to
the  full extent, inwardly as well as outwardly.  The mania for books
kept him continually buying; the love of books supervened to make them
a part of himself and his life.

Toward the close of August of the present year my brother wrote the
first chapter of   "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac." At that time
he was in an exhausted physical condition and apparently unfit for any
protracted literary labor.  But the prospect of gratifying a
long-cherished ambition, the delight of beginning the story he had
planned so hopefully, seemed to give him new strength, and he threw
himself into the work with an enthusiasm that was, alas, misleading to
those who had noted fearfully his declining vigor of body.  For years
no literary occupation had seemed to give him equal pleasure, and in
the discussion of the progress of his writing from day to day his eye
would brighten, all of his old animation would return, and everything
would betray the lively interest he felt in the creature of his
imagination in whom he was living over the delights of the
book-hunter's chase.  It was his ardent wish that this work, for the
fulfilment of which he had been so long preparing, should be, as he
playfully expressed it, a monument of apologetic compensation to a
class of people he had so humorously maligned, and those who knew him
intimately will recognize in the shortcomings of the bibliomaniac the
humble confession of his own weaknesses.

It is easy to understand from the very nature of the undertaking that
it was practically limitless; that a bibliomaniac of so many years'
experience could prattle on indefinitely concerning his "love affairs,"
and at the same time be in no danger of repetition.  Indeed my
brother's plans at the outset were not definitely formed.  He would
say, when questioned or joked about these amours, that he was in the
easy position of Sam Weller when he indited his famous valentine, and
could "pull up" at any moment.  One week he would contend that a
book-hunter ought to be good for a year at least, and the next week he
would argue as strongly that it was time to send the old man into
winter quarters and go to press.  But though the approach of cold
weather  increased his physical indisposition, he was not the less
interested in his prescribed hours of labor, howbeit his weakness
warned him that he should say to his book, as his much-loved Horace had
written:

                  "Fuge quo descendere gestis:
            Non erit emisso reditis tibi."


Was it strange that his heart should relent, and that he should write
on, unwilling to give the word of dismissal to the book whose
preparation had been a work of such love and solace?

During the afternoon of Saturday, November 2, the nineteenth instalment
of "The Love Affairs" was written.  It was the conclusion of his
literary life.  The verses supposably contributed by Judge Methuen's
friend, with which the chapter ends, were the last words written by
Eugene Field.  He was at that time apparently quite as well as on any
day during the fall months, and neither he nor any member of his family
had the slightest premonition that death was hovering about the
household.  The next day, though still feeling indisposed, he was at
times up and about, always cheerful and full of that sweetness and
sunshine which, in his last years, seem now to have been the
preparation for the life beyond.  He spoke of the chapter he had
written the day before, and it was then that he outlined his plan of
completing the work.  One chapter only remained to be written, and it
was to chronicle the death of the old bibliomaniac, but not until he
had unexpectedly fallen heir to a very rare and almost priceless copy
of Horace, which acquisition marked the pinnacle of the book-hunter's
conquest. True to his love for the Sabine singer, the western poet
characterized the immortal odes of twenty centuries gone the greatest
happiness of bibliomania.

In the early morning of November 4 the soul of Eugene Field passed
upward.  On the table, folded and sealed, were the memoirs of the old
man upon whom the sentence of death had been pronounced.  On the bed in
the corner of the room, with one arm thrown over his breast, and the
smile of peace and rest on his tranquil face, the poet lay.  All around
him, on the shelves  and in the cases, were the books he loved so well.
Ah, who shall say that on that morning his fancy was not verified, and
that as the gray light came reverently through the window, those
cherished volumes did not bestir themselves, awaiting the cheery voice:
"Good day to you, my sweet friends.  How lovingly they beam upon me,
and how glad they are that my rest has been unbroken."

Could they beam upon you less lovingly, great heart, in the chamber
warmed by your affection and now sanctified by death? Were they less
glad to know that the repose would be unbroken forevermore, since it
came the glorious reward, my brother, of the friend who went gladly to
it through his faith, having striven for it through his works?

ROSWELL MARTIN FIELD

Buena Park, December, 1895.



The Chapters in this Book

     I  MY FIRST LOVE
    II  THE BIRTH OF A NEW PASSION
   III  THE LUXURY OF READING IN BED
    IV  THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME
     V  BALDNESS AND INTELLECTUALITY
    VI  MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA
   VII  THE DELIGHTS OF FENDER-FISHING
  VIII  BALLADS AND THEIR MAKERS
    IX  BOOKSELLERS AND PRINTERS, OLD AND NEW
     X  WHEN FANCHONETTE BEWITCHED ME
    XI  DIAGNOSIS OF THE BACILLUS LIBRORUM
   XII  THE PLEASURES OF EXTRA-ILLUSTRATION
  XIII  ON THE ODORS WHICH MY BOOKS EXHALE
   XIV  ELZEVIRS AND DIVERS OTHER MATTERS
    XV  A BOOK THAT BRINGS SOLACE AND CHEER
   XVI  THE MALADY CALLED CATALOGITIS
  XVII  THE NAPOLEONIC RENAISSANCE
 XVIII  MY WORKSHOP AND OTHERS
   XIX  OUR DEBT TO MONKISH MEN



I

MY FIRST LOVE

At this moment, when I am about to begin the most important undertaking
of my life, I recall the sense of abhorrence with which I have at
different times read the confessions of men famed for their prowess in
the realm of love.  These boastings have always shocked me, for I
reverence love as the noblest of the passions, and it is impossible for
me to conceive how one who has truly fallen victim to its benign
influence can ever thereafter speak flippantly of it.

Yet there have been, and there still are, many who take a seeming
delight in telling you how many conquests they have made, and they not
infrequently have the bad taste to explain with wearisome prolixity the
ways and the means whereby those conquests were wrought; as, forsooth,
an unfeeling huntsman is forever boasting of the game he has
slaughtered and is forever dilating upon the repulsive details of his
butcheries.

I have always contended that one who is in love (and having once been
in love is to be always in love) has, actually, no confession to make.
Love is so guileless, so proper, so pure a passion as to involve none
of those things which require or which admit of confession.  He,
therefore, who surmises that in this exposition of my affaires du coeur
there is to be any betrayal of confidences, or any discussion,
suggestion, or hint likely either to shame love or its votaries or to
bring a blush to the cheek of the fastidious--he is grievously in error.

Nor am I going to boast; for I have made no conquests.  I am in no
sense a hero.  For many, very many years I have walked in a pleasant
garden, enjoying sweet odors and soothing spectacles; no predetermined
itinerary has controlled my course; I have wandered whither I pleased,
and very many times I have strayed so far into the tangle-wood and
thickets as almost to have lost my way.  And now it is my purpose to
walk that pleasant garden once more, inviting you to bear me company
and to share with me what satisfaction may accrue from an old man's
return to old-time places and old-time loves.

As a child I was serious-minded.  I cared little for those sports which
usually excite the ardor of youth.  To out-of-door games and exercises
I had particular aversion.  I was born in a southern latitude, but at
the age of six years I went to live with my grandmother in New
Hampshire, both my parents having fallen victims to the cholera.  This
change from the balmy temperature of the South to the rigors of the
North was not agreeable to me, and I have always held it responsible
for that delicate health which has attended me through life.

My grandmother encouraged my disinclination to play; she recognized in
me that certain seriousness of mind which I remember to have heard her
say I inherited from her, and she determined to make of me what she had
failed to make of any of her  own sons--a professional expounder of the
only true faith of Congregationalism.  For this reason, and for the
further reason that at the tender age of seven years I publicly avowed
my desire to become a clergyman, an ambition wholly sincere at that
time--for these reasons was I duly installed as prime favorite in my
grandmother's affections.

As distinctly as though it were but yesterday do I recall the time when
I met my first love.  It was in the front room of the old homestead,
and the day was a day in spring.  The front room answered those
purposes which are served by the so-called parlor of the present time.
I remember the low ceiling, the big fireplace, the long, broad
mantelpiece, the andirons and fender of brass, the tall clock with its
jocund and roseate moon, the bellows that was always wheezy, the wax
flowers under a glass globe in the corner, an allegorical picture of
Solomon's temple, another picture of little Samuel at prayer, the high,
stiff-back chairs, the foot-stool with its gayly embroidered top, the
mirror in its gilt-and-black  frame--all these things I remember well,
and with feelings of tender reverence, and yet that day I now recall
was well-nigh threescore and ten years ago!

Best of all I remember the case in which my grandmother kept her books,
a mahogany structure, massive and dark, with doors composed of
diamond-shaped figures of glass cunningly set in a framework of lead.
I was in my seventh year then, and I had learned to read I know not
when.  The back and current numbers of the "Well-Spring" had fallen
prey to my insatiable appetite for literature.  With the story of the
small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and
then became a good and great man, I was as familiar as if I myself had
invented that ingenious and instructive tale; I could lisp the moral
numbers of Watts and the didactic hymns of Wesley, and the annual
reports of the American Tract Society had already revealed to me the
sphere of usefulness in which my grandmother hoped I would ultimately
figure with discretion and zeal.  And yet my heart was free; wholly
untouched of that  gentle yet deathless passion which was to become my
delight, my inspiration, and my solace, it awaited the coming of its
first love.

Upon one of those shelves yonder--it is the third shelf from the top,
fourth compartment to the right--is that old copy of the "New England
Primer," a curious little, thin, square book in faded blue board
covers.  A good many times I have wondered whether I ought not to have
the precious little thing sumptuously attired in the finest style known
to my binder; indeed, I have often been tempted to exchange the homely
blue board covers for flexible levant, for it occurred to me that in
this way I could testify to my regard for the treasured volume.  I
spoke of this one day to my friend Judge Methuen, for I have great
respect for his judgment.

"It would be a desecration," said he, "to deprive the book of its
original binding.  What!  Would you tear off and cast away the covers
which have felt the caressing pressure of the hands of those whose
memory you revere?  The most sacred of sentiments should forbid that
act of vandalism!"

I never think or speak of the "New England  Primer" that I do not
recall Captivity Waite, for it was Captivity who introduced me to the
Primer that day in the springtime of sixty-three years ago.  She was of
my age, a bright, pretty girl--a very pretty, an exceptionally pretty
girl, as girls go.  We belonged to the same Sunday-school class.  I
remember that upon this particular day she brought me a russet apple.
It was she who discovered the Primer in the mahogany case, and what was
not our joy as we turned over the tiny pages together and feasted our
eyes upon the vivid pictures and perused the absorbingly interesting
text! What wonder that together we wept tears of sympathy at the
harrowing recital of the fate of John Rogers!

Even at this remote date I cannot recall that experience with
Captivity, involving as it did the wood-cut representing the
unfortunate Rogers standing in an impossible bonfire and being consumed
thereby in the presence of his wife and their numerous progeny, strung
along in a pitiful line across the picture for artistic effect--even
now, I say, I cannot contemplate that experience  and that wood-cut
without feeling lumpy in my throat and moist about my eyes.

How lasting are the impressions made upon the youthful mind! Through
the many busy years that have elapsed since first I tasted the
thrilling sweets of that miniature Primer I have not forgotten that
"young Obadias, David, Josias, all were pious"; that "Zaccheus he did
climb the Tree our Lord to see"; and that "Vashti for Pride was set
aside"; and still with many a sympathetic shudder and tingle do I
recall Captivity's overpowering sense of horror, and mine, as we
lingered long over the portraitures of Timothy flying from Sin, of
Xerxes laid out in funeral garb, and of proud Korah's troop partly
submerged.

               My Book and Heart
               Must never part.


So runs one of the couplets in this little Primer-book, and right truly
can I say that from the springtime day sixty-odd years ago, when first
my heart went out in love to this little book, no change of scene or of
custom  no allurement of fashion, no demand of mature years, has abated
that love.  And herein is exemplified the advantage which the love of
books has over the other kinds of love. Women are by nature fickle, and
so are men; their friendships are liable to dissipation at the merest
provocation or the slightest pretext.

Not so, however, with books, for books cannot change.  A thousand years
hence they are what you find them to-day, speaking the same words,
holding forth the same cheer, the same promise, the same comfort;
always constant, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those
who weep.

Captivity Waite was an exception to the rule governing her sex. In all
candor I must say that she approached closely to a realization of the
ideals of a book--a sixteenmo, if you please, fair to look upon, of
clear, clean type, well ordered and well edited, amply margined, neatly
bound; a human book whose text, as represented by her disposition and
her mind, corresponded felicitously with the comeliness of her
exterior.  This child was the great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin
Waite, whose family was carried off by Indians in 1677.  Benjamin
followed the party to Canada, and after many months of search found and
ransomed the captives.

The historian has properly said that the names of Benjamin Waite and
his companion in their perilous journey through the wilderness to
Canada should "be memorable in all the sad or happy homes of this
Connecticut valley forever."  The child who was my friend in youth, and
to whom I may allude occasionally hereafter in my narrative, bore the
name of one of the survivors of this Indian outrage, a name to be
revered as a remembrancer of sacrifice and heroism.



II

THE BIRTH OF A NEW PASSION

When I was thirteen years old I went to visit my Uncle Cephas. My
grandmother would not have parted with me even for that fortnight had
she not actually been compelled to.  It happened that she was called to
a meeting of the American Tract Society, and it was her intention to
pay a visit to her cousin, Royall Eastman, after she had discharged the
first and imperative duty she owed the society.  Mrs. Deacon Ranney was
to have taken me and provided for my temporal and spiritual wants
during grandmother's absence, but at the last moment the deacon came
down with one of his spells of quinsy, and no other alternative
remained but to pack me off to Nashua, where my Uncle Cephas lived.

This involved considerable expense, for the stage fare was three
shillings each way: it came particularly hard on grandmother, inasmuch
as she had just paid her road tax and had not yet received her
semi-annual dividends on her Fitchburg Railway stock.  Indifferent,
however, to every sense of extravagance and to all other considerations
except those of personal pride, I rode away atop of the stage-coach,
full of exultation.  As we rattled past the Waite house I waved my cap
to Captivity and indulged in the pleasing hope that she would be
lonesome without me.  Much of the satisfaction of going away arises
from the thought that those you leave behind are likely to be
wretchedly miserable during your absence.

My Uncle Cephas lived in a house so very different from my
grandmother's that it took me some time to get used to the place. Uncle
Cephas was a lawyer, and his style of living was not at all like
grandmother's; he was to have been a minister, but at twelve years of
age he attended the county fair, and that incident seemed to change the
whole bent of his life.  At twenty-one he married Samantha Talbott, and
that was another  blow to grandmother, who always declared that the
Talbotts were a shiftless lot.  However, I was agreeably impressed with
Uncle Cephas and Aunt 'Manthy, for they welcomed me very cordially and
turned me over to my little cousins, Mary and Henry, and bade us three
make merry to the best of our ability.  These first favorable
impressions of my uncle's family were confirmed when I discovered that
for supper we had hot biscuit and dried beef warmed up in cream gravy,
a diet which, with all due respect to grandmother, I considered much
more desirable than dry bread and dried-apple sauce.

Aha, old Crusoe!  I see thee now in yonder case smiling out upon me as
cheerily as thou didst smile those many years ago when to a little boy
thou broughtest the message of Romance!  And I do love thee still, and
I shall always love thee, not only for thy benefaction in those ancient
days, but also for the light and the cheer which thy genius brings to
all ages and conditions of humanity.

My Uncle Cephas's library was stored with a large variety of pleasing
literature.  I did  not observe a glut of theological publications, and
I will admit that I felt somewhat aggrieved personally when, in answer
to my inquiry, I was told that there was no "New England Primer" in the
collection.  But this feeling was soon dissipated by the absorbing
interest I took in De Foe's masterpiece, a work unparalleled in the
realm of fiction.

I shall not say that "Robinson Crusoe" supplanted the Primer in my
affections; this would not be true.  I prefer to say what is the truth;
it was my second love.  Here again we behold another advantage which
the lover of books has over the lover of women. If he be a genuine
lover he can and should love any number of books, and this
polybibliophily is not to the disparagement of any one of that number.
But it is held by the expounders of our civil and our moral laws that
he who loveth one woman to the exclusion of all other women speaketh by
that action the best and highest praise both of his own sex and of hers.

I thank God continually that it hath been my lot in life to found an
empire in my heart--no cramped and wizened borough wherein one jealous
mistress hath exercised her petty tyranny, but an expansive and
ever-widening continent divided and subdivided into dominions,
jurisdictions, caliphates, chiefdoms, seneschalships, and prefectures,
wherein tetrarchs, burgraves, maharajahs, palatines, seigniors,
caziques, nabobs, emirs, nizams, and nawabs hold sway, each over his
special and particular realm, and all bound together in harmonious
cooperation by the conciliating spirit of polybibliophily!

Let me not be misunderstood; for I am not a woman-hater.  I do not
regret the acquaintances--nay, the friendships--I have formed with
individuals of the other sex.  As a philosopher it has behooved me to
study womankind, else I should not have appreciated the worth of these
other better loves.  Moreover, I take pleasure in my age in associating
this precious volume or that with one woman or another whose friendship
came into my life at the time when I was reading and loved that book.

The other day I found my nephew William swinging in the hammock on the
porch with his girl friend Celia; I saw that the  young people were
reading Ovid.  "My children," said I, "count this day a happy one.  In
the years of after life neither of you will speak or think of Ovid and
his tender verses without recalling at the same moment how of a
gracious afternoon in distant time you sat side by side contemplating
the ineffably precious promises of maturity and love."

I am not sure that I do not approve that article in Judge Methuen's
creed which insists that in this life of ours woman serves a
probationary period for sins of omission or of commission in a previous
existence, and that woman's next step upward toward the final eternity
of bliss is a period of longer or of shorter duration, in which her
soul enters into a book to be petted, fondled, beloved and cherished by
some good man--like the Judge, or like myself, for that matter.

This theory is not an unpleasant one; I regard it as much more
acceptable than those so-called scientific demonstrations which would
make us suppose that we are descended from tree-climbing and bug-eating
simians.  However, it is far from my purpose to enter upon any argument
of these questions at this time, for Judge Methuen himself is going to
write a book upon the subject, and the edition is to be limited to two
numbered and signed copies upon Japanese vellum, of which I am to have
one and the Judge the other.

The impression I made upon Uncle Cephas must have been favorable, for
when my next birthday rolled around there came with it a book from
Uncle Cephas--my third love, Grimm's "Household Stories." With the
perusal of this monumental work was born that passion for fairy tales
and folklore which increased rather than diminished with my maturer
years.  Even at the present time I delight in a good fairy story, and I
am grateful to Lang and to Jacobs for the benefit they have conferred
upon me and the rest of English-reading humanity through the medium of
the fairy books and the folk tales they have translated and compiled.
Baring-Gould and Lady Wilde have done noble work in the same realm; the
writings of the former have interested me particularly, for together
with profound learning in directions which are specially pleasing to
me, Baring-Gould has a distinct literary touch which invests his work
with a grace indefinable but delicious and persuasive.

I am so great a lover of and believer in fairy tales that I once
organized a society for the dissemination of fairy literature, and at
the first meeting of this society we resolved to demand of the board of
education to drop mathematics from the curriculum in the public schools
and to substitute therefor a four years' course in fairy literature, to
be followed, if the pupil desired, by a post-graduate course in
demonology and folk-lore.  We hired and fitted up large rooms, and the
cause seemed to be flourishing until the second month's rent fell due.
It was then discovered that the treasury was empty; and with this
discovery the society ended its existence, without having accomplished
any tangible result other than the purchase of a number of sofas and
chairs, for which Judge Methuen and I had to pay.

Still, I am of the opinion (and Judge Methuen indorses it) that we need
in this country of ours just that influence which the fairy tale
exerts.  We are becoming too practical; the lust for material gain is
throttling every other consideration.  Our babes and sucklings are no
longer regaled with the soothing tales of giants, ogres, witches, and
fairies; their hungry, receptive minds are filled with stories about
the pursuit and slaughter of unoffending animals, of war and of murder,
and of those questionable practices whereby a hero is enriched and
others are impoverished.  Before he is out of his swaddling-cloth the
modern youngster is convinced that the one noble purpose in life is to
get, get, get, and keep on getting of worldly material. The fairy tale
is tabooed because, as the sordid parent alleges, it makes youth
unpractical.

One consequence of this deplorable condition is, as I have noticed (and
as Judge Methuen has, too), that the human eye is diminishing in size
and fulness, and is losing its lustre.  By as much as you take the
God-given grace of fancy from man, by so much do you impoverish his
eyes.  The eye is so beautiful and serves so very many noble purposes,
and is, too, so ready in the expression of tenderness, of pity, of
love, of solicitude, of compassion, of dignity, of every gentle mood
and noble inspiration, that in that metaphor which contemplates the
eternal vigilance of the Almighty we recognize the best poetic
expression of the highest human wisdom.

My nephew Timothy has three children, two boys and a girl.  The elder
boy and the girl have small black eyes; they are as devoid of fancy as
a napkin is of red corpuscles; they put their pennies into a tin bank,
and they have won all the marbles and jack-stones in the neighborhood.
They do not believe in Santa Claus or in fairies or in witches; they
know that two nickels make a dime, and their golden rule is to do
others as others would do them.  The other boy (he has been christened
Matthew, after me) has a pair of large, round, deep-blue eyes,
expressive of all those emotions which a keen, active fancy begets.

Matthew can never get his fill of fairy tales, and how the dear little
fellow loves Santa Claus!  He sees things at night; he will not go to
bed in the dark; he hears and understands what the birds and crickets
say, and what the night wind sings, and what the rustling leaves tell.
Wherever Matthew goes he sees beautiful pictures and hears sweet music;
to his impressionable soul all nature speaks its wisdom and its poetry.
God! how I love that boy!  And he shall never starve!  A goodly share
of what I have shall go to him!  But this clause in my will, which the
Judge recently drew for me, will, I warrant me, give the dear child the
greatest happiness:

"Item.  To my beloved grandnephew and namesake, Matthew, I do bequeath
and give (in addition to the lands devised and the stocks, bonds and
moneys willed to him, as hereinabove specified) the two mahogany
bookcases numbered 11 and 13, and the contents thereof, being volumes
of fairy and folk tales of all nations, and dictionaries and other
treatises upon demonology, witchcraft, mythology, magic and kindred
subjects, to be his, his heirs, and his assigns, forever."



III

THE LUXURY OF READING IN BED

Last night, having written what you have just read about the benefits
of fairy literature, I bethought me to renew my acquaintance with some
of those tales which so often have delighted and solaced me.  So I
piled at least twenty chosen volumes on the table at the head of my
bed, and I daresay it was nigh daylight when I fell asleep.  I began my
entertainment with several pages from Keightley's "Fairy Mythology,"
and followed it up with random bits from Crofton Croker's "Traditions
of the South of Ireland," Mrs. Carey's "Legends of the French
Provinces," Andrew Lang's Green, Blue and Red fairy books, Laboulaye's
"Last Fairy Tales," Hauff's "The Inn in the Spessart," Julia Goddard's
"Golden Weathercock," Frere's "Eastern Fairy Legends,"  Asbjornsen's
"Folk Tales," Susan Pindar's "Midsummer Fays," Nisbit Bain's "Cossack
Fairy Tales," etc., etc.

I fell asleep with a copy of Villamaria's fairy stories in my hands,
and I had a delightful dream wherein, under the protection and guidance
of my fairy godmother, I undertook the rescue of a beautiful princess
who had been enchanted by a cruel witch and was kept in prison by the
witch's son, a hideous ogre with seven heads, whose companions were
four equally hideous dragons.

This undertaking in which I was engaged involved a period of five
years, but time is of precious little consideration to one when he is
dreaming of exploits achieved in behalf of a beautiful princess.  My
fairy godmother (she wore a mob-cap and was hunchbacked) took good care
of me, and conducted me safely through all my encounters with demons,
giants, dragons, witches, serpents, hippogriffins, ogres, etc.; and I
had just rescued the princess and broken the spell which bound her, and
we were about to "live in peace to the end of our lives," when I awoke
to find it was all a dream, and that the gas-light over my bed had been
blazing away during the entire period of my five-year war for the
delectable maiden.

This incident gives me an opportunity to say that observation has
convinced me that all good and true book-lovers practise the pleasing
and improving avocation of reading in bed.  Indeed, I fully believe
with Judge Methuen that no book can be appreciated until it has been
slept with and dreamed over.  You recall, perhaps, that eloquent
passage in his noble defence of the poet Archias, wherein Cicero (not
Kikero) refers to his own pursuit of literary studies:  "Haec studia
adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant; secundas res ornant,
adversis perfugium ac solatium praebent; delectant domi, non impediunt
foris; PERNOCTANT nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur!"

By the gods! you spoke tally, friend Cicero; for it is indeed so, that
these pursuits nourish our earlier and delight our later years,
dignifying the minor details of life and affording a perennial refuge
and solace; at home they please us and in no vocation elsewhere do they
embarrass us; they are with  us by night, they go with us upon our
travels, and even upon our retirement into the country do they
accompany us!

I have italicized pernoctant because it is that word which demonstrates
beyond all possibility of doubt that Cicero made a practice of reading
in bed.  Why, I can almost see him now, propped up in his couch,
unrolling scroll after scroll of his favorite literature, and enjoying
it mightily, too, which enjoyment is interrupted now and then by the
occasion which the noble reader takes to mutter maledictions upon the
slave who has let the lamp run low of oil or has neglected to trim the
wick.

"Peregrinantur?"  Indeed, they do share our peregrinations, these
literary pursuits do.  If Thomas Hearne (of blessed memory!) were alive
to-day he would tell us that he used always to take a book along with
him whenever he went walking, and was wont to read it as he strolled
along.  On several occasions (as he tells us in his diary) he became so
absorbed in his reading that he missed his way and darkness came upon
him before he knew it.

I have always wondered why book-lovers have not had more to say of
Hearne, for assuredly he was as glorious a collector as ever felt the
divine fire glow within him.  His character is exemplified in this
prayer, which is preserved among other papers of his in the Bodleian
Library:

"O most gracious and merciful Lord God, wonderful is Thy providence.  I
return all possible thanks to Thee for the care Thou hast always taken
of me.  I continually meet with most signal instances of this Thy
providence, and one act yesterday, when I unexpectedly met with three
old MSS., for which, in a particular manner, I return my thanks,
beseeching Thee to continue the same protection to me, a poor, helpless
sinner," etc.

Another prayer of Hearne's, illustrative of his faith in dependence
upon Divine counsel, was made at the time Hearne was importuned by Dr.
Bray, commissary to my Lord Bishop of London, "to go to Mary-Land" in
the character of a missionary.  "O Lord God, Heavenly Father, look down
upon me with pity," cries this pious soul,  "and be pleased to be my
guide, now I am importuned to leave the place where I have been
educated in the university.  And of Thy great goodness I humbly desire
Thee to signify to me what is most proper for me to do in this affair."

Another famous man who made a practice of reading books as he walked
the highways was Dr. Johnson, and it is recorded that he presented a
curious spectacle indeed, for his shortsightedness compelled him to
hold the volume close to his nose, and he shuffled along, rather than
walked, stepping high over shadows and stumbling over sticks and stones.

But, perhaps, the most interesting story illustrative of the practice
of carrying one's reading around with one is that which is told of
Professor Porson, the Greek scholar.  This human monument of learning
happened to be travelling in the same coach with a coxcomb who sought
to air his pretended learning by quotations from the ancients.  At last
old Porson asked:

"Pri'thee, sir, whence comes that quotation?"

"From Sophocles," quoth the vain fellow.

"Be so kind as to find it for me?" asked Porson, producing a copy of
Sophocles from his pocket.

Then the coxcomb, not at all abashed, said that he meant not Sophocles,
but Euripides.  Whereupon Porson drew from another pocket a copy of
Euripides and challenged the upstart to find the quotation in question.
Full of confusion, the fellow thrust his head out of the window of the
coach and cried to the driver:

"In heaven's name, put me down at once; for there is an old gentleman
in here that hath the Bodleian Library in his pocket!"

Porson himself was a veritable slave to the habit of reading in bed.
He would lie down with his books piled around him, then light his pipe
and start in upon some favorite volume.  A jug of liquor was invariably
at hand, for Porson was a famous drinker. It is related that on one
occasion he fell into a boosy slumber, his pipe dropped out of his
mouth and set fire to the bed-clothes. But for the arrival of succor
the  tipsy scholar would surely have been cremated.

Another very slovenly fellow was De Quincey, and he was devoted to
reading in bed.  But De Quincey was a very vandal when it came to the
care and use of books.  He never returned volumes he borrowed, and he
never hesitated to mutilate a rare book in order to save himself the
labor and trouble of writing out a quotation.

But perhaps the person who did most to bring reading in bed into evil
repute was Mrs. Charles Elstob, ward and sister of the Canon of
Canterbury (circa 1700).  In his "Dissertation on Letter-Founders,"
Rowe Mores describes this woman as the "indefessa comes" of her
brother's studies, a female student in Oxford.  She was, says Mores, a
northern lady of an ancient family and a genteel fortune, "but she
pursued too much the drug called learning, and in that pursuit failed
of being careful of any one thing necessary.  In her latter years she
was tutoress in the family of the Duke of Portland, where we visited
her in her sleeping-room at Bulstrode, surrounded  with books and
dirtiness, the usual appendages of folk of learning!"

There is another word which Cicero uses--for I have still somewhat more
to say of that passage from the oration "pro Archia poeta"--the word
"rusticantur," which indicates that civilization twenty centuries ago
made a practice of taking books out into the country for summer
reading.  "These literary pursuits rusticate with us," says Cicero, and
thus he presents to us a pen-picture of the Roman patrician stretched
upon the cool grass under the trees, perusing the latest popular
romance, while, forsooth, in yonder hammock his dignified spouse swings
slowly to and fro, conning the pages and the colored plates of the
current fashion journal.  Surely in the telltale word "rusticantur" you
and I and the rest of human nature find a worthy precedent and much
encouragement for our practice of loading up with plenty of good
reading before we start for the scene of our annual summering.

As for myself, I never go away from home that I do not take a trunkful
of books with  me, for experience has taught me that there is no
companionship better than that of these friends, who, however much all
things else may vary, always give the same response to my demand upon
their solace and their cheer.  My sister, Miss Susan, has often
inveighed against this practice of mine, and it was only yesterday that
she informed me that I was the most exasperating man in the world.

However, as Miss Susan's experience with men during the sixty-seven hot
summers and sixty-eight hard winters of her life has been somewhat
limited, I think I should bear her criticism without a murmur.  Miss
Susan is really one of the kindest creatures in all the world.  It is
her misfortune that she has had all her life an insane passion for
collecting crockery, old pewter, old brass, old glass, old furniture
and other trumpery of that character; a passion with which I have
little sympathy.  I do not know that Miss Susan is prouder of her
collection of all this folderol than she is of the fact that she is a
spinster.

This latter peculiarity asserts itself upon  every occasion possible.
I recall an unpleasant scene in the omnibus last winter, when the
obsequious conductor, taking advantage of my sister's white hair and
furrowed cheeks, addressed that estimable lady as "Madam."  I'd have
you know that my sister gave the fellow to understand very shortly and
in very vigorous English (emphasized with her blue silk umbrella) that
she was Miss Susan, and that she did not intend to be Madamed by
anybody, under any condition.



IV

THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME

Captivity Waite never approved of my fondness for fairy literature.
She shared the enthusiasm which I expressed whenever "Robinson Crusoe"
was mentioned; there was just enough seriousness in De Foe's romance,
just enough piety to appeal for sympathy to one of Captivity Waite's
religious turn of mind. When it came to fiction involving witches,
ogres, and flubdubs, that was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of
the little Puritan revolted.

Yet I have the documentary evidence to prove that Captivity's ancestors
(both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as
abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined.  The Waites of
Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and  Sinai Higginbotham
(Captivity's great-great-grandfather on her mother's side of the
family) was Cotton Mather's boon companion, and rode around the gallows
with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young
women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little
children with their damnable arts of witchcraft.  Human thought is like
a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an
uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at
everything involving the play of fancy.

I felt harshly toward Captivity Waite for a time, but I harbor her no
ill-will now; on the contrary, I recall with very tender feelings the
distant time when our sympathies were the same and when we journeyed
the pathway of early youth in a companionship sanctified by the
innocence and the loyalty and the truth of childhood.  Indeed, I am not
sure that that early friendship did not make a lasting impression upon
my life; I have thought of Captivity Waite a great  many times, and I
have not unfrequently wondered what might have been but for that book
of fairy tales which my Uncle Cephas sent me.

She was a very pretty child, and she lost none of her comeliness and
none of her sweetness of character as she approached maturity.  I was
impressed with this upon my return from college. She, too, had pursued
those studies deemed necessary to the acquirement of a good education;
she had taken a four years' course at South Holyoke and had finished at
Mrs. Willard's seminary at Troy.  "You will now," said her father, and
he voiced the New England sentiment regarding young womanhood; "you
will now return to the quiet of your home and under the direction of
your mother study the performance of those weightier duties which
qualify your sex for a realization of the solemn responsibilities of
human life."

Three or four years ago a fine-looking young fellow walked in upon me
with a letter of introduction from his mother.  He was Captivity
Waite's son!  Captivity is a widow now, and she is still living in her
native State, within twenty miles of the spot where she was born.
Colonel Parker, her husband, left her a good property when he died, and
she is famous for her charities. She has founded a village library, and
she has written me on several occasions for advice upon proposed
purchases of books.

I don't mind telling you that I had a good deal of malicious pleasure
in sending her not long ago a reminder of old times in these words:
"My valued friend," I wrote, "I see by the catalogue recently published
that your village library contains, among other volumes representing
the modern school of fiction, eleven copies of 'Trilby' and six copies
of 'The Heavenly Twins.' I also note an absence of certain works whose
influence upon my earlier life was such that I make bold to send copies
of the same to your care in the hope that you will kindly present them
to the library with my most cordial compliments.  These are a copy each
of the 'New England Primer' and Grimm's 'Household Stories.'"

At the age of twenty-three, having been graduated from college and
having read the poems of Villon, the confessions of Rousseau, and
Boswell's life of Johnson, I was convinced that I had comprehended the
sum of human wisdom and knew all there was worth knowing.  If at the
present time--for I am seventy-two--I knew as much as I thought I knew
at twenty-three I should undoubtedly be a prodigy of learning and
wisdom.

I started out to be a philosopher.  My grandmother's death during my
second year at college possessed me of a considerable sum of money and
severed every tie and sentimental obligation which had previously held
me to my grandmother's wish that I become a minister of the gospel.
When I became convinced that I knew everything I conceived a desire to
see something, for I had traveled none and I had met but few people.

Upon the advice of my Uncle Cephas, I made a journey to Europe, and
devoted two years to seeing sights and to acquainting myself with the
people and the customs abroad.  Nine months of this time I spent in
Paris, which was then an irregular and unkempt city, but withal quite
as evil as at present.  I took apartments in the Latin  Quarter, and,
being of a generous nature, I devoted a large share of my income to the
support of certain artists and students whose talents and time were
expended almost exclusively in the pursuit of pleasure.

While thus serving as a visible means of support to this horde of
parasites, I fell in with the man who has since then been my intimate
friend.  Judge Methuen was a visitor in Paris, and we became boon
companions.  It was he who rescued me from the parasites and revived
the flames of honorable ambition, which had well-nigh been extinguished
by the wretched influence of Villon and Rousseau.  The Judge was a year
my senior, and a wealthy father provided him with the means for
gratifying his wholesome and refined tastes.  We two went together to
London, and it was during our sojourn in that capital that I began my
career as a collector of books.  It is simply justice to my benefactor
to say that to my dear friend Methuen I am indebted for the inspiration
which started me upon a course so full of sweet surprises and precious
rewards.

There are very many kinds of book collectors, but I think all may be
grouped in  three classes, viz.:  Those who collect from vanity; those
who collect for the benefits of learning; those who collect through a
veneration and love for books.  It is not unfrequent that men who begin
to collect books merely to gratify their personal vanity find
themselves presently so much in love with the pursuit that they become
collectors in the better sense.

Just as a man who takes pleasure in the conquest of feminine hearts
invariably finds himself at last ensnared by the very passion which he
has been using simply for the gratification of his vanity, I am
inclined to think that the element of vanity enters, to a degree, into
every phase of book collecting; vanity is, I take it, one of the
essentials to a well-balanced character--not a prodigious vanity, but a
prudent, well-governed one.  But for vanity there would be no
competition in the world; without competition there would be no
progress.

In these later days I often hear this man or that sneered at because,
forsooth, he collects books without knowing what the books are about.
But for my part, I say that that  man bids fair to be all right; he has
made a proper start in the right direction, and the likelihood is that,
other things being equal, he will eventually become a lover, as well as
a buyer, of books. Indeed, I care not what the beginning is, so long as
it be a beginning.  There are different ways of reaching the goal.
Some folk go horseback via the royal road, but very many others are
compelled to adopt the more tedious processes, involving rocky pathways
and torn shoon and sore feet.

So subtile and so infectious is this grand passion that one is hardly
aware of its presence before it has complete possession of him; and I
have known instances of men who, after having associated one evening
with Judge Methuen and me, have waked up the next morning filled with
the incurable enthusiasm of bibliomania.  But the development of the
passion is not always marked by exhibitions of violence; sometimes,
like the measles, it is slow and obstinate about "coming out," and in
such cases applications should be resorted to for the purpose of
diverting the malady from the vitals; otherwise serious results may
ensue.

Indeed, my learned friend Dr. O'Rell has met with several cases (as he
informs me) in which suppressed bibliomania has resulted fatally.  Many
of these cases have been reported in that excellent publication, the
"Journal of the American Medical Association," which periodical, by the
way, is edited by ex-Surgeon-General Hamilton, a famous collector of
the literature of ornament and dress.

To make short of a long story, the medical faculty is nearly a unit
upon the proposition that wherever suppressed bibliomania is suspected
immediate steps should be taken to bring out the disease.  It is true
that an Ohio physician, named Woodbury, has written much in defence of
the theory that bibliomania can be aborted; but a very large majority
of his profession are of the opinion that the actual malady must needs
run a regular course, and they insist that the cases quoted as cured by
Woodbury were not genuine, but were bastard or false phases, of the
same class as the chickenpox and the German measles.

My mania exhibited itself first in an affectation for old books; it
mattered not what the book itself was--so long as it bore an ancient
date upon its title-page or in its colophon I pined to possess it.
This was not only a vanity, but a very silly one. In a month's time I
had got together a large number of these old tomes, many of them
folios, and nearly all badly worm-eaten, and sadly shaken.

One day I entered a shop kept by a man named Stibbs, and asked if I
could procure any volumes of sixteenth-century print.

"Yes," said Mr. Stibbs, "we have a cellarful of them, and we sell them
by the ton or by the cord."

That very day I dispersed my hoard of antiques, retaining only my
Prynne's "Histrio-Mastix" and my Opera Quinti Horatii Flacci (8vo,
Aldus, Venetiis, 1501).  And then I became interested in British
balladry--a noble subject, for which I have always had a veneration and
love, as the well-kept and profusely annotated volumes in cases 3, 6,
and 9 in the front room are ready to prove to you at any time you
choose to visit my quiet, pleasant home.



V

BALDNESS AND INTELLECTUALITY

One of Judge Methuen's pet theories is that the soul in the human body
lies near the center of gravity; this is, I believe, one of the tenets
of the Buddhist faith, and for a long time I eschewed it as one might
shun a vile thing, for I feared lest I should become identified even
remotely with any faith or sect other than Congregationalism.

Yet I noticed that in moments of fear or of joy or of the sense of any
other emotion I invariably experienced a feeling of goneness in the pit
of my stomach, as if, forsooth, the center of my physical system were
also the center of my nervous and intellectual system, the point at
which were focused all those devious lines of communication by means of
which sensation is instantaneously transmitted from one part of the
body to another.


I mentioned this circumstance to Judge Methuen, and it seemed to please
him.  "My friend," said he, "you have a particularly sensitive soul; I
beg of you to exercise the greatest prudence in your treatment of it.
It is the best type of the bibliomaniac soul, for the quickness of its
apprehensions betokens that it is alert and keen and capable of
instantaneous impressions and enthusiasms.  What you have just told me
convinces me that you are by nature qualified for rare exploits in the
science and art of book-collecting.  You will presently become
bald--perhaps as bald as Thomas Hobbes was--for a vigilant and active
soul invariably compels baldness, so close are the relations between
the soul and the brain, and so destructive are the growth and
operations of the soul to those vestigial features which humanity has
inherited from those grosser animals, our prehistoric ancestors."

You see by this that Judge Methuen recognized baldness as prima-facie
evidence of intellectuality and spirituality.  He has collected much
literature upon the subject, and has  promised the Academy of Science
to prepare and read for the instruction of that learned body an essay
demonstrating that absence of hair from the cranium (particularly from
the superior regions of the frontal and parietal divisions) proves a
departure from the instincts and practices of brute humanity, and
indicates surely the growth of the understanding.

It occurred to the Judge long ago to prepare a list of the names of the
famous bald men in the history of human society, and this list has
grown until it includes the names of thousands, representing every
profession and vocation.  Homer, Socrates, Confucius, Aristotle, Plato,
Cicero, Pliny, Maecenas, Julius Caesar, Horace, Shakespeare, Bacon,
Napoleon Bonaparte, Dante, Pope, Cowper, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Israel
Putnam, John Quincy Adams, Patrick Henry--these geniuses all were bald.
But the baldest of all was the philosopher Hobbes, of whom the revered
John Aubrey has recorded that "he was very bald, yet within dore he
used to study and sitt bare-headed, and said he never took cold in his
head, but that the greatest trouble was to keepe off the flies from
pitching on the baldness."

In all the portraits and pictures of Bonaparte which I have seen, a
conspicuous feature is that curl or lock of hair which depends upon the
emperor's forehead, and gives to the face a pleasant degree of
picturesque distinction.  Yet this was a vanity, and really a laughable
one; for early in life Bonaparte began to get bald, and this so
troubled him that he sought to overcome the change it made in his
appearance by growing a long strand of hair upon his occiput and
bringing it forward a goodly distance in such artful wise that it right
ingeniously served the purposes of that Hyperion curl which had been
the pride of his youth, but which had fallen early before the ravages
of time.

As for myself, I do not know that I ever shared that derisive opinion
in which the unthinking are wont to hold baldness.  Nay, on the
contrary, I have always had especial reverence for this mark of
intellectuality, and I agree with my friend Judge Methuen that the
tragic episode recorded in the second chapter of II. Kings should serve
the honorable purpose of indicating to humanity that bald heads are
favored with the approval and the protection of Divinity.

In my own case I have imputed my early baldness to growth in
intellectuality and spirituality induced by my fondness for and
devotion to books.  Miss Susan, my sister, lays it to other causes,
first among which she declares to be my unnatural practice of reading
in bed, and the second my habit of eating welsh-rarebits late of
nights.  Over my bed I have a gas-jet so properly shaded that the rays
of light are concentrated and reflected downward upon the volume which
I am reading.

Miss Susan insists that much of this light and its attendant heat falls
upon my head, compelling there a dryness of the scalp whereby the
follicles have been deprived of their natural nourishment and have
consequently died.  She furthermore maintains that the welsh-rarebits
of which I partake invariably at the eleventh hour every night breed
poisonous vapors and subtle megrims within my stomach, which humors,
rising by their natural courses to my brain, do  therein produce a
fever that from within burneth up the fluids necessary to a healthy
condition of the capillary growth upon the super-adjacent and exterior
cranial integument.

Now, this very declaration of Miss Susan's gives me a potent argument
in defence of my practices, for, being bald, would not a neglect of
those means whereby warmth is engendered where it is needed result in
colds, quinsies, asthmas, and a thousand other banes?  The same
benignant Providence which, according to Laurence Sterne, tempereth the
wind to the shorn lamb provideth defence and protection for the bald.
Had I not loved books, the soul in my midriff had not done away with
those capillary vestiges of my simian ancestry which originally
flourished upon my scalp; had I not become bald, the delights and
profits of reading in bed might never have fallen to my lot.

And indeed baldness has its compensations; when I look about me and see
the time, the energy, and the money that are continually expended upon
the nurture and tending of the hair, I am thankful that my lot  is what
it is.  For now my money is applied to the buying of books, and my time
and energy are devoted to the reading of them.

To thy vain employments, thou becurled and pomaded Absalom! Sweeter
than thy unguents and cosmetics and Sabean perfumes is the smell of
those old books of mine, which from the years and from the ship's hold
and from constant companionship with sages and philosophers have
acquired a fragrance that exalteth the soul and quickeneth the
intellectuals!  Let me paraphrase my dear Chaucer and tell thee, thou
waster of substances, that

      For me was lever han at my beddes hed
      A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red
      Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
      Than robes rich, or fidel, or sautrie;
      But all be that I ben a philosopher
      Yet have I but litel gold in cofre!


Books, books, books--give me ever more books, for they are the caskets
wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity--words, the only
things that live forever!  I bow reverently to the bust in yonder
corner whenever I recall what Sir John Herschel  (God rest his dear
soul!) said and wrote: "Were I to pay for a taste that should stand me
in stead under every variety of circumstances and be a source of
happiness and cheerfulness to me during life, and a shield against its
ills, however things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it
would be a taste for reading.  Give a man this taste and a means of
gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man;
unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of
books.  You place him in contact with the best society in every period
of history--with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest,
and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a
denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages.  The world has been
created for him."

For one phrase particularly do all good men, methinks, bless burly,
bearish, phrase-making old Tom Carlyle.  "Of all things," quoth he,
"which men do or make here below by far the most momentous, wonderful,
and worthy are the things we call books."  And Judge Methuen's favorite
quotation is  from Babington Macaulay to this effect:  "I would rather
be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not
love reading."

Kings, indeed!  What a sorry lot are they!  Said George III. to Nicol,
his bookseller:  "I would give this right hand if the same attention
had been paid to my education which I pay to that of the prince."
Louis XIV. was as illiterate as the lowliest hedger and ditcher.  He
could hardly write his name; at first, as Samuel Pegge tells us, he
formed it out of six straight strokes and a line of beauty, thus:

    | | | | | | S

--which he afterward perfected as best he could, and the result was
LOUIS.

Still I find it hard to inveigh against kings when I recall the
goodness of Alexander to Aristotle, for without Alexander we should
hardly have known of Aristotle.  His royal patron provided the
philosopher with every advantage for the acquisition of learning,
dispatching couriers to all parts of the earth to gather books and
manuscripts and every variety of curious thing likely to swell the
store of Aristotle's knowledge.

Yet set them up in a line and survey them--these wearers of crowns and
these wielders of scepters--and how pitiable are they in the paucity
and vanity of their accomplishments!  What knew they of the true
happiness of human life?  They and their courtiers are dust and
forgotten.

Judge Methuen and I shall in due time pass away, but our
courtiers--they who have ever contributed to our delight and
solace--our Horace, our Cervantes, our Shakespeare, and the rest of the
innumerable train--these shall never die.  And inspired and sustained
by this immortal companionship we blithely walk the pathway illumined
by its glory, and we sing, in season and out, the song ever dear to us
and ever dear to thee, I hope, O gentle reader:

  Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke,
      Eyther in doore or out,
  With the greene leaves whispering overhead,
      Or the streete cryes all about;
  Where I maie reade all at my ease
      Both of the newe and old,
  For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
      Is better to me than golde!



VI

MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA

My bookseller and I came nigh to blows some months ago over an edition
of Boccaccio, which my bookseller tried to sell me.  This was a copy in
the original, published at Antwerp in 1603, prettily rubricated, and
elaborately adorned with some forty or fifty copperplates illustrative
of the text.  I dare say the volume was cheap enough at thirty dollars,
but I did not want it.

My reason for not wanting it gave rise to that discussion between my
bookseller and myself, which became very heated before it ended.  I
said very frankly that I did not care for the book in the original,
because I had several translations done by the most competent hands.
Thereupon my bookseller ventured that aged and hackneyed argument which
has for centuries done the book  trade such effective service--namely,
that in every translation, no matter how good that translation may be,
there is certain to be lost a share of the flavor and spirit of the
meaning.

"Fiddledeedee!" said I.  "Do you suppose that these translators who
have devoted their lives to the study and practice of the art are not
competent to interpret the different shades and colors of meaning
better than the mere dabbler in foreign tongues?  And then, again, is
not human life too short for the lover of books to spend his precious
time digging out the recondite allusions of authors, lexicon in hand?
My dear sir, it is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money
for that which one can get done much better and at a much smaller
expenditure by another hand."

From my encounter with my bookseller I went straight home and took down
my favorite copy of the "Decameron" and thumbed it over very tenderly;
for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little
volume.  I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed
since Yseult Hardynge and I parted. She was such a creature as the
great novelist himself would have chosen for a heroine; she had the
beauty and the wit of those Florentine ladies who flourished in the
fourteenth century, and whose graces of body and mind have been
immortalized by Boccaccio.  Her eyes, as I particularly recall, were
specially fine, reflecting from their dark depths every expression of
her varying moods.

Why I called her Fiammetta I cannot say, for I do not remember; perhaps
from a boyish fancy, merely.  At that time Boccaccio and I were famous
friends; we were together constantly, and his companionship had such an
influence upon me that for the nonce I lived and walked and had my
being in that distant, romantic period when all men were gallants and
all women were grandes dames and all birds were nightingales.

I bought myself an old Florentine sword at Noseda's in the Strand and
hung it on the wall in my modest apartments; under it I placed
Boccaccio's portrait and Fiammetta's, and I was wont to drink toasts to
these  beloved counterfeit presentments in flagons (mind you, genuine
antique flagons) of Italian wine. Twice I took Fiammetta boating upon
the Thames and once to view the Lord Mayor's pageant; her mother was
with us on both occasions, but she might as well have been at the
bottom of the sea, for she was a stupid old soul, wholly incapable of
sharing or appreciating the poetic enthusiasms of romantic youth.

Had Fiammetta been a book--ah, unfortunate lady!--had she but been a
book she might still be mine, for me to care for lovingly and to hide
from profane eyes and to attire in crushed levant and gold and to
cherish as a best-beloved companion in mine age!  Had she been a book
she could not have been guilty of the folly of wedding with a yeoman of
Lincolnshire--ah me, what rude awakenings too often dispel the pleasing
dreams of youth!

When I revisited England in the sixties, I was tempted to make an
excursion into Lincolnshire for the purpose of renewing my acquaintance
with Fiammetta.  Before, however, I had achieved that object this
thought occurred to me:  "You are upon a fool's errand; turn back, or
you will destroy forever one of the sweetest of your boyhood illusions!
You seek Fiammetta in the delusive hope of finding her in the person of
Mrs. Henry Boggs; there is but one Fiammetta, and she is the memory
abiding in your heart.  Spare yourself the misery of discovering in the
hearty, fleshy Lincolnshire hussif the decay of the promises of years
ago; be content to do reverence to the ideal Fiammetta who has built
her little shrine in your sympathetic heart!"

Now this was strange counsel, yet it had so great weight with me that I
was persuaded by it, and after lying a night at the Swan-and-Quiver
Tavern I went back to London, and never again had a desire to visit
Lincolnshire.

But Fiammetta is still a pleasing memory--ay, and more than a memory to
me, for whenever I take down that precious book and open it, what a
host of friends do troop forth!  Cavaliers, princesses, courtiers,
damoiselles, monks, nuns, equerries, pages, maidens--humanity of every
class and condition, and all instinct with the color of the master
magician, Boccaccio!

And before them all cometh a maiden with dark, glorious eyes, and she
beareth garlands of roses; the moonlight falleth like a benediction
upon the Florentine garden slope, and the night wind seeketh its cradle
in the laurel tree, and fain would sleep to the song of the nightingale.

As for Judge Methuen, he loves his Boccaccio quite as much as I do
mine, and being somewhat of a versifier he has made a little poem on
the subject, a copy of which I have secured surreptitiously and do now
offer for your delectation:

   One day upon a topmost shelf
      I found a precious prize indeed,
   Which father used to read himself,
      But did not want us boys to read;
   A brown old book of certain age
      (As type and binding seemed to show),
   While on the spotted title-page
      Appeared the name "Boccaccio."

   I'd never heard that name before,
      But in due season it became
   To him who fondly brooded o'er
      Those pages a beloved name!
   Adown the centuries I walked
      Mid pastoral scenes and royal show;
   With seigneurs and their dames I talked--
      The crony of Boccaccio!

   Those courtly knights and sprightly maids,
     Who really seemed disposed to shine
   In gallantries and escapades,
      Anon became great friends of mine.
   Yet was there sentiment with fun,
      And oftentimes my tears would flow
   At some quaint tale of valor done,
      As told by my Boccaccio.

   In boyish dreams I saw again
      Bucolic belles and dames of court,
   The princely youths and monkish men
      Arrayed for sacrifice or sport.
   Again I heard the nightingale
      Sing as she sang those years ago
   In his embowered Italian vale
      To my revered Boccaccio.

   And still I love that brown old book
      I found upon the topmost shelf--
   I love it so I let none look
      Upon the treasure but myself!
   And yet I have a strapping boy
      Who (I have every cause to know)
   Would to its full extent enjoy
      The friendship of Boccaccio!

   But boys are, oh! so different now
      From what they were when I was one!
   I fear my boy would not know how
      To take that old raconteur's fun!
   In your companionship, O friend,
      I think it wise alone to go
   Plucking the gracious fruits that bend
      Wheree'er you lead, Boccaccio.

   So rest you there upon the shelf,
      Clad in your garb of faded brown;
   Perhaps, sometime, my boy himself
      Shall find you out and take you down.
   Then may he feel the joy once more
      That thrilled me, filled me years ago
   When reverently I brooded o'er
      The glories of Boccaccio!


Out upon the vile brood of imitators, I say!  Get ye gone, ye Bandellos
and ye Straparolas and ye other charlatans who would fain possess
yourselves of the empire which the genius of Boccaccio bequeathed to
humanity.  There is but one master, and to him we render grateful
homage.  He leads us down through the cloisters of time, and at his
touch the dead become reanimate, and all the sweetness and the valor of
antiquity recur; heroism, love, sacrifice, tears,  laughter, wisdom,
wit, philosophy, charity, and understanding are his auxiliaries;
humanity is his inspiration, humanity his theme, humanity his audience,
humanity his debtor.

Now it is of Tancred's daughter he tells, and now of Rossiglione's
wife; anon of the cozening gardener he speaks and anon of Alibech; of
what befell Gillette de Narbonne, of Iphigenia and Cymon, of Saladin,
of Calandrino, of Dianora and Ansaldo we hear; and what subject soever
he touches he quickens it into life, and he so subtly invests it with
that indefinable quality of his genius as to attract thereunto not only
our sympathies but also our enthusiasm.

Yes, truly, he should be read with understanding; what author should
not?  I would no more think of putting my Boccaccio into the hands of a
dullard than I would think of leaving a bright and beautiful woman at
the mercy of a blind mute.

I have hinted at the horror of the fate which befell Yseult Hardynge in
the seclusion of Mr. Henry Boggs's Lincolnshire estate.  Mr. Henry
Boggs knew nothing of romance, and he cared less; he was wholly
incapable of appreciating a woman with dark, glorious eyes and an
expanding soul; I'll warrant me that he would at any time gladly have
traded a "Decameron" for a copy of "The Gentleman Poulterer," or for a
year's subscription to that grewsome monument to human imbecility,
London "Punch."

Ah, Yseult! hadst thou but been a book!



VII

THE DELIGHTS OF FENDER-FISHING

I should like to have met Izaak Walton.  He is one of the few authors
whom I know I should like to have met.  For he was a wise man, and he
had understanding.  I should like to have gone angling with him, for I
doubt not that like myself he was more of an angler theoretically than
practically.  My bookseller is a famous fisherman, as, indeed,
booksellers generally are, since the methods employed by fishermen to
deceive and to catch their finny prey are very similar to those
employed by booksellers to attract and to entrap buyers.

As for myself, I regard angling as one of the best of avocations, and
although I have pursued it but little, I concede that doubtless had I
practised it oftener I should have been a better man.  How truly has
Dame  Juliana Berners said that "at the least the angler hath his
wholesome walk and merry at his ease, and a sweet air of the sweet
savour of the mead flowers that maketh him hungry; he heareth the
melodious harmony of fowls; he seeth the young swans, herons, ducks,
cotes, and many other fowls with their broods, which meseemeth better
than all the noise of hounds, the blasts of horns, and the cry of fowls
that hunters, falconers, and fowlers can make.  And IF the angler take
fish--surely then is there no man merrier than he is in his spirit!"

My bookseller cannot understand how it is that, being so enthusiastic a
fisherman theoretically, I should at the same time indulge so seldom in
the practice of fishing, as if, forsooth, a man should be expected to
engage continually and actively in every art and practice of which he
may happen to approve.  My young friend Edward Ayer has a noble
collection of books relating to the history of American aboriginals and
to the wars waged between those Indians and the settlers in this
country; my other young friend Luther Mills has gathered together a
multitude of books treating of the Napoleonic wars; yet neither Ayer
nor Mills hath ever slain a man or fought a battle, albeit both find
delectation in recitals of warlike prowess and personal valor.  I love
the night and all the poetic influences of that quiet time, but I do
not sit up all night in order to hear the nightingale or to contemplate
the astounding glories of the heavens.

For similar reasons, much as I appreciate and marvel at the beauties of
early morning, I do not make a practice of early rising, and sensible
as I am to the charms of the babbling brook and of the crystal lake, I
am not addicted to the practice of wading about in either to the danger
either to my own health or to the health of the finny denizens in those
places.

The best anglers in the world are those who do not catch fish; the mere
slaughter of fish is simply brutal, and it was with a view to keeping
her excellent treatise out of the hands of the idle and the
inappreciative that Dame Berners incorporated that treatise in a
compendious book whose cost was so large that only "gentyll and noble
men"  could possess it.  What mind has he who loveth fishing merely for
the killing it involves--what mind has such a one to the beauty of the
ever-changing panorama which nature unfolds to the appreciative eye, or
what communion has he with those sweet and uplifting influences in
which the meadows, the hillsides, the glades, the dells, the forests,
and the marshes abound?

Out upon these vandals, I say--out upon the barbarians who would rob
angling of its poesy, and reduce it to the level of the butcher's
trade!  It becomes a base and vicious avocation, does angling, when it
ceases to be what Sir Henry Wotton loved to call it--"an employment for
his idle time, which was then not idly spent; a rest to his mind, a
cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet
thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness, and a
begetter of habits of peace and patience in those that professed and
practised it!"

There was another man I should like to have met--Sir Henry Wotton; for
he was an ideal angler.  Christopher North, too ("an excellent angler
and now with God"!)--how I should love to have explored the Yarrow with
him, for he was a man of vast soul, vast learning, and vast wit.

"Would you believe it, my dear Shepherd," said he, "that my piscatory
passions are almost dead within me, and I like now to saunter along the
banks and braes, eying the younkers angling, or to lay me down on some
sunny spot, and with my face up to heaven, watch the slow-changing
clouds!"

THERE was the angling genius with whom I would fain go angling!

"Angling," says our revered St. Izaak, "angling is somewhat like
poetry--men are to be born so."

Doubtless there are poets who are not anglers, but doubtless there
never was an angler who was not also a poet.  Christopher North was a
famous fisherman; he began his career as such when he was a child of
three years.  With his thread line and bent-pin hook the wee tot set
out to make his first cast in "a wee burnie" he had discovered near his
home.  He caught his fish, too, and for the rest of the day he carried
the miserable little specimen about on a  plate, exhibiting it
triumphantly.  With that first experience began a life which I am fain
to regard as one glorious song in praise of the beauty and the
beneficence of nature.

My bookseller once took me angling with him in a Wisconsin lake which
was the property of a club of anglers to which my friend belonged.  As
we were to be absent several days I carried along a box of books, for I
esteem appropriate reading to be a most important adjunct to an angling
expedition.  My bookseller had with him enough machinery to stock a
whaling expedition, and I could not help wondering what my old Walton
would think, could he drop down into our company with his modest
equipment of hooks, flies, and gentles.

The lake whither we went was a large and beautiful expanse, girt by a
landscape which to my fancy was the embodiment of poetic delicacy and
suggestion.  I began to inquire about the chub, dace, and trouts, but
my bookseller lost no time in telling me that the lake had been rid of
all cheap fry, and had been stocked with game fish, such as bass and
pike.

I did not at all relish this covert sneer at traditions which I have
always reverenced, and the better acquainted I became with my
bookseller's modern art of angling the less I liked it.  I have little
love for that kind of angling which does not admit of a simultaneous
enjoyment of the surrounding beauties of nature. My bookseller enjoined
silence upon me, but I did not heed the injunction, for I must, indeed,
have been a mere wooden effigy to hold my peace amid that picturesque
environment of hill, valley, wood, meadow, and arching sky of clear
blue.

It was fortunate for me that I had my "Noctes Ambrosianae" along, for
when I had exhausted my praise of the surrounding glories of nature, my
bookseller would not converse with me; so I opened my book and read to
him that famous passage between Kit North and the Ettrick Shepherd,
wherein the shepherd discourses boastfully of his prowess as a piscator
of sawmon.

As the sun approached midheaven and its heat became insupportable, I
raised my umbrella; to this sensible proceeding my bookseller
objected--in fact, there was  hardly any reasonable suggestion I had to
make for beguiling the time that my bookseller did not protest against
it, and when finally I produced my "Newcastle Fisher's Garlands" from
my basket, and began to troll those spirited lines beginning

     Away wi' carking care and gloom
      That make life's pathway weedy O!
  A cheerful glass makes flowers to bloom
      And lightsome hours fly speedy O!

he gathered in his rod and tackle, and declared that it was no use
trying to catch fish while Bedlam ran riot.

As for me, I had a delightful time of it; I caught no fish, to be sure:
but what of that?  I COULD have caught fish had I so desired, but, as I
have already intimated to you and as I have always maintained and
always shall, the mere catching of fish is the least of the many
enjoyments comprehended in the broad, gracious art of angling.

Even my bookseller was compelled to admit ultimately that I was a
worthy disciple of Walton, for when we had returned to the club house
and had partaken of our supper I regaled the company with many a
cheery tale and merry song which I had gathered from my books.  Indeed,
before I returned to the city I was elected an honorary member of the
club by acclamation--not for the number of fish I had expiscated (for I
did not catch one), but for that mastery of the science of angling and
the literature and the traditions and the religion and the philosophy
thereof which, by the grace of the companionship of books, I had
achieved.

It is said that, with his feet over the fender, Macaulay could
discourse learnedly of French poetry, art, and philosophy.  Yet he
never visited Paris that he did not experience the most exasperating
difficulties in making himself understood by the French customs
officers.

In like manner I am a fender-fisherman.  With my shins toasting before
a roaring fire, and with Judge Methuen at my side, I love to exploit
the joys and the glories of angling.  The Judge is "a brother of the
angle," as all will allow who have heard him tell Father Prout's story
of the bishop and the turbots or heard him sing--

  With angle rod and lightsome heart,
  Our conscience clear, we gay depart
  To pebbly brooks and purling streams,
  And ne'er a care to vex our dreams.


And how could the lot of the fender-fisherman be happier?  No colds,
quinsies or asthmas follow his incursions into the realms of fancy
where in cool streams and peaceful lakes a legion of chubs and trouts
and sawmon await him; in fancy he can hie away to the far-off Yalrow
and once more share the benefits of the companionship of Kit North, the
Shepherd, and that noble Edinburgh band; in fancy he can trudge the
banks of the Blackwater with the sage of Watergrasshill; in fancy he
can hear the music of the Tyne and feel the wind sweep cool and fresh
o'er Coquetdale; in fancy, too, he knows the friendships which only he
can know--the friendships of the immortals whose spirits hover where
human love and sympathy attract them.

How well I love ye, O my precious books--my Prout, my Wilson, my
Phillips, my Berners, my Doubleday, my Roxby, my Chatto, my Thompson,
my Crawhall!  For  ye are full of joyousness and cheer, and your songs
uplift me and make me young and strong again.

And thou, homely little brown thing with worn leaves, yet more precious
to me than all jewels of the earth--come, let me take thee from thy
shelf and hold thee lovingly in my hands and press thee tenderly to
this aged and slow-pulsing heart of mine!  Dost thou remember how I
found thee half a century ago all tumbled in a lot of paltry trash?
Did I not joyously possess thee for a sixpence, and have I not
cherished thee full sweetly all these years?  My Walton, soon must we
part forever; when I am gone say unto him who next shall have thee to
his own that with his latest breath an old man blessed thee!



VIII

BALLADS AND THEIR MAKERS

One of the most interesting spots in all London to me is Bunhill Fields
cemetery, for herein are the graves of many whose memory I revere.  I
had heard that Joseph Ritson was buried here, and while my sister, Miss
Susan, lingered at the grave of her favorite poet, I took occasion to
spy around among the tombstones in the hope of discovering the last
resting-place of the curious old antiquary whose labors in the field of
balladry have placed me under so great a debt of gratitude to him.

But after I had searched in vain for somewhat more than an hour one of
the keepers of the place told me that in compliance with Ritson's
earnest desire while living, that antiquary's grave was immediately
after the interment of the body levelled down and left to  the care of
nature, with no stone to designate its location.  So at the present
time no one knows just where old Ritson's grave is, only that within
that vast enclosure where so many thousand souls sleep their last sleep
the dust of the famous ballad-lover lies fast asleep in the bosom of
mother earth.

I have never been able to awaken in Miss Susan any enthusiasm for
balladry.  My worthy sister is of a serious turn of mind, and I have
heard her say a thousand times that convivial songs (which is her name
for balladry) are inspirations, if not actually compositions, of the
devil.  In her younger days Miss Susan performed upon the melodeon with
much discretion, and at one time I indulged the delusive hope that
eventually she would not disdain to join me in the vocal performance of
the best ditties of D'Urfey and his ilk.

If I do say it myself, I had a very pretty voice thirty or forty years
ago, and even at the present time I can deliver the ballad of King
Cophetua and the beggar maid with amazing spirit when I have my friend
Judge Methuen at my side and a bowl of steaming punch between us.  But
my education of Miss Susan ended without being finished.  We two
learned to perform the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens very acceptably, but
Miss Susan abandoned the copartnership when I insisted that we proceed
to the sprightly ditty beginning,

     Life's short hours too fast are hasting--
     Sweet amours cannot be lasting.


My physician, Dr. O'Rell, has often told me that he who has a
well-assorted ballad library should never be lonely, for the
limitations of balladly are so broad that within them are to be found
performances adapted to every mood to which humanity is liable.  And,
indeed, my experience confirms the truth of my physician's theory.  It
were hard for me to tell what delight I have had upon a hot and gusty
day in a perusal of the history of Robin Hood, for there is such
actuality in those simple rhymes as to dispel the troublesome
environments of the present and transport me to better times and
pleasanter scenes.

Aha! how many times have I walked with  brave Robin in Sherwood forest!
How many times have Little John and I couched under the greenwood tree
and shared with Friar Tuck the haunch of juicy venison and the pottle
of brown October brew!  And Will Scarlet and I have been famous friends
these many a year, and if Allen-a-Dale were here he would tell you that
I have trolled full many a ballad with him in praise of Maid Marian's
peerless beauty.

Who says that Sherwood is no more and that Robin and his merry men are
gone forever!  Why, only yesternight I walked with them in that
gracious forest and laughed defiance at the doughty sheriff and his
craven menials.  The moonlight twinkled and sifted through the boscage,
and the wind was fresh and cool. Right merrily we sang, and I doubt not
we should have sung the whole night through had not my sister, Miss
Susan, come tapping at my door, saying that I had waked her parrot and
would do well to cease my uproar and go to sleep.

Judge Methuen has a copy of Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry" that he prizes highly.  It is the first edition of this noble
work, and was originally presented by Percy to Dr. Birch of the British
Museum.  The Judge found these three volumes exposed for sale in a
London book stall, and he comprehended them without delay--a great
bargain, you will admit, when I tell you that they cost the Judge but
three shillings!  How came these precious volumes into that book stall
I shall not presume to say.

Strange indeed are the vicissitudes which befall books, stranger even
than the happenings in human life.  All men are not as considerate of
books as I am; I wish they were.  Many times I have felt the deepest
compassion for noble volumes in the possession of persons wholly
incapable of appreciating them.  The helpless books seemed to appeal to
me to rescue them, and too many times I have been tempted to snatch
them from their inhospitable shelves, and march them away to a pleasant
refuge beneath my own comfortable roof tree.

Too few people seem to realize that books have feelings.  But if I know
one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and
love me.  When of a morning I awaken I cast my eyes about my room to
see how fare my beloved treasures, and as I cry cheerily to them,
"Good-day to you, sweet friends!" how lovingly they beam upon me, and
how glad they are that my repose has been unbroken.  When I take them
from their places, how tenderly do they respond to the caresses of my
hands, and with what exultation do they respond unto my call for
sympathy!

Laughter for my gayer moods, distraction for my cares, solace for my
griefs, gossip for my idler moments, tears for my sorrows, counsel for
my doubts, and assurance against my fears--these things my books give
me with a promptness and a certainty and a cheerfulness which are more
than human; so that I were less than human did I not love these
comforters and bear eternal gratitude to them.

Judge Methuen read me once a little poem which I fancy mightily; it is
entitled "Winfreda," and you will find it in your Percy, if you have
one.  The last stanza, as I recall it, runs in this wise:

  And when by envy time transported
  Shall seek to rob us of our joys,
  You'll in our girls again be courted
  And I'll go wooing in our boys.


"Now who was the author of those lines?" asked the Judge.

"Undoubtedly Oliver Wendell Holmes," said I.  "They have the flavor
peculiar to our Autocrat; none but he could have done up so much
sweetness in such a quaint little bundle."

"You are wrong," said the Judge, "but the mistake is a natural one.
The whole poem is such a one as Holmes might have written, but it saw
the light long before our dear doctor's day: what a pity that its
authorship is not known!"

"Yet why a pity?" quoth I.  "Is it not true that words are the only
things that live forever?  Are we not mortal, and are not books
immortal?  Homer's harp is broken and Horace's lyre is unstrung, and
the voices of the great singers are hushed; but their songs--their
songs are imperishable.  O friend! what moots it to them or to us who
gave this epic or that lyric to immortality?  The  singer belongs to a
year, his song to all time.  I know it is the custom now to credit the
author with his work, for this is a utilitarian age, and all things are
by the pound or the piece, and for so much money.

"So when a song is printed it is printed in small type, and the name of
him who wrote it is appended thereunto in big type.  If the song be
meritorious it goes to the corners of the earth through the medium of
the art preservative of arts, but the longer and the farther it travels
the bigger does the type of the song become and the smaller becomes the
type wherein the author's name is set.

"Then, finally, some inconsiderate hand, wielding the pen or shears,
blots out or snips off the poet's name, and henceforth the song is
anonymous.  A great iconoclast--a royal old iconoclast--is Time: but he
hath no terrors for those precious things which are embalmed in words,
and the only fellow that shall surely escape him till the crack of doom
is he whom men know by the name of Anonymous!"

"Doubtless you speak truly," said the  Judge; "yet it would be
different if I but had the ordering of things.  I would let the poets
live forever and I would kill off most of their poetry."

I do not wonder that Ritson and Percy quarrelled.  It was his
misfortune that Ritson quarrelled with everybody.  Yet Ritson was a
scrupulously honest man; he was so vulgarly sturdy in his honesty that
he would make all folk tell the truth even though the truth were of
such a character as to bring the blush of shame to the devil's hardened
cheek.

On the other hand, Percy believed that there were certain true things
which should not be opened out in the broad light of day; it was this
deep-seated conviction which kept him from publishing the manuscript
folio, a priceless treasure, which Ritson never saw and which, had it
fallen in Ritson's way instead of Percy's, would have been clapped at
once into the hands of the printer.

How fortunate it is for us that we have in our time so great a scholar
as Francis James Child, so enamored of balladry and so learned in it,
to complete and finish the work of his predecessors.  I count myself
happy that I  have heard from the lips of this enthusiast several of
the rarest and noblest of the old British and old Scottish ballads; and
I recall with pride that he complimented me upon my spirited vocal
rendering of "Burd Isabel and Sir Patrick," "Lang Johnny More," "The
Duke o' Gordon's Daughter," and two or three other famous songs which I
had learned while sojourning among the humbler classes in the North of
England.

After paying our compliments to the Robin Hood garlands, to Scott, to
Kirkpatrick Sharpe, to Ritson, to Buchan, to Motherwell, to Laing, to
Christie, to Jamieson, and to the other famous lovers and compilers of
balladry, we fell to discoursing of French song and of the service that
Francis Mahony performed for English-speaking humanity when he
exploited in his inimitable style those lyrics of the French and the
Italian people which are now ours as much as they are anybody else's.

Dear old Beranger! what wonder that Prout loved him, and what wonder
that we all love him?  I have thirty odd editions of his works, and I
would walk farther to  pick up a volume of his lyrics than I would walk
to secure any other book, excepting of course a Horace.  Beranger and I
are old cronies.  I have for the great master a particularly tender
feeling, and all on account of Fanchonette.

But there--you know nothing of Fanchonette, because I have not told you
of her.  She, too, should have been a book instead of the dainty,
coquettish Gallic maiden that she was.



IX

BOOKSELLERS AND PRINTERS, OLD AND NEW

Judge Methuen tells me that he fears what I have said about my
bookseller will create the impression that I am unkindly disposed
toward the bookselling craft.  For the last fifty years I have had
uninterrupted dealings with booksellers, and none knows better than the
booksellers themselves that I particularly admire them as a class.
Visitors to my home have noticed that upon my walls are hung noble
portraits of Caxton, Wynkin de Worde, Richard Pynson, John Wygthe,
Rayne Wolfe, John Daye, Jacob Tonson, Richard Johnes, John Dunton, and
other famous old printers and booksellers.

I have, too, a large collection of portraits of modern booksellers,
including a pen-and-ink sketch of Quaritch, a line engraving of Rimell,
and a very excellent etching of my  dear friend, the late Henry
Stevens.  One of the portraits is a unique, for I had it painted
myself, and I have never permitted any copy to be made of it; it is of
my bookseller, and it represents him in the garb of a fisherman,
holding his rod and reel in one hand and the copy of the "Compleat
Angler" in the other.

Mr. Curwen speaks of booksellers as being "singularly thrifty, able,
industrious, and persevering--in some few cases singularly venturesome,
liberal, and kind-hearted."  My own observation and experience have
taught me that as a class booksellers are exceptionally intelligent,
ranking with printers in respect to the variety and extent of their
learning.

They have, however, this distinct advantage over the printers--they are
not brought in contact with the manifold temptations to intemperance
and profligacy which environ the votaries of the art preservative of
arts.  Horace Smith has said that "were there no readers there
certainly would be no writers; clearly, therefore, the existence of
writers depends upon the existence of readers: and,  of course, since
the cause must be antecedent to the effect, readers existed before
writers.  Yet, on the other hand, if there were no writers there could
be no readers; so it would appear that writers must be antecedent to
readers."

It amazes me that a reasoner so shrewd, so clear, and so exacting as
Horace Smith did not pursue the proposition further; for without
booksellers there would have been no market for books--the author would
not have been able to sell, and the reader would not have been able to
buy.

The further we proceed with the investigation the more satisfied we
become that the original man was three of number, one of him being the
bookseller, who established friendly relations between the other two of
him, saying:  "I will serve you both by inciting both a demand and a
supply."  So then the author did his part, and the reader his, which I
take to be a much more dignified scheme than that suggested by Darwin
and his school of investigators.

By the very nature of their occupation booksellers are broad-minded;
their association with every class of humanity and their constant
companionship with books give them a liberality that enables them to
view with singular clearness and dispassionateness every phase of life
and every dispensation of Providence.  They are not always practical,
for the development of the spiritual and intellectual natures in man
does not at the same time promote dexterity in the use of the baser
organs of the body, I have known philosophers who could not harness a
horse or even shoo chickens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once consumed several hours' time trying to
determine whether he should trundle a wheelbarrow by pushing it or by
pulling it.  A. Bronson Alcott once tried to construct a chicken coop,
and he had boarded himself up inside the structure before he discovered
that he had not provided for a door or for windows.  We have all heard
the story of Isaac Newton--how he cut two holes in his study-door, a
large one for his cat to enter by, and a small one for the kitten.

This unworldliness--this impossibility, if you please--is
characteristic of intellectual  progression.  Judge Methuen's second
son is named Grolier; and the fact that he doesn't know enough to come
in out of the rain has inspired both the Judge and myself with the
conviction that in due time Grolier will become a great philosopher.

The mention of this revered name reminds me that my bookseller told me
the other day that just before I entered his shop a wealthy patron of
the arts and muses called with a volume which he wished to have rebound.

"I can send it to Paris or to London," said my bookseller. "If you have
no choice of binder, I will entrust it to Zaehnsdorf with instructions
to lavish his choicest art upon it."

"But indeed I HAVE a choice," cried the plutocrat, proudly. "I noticed
a large number of Grolier bindings at the Art Institute last week, and
I want something of the same kind myself.  Send the book to Grolier,
and tell him to do his prettiest by it, for I can stand the expense, no
matter what it is."

Somewhere in his admirable discourse old Walton has stated the theory
that an angler must be born and then made.  I have always held the same
to be true of the bookseller.  There are many, too many, charlatans in
the trade; the simon-pure bookseller enters upon and conducts
bookselling not merely as a trade and for the purpose of amassing
riches, but because he loves books and because he has pleasure in
diffusing their gracious influences.

Judge Methuen tells me that it is no longer the fashion to refer to
persons or things as being "simon-pure"; the fashion, as he says,
passed out some years ago when a writer in a German paper "was led into
an amusing blunder by an English review.  The reviewer, having occasion
to draw a distinction between George and Robert Cruikshank, spoke of
the former as the real Simon Pure.  The German, not understanding the
allusion, gravely told his readers that George Cruikshank was a
pseudonym, the author's real name being Simon Pure."

This incident is given in Henry B. Wheatley's "Literary Blunders," a
very charming book, but one that could have been made more interesting
to me had it recorded the curious blunder which Frederick Saunders
makes in his "Story of Some Famous Books."  On page 169 we find this
information:  "Among earlier American bards we instance Dana, whose
imaginative poem 'The Culprit Fay,' so replete with poetic beauty, is a
fairy tale of the highlands of the Hudson.  The origin of the poem is
traced to a conversation with Cooper, the novelist, and Fitz-Greene
Halleck, the poet, who, speaking of the Scottish streams and their
legendary associations, insisted that the American rivers were not
susceptible of like poetic treatment.  Dana thought otherwise, and to
make his position good produced three days after this poem."

It may be that Saunders wrote the name Drake, for it was James Rodman
Drake who did "The Culprit Fay."  Perhaps it was the printer's fault
that the poem is accredited to Dana.  Perhaps Mr. Saunders writes so
legible a hand that the printers are careless with his manuscript.

"There is," says Wheatley, "there is a popular notion among authors
that it is not wise to write a clear hand.  Menage was one of the first
to express it.  He wrote:  'If  you desire that no mistake shall appear
in the works which you publish, never send well-written copy to the
printer, for in that case the manuscript is given to young apprentices,
who make a thousand errors; while, on the other hand, that which is
difficult to read is dealt with by the master-printers.'"

The most distressing blunder I ever read in print was made at the time
of the burial of the famous antiquary and litterateur, John Payne
Collier.  In the London newspapers of Sept. 21, 1883, it was reported
that "the remains of the late Mr. John Payne Collier were interred
yesterday in Bray churchyard, near Maidenhead, in the presence of a
large number of spectators." Thereupon the Eastern daily press
published the following remarkable perversion:  "The Bray Colliery
Disaster.  The remains of the late John Payne, collier, were interred
yesterday afternoon in the Bray churchyard in the presence of a large
number of friends and spectators."

Far be it from the book-lover and the book-collector to rail at
blunders, for not unfrequently these very blunders make books valuable.
Who cares for a Pine's Horace that does not contain the "potest" error?
The genuine first edition of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" is to be
determined by the presence of a certain typographical slip in the
introduction.  The first edition of the English Scriptures printed in
Ireland (1716) is much desired by collectors, and simply because of an
error. Isaiah bids us "sin no more," but the Belfast printer, by some
means or another, transposed the letters in such wise as to make the
injunction read "sin on more."

The so-called Wicked Bible is a book that is seldom met with, and,
therefore, in great demand.  It was printed in the time of Charles I.,
and it is notorious because it omits the adverb "not" in its version of
the seventh commandment; the printers were fined a large sum for this
gross error.  Six copies of the Wicked Bible are known to be in
existence.  At one time the late James Lenox had two copies; in his
interesting memoirs Henry Stevens tells how he picked up one copy in
Paris for fifty guineas.

Rabelais' printer got the satirical doctor  into deep water for
printing asne for ame; the council of the Sorbonne took the matter up
and asked Francis I. to prosecute Rabelais for heresy; this the king
declined to do, and Rabelais proceeded forthwith to torment the council
for having founded a charge of heresy upon a printer's blunder.

Once upon a time the Foulis printing establishment at Glasgow
determined to print a perfect Horace; accordingly the proof sheets were
hung up at the gates of the university, and a sum of money was paid for
every error detected.

Notwithstanding these precautions the edition had six uncorrected
errors in it when it was finally published.  Disraeli says that the
so-called Pearl Bible had six thousand errata!  The works of Picus of
Mirandula, Strasburg, 1507, gave a list of errata covering fifteen
folio pages, and a worse case is that of "Missae ac Missalis Anatomia"
(1561), a volume of one hundred and seventy-two pages, fifteen of which
are devoted to the errata.  The author of the Missae felt so deeply
aggrieved by this array of blunders that he made a public explanation
to the effect that the devil himself stole the manuscript, tampered
with it, and then actually compelled the printer to misread it.

I am not sure that this ingenious explanation did not give origin to
the term of "printer's devil."


   It is frightful to think
      What nonsense sometimes
   They make of one's sense
      And, what's worse, of one's rhymes.

   It was only last week,
      In my ode upon spring,
   Which I meant to have made
      A most beautiful thing,

   When I talked of the dewdrops
      From freshly blown roses,
   The nasty things made it
      From freshly blown noses.


We can fancy Richard Porson's rage (for Porson was of violent temper)
when, having written the statement that "the crowd rent the air with
their shouts," his printer made the line read "the crowd rent the air
with their snouts."  However, this error was a natural one, since it
occurs in the "Catechism  of the Swinish Multitude."  Royalty only are
privileged when it comes to the matter of blundering.  When Louis XIV.
was a boy he one day spoke of "un carosse"; he should have said "une
carosse," but he was king, and having changed the gender of carosse the
change was accepted, and unto this day carosse is masculine.

That errors should occur in newspapers is not remarkable, for much of
the work in a newspaper office is done hastily.  Yet some of these
errors are very amusing.  I remember to have read in a Berlin newspaper
a number of years ago that "Prince Bismarck is trying to keep up honest
and straightforward relations with all the girls" (madchen).

This statement seemed incomprehensible until it transpired that the
word "madchen" was in this instance a misprint for "machten," a word
meaning all the European powers.



X

WHEN FANCHONETTE BEWITCHED ME

The garden in which I am straying has so many diversions to catch my
eye, to engage my attention and to inspire reminiscence that I find it
hard to treat of its beauties methodically.  I find myself wandering up
and down, hither and thither, in so irresponsible a fashion that I
marvel you have not abandoned me as the most irrational of madmen.

Yet how could it be otherwise?  All around me I see those things that
draw me from the pathway I set out to pursue: like a heedless butterfly
I flit from this sweet unto that, glorying and revelling in the
sunshine and the posies.  There is little that is selfish in a love
like this, and herein we have another reason why the passion for books
is beneficial.  He who loves women must and  should love some one woman
above the rest, and he has her to his keeping, which I esteem to be one
kind of selfishness.

But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this,
but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble
passion.  Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!

To return now to the matter of booksellers, I would fain impress you
with the excellences of the craft, for I know their virtues. My
association with them has covered so long a period and has been so
intimate that even in a vast multitude of people I have no difficulty
in determining who are the booksellers and who are not.

For, having to do with books, these men in due time come to resemble
their wares not only in appearance but also in conversation.  My
bookseller has dwelt so long in his corner with folios and quartos and
other antique tomes that he talks in black-letter and has the modest,
engaging look of a brown old stout binding, and to the delectation of
discriminating olfactories he exhaleth an odor of mildew and of tobacco
commingled, which is more grateful to the true bibliophile than all the
perfumes of Araby.

I have studied the craft so diligently that by merely clapping my eyes
upon a bookseller I can tell you with certainty what manner of books he
sells; but you must know that the ideal bookseller has no fads, being
equally proficient in and a lover of all spheres, departments,
branches, and lines of his art.  He is, moreover, of a benignant
nature, and he denies credit to none; yet, withal, he is righteously so
discriminating that he lets the poor scholar have for a paltry sum that
which the rich parvenu must pay dearly for.  He is courteous and
considerate where courtesy and consideration are most seemly.

Samuel Johnson once rolled into a London bookseller's shop to ask for
literary employment.  The bookseller scrutinized his burly frame,
enormous hands, coarse face, and humble apparel.

"You would make a better porter," said he.

This was too much for the young lexicographer's patience.  He picked up
a folio and incontinently let fly at the bookseller's head,  and then
stepping over the prostrate victim he made his exit, saying:  "Lie
there, thou lump of lead!"

This bookseller was Osborne, who had a shop at Gray's Inn Gate. To
Boswell Johnson subsequently explained:  "Sir, he was impertinent to
me, and I beat him."

Jacob Tonson was Dryden's bookseller; in the earlier times a seller was
also a publisher of books.  Dryden was not always on amiable terms with
Tonson, presumably because Dryden invariably was in debt to Tonson.  On
one occasion Dryden asked for an advance of money, but Tonson refused
upon the grounds that the poet's overdraft already exceeded the limits
of reasonableness. Thereupon Dryden penned the following lines and sent
them to Tonson with the message that he who wrote these lines could
write more:

      With leering looks, bull-faced and freckled fair
      With two left legs, with Judas-colored hair,
      And frowzy pores that taint the ambient air.


These lines wrought the desired effect: Tonson sent the money which
Dryden had asked  for.  When Dryden died Tonson made overtures to Pope,
but the latter soon went over to Tonson's most formidable rival,
Bernard Lintot.  On one occasion Pope happened to be writing to both
publishers, and by a curious blunder he inclosed to each the letter
intended for the other.  In the letter meant for Tonson, he said that
Lintot was a scoundrel, and in the letter meant for Lintot he declared
that Tonson was an old rascal.  We can fancy how little satisfaction
Messrs. Lintot and Tonson derived from the perusal of these missent
epistles.

Andrew Millar was the publisher who had practical charge of the
production of Johnson's dictionary.  It seems that Johnson drew out his
stipulated honorarium of eight thousand dollars (to be more exact,
L1575) before the dictionary went to press; this is not surprising, for
the work of preparation consumed eight years, instead of three, as
Johnson had calculated.  Johnson inquired of the messenger what Millar
said when he received the last batch of copy.  The messenger answered:
"He said 'Thank God I have done with him.'"  This made Johnson smile.
"I am glad," said he, quietly, "that he thanks God for anything."

I was not done with my discourse when a book was brought in from Judge
Methuen; the interruption was a pleasant one.  "I was too busy last
evening," writes the judge, "to bring you this volume which I picked up
in a La Salle street stall yesterday.  I know your love for the
scallawag Villon, so I am sure you will fancy the lines which,
evidently, the former owner of this book has scribbled upon the
fly-leaf."  Fancy them?  Indeed I do; and if you dote on the
"scallawag" as I dote on him you also will declare that our anonymous
poet has not wrought ill.


                      FRANCOIS VILLON

  If I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I,
  What would it matter to me how the time might drag or fly?
  HE would in sweaty anguish toil the days and nights away,
  And still not keep the prowling, growling, howling wolf at bay!
  But, with my valiant bottle and my frouzy brevet-bride,
  And my score of loyal cut-throats standing guard for me outside,
  What worry of the morrow would provoke a casual sigh
  If I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I?

  If I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I,
  To yonder gloomy boulevard at midnight I would hie;
  "Stop, stranger! and deliver your possessions, ere you feel
  The mettle of my bludgeon or the temper of my steel!"
  He should give me gold and diamonds, his snuff-box and his cane--
  "Now back, my boon companions, to our bordel with our gain!"
  And, back within that brothel, how the bottles they would fly,
  If I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I!

  If I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I,
  We both would mock the gibbet which the law has lifted high;
  HE in his meagre, shabby home, _I_ in my roaring den--
  HE with his babes around him, _I_ with my hunted men!
  His virtue be his bulwark--my genius should be mine!--
  "Go, fetch my pen, sweet Margot, and a jorum of your wine!

       .    .    .    .    .    .    .

  So would one vainly plod, and one win immortality--
  If I were Francois Villon and Francois Villon I!



My acquaintance with Master Villon was made in Paris during my second
visit to that  fascinating capital, and for a while I was under his
spell to that extent that I would read no book but his, and I made
journeys to Rouen, Tours, Bordeaux, and Poitiers for the purpose of
familiarizing myself with the spots where he had lived, and always
under the surveillance of the police.  In fact, I became so infatuated
of Villonism that at one time I seriously thought of abandoning myself
to a life of crime in order to emulate in certain particulars at least
the example of my hero.

There were, however, hindrances to this scheme, first of which was my
inability to find associates whom I wished to attach to my cause in the
capacity in which Colin de Cayeulx and the Baron de Grigny served
Master Francois.  I sought the companionship of several low-browed,
ill-favored fellows whom I believed suited to my purposes, but almost
immediately I wearied of them, for they had never looked into a book
and were so profoundly ignorant as to be unable to distinguish between
a folio and a thirty-twomo.

Then again it befell that, while the Villon  fever was raging within
and I was contemplating a career of vice, I had a letter from my uncle
Cephas, apprising me that Captivity Waite (she was now Mrs. Eliphalet
Parker) had named her first-born after me! This intelligence had the
effect of cooling and sobering me; I began to realize that, with the
responsibility the coming and the christening of Captivity's first-born
had imposed upon me, it behooved me to guard with exceeding jealousy
the honor of the name which my namesake bore.

While I was thus tempest-tossed, Fanchonette came across my pathway,
and with the appearance of Fanchonette every ambition to figure in the
annals of bravado left me.  Fanchonette was the niece of my landlady;
her father was a perfumer; she lived with the old people in the Rue des
Capucins.  She was of middling stature and had blue eyes and black
hair.  Had she not been French, she would have been Irish, or, perhaps,
a Grecian.  Her manner had an indefinable charm.

It was she who acquainted me with Beranger; that is why I never take up
that precious volume that I do not think, sweetly and tenderly, of
Fanchonette.  The book is bound, as you see, in a dainty blue, and the
border toolings are delicate tracings of white--all for a purpose, I
can assure you.  She used to wear a dainty blue gown, from behind the
nether hem of which the most immaculate of petticoats peeped out.

If we were never boys, how barren and lonely our age would be. Next to
the ineffably blessed period of youth there is no time of life
pleasanter than that in which serene old age reviews the exploits and
the prodigies of boyhood.  Ah, my gay fellows, harvest your crops
diligently, that your barns and granaries be full when your arms are no
longer able to wield the sickle!

Haec meminisse--to recall the old time--to see her rise out of the dear
past--to hear Fanchonette's voice again--to feel the grace of
springtime--how gloriously sweet this is!  The little quarrels, the
reconciliations, the coquetries, the jealousies, the reproaches, the
forgivenesses--all the characteristic and endearing haps of the Maytime
of life--precious indeed are these retrospections to the hungry eyes of
age!

She wed with the perfumer's apprentice; but that was so very long ago
that I can pardon, if not forget, the indiscretion.  Who knows where
she is to-day?  Perhaps a granny beldame in a Parisian alley; perhaps
for years asleep in Pere la Chaise.  Come forth, beloved Beranger, and
sing me the old song to make me young and strong and brave again!

     Let them be served on gold--
           The wealthy and the great;
      Two lovers only want
           A single glass and plate!
                Ring ding, ring ding,
                     Ring ding ding--
                Old wine, young lassie,
                     Sing, boys, sing!



XI

DIAGNOSIS OF THE BACILLUS LIBRORUM

For a good many years I was deeply interested in British politics.  I
was converted to Liberalism, so-called, by an incident which I deem
well worth relating.  One afternoon I entered a book-shop in High
Holborn, and found that the Hon. William E. Gladstone had preceded me
thither.  I had never seen Mr. Gladstone before.  I recognized him now
by his resemblance to the caricatures, and by his unlikeness to the
portraits which the newspapers had printed.

As I entered the shop I heard the bookseller ask:  "What books shall I
send?"

To this, with a very magnificent sweep of his arms indicating every
point of the compass, Gladstone made answer:  "Send me THOSE!"

With these words he left the place, and I stepped forward to claim a
volume which had attracted my favorable attention several days previous.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the bookseller, politely, "but that book
is sold."

"Sold?" I cried.

"Yes, sir," replied the bookseller, smiling with evident pride; "Mr.
Gladstone just bought it; I haven't a book for sale--Mr. Gladstone just
bought them ALL!"

The bookseller then proceeded to tell me that whenever Gladstone
entered a bookshop he made a practice of buying everything in sight.
That magnificent, sweeping gesture of his comprehended
everything--theology, history, social science, folk-lore, medicine,
travel, biography--everything that came to his net was fish!

"This is the third time Mr. Gladstone has visited me," said the
bookseller, "and this is the third time he has cleaned me out."

"This man is a good man," says I to myself.  "So notable a lover of
books surely cannot err.  The cause of home rule must be a just one
after all."

From others intimately acquainted with him I learned that Gladstone was
an omnivorous reader; that he ordered his books by the cart-load, and
that his home in Hawarden literally overflowed with books.  He made a
practice, I was told, of overhauling his library once in so often and
of weeding out such volumes as he did not care to keep.  These
discarded books were sent to the second-hand dealers, and it is said
that the dealers not unfrequently took advantage of Gladstone by
reselling him over and over again (and at advanced prices, too) the
very lots of books he had culled out and rejected.

Every book-lover has his own way of buying; so there are as many ways
of buying as there are purchasers.  However, Judge Methuen and I have
agreed that all buyers may be classed in these following specified
grand divisions:

    The reckless buyer.

    The shrewd buyer.

    The timid buyer.

Of these three classes the third is least worthy of our consideration,
although it includes very many lovers of books, and consequently very
many friends of mine.  I have actually known men to hesitate, to
ponder, to dodder for weeks, nay, months over the purchase of a book;
not because they did not want it, nor because they deemed the price
exorbitant, nor yet because they were not abundantly able to pay that
price.  Their hesitancy was due to an innate, congenital lack of
determination--that same hideous curse of vacillation which is
responsible for so much misery in human life.

I have made a study of these people, and I find that most of them are
bachelors whose state of singleness is due to the fact that the same
hesitancy which has deprived them of many a coveted volume has operated
to their discomfiture in the matrimonial sphere.  While they
deliberated, another bolder than they came along and walked off with
the prize.

One of the gamest buyers I know of was the late John A. Rice of
Chicago.  As a competitor at the great auction sales he was invincible;
and why?  Because, having determined to buy a book, he put no limit to
the amount of his bid.  His instructions to his agent were in these
words:  "I must have those books, no matter what they cost."

An English collector found in Rice's library a set of rare volumes he
had been searching for for years.

"How did you happen to get them?" he asked.  "You bought them at the
Spencer sale and against my bid.  Do you know, I told my buyer to bid a
thousand pounds for them, if necessary!"

"That was where I had the advantage of you," said Rice, quietly.  "I
specified no limit; I simply told my man to buy the books."

The spirit of the collector cropped out early in Rice.  I remember to
have heard him tell how one time, when he was a young man, he was
shuffling over a lot of tracts in a bin in front of a Boston bookstall.
His eye suddenly fell upon a little pamphlet entitled "The Cow-Chace."
He picked it up and read it.  It was a poem founded upon the defeat of
Generals Wayne, Irving, and Proctor.  The last stanza ran in this wise:

    And now I've closed my epic strain,
    I tremble as I show it,
    Lest this same warrior-drover, Wayne,
    Should ever catch the poet.


Rice noticed that the pamphlet bore the imprint of James Rivington, New
York, 1780.  It occurred to him that some time this modest tract of
eighteen pages might be valuable; at any rate, he paid the fifteen
cents demanded for it, and at the same time he purchased for ten cents
another pamphlet entitled "The American Tories, a Satire."

Twenty years later, having learned the value of these exceedingly rare
tracts, Mr. Rice sent them to London and had them bound in Francis
Bedford's best style--"crimson crushed levant morocco, finished to a
Grolier pattern."  Bedford's charges amounted to seventy-five dollars,
which with the original cost of the pamphlets represented an
expenditure of seventy-five dollars and twenty-five cents upon Mr.
Rice's part.  At the sale of the Rice library in 1870, however, this
curious, rare, and beautiful little book brought the extraordinary sum
of seven hundred and fifty dollars!

The Rice library contained about five thousand volumes, and it realized
at auction sale somewhat more than seventy-two thousand dollars.  Rice
has often told me that for a long time he could not make up his mind to
part with his books; yet his health was so poor that he found it
imperative to retire from business, and to devote a long period of time
to travel; these were the considerations that induced him finally to
part with his treasures.  "I have never regretted having sold them," he
said. "Two years after the sale the Chicago fire came along.  Had I
retained those books, every one of them would have been lost."

Mrs. Rice shared her husband's enthusiasm for books.  Whenever a new
invoice arrived, the two would lock themselves in their room, get down
upon their knees on the floor, open the box, take out the treasures and
gloat over them, together!  Noble lady! she was such a wife as any good
man might be proud of.  They were very happy in their companionship on
earth, were my dear old friends. He was the first to go; their
separation was short; together once more and forever they share the
illimitable joys which await all lovers of good books when virtue hath
mournfully writ the colophon to their human careers.

Although Mr. Rice survived the sale of his remarkable library a period
of twenty-six years, he did not get together again a collection of
books that he was willing to call a library.  His first collection was
so remarkable that he preferred to have his fame rest wholly upon it.
Perhaps he was wise; yet how few collectors there are who would have
done as he did.

As for myself, I verily believe that, if by fire or by water my library
should be destroyed this night, I should start in again to-morrow upon
the collection of another library.  Or if I did not do this, I should
lay myself down to die, for how could I live without the companionships
to which I have ever been accustomed, and which have grown as dear to
me as life itself?

Whenever Judge Methuen is in a jocular mood and wishes to tease me, he
asks me whether I have forgotten the time when I was possessed of a
spirit of reform and registered a solemn vow in high heaven to buy no
more books.  Teasing, says Victor Hugo, is the malice of good men;
Judge Methuen means no evil when he recalls that weakness--the one
weakness in all my career.

No, I have not forgotten that time; I look back upon it with a shudder
of horror, for wretched indeed would have been my existence had I
carried into effect the project I devised at that remote period!

Dr. O'Rell has an interesting theory which you will find recorded in
the published proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol.
xxxiv., p. 216).  Or, if you cannot procure copies of that work, it may
serve your purpose to know that the doctor's theory is to this
effect--viz., that bibliomania does not deserve the name of bibliomania
until it is exhibited in the second stage. For secondary bibliomania
there is no known cure; the few cases reported as having been cured
were doubtless not bibliomania at all, or, at least, were what we of
the faculty call false or chicken bibliomania.

"In false bibliomania, which," says Dr. O'Rell, "is the primary stage
of the grand passion--the vestibule to the main edifice--the usual
symptoms are flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, a bounding pulse, and
quick respiration.  This period of exaltation is not unfrequently
followed by a condition of collapse in which we find the victim pale,
pulseless, and dejected.  He is pursued and tormented of imaginary
horrors, he reproaches himself for imaginary crimes, and he implores
piteously for relief from fancied dangers.  The sufferer now stands in
a slippery place; unless his case is treated intelligently he will
issue from that period of gloom cured of the sweetest of madnesses, and
doomed to a life of singular uselessness.

"But properly treated," continues Dr. O'Rell, "and particularly if his
spiritual needs be ministered to, he can be brought safely through this
period of collapse into a condition of reenforced exaltation, which is
the true, or secondary stage of, bibliomania, and for which there is no
cure known to humanity."

I should trust Dr. O'Rell's judgment in this matter, even if I did not
know from experience that it was true.  For Dr. O'Rell is the most
famous authority we have in bibliomania and kindred maladies.  It is he
(I make the information known at the risk of offending the ethics of
the profession)--it is he who discovered the bacillus librorum, and,
what is still more important and still more to his glory, it is he who
invented that subtle lymph which is now everywhere employed by the
profession as a diagnostic where the presence of the germs of
bibliomania (in other words, bacilli librorum) is suspected.

I once got this learned scientist to inject a milligram of the lymph
into the femoral artery of Miss Susan's cat.  Within an hour the
precocious beast surreptitiously entered my library for the first time
in her life, and ate the covers of my pet edition of Rabelais.  This
demonstrated to Dr. O'Rell's satisfaction the efficacy of his
diagnostic, and it proved to Judge Methuen's satisfaction what the
Judge has always maintained--viz., that Rabelais was an old rat.



XII

THE PLEASURES OF EXTRA-ILLUSTRATION

Very many years ago we became convinced--Judge Methuen and I did--that
there was nothing new in the world.  I think it was while we were in
London and while we were deep in the many fads of bibliomania that we
arrived at this important conclusion.

We had been pursuing with enthusiasm the exciting delights of
extra-illustration, a practice sometimes known as Grangerism; the
friends of the practice call it by the former name, the enemies by the
latter.  We were engaged at extra-illustrating Boswell's life of
Johnson, and had already got together somewhat more than eleven
thousand prints when we ran against a snag, an obstacle we never could
surmount.  We agreed that our work would be incomplete, and therefore
vain, unless we secured a picture of the book with which the great
lexicographer knocked down Osborne, the bookseller at Gray's Inn Gate.

Unhappily we were wholly in the dark as to what the title of that book
was, and, although we ransacked the British Museum and even appealed to
the learned Frognall Dibdin, we could not get a clew to the identity of
the volume.  To be wholly frank with you, I will say that both the
Judge and I had wearied of the occupation; moreover, it involved great
expense, since we were content with nothing but India proofs (those
before letters preferred).  So we were glad of this excuse for
abandoning the practice.

While we were contemplating a graceful retreat the Judge happened to
discover in the "Natural History" of Pliny a passage which proved to
our satisfaction that, so far from being a new or a modern thing, the
extra-illustration of books was of exceptional antiquity.  It seems
that Atticus, the friend of Cicero, wrote a book on the subject of
portraits and portrait-painting, in the course of which treatise he
mentions that Marcus Varro "conceived the very liberal idea of
inserting, by some means or another, in his numerous volumes, the
portraits of several hundred individuals, as he could not bear the idea
that all traces of their features should be lost or that the lapse of
centuries should get the better of mankind."

"Thus," says Pliny, "was he the inventor of a benefit to his fellow-men
that might have been envied by the gods themselves; for not only did he
confer immortality upon the originals of these portraits, but he
transmitted these portraits to all parts of the earth, so that
everywhere it might be possible for them to be present, and for each to
occupy his niche."

Now, Pliny is not the only one who has contributed to the
immortalization of Marcus Varro.  I have had among my papers for thirty
years the verses which Judge Methuen dashed off (for poets invariably
dash off their poetry), and they are such pleasant verses that I don't
mind letting the world see them.

              MARCUS VARRO

   Marcus Varro went up and down
      The places where old books were sold;
   He ransacked all the shops in town
      For pictures new and pictures old.
   He gave the folk of earth no peace;
      Snooping around by day and night,
   He plied the trade in Rome and Greece
      Of an insatiate Grangerite.

  "Pictures!" was evermore his cry--
      "Pictures of old or recent date,"
   And pictures only would he buy
      Wherewith to "extra-illustrate."
   Full many a tome of ancient type
      And many a manuscript he took,
   For nary purpose but to swipe
      Their pictures for some other book.

   While Marcus Varro plied his fad
      There was not in the shops of Greece
   A book or pamphlet to be had
      That was not minus frontispiece.
   Nor did he hesitate to ply
      His baleful practices at home;
   It was not possible to buy
      A perfect book in all of Rome!

   What must the other folk have done--
      Who, glancing o'er the books they bought,
   Came soon and suddenly upon
      The vandalism Varro wrought!
   How must their cheeks have flamed with red--
      How did their hearts with choler beat!
   We can imagine what they said--
      We can imagine, not repeat!

   Where are the books that Varro made--
      The pride of dilettante Rome--
   With divers portraitures inlaid
      Swiped from so many another tome?
   The worms devoured them long ago--
      O wretched worms! ye should have fed
   Not on the books "extended" so,
      But on old Varro's flesh instead!

   Alas, that Marcus Varro lives
      And is a potent factor yet!
   Alas, that still his practice gives
      Good men occasion for regret!
   To yonder bookstall, pri'thee, go,
      And by the "missing" prints and plates
   And frontispieces you shall know
      He lives, and "extra-illustrates"!


In justice to the Judge and to myself I should say that neither of us
wholly approves the sentiment which the poem I have quoted implies.  We
regard Grangerism as one of the unfortunate stages in bibliomania; it
is a period which seldom covers more than five years, although Dr.
O'Rell has met with one case in his practice that has lasted ten years
and still gives no symptom of abating in virulence.

Humanity invariably condones the pranks of youth on the broad and
charitable grounds that "boys will be boys"; so we bibliomaniacs are
prone to wink at the follies of the Grangerite, for we know that he
will know better by and by and will heartily repent of the mischief he
has done.  We know the power of books so well that we know that no man
can have to do with books that presently he does not love them.  He may
at first endure them; then he may come only to pity them; anon, as
surely as the morrow's sun riseth, he shall embrace and love those
precious things.

So we say that we would put no curb upon any man, it being better that
many books should be destroyed, if ultimately by that destruction a
penitent and loyal soul be added to the roster of bibliomaniacs.
There is more joy over one Grangerite that repenteth than over ninety
and nine just men that need no repentance.

And we have a similar feeling toward such of our number as for the
nonce become imbued with a passion for any of the other little fads
which bibliomaniac flesh is heir to.  All the soldiers in an army
cannot be foot, or horse, or captains, or majors, or generals, or
artillery, or ensigns, or drummers, or buglers.  Each one has his place
to fill and his part to do, and the consequence is a concinnate whole.
Bibliomania is beautiful as an entirety, as a symmetrical blending of a
multitude of component parts, and he is indeed disloyal to the cause
who, through envy or shortsightedness or ignorance, argues to the
discredit of angling, or Napoleonana, or balladry, or Indians, or
Burns, or Americana, or any other branch or phase of bibliomania; for
each of these things accomplishes a noble purpose in that each
contributes to the glory of the great common cause of bibliomania,
which is indeed the summum bonum of human life.

I have heard many decried who indulged  their fancy for bookplates, as
if, forsooth, if a man loved his books, he should not lavish upon them
testimonials of his affection!  Who that loves his wife should hesitate
to buy adornments for her person? I favor everything that tends to
prove that the human heart is swayed by the tenderer emotions.
Gratitude is surely one of the noblest emotions of which humanity is
capable, and he is indeed unworthy of our respect who would forbid
humanity's expressing in every dignified and reverential manner its
gratitude for the benefits conferred by the companionship of books.

As for myself, I urge upon all lovers of books to provide themselves
with bookplates.  Whenever I see a book that bears its owner's plate I
feel myself obligated to treat that book with special consideration.
It carries with it a certificate of its master's love; the bookplate
gives the volume a certain status it would not otherwise have.  Time
and again I have fished musty books out of bins in front of bookstalls,
bought them and borne them home with me simply because they had upon
their covers the bookplates of their former owners.  I have a case
filled with these aristocratic estrays, and I insist that they shall be
as carefully dusted and kept as my other books, and I have provided in
my will for their perpetual maintenance after my decease.

If I were a rich man I should found a hospital for homeless
aristocratic books, an institution similar in all essential particulars
to the institution which is now operated at our national capital under
the bequest of the late Mr. Cochrane.  I should name it the Home for
Genteel Volumes in Decayed Circumstances.

I was a young man when I adopted the bookplate which I am still using,
and which will be found in all my books.  I drew the design myself and
had it executed by a son of Anderson, the first of American engravers.
It is by no means elaborate: a book rests upon a heart, and underneath
appear the lines:

     My Book and Heart
     Must never part.

Ah, little Puritan maid, with thy dear eyes of honest blue and thy fair
hair in proper  plaits adown thy back, little thought we that
springtime long ago back among the New England hills that the tiny book
we read together should follow me through all my life!  What a part has
that Primer played!  And now all these other beloved companions bear
witness to the love I bear that Primer and its teachings, for each
wears the emblem I plucked from its homely pages.

That was in the springtime, Captivity Waite; anon came summer, with all
its exuberant glory, and presently the cheery autumn stole upon me.
And now it is the winter-time, and under the snows lies buried  many a
sweet, fair thing I cherished once.  I am aweary and will rest a little
while; lie thou there, my pen, for a dream--a pleasant dream--calleth
me away.  I shall see those distant hills again, and the homestead
under the elms; the old associations and the old influences shall be
round about me, and a child shall lead me and we shall go together
through green pastures and by still waters.  And, O my pen, it will be
the springtime again!



XIII

ON THE ODORS WHICH MY BOOKS EXHALE

Have you ever come out of the thick, smoky atmosphere of the town into
the fragrant, gracious atmosphere of a library?  If you have, you know
how grateful the change is, and you will agree with me when I say that
nothing else is so quieting to the nerves, so conducive to physical
health, and so quick to restore a lively flow of the spirits.

Lafcadio Hearn once wrote a treatise upon perfumes, an ingenious and
scholarly performance; he limited the edition to fifty copies and
published it privately--so the book is rarely met with. Curiously
enough, however, this author had nothing to say in the book about the
smells of books, which I regard as a most unpardonable error, unless,
properly estimating the subject to be worthy  of a separate treatise,
he has postponed its consideration and treatment to a time when he can
devote the requisite study and care to it.

We have it upon the authority of William Blades that books breathe;
however, the testimony of experts is not needed upon this point, for if
anybody be sceptical, all he has to do to convince himself is to open a
door of a bookcase at any time and his olfactories will be greeted by
an outrush of odors that will prove to him beyond all doubt that books
do actually consume air and exhale perfumes.

Visitors to the British Museum complain not unfrequently that they are
overcome by the closeness of the atmosphere in that place, and what is
known as the British Museum headache has come to be recognized by the
medical profession in London as a specific ailment due to the absence
of oxygen in the atmosphere, which condition is caused by the multitude
of books, each one of which, by that breathing process peculiar to
books, consumes several thousand cubic feet of air every twenty-four
hours.

Professor Huxley wondered for a long time why the atmosphere of the
British Museum should be poisonous while other libraries were free from
the poison; a series of experiments convinced him that the presence of
poison in the atmosphere was due to the number of profane books in the
Museum.  He recommended that these poison-engendering volumes be
treated once every six months with a bath of cedria, which, as I
understand, is a solution of the juices of the cedar tree; this, he
said, would purge the mischievous volumes temporarily of their evil
propensities and abilities.

I do not know whether this remedy is effective, but I remember to have
read in Pliny that cedria was used by the ancients to render their
manuscripts imperishable.  When Cneius Terentius went digging in his
estate in the Janiculum he came upon a coffer which contained not only
the remains of Numa, the old Roman king, but also the manuscripts of
the famous laws which Numa compiled. The king was in some such
condition as you might suppose him to be after having been buried
several centuries,  but the manuscripts were as fresh as new, and their
being so is said to have been due to the fact that before their burial
they were rubbed with citrus leaves.

These so-called books of Numa would perhaps have been preserved unto
this day but for the fanaticism of the people who exhumed and read
them; they were promptly burned by Quintus Petilius, the praetor,
because (as Cassius Hemina explains) they treated of philosophical
subjects, or because, as Livy testifies, their doctrines were inimical
to the religion then existing.

As I have had little to do with profane literature, I know nothing of
the habits of such books as Professor Huxley has prescribed an antidote
against.  Of such books as I have gathered about me and made my
constant companions I can say truthfully that a more
delectable-flavored lot it were impossible to find. As I walk amongst
them, touching first this one and then that, and regarding all with
glances of affectionate approval, I fancy that I am walking in a
splendid garden, full of charming vistas, wherein parterre after
parterre of beautiful flowers is  unfolded to my enraptured vision; and
surely there never were other odors so delightful as the odors which my
books exhale!


  My garden aboundeth in pleasant nooks
      And fragrance is over it all;
  For sweet is the smell of my old, old books
      In their places against the wall.

  Here is a folio that's grim with age
      And yellow and green with mould;
  There's the breath of the sea on every page
      And the hint of a stanch ship's hold.

  And here is a treasure from France la belle
      Exhaleth a faint perfume
  Of wedded lily and asphodel
      In a garden of song abloom.

  And this wee little book of Puritan mien
      And rude, conspicuous print
  Hath the Yankee flavor of wintergreen,
      Or, may be, of peppermint.

  In Walton the brooks a-babbling tell
      Where the cheery daisy grows,
  And where in meadow or woodland dwell
      The buttercup and the rose.

  But best beloved of books, I ween,
      Are those which one perceives
  Are hallowed by ashes dropped between
      The yellow, well-thumbed leaves.

  For it's here a laugh and it's there a tear,
      Till the treasured book is read;
  And the ashes betwixt the pages here
      Tell us of one long dead.

  But the gracious presence reappears
      As we read the book again,
  And the fragrance of precious, distant years
      Filleth the hearts of men

  Come, pluck with me in my garden nooks
      The posies that bloom for all;
  Oh, sweet is the smell of my old, old books
      In their places against the wall!


Better than flowers are they, these books of mine!  For what are the
seasons to them?  Neither can the drought of summer nor the asperity of
winter wither or change them.  At all times and under all circumstances
they are the same--radiant, fragrant, hopeful, helpful!  There is no
charm which they do not possess, no beauty that is not theirs.

What wonder is it that from time immemorial humanity has craved the
boon of carrying to the grave some book particularly beloved in life?
Even Numa Pompilius provided that his books should share his tomb with
him.  Twenty-four of these precious volumes were consigned with him to
the grave.  When Gabriel Rossetti's wife died, the poet cast into her
open grave the unfinished volume of his poems, that being the last and
most precious tribute he could pay to her cherished memory.

History records instance after instance of the consolation dying men
have received from the perusal of books, and many a one has made his
end holding in his hands a particularly beloved volume. The reverence
which even unlearned men have for books appeals in these splendid
libraries which are erected now and again with funds provided by the
wills of the illiterate.  How dreadful must be the last moments of that
person who has steadfastly refused to share the companionship and
acknowledge the saving grace of books!

Such, indeed, is my regard for these friendships that it is with misery
that I contemplate  the probability of separation from them by and by.
I have given my friends to understand that when I am done with earth
certain of my books shall be buried with me. The list of these books
will be found in the left-hand upper drawer of the old mahogany
secretary in the front spare room.


          When I am done,
           I'd have no son
  Pounce on these treasures like a vulture;
           Nay, give them half
           My epitaph
  And let them share in my sepulture.

          Then when the crack
           Of doom rolls back
  The marble and the earth that hide me,
           I'll smuggle home
           Each precious tome
  Without a fear a wife shall chide me.


The dread of being separated by death from the objects of one's love
has pursued humanity from the beginning.  The Hindoos used to have a
selfish fashion of requiring their widows to be entombed alive with
their corpses.  The North American Indian insists that his horse, his
bow and arrows, his spear, and his other cherished trinkets shall share
his grave with him.

My sister, Miss Susan, has provided that after her demise a number of
her most prized curios shall be buried with her.  The list, as I recall
it, includes a mahogany four-post bedstead, an Empire dresser, a brass
warming-pan, a pair of brass andirons, a Louis Quinze table, a
Mayflower teapot, a Tomb of Washington platter, a pewter tankard, a
pair of her grandmother's candlesticks, a Paul Revere lantern, a tall
Dutch clock, a complete suit of armor purchased in Rome, and a
collection of Japanese bric-a-brac presented to Miss Susan by a
returned missionary.

I do not see what Miss Susan can possibly do with all this trumpery in
the hereafter, but, if I survive her, I shall certainly insist upon a
compliance with her wishes, even though it involve the erection of a
tumulus as prodigious as the pyramid of Cheops.



XIV

ELZEVIRS AND DIVERS OTHER MATTERS

Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and Lockhart's "Life of Scott" are accepted
as the models of biography.  The third remarkable performance in this
line is Mrs. Gordon's memoir of her father, John Wilson, a volume so
charmingly and tenderly written as to be of interest to those even who
know and care little about that era in the history of English
literature in which "crusty Christopher" and his associates in the
making of "Blackwood's" figured.

It is a significant fact, I think, that the three greatest biographers
the world has known should have been Scotch; it has long been the
fashion to laugh and to sneer at what is called Scotch dulness; yet
what prodigies has not Scotch genius performed  in every department of
literature, and would not our literature be poor indeed to-day but for
the contributions which have been made to it by the very people whom we
affect to deride?

John Wilson was one of the most interesting figures of a time when
learning was at a premium; he was a big man amongst big men, and even
in this irreverential time genius uncovers at the mention of his name.
His versatility was astounding; with equal facility and felicity he
could conduct a literary symposium and a cock-fight, a theological
discussion and an angling expedition, a historical or a political
inquiry and a fisticuffs.

Nature had provided him with a mighty brain in a powerful body; he had
a physique equal to the performance of what suggestion soever his
splendid intellectuals made.  To him the incredible feat of walking
seventy miles within the compass of a day was mere child's play; then,
when the printer became clamorous, he would immure himself in his
wonderful den and reel off copy until that printer cried "Hold;
enough!"  It was no  unusual thing for him to write for thirteen hours
at a stretch; when he worked he worked, and when he played he
played--that is perhaps the reason why he was never a dull boy.

Wilson seems to have been a procrastinator.  He would put off his task
to the very last moment; this is a practice that is common with
literary men--in fact, it was encouraged by those who were regarded as
authorities in such matters anciently.  Ringelbergius gave this advice
to an author under his tuition:

"Tell the printers," said he, "to make preparations for a work you
intend writing, and never alarm yourself about it because it is not
even begun, for, after having announced it you may without difficulty
trace out in your own head the whole plan of your work and its
divisions, after which compose the arguments of the chapters, and I can
assure you that in this manner you may furnish the printers daily with
more copy than they want.  But, remember, when you have once begun
there must be no flagging till the work is finished."

The loyalty of human admiration was never better illustrated than in
Shelton Mackenzie's devotion to Wilson's genius.  To Mackenzie we are
indebted for a compilation of the "Noctes Ambrosianae," edited with
such discrimination, such ability, such learning, and such enthusiasm
that, it seems to me, the work must endure as a monument not only to
Wilson's but also to Mackenzie's genius.

I have noticed one peculiarity that distinguishes many admirers of the
Noctes: they seldom care to read anything else; in the Noctes they find
a response to the demand of every mood.  It is much the same way with
lovers of Father Prout.  Dr. O'Rell divides his adoration between old
Kit North and the sage of Watergrass Hill.  To be bitten of either
mania is bad enough; when one is possessed at the same time of a
passion both for the Noctes and for the Reliques hopeless indeed is his
malady!  Dr. O'Rell is so deep under the spell of crusty Christopher
and the Corkonian pere that he not only buys every copy of the Noctes
and of the Reliques he comes across, but insists  upon giving copies of
these books to everybody in his acquaintance.  I have even known him to
prescribe one or the other of these works to patients of his.

I recall that upon one occasion, having lost an Elzevir at a book
auction, I was afflicted with melancholia to such a degree that I had
to take to my bed.  Upon my physician's arrival he made, as is his
custom, a careful inquiry into my condition and into the causes
inducing it.  Finally, "You are afflicted," said Dr. O'Rell, "with the
megrims, which, fortunately, is at present confined to the region of
the Pacchionian depressions of the sinister parietal.  I shall
administer Father Prout's 'Rogueries of Tom Moore' (pronounced More)
and Kit North's debate with the Ettrick Shepherd upon the subject of
sawmon.  No other remedy will prove effective."

The treatment did, in fact, avail me, for within forty-eight hours I
was out of bed, and out of the house; and, what is better yet, I picked
up at a bookstall, for a mere song, a first edition of "Special
Providences in New England"!

Never, however, have I wholly ceased to regret the loss of the Elzevir,
for an Elzevir is to me one of the most gladdening sights human eye can
rest upon.  In his life of the elder Aldus, Renouard says:  "How few
are there of those who esteem and pay so dearly for these pretty
editions who know that the type that so much please them are the work
of Francis Garamond, who cast them one hundred years before at Paris."

In his bibliographical notes (a volume seldom met with now) the learned
William Davis records that Louis Elzevir was the first who observed the
distinction between the v consonant and the u vowel, which distinction,
however, had been recommended long before by Ramus and other writers,
but had never been regarded. There were five of these Elzevirs, viz.:
Louis, Bonaventure, Abraham, Louis, Jr., and Daniel.

A hundred years ago a famous bibliophile remarked:  "The diminutiveness
of a large portion, and the beauty of the whole, of the classics
printed by the Elzevirs at Leyden and Amsterdam have long rendered them
justly celebrated, and the prices they bear in  public sales
sufficiently demonstrate the estimation in which they are at present
held."

The regard for these precious books still obtains, and we meet with it
in curiously out-of-the-way places, as well as in those libraries where
one would naturally expect to find it.  My young friend Irving Way
(himself a collector of rare enthusiasm) tells me that recently during
a pilgrimage through the state of Texas he came upon a gentleman who
showed him in his modest home the most superb collection of Elzevirs he
had ever set eyes upon!

How far-reaching is thy grace, O bibliomania!  How good and sweet it is
that no distance, no environment, no poverty, no distress can appall or
stay thee.  Like that grim spectre we call death, thou knockest
impartially at the palace portal and at the cottage door.  And it
seemeth thy especial delight to bring unto the lonely in desert places
the companionship that exalteth humanity!

It makes me groan to think of the number of Elzevirs that are lost in
the libraries of rich parvenus who know nothing of and care no  thing
for the treasures about them further than a certain vulgar vanity which
is involved.  When Catherine of Russia wearied of Koritz she took to
her affection one Kimsky Kossakof, a sergeant in the guards.  Kimsky
was elated by this sudden acquisition of favor and riches.  One of his
first orders was to his bookseller.  Said he to that worthy:  "Fit me
up a handsome library; little books above and great ones below."

It is narrated of a certain British warrior that upon his retirement
from service he bought a library en bloc, and, not knowing any more
about books than a peccary knows of the harmonies of the heavenly
choir, he gave orders for the arrangement of the volumes in this wise:
"Range me," he quoth, "the grenadiers (folios) at the bottom, the
battalion (octavos) in the middle, and the light-bobs (duodecimos) at
the top!"

Samuel Johnson, dancing attendance upon Lord Chesterfield, could hardly
have felt his humiliation more keenly than did the historian Gibbon
when his grace the Duke of Cumberland met him bringing the third volume
of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to the ducal mansion.
This history was originally printed in quarto; Gibbon was carrying the
volume and anticipating the joy of the duke upon its arrival.  What did
the duke say?  "What?" he cried.  "Ah, another ---- big square book,
eh?"

It is the fashion nowadays to harp upon the degeneracy of humanity; to
insist that taste is corrupted, and that the faculty of appreciation is
dead.  We seem incapable of realizing that this is the golden age of
authors, if not the golden age of authorship.

In the good old days authors were in fact a despised and neglected
class.  The Greeks put them to death, as the humor seized them.  For a
hundred years after his death Shakespeare was practically unknown to
his countrymen, except Suckling and his coterie: during his life he was
roundly assailed by his contemporaries, one of the latter going to the
extreme of denouncing him as a daw that strutted in borrowed plumage.
Milton was accused of plagiarism, and one of his critics devoted many
years to compiling  from every quarter passages in ancient works which
bore a similarity to the blind poet's verses.  Even Samuel Johnson's
satire of "London" was pronounced a plagiarism.

The good old days were the days, seemingly, when the critics had their
way and ran things with a high hand; they made or unmade books and
authors.  They killed Chatterton, just as, some years later, they
hastened the death of Keats.  For a time they were all-powerful.  It
was not until the end of the eighteenth century that these professional
tyrants began to lose their grip, and when Byron took up the lance
against them their doom was practically sealed.

Who would care a picayune in these degenerate days what Dr. Warburton
said pro or con a book?  It was Warburton (then Bishop of Gloucester)
who remarked of Granger's "Biographical History of England" that it was
"an odd one."  This was as high a compliment as he ever paid a book;
those which he did not like he called sad books, and those which he
fancied he called odd ones.

The truth seems to be that through the  diffusion of knowledge and the
multiplicity and cheapness of books people generally have reached the
point in intelligence where they feel warranted in asserting their
ability to judge for themselves.  So the occupation of the critic, as
interpreted and practised of old, is gone.

Reverting to the practice of lamenting the degeneracy of humanity, I
should say that the fashion is by no means a new one. Search the
records of the ancients and you will find the same harping upon the one
string of present decay and former virtue. Herodotus, Sallust, Caesar,
Cicero, and Pliny take up and repeat the lugubrious tale in turn.

Upon earth there are three distinct classes of men:  Those who
contemplate the past, those who contemplate the present, those who
contemplate the future.  I am of those who believe that humanity
progresses, and it is my theory that the best works of the past have
survived and come down to us in these books which are our dearest
legacies, our proudest possessions, and our best-beloved companions.



XV

A BOOK THAT BRINGS SOLACE AND CHEER

One of my friends had a mania for Bunyan once upon a time, and,
although he has now abandoned that fad for the more fashionable passion
of Napoleonana, he still exhibits with evident pride the many editions
of the "Pilgrim's Progress" he gathered together years ago.  I have
frequently besought him to give me one of his copies, which has a
curious frontispiece illustrating the dangers besetting the traveller
from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.  This frontispiece,
which is prettily illuminated, occurs in Virtue's edition of the
"Pilgrim's Progress"; the book itself is not rare, but it is hardly
procurable in perfect condition, for the reason that the colored plate
is so pleasing to the eye that few have been able to resist the
temptation to make away with it.

For similar reasons it is seldom that we meet with a perfect edition of
Quarles' "Emblems"; indeed, an "Emblems" of early publication that does
not lack the title-page is a great rarity. In the "good old days," when
juvenile books were few, the works of Bunyan and of Quarles were vastly
popular with the little folk, and little fingers wrought sad havoc with
the title-pages and the pictures that with their extravagant and vivid
suggestions appealed so directly and powerfully to the youthful fancy.

Coleridge says of the "Pilgrim's Progress" that it is the best summary
of evangelical Christianity ever produced by a writer not miraculously
inspired.  Froude declares that it has for two centuries affected the
spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more
powerfully than any other book, except the Bible.  "It is," says
Macaulay, "perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a
hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of
the common people."

Whether or not Bunyan is, as D'Israeli has called him, the Spenser of
the people, and  whether or not his work is the poetry of Puritanism,
the best evidence of the merit of the "Pilgrim's Progress" appears, as
Dr. Johnson has shrewdly pointed out, in the general and continued
approbation of mankind.  Southey has critically observed that to his
natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general
popularity, his language being everywhere level to the most ignorant
reader and to the meanest capacity; "there is a homely reality about
it--a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of
narration, to a child."

Another cause of his popularity, says Southey, is that he taxes the
imagination as little as the understanding.  "The vividness of his own,
which, as history shows, sometimes could not distinguish ideal
impressions from actual ones, occasioned this. He saw the things of
which he was writing as distinctly with his mind's eye as if they were,
indeed, passing before him in a dream."

It is clear to me that in his youth Bunyan would have endeared himself
to me had I lived at that time, for his fancy was of that kind and of
such intensity as I delight to find in youth.  "My sins," he tells us,
"did so offend the Lord that even in my childhood He did scare and
affright me with fearful dreams and did terrify me with dreadful
visions.  I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with
apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then
thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be
rid."

It is quite likely that Bunyan overestimated his viciousness. One of
his ardent, intense temperament having once been touched of the saving
grace could hardly help recognizing in himself the most miserable of
sinners.  It is related that upon one occasion he was going somewhere
disguised as a wagoner, when he was overtaken by a constable who had a
warrant for his arrest.

"Do you know that devil of a fellow Bunyan?" asked the constable.

"Know him?" cried Bunyan.  "You might call him a devil indeed, if you
knew him as well as I once did!"

This was not the only time his wit served him to good purpose. On
another occasion a certain Cambridge student, who was filled with a
sense of his own importance, undertook to prove to him what a divine
thing reason was, and he capped his argument with the declaration that
reason was the chief glory of man which distinguished him from a beast.
To this Bunyan calmly made answer:  "Sin distinguishes man from beast;
is sin divine?"

Frederick Saunders observes that, like Milton in his blindness, Bunyan
in his imprisonment had his spiritual perception made all the brighter
by his exclusion from the glare of the outside world.  And of the great
debt of gratitude we all owe to "the wicked tinker of Elstow" Dean
Stanley has spoken so truly that I am fain to quote his words:  "We all
need to be cheered by the help of Greatheart and Standfast and
Valiant-for-the-Truth, and good old Honesty!  Some of us have been in
Doubting Castle, some in the Slough of Despond.  Some have experienced
the temptations of Vanity Fair; all of us have to climb the Hill of
Difficulty; all of us need to be instructed by the Interpreter in the
House Beautiful; all of us bear the same burden; all of us need the
same armor in our fight with Apollyon; all of us have to pass through
the Wicket Gate--to pass through the dark river, and for all of us (if
God so will) there wait the shining ones at the gates of the Celestial
City!  Who does not love to linger over the life story of the 'immortal
dreamer' as one of those characters for whom man has done so little and
God so much?"

About my favorite copy of the "Pilgrim's Progress" many a pleasant
reminiscence lingers, for it was one of the books my grandmother gave
my father when he left home to engage in the great battle of life; when
my father died this thick, dumpy little volume, with its rude cuts and
poorly printed pages, came into my possession.  I do not know what part
this book played in my father's life, but I can say for myself that it
has brought me solace and cheer a many times.

The only occasion upon which I felt bitterly toward Dr. O'Rell was when
that personage observed in my hearing one day that Bunyan was a
dyspeptic, and that had he not been one he would doubtless never have
written the "Pilgrim's Progress."

I took issue with the doctor on this point; whereupon he cited those
visions and dreams, which, according to the light of science as it now
shines, demonstrate that Bunyan's digestion must have been morbid.
And, forthwith, he overwhelmed me with learned instances from Galen and
Hippocrates, from Spurzheim and Binns, from Locke and Beattie, from
Malebranche and Bertholini, from Darwin and Descartes, from Charlevoix
and Berkeley, from Heraclitus and Blumenbach, from Priestley and
Abercrombie; in fact, forsooth, he quoted me so many authorities that
it verily seemed to me as though the whole world were against me!

I did not know until then that Dr. O'Rell had made a special study of
dreams, of their causes and of their signification.  I had always
supposed that astrology was his particular hobby, in which science I
will concede him to be deeply learned, even though he has never yet
proved to my entire satisfaction that the reason why my copy of
Justinian has faded from a royal purple to a  pale blue is, first,
because the binding was renewed at the wane of the moon and when Sirius
was in the ascendant, and, secondly, because (as Dr. O'Rell has
discovered) my binder was born at a moment fifty-six years ago when
Mercury was in the fourth house and Herschel and Saturn were aspected
in conjunction, with Sol at his northern declination.

Dr. O'Rell has frequently expressed surprise that I have never wearied
of and drifted away from the book-friendships of my earlier years.
Other people, he says, find, as time elapses, that they no longer
discover those charms in certain books which attracted them so
powerfully in youth.  "We have in our earlier days," argues the doctor,
"friendships so dear to us that we would repel with horror the
suggestion that we could ever become heedless or forgetful of them;
yet, alas, as we grow older we gradually become indifferent to these
first friends, and we are weaned from them by other friendships; there
even comes a time when we actually wonder how it were possible for us
to be on terms of intimacy with  such or such a person.  We grow away
from people, and in like manner and for similar reasons we grow away
from books."

Is it indeed possible for one to become indifferent to an object he has
once loved?  I can hardly believe so.  At least it is not so with me,
and, even though the time may come when I shall no longer be able to
enjoy the uses of these dear old friends with the old-time enthusiasm,
I should still regard them with that tender reverence which in his age
the poet Longfellow expressed when looking round upon his beloved books:

  Sadly as some old mediaeval knight
      Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield--
      The sword two-handed and the shining shield
  Suspended in the hall and full in sight,
  While secret longings for the lost delight
      Of tourney or adventure in the field
      Came over him, and tears but half concealed
  Trembled and fell upon his beard of white;
  So I behold these books upon their shelf
      My ornaments and arms of other days;
          Not wholly useless, though no longer used,
  For they remind me of my other self
     Younger and stronger, and the pleasant ways
          In which I walked, now clouded and confused.


If my friend O'Rell's theory be true, how barren would be Age! Lord
Bacon tells us in his "Apothegms" that Alonzo of Aragon was wont to
say, in commendation of Age, that Age appeared to be best in four
things:  Old wood best to burn; old wine to drink; old friends to
trust; and old authors to read.  Sir John Davys recalls that "a French
writer (whom I love well) speaks of three kinds of companions:  Men,
women and books," and my revered and beloved poet-friend, Richard Henry
Stoddard, has wrought out this sentiment in a poem of exceeding beauty,
of which the concluding stanza runs in this wise:

      Better than men and women, friend,
      That are dust, though dear in our joy and pain,
  Are the books their cunning hands have penned,
      For they depart, but the books remain;
  Through these they speak to us what was best
      In the loving heart and the noble mind;
  All their royal souls possessed
      Belongs forever to all mankind!
  When others fail him, the wise man looks
  To the sure companionship of books.


If ever, O honest friends of mine, I should forget you or weary of your
companionship,  whither would depart the memories and the associations
with which each of you is hallowed!  Would ever the modest flowers of
spring-time, budding in pathways where I no longer wander, recall to my
failing sight the vernal beauty of the Puritan maid, Captivity?  In
what reverie of summer-time should I feel again the graciousness of thy
presence, Yseult?

And Fanchonette--sweet, timid little Fanchonette! would ever thy ghost
come back from out those years away off yonder? Be hushed, my Beranger,
for a moment; another song hath awakened softly responsive echoes in my
heart! It is a song of Fanchonette:

      In vain, in vain; we meet no more,
      Nor dream what fates befall;
  And long upon the stranger's shore
      My voice on thee may call,
  When years have clothed the line in moss
      That tells thy name and days,
  And withered, on thy simple cross,
      The wreaths of Pere la Chaise!



XVI

THE MALADY CALLED CATALOGITIS

Judge Methuen tells me that one of the most pleasing delusions he has
experienced in his long and active career as a bibliomaniac is that
which is born of the catalogue habit.  Presuming that there are among
my readers many laymen,--for I preach salvation to the heathen,--I will
explain for their information that the catalogue habit, so called, is a
practice to which the confirmed lover of books is likely to become
addicted.  It is a custom of many publishers and dealers to publish and
to disseminate at certain periods lists of their wares, in the hope of
thereby enticing readers to buy those wares.

By what means these crafty tradesmen secure the names of their
prospective victims I cannot say, but this I know full well--that there
seems not to be a book-lover on the face of the earth, I care not how
remote or how secret his habitation may be, that these dealers do not
presently find him out and overwhelm him with their delightful
temptations.

I have been told that among booksellers there exists a secret league
which provides for the interchange of confidences; so that when a new
customer enters a shop in the Fulham road or in Oxford street or along
the quays of Paris, or it matters not where (so long as the object of
his inquiry be a book), within the space of a month that man's name and
place of residence are reported to and entered in the address list of
every other bookseller in Christendom, and forthwith and forever after
the catalogues and price-lists and bulletins of publishers and dealers
in every part of the world are pelted at him through the unerring
processes of the mails.

Judge Methuen has been a victim (a pleasant victim) to the catalogue
habit for the last forty years, and he has declared that if all the
catalogues sent to and read by him in that space of time were gathered
together in a heap they would make a pile bigger than Pike's Peak, and
a thousandfold more interesting.  I myself have been a famous reader of
catalogues, and I can testify that the habit has possessed me of
remarkable delusions, the most conspicuous of which is that which
produces within me the conviction that a book is as good as mine as
soon as I have met with its title in a catalogue, and set an X over
against it in pencil.

I recall that on one occasion I was discussing with Judge Methuen and
Dr. O'Rell the attempted escapes of Charles I. from Carisbrooke Castle;
a point of difference having arisen, I said: "Gentlemen, I will refer
to Hillier's 'Narrative,' and I doubt not that my argument will be
sustained by that authority."

It was vastly easier, however, to cite Hillier than it was to find him.
For three days I searched in my library, and tumbled my books about in
that confusion which results from undue eagerness; 't was all in vain;
neither hide nor hair of the desired volume could I discover.  It
finally occurred to me that I must have lent the book to somebody, and
then again I felt sure that it had been stolen.

No tidings of the missing volume came to me, and I had almost forgotten
the incident when one evening (it was fully two years after my
discussion with my cronies) I came upon, in one of the drawers of my
oak chest, a Sotheran catalogue of May, 1871.  By the merest chance I
opened it, and as luck would have it, I opened it at the very page upon
which appeared this item:

"Hillier (G.) 'Narrative of the Attempted Escapes of Charles the First
from Carisbrooke Castle'; cr.  8vo, 1852, cloth, 3/6."

Against this item appeared a cross in my chirography, and I saw at a
glance that this was my long-lost Hillier! I had meant to buy it, and
had marked it for purchase; but with the determination and that
pencilled cross the transaction had ended. Yet, having resolved to buy
it had served me almost as effectively as though I had actually bought
it; I thought--aye, I could have sworn--I HAD bought it, simply because
I MEANT to buy it.

"The experience is not unique," said Judge Methuen, when I narrated it
to him at our next meeting.  "Speaking for myself, I can say that it is
a confirmed habit with me to mark certain items in catalogues which I
read, and then to go my way in the pleasing conviction that they are
actually mine."

"I meet with cases of this character continually," said Dr. O'Rell.
"The hallucination is one that is recognized as a specific one by
pathologists; its cure is quickest effected by means of hypnotism.
Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in
serious distress.  She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears
that her husband was upon the verge of insanity.  Her testimony was to
the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of
a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was
limited to three hundred or thereabouts.

"Upon inquiry I learned that N. M. (for so I will call the victim of
this delusion) made a practice of reading and of marking booksellers'
catalogues; further investigation developed that N. M.'s great-uncle on
his mother's side had invented a flying-machine  that would not fly,
and that a half-brother of his was the author of a pamphlet entitled
'16 to 1; or the Poor Man's Vade-Mecum.'

"'Madam,' said I, 'it is clear to me that your husband is afflicted
with catalogitis.'

"At this the poor woman went into hysterics, bewailing that she should
have lived to see the object of her affection the victim of a malady so
grievous as to require a Greek name.  When she became calmer I
explained to her that the malady was by no means fatal, and that it
yielded readily to treatment."

"What, in plain terms," asked Judge Methuen, "is catalogitis?"

"I will explain briefly," answered the doctor.  "You must know first
that every perfect human being is provided with two sets of bowels; he
has physical bowels and intellectual bowels, the brain being the
latter.  Hippocrates (since whose time the science of medicine has not
advanced even the two stadia, five parasangs of Xenophon)--Hippocrates,
I say, discovered that the brain is subject to those very same diseases
to which the other and inferior bowels are liable.

"Galen confirmed this discovery and he records a case (Lib. xi., p.
318) wherein there were exhibited in the intellectual bowels symptoms
similar to those we find in appendicitis.  The brain is wrought into
certain convolutions, just as the alimentary canal is; the fourth
layer, so called, contains elongated groups of small cells or nuclei,
radiating at right angles to its plane, which groups present a
distinctly fanlike structure.  Catalogitis is a stoppage of this fourth
layer, whereby the functions of the fanlike structure are suffered no
longer to cool the brain, and whereby also continuity of thought is
interrupted, just as continuity of digestion is prevented by stoppage
of the vermiform appendix.

"The learned Professor Biersteintrinken," continued Dr. O'Rell, "has
advanced in his scholarly work on 'Raderinderkopf' the interesting
theory that catalogitis is produced by the presence in the brain of a
germ which has its origin in the cheap paper used by booksellers for
catalogue purposes, and this theory seems to have the approval of M.
Marie-Tonsard, the most famous of authorities on inebriety, in his
celebrated classic entitled 'Un Trait sur Jacques-Jacques.'"

"Did you effect a cure in the case of N. M.?" I asked.

"With the greatest of ease," answered the doctor.  "By means of
hypnotism I purged his intellectuals of their hallucination, relieving
them of their perception of objects which have no reality and ridding
them of sensations which have no corresponding external cause.  The
patient made a rapid recovery, and, although three months have elapsed
since his discharge, he has had no return of the disease."

As a class booksellers do not encourage the reading of other
booksellers' catalogues; this is, presumably, because they do not care
to encourage buyers to buy of other sellers.  My bookseller, who in all
virtues of head and heart excels all other booksellers I ever met with,
makes a scrupulous practice of destroying the catalogues that come to
his shop, lest some stray copy may fall into the hands of a mousing
book-lover and divert his attention to other hunting-grounds.  It is
indeed remarkable to what excess the  catalogue habit will carry its
victim; the author of "Will Shakespeare, a Comedy," has frequently
confessed to me that it mattered not to him whether a catalogue was
twenty years old--so long as it was a catalogue of books he found the
keenest delight in its perusal; I have often heard Mr. Hamlin, the
theatre manager, say that he preferred old catalogues to new, for the
reason that the bargains to be met with in old catalogues expired long
ago under the statute of limitations.

Judge Methuen, who is a married man and has therefore had an excellent
opportunity to study the sex, tells me that the wives of bibliomaniacs
regard catalogues as the most mischievous temptations that can be
thrown in the way of their husbands.  I once committed the imprudence
of mentioning the subject in Mrs. Methuen's presence: that estimable
lady gave it as her opinion that there were plenty of ways of spending
money foolishly without having recourse to a book-catalogue for
suggestion.  I wonder whether Captivity would have had this opinion,
had Providence ordained that  we should walk together the quiet pathway
of New England life; would Yseult always have retained the exuberance
and sweetness of her youth, had she and I realized what might have
been?  Would Fanchonette always have sympathized with the whims and
vagaries of the restless yet loyal soul that hung enraptured on her
singing in the Quartier Latin so long ago that the memory of that song
is like the memory of a ghostly echo now?

Away with such reflections!  Bring in the candles, good servitor, and
range them at my bed's head; sweet avocation awaits me, for here I have
a goodly parcel of catalogues with which to commune. They are messages
from Methuen, Sotheran, Libbie, Irvine, Hutt, Davey, Baer, Crawford,
Bangs, McClurg, Matthews, Francis, Bouton, Scribner, Benjamin, and a
score of other friends in every part of Christendom; they deserve and
they shall have my respectful--nay, my enthusiastic attention.  Once
more I shall seem to be in the old familiar shops where treasures
abound and where patient delving bringeth rich rewards.  Egad, what  a
spendthrift I shall be this night; pence, shillings, thalers, marks,
francs, dollars, sovereigns--they are the same to me!

Then, after I have comprehended all the treasures within reach, how
sweet shall be my dreams of shelves overflowing with the wealth of
which my fancy has possessed me!


  Then shall my library be devote
      To the magic of Niddy-Noddy,
  Including the volumes which Nobody wrote
      And the works of Everybody.



XVII

THE NAPOLEONIC RENAISSANCE

If I had begun collecting Napoleonana in my youth I should now have on
hand a priceless collection.  This reminds me that when I first came to
Chicago suburban property along the North Shore could be bought for
five hundred dollars an acre which now sells for two hundred dollars a
front foot; if I had purchased real estate in that locality when I had
the opportunity forty years ago I should be a millionnaire at the
present time.

I think I am more regretful of having neglected the Napoleonana than of
having missed the real-estate chances, for since my library contains
fewer than two hundred volumes relating to Bonaparte and his times I
feel that I have been strangely remiss in the pursuit of one of the
most interesting and most instructive of bibliomaniac fads.  When I
behold the remarkable collections of Napoleonana made by certain
friends of mine I am filled with conflicting emotions of delight and
envy, and Judge Methuen and I are wont to contemplate with regret the
opportunities we once had of throwing all these modern collections in
the shade.

When I speak of Napoleonana I refer exclusively to literature relating
to Napoleon; the term, however, is generally used in a broader sense,
and includes every variety of object, from the snuff-boxes used by the
emperor at Malmaison to the slippers he wore at St. Helena.  My friend,
Mr. Redding, of California, has a silver knife and fork that once
belonged to Bonaparte, and Mr. Mills, another friend of mine, has the
neckerchief which Napoleon wore on the field of Waterloo.  In Le
Blanc's little treatise upon the art of tying the cravat it is recorded
that Napoleon generally wore a black silk cravat, as was remarked at
Wagram, Lodi, Marengo and Austerlitz.  "But at Waterloo," says Le
Blanc, "it was observed that, contrary to his usual custom, he wore a
white handkerchief with a flowing bow, although  the day previous he
appeared in his black cravat."

I remember to have seen in the collection of Mr. Melville E. Stone a
finger-ring, which, having been brought by an old French soldier to New
Orleans, ultimately found its way to a pawn-shop. This bauble was of
gold, and at two opposite points upon its outer surface appeared a
Napoleonic "N," done in black enamel: by pressing upon one of these Ns
a secret spring was operated, the top of the ring flew back, and a tiny
gold figure of the Little Corporal stood up, to the astonishment and
admiration of the beholder.

Another curious Napoleonic souvenir in Mr. Stone's motley collection is
a cotton print handkerchief, upon which are recorded scenes from the
career of the emperor; the thing must have been of English manufacture,
for only an Englishman (inspired by that fear and that hatred of
Bonaparte which only Englishmen had) could have devised this atrocious
libel.  One has to read the literature current in the earlier part of
this century in order to get a correct idea of the terror with which
Bonaparte filled his enemies, and this literature is so extensive that
it seems an impossibility that anything like a complete collection
should be got together; to say nothing of the histories, the
biographies, the volumes of reminiscence and the books of criticism
which the career of the Corsican inspired, there are Napoleon
dream-books, Napoleon song-books, Napoleon chap-books, etc., etc.,
beyond the capability of enumeration.

The English were particularly active in disseminating libels upon
Napoleon; they charged him in their books and pamphlets with murder,
arson, incest, treason, treachery, cowardice, seduction, hypocrisy,
avarice, robbery, ingratitude, and jealousy; they said that he poisoned
his sick soldiers, that he was the father of Hortense's child, that he
committed the most atrocious cruelties in Egypt and Italy, that he
married Barras' discarded mistress, that he was afflicted with a
loathsome disease, that he murdered the Duc d'Enghien and officers in
his own army of whom he was jealous, that he was criminally intimate
with his own sisters--in short, there was no crime, however revolting,
with  which these calumniators were not hasty to charge the emperor.

This same vindictive hatred was visited also upon all associated with
Bonaparte in the conduct of affairs at that time.  Murat was "a brute
and a thief"; Josephine, Hortense, Pauline, and Mme. Letitia were
courtesans; Berthier was a shuffling, time-serving lackey and tool;
Augereau was a bastard, a spy, a robber, and a murderer; Fouche was the
incarnation of every vice; Lucien Bonaparte was a roue and a marplot;
Cambaceres was a debauchee; Lannes was a thief, brigand, and a
poisoner; Talleyrand and Barras were--well, what evil was told of them
has yet to be disproved.  But you would gather from contemporaneous
English publications that Bonaparte and his associates were veritable
fiends from hell sent to scourge civilization.  These books are so
strangely curious that we find it hard to classify them: we cannot call
them history, and they are too truculent to pass for humor; yet they
occupy a distinct and important place among Napoleonana.

Until William Hazlitt's life of Bonaparte appeared we had no English
treatment of Bonaparte that was in any sense fair, and, by the way,
Hazlitt's work is the only one in English I know of which gives the
will of Bonaparte, an exceedingly interesting document.

For a good many years I held the character of Napoleon in light esteem,
for the reason that he had but small regard for books. Recent
revelations, however, made to me by Dr. O'Rell (grandnephew of "Tom
Burke of Ours"), have served to dissipate that prejudice, and I
question not that I shall duly become as ardent a worshipper of the
Corsican as my doctor himself is.  Dr. O'Rell tells me--and his
declarations are corroborated by Frederic Masson and other
authorities--that Bonaparte was a lover and a collector of books, and
that he contributed largely to the dignity and the glorification of
literature by publishing a large number of volumes in the highest style
of the art.

The one department of literature for which he seems to have had no
liking was fiction.  Novels of all kinds he was in the habit of tossing
into the fire.  He was a prodigious buyer of books, and those which he
read  were invariably stamped on the outer cover with the imperial
arms; at St. Helena his library stamp was merely a seal upon which ink
was smeared.

Napoleon cared little for fine bindings, yet he knew their value, and
whenever a presentation copy was to be bound he required that it be
bound handsomely.  The books in his own library were invariably bound
"in calf of indifferent quality," and he was wont, while reading a
book, to fill the margin with comments in pencil.  Wherever he went he
took a library of books with him, and these volumes he had deprived of
all superfluous margin, so as to save weight and space.  Not
infrequently when hampered by the rapid growth of this travelling
library he would toss the "overflow" of books out of his carriage
window, and it was his custom (I shudder to record it!) to separate the
leaves of pamphlets, magazines, and volumes by running his finger
between them, thereby invariably tearing the pages in shocking wise.

In the arrangement of his library Napoleon observed that exacting
method which was characteristic of him in other employments  and
avocations.  Each book had its particular place in a special case, and
Napoleon knew his library so well that he could at any moment place his
hand upon any volume he desired.  The libraries at his palaces he had
arranged exactly as the library at Malmaison was, and never was one
book borrowed from one to serve in another.  It is narrated of him that
if ever a volume was missing Napoleon would describe its size and the
color of its binding to the librarian, and would point out the place
where it might have been wrongly put and the case where it properly
belonged.

If any one question the greatness of this man let him explain if he can
why civilization's interest in Napoleon increases as time rolls on.
Why is it that we are curious to know all about him--that we have
gratification in hearing tell of his minutest habits, his moods, his
whims, his practices, his prejudices?  Why is it that even those who
hated him and who denied his genius have felt called upon to record in
ponderous tomes their reminiscences of him and his deeds?  Princes,
generals, lords, courtiers, poets, painters, priests, plebeians--all
have vied with one another in answering humanity's demand for more and
more and ever more about Napoleon Bonaparte.

I think that the supply will, like the demand, never be exhausted.  The
women of the court have supplied us with their memoirs; so have the
diplomats of that period; so have the wives of his generals; so have
the Tom-Dick-and-Harry spectators of those kaleidoscopic scenes; so
have his keepers in exile; so has his barber.  The chambermaids will be
heard from in good time, and the hostlers, and the scullions.  Already
there are rumors that we are soon to be regaled with Memoirs of the
Emperor Napoleon by the Lady who knew the Tailor who Once Sewed a
Button on the Emperor's Coat, edited by her loving grandson, the Duc de
Bunco.

Without doubt many of those who read these lines will live to see the
time when memoirs of Napoleon will be offered by "a gentleman who
purchased a collection of Napoleon spoons in 1899"; doubtless, too, the
book will be hailed with satisfaction, for this Napoleonic enthusiasm
increases as time wears on.

Curious, is it not, that no calm, judicial study of this man's
character and exploits is received with favor?  He who treats of the
subject must be either a hater or an adorer of Napoleon; his blood must
be hot with the enthusiasm of rage or of love.

To the human eye there appears in space a luminous sphere that in its
appointed path goes on unceasingly.  The wise men are not agreed
whether this apparition is merely of gaseous composition or is a solid
body supplied extraneously with heat and luminosity, inexhaustibly;
some argue that its existence will be limited to the period of one
thousand, or five hundred thousand, or one million years; others
declare that it will roll on until the end of time.  Perhaps the nature
of that luminous sphere will never be truly known to mankind; yet with
calm dignity it moves in its appointed path among the planets and the
stars of the universe, its fires unabated, its luminosity undimmed.

Even so the great Corsican, scrutinized of all human eyes, passes along
the aisle of Time enveloped in the impenetrable mystery of enthusiasm,
genius, and splendor.



XVIII

MY WORKSHOP AND OTHERS

  The women-folk are few up there,
      For 't were not fair, you know,
  That they our heavenly bliss should share
      Who vex us here below!
  The few are those who have been kind
      To husbands such as we:
  They knew our fads and didn't mind--
      Says Dibdin's ghost to me.

It has never been explained to my satisfaction why women, as a class,
are the enemies of books, and are particularly hostile to bibliomania.
The exceptions met with now and then simply prove the rule.  Judge
Methuen declares that bibliophobia is but one phase of jealousy; that
one's wife hates one's books because she fears that her husband is in
love, or is going to be in love, with those companions of his student
hours.  If, instead of being folios, quartos, octavos, and the like,
the Judge's books were buxom, blithe maidens, his wife could hardly be
more jealous of the Judge's attentions to them than she is under
existing circumstances.  On one occasion, having found the Judge on two
successive afternoons sitting alone in the library with Pliny in his
lap, this spirited lady snatched the insidious volume from her
husband's embraces and locked it up in one of the kitchen pantries; nor
did she release the object of her displeasure until the Judge had
promised solemnly to be more circumspect in the future, and had further
mollified his wife's anger by bringing home a new silk dress and a
bonnet of exceptional loveliness.

Other instances of a similar character have demonstrated that Mrs.
Methuen regards with implacable antipathy the volumes upon which my
learned and ingenious friend would fain lavish the superabundance of
his affection.  Many years ago the Judge was compelled to resort to
every kind of artifice in order to sneak new books into his house, and
had he not been imbued with the true afflatus of bibliomania he would
long ago have broken down under the heartless tyranny of his vindictive
spouse.

When I look around me and survey the persecution to which book-lovers
are subjected by their wives, I thank the goddess Fortune that she has
cast my lot among the celibates; indeed, it is still one of the few
serious questions I have not yet solved, viz.: whether a man can at the
same time be true to a wife and to bibliomania.  Both are exacting
mistresses, and neither will tolerate a rival.

Dr. O'Rell has a theory that the trouble with most wives is that they
are not caught young enough; he quotes Dr. Johnson's sage remark to the
effect that "much can be made of a Scotchman if caught young," and he
asserts that this is equally true of woman.  Mrs. O'Rell was a mere
girl when she wedded with the doctor, and the result of thirty years'
experience and training is that this model woman sympathizes with her
excellent husband's tastes, and actually has a feeling of contempt for
other wives who have never heard of Father Prout and Kit North, and who
object to their husbands' smoking in bed.

I recall with what enthusiasm I once heard this superior creature
commend the doctor for having accepted in lieu of a fee a set of
Calvin's "Institutes," with copious notes, in twelve octavo volumes,
and a portfolio of colored fox-hunting prints.  My admiration for this
model wife could find expression in no other way; I jumped from my
chair, seized her in my arms, and imprinted upon her brow a fervent but
respectful kiss.

It would be hard to imagine a prettier picture than that presented to
my vision as I looked in from the porch of the doctor's residence upon
the doctor's family gathered together in the library after dinner.  The
doctor himself, snuggled down in a vast easy-chair, was dividing his
attention between a brier pipe and the odes of Propertius; his wife,
beside him in her rocker, smiled and smiled again over the quaint humor
of Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford"; upon yonder settee, Francis Mahony
Methuen, the oldest son, was deep in the perusal of Wilson's "Tales of
the Border"; his brother,  Russell Lowell, was equally absorbed in the
pathetic tale of "The Man without a Country"; Letitia Landon Methuen,
the daughter, was quietly sobbing over the tragedy of "Evangeline"; in
his high chair sat the chubby baby boy, Beranger Methuen, crowing
gleefully over an illustrated copy of that grand old classic, "Poems
for Infant Minds by Two Young Persons."

For several moments I stood spellbound, regarding with ineffable
rapture this inspiring spectacle.  "How manifold are thy blessings, O
Bibliomania," thought I, "and how graciously they are distributed in
this joyous circle, wherein it is permitted to see not only the maturer
members, but, alas, the youth and even the babes and sucklings drinking
freely and gratefully at the fountain-head of thy delights!"

Dr. O'Rell's library is one of the most charming apartments I know of.
It looks out upon every variety of scenery, for Dr. O'Rell has had
constructed at considerable expense a light iron framework from which
are suspended at different times cunningly painted canvases
representing landscapes and marines corresponding to the most whimsical
fancy.

In the dead of winter, the doctor often has a desire to look out upon a
cheery landscape; thereupon, by a simple manipulation of a keyboard,
there is unrolled a panorama of velvety hillsides and flowery meads, of
grazing sheep, and of piping rustics; so natural is the spectacle that
one can almost hear the music of the reeds, and fancy himself in
Arcadia.  If in midsummer the heat is oppressive and life seems
burthensome, forthwith another canvas is outspread, and the glories of
the Alps appear, or a stretch of blue sea, or a corner of a primeval
forest.

So there is an outlook for every mood, and I doubt not that this
ingenious provision contributes potently towards promoting bibliomaniac
harmony and prosperity in my friend's household.  It is true that I
myself am not susceptible to external influences when once I am
surrounded by books; I do not care a fig whether my library overlooks a
garden or a desert; give me my dear companions in their dress of
leather, cloth, or boards, and it matters not to me whether God sends
storm or sunshine, flowers or hail, light or darkness, noise or calm.
Yet I know and admit that environment means much to most people, and I
do most heartily applaud Dr. O'Rell's versatile device.

I have always thought that De Quincey's workshop would have given me
great delight.  The particular thing that excited De Quincey's choler
was interference with his books and manuscripts, which he piled atop of
one another upon the floor and over his desk, until at last there would
be but a narrow little pathway from the desk to the fireplace and from
the fireplace to the door; and his writing-table--gracious! what a
Pelion upon Ossa of confusion it must have been!

Yet De Quincey insisted that he knew "just where everything was," and
he merely exacted that the servants attempt no such vandalism as
"cleaning up" in his workshop.  Of course there would presently come a
time when there was no more room on the table and when the little
pathway to the fireplace and the door would be no longer visible; then,
with a sigh, De Quincey would lock the door of that room and betake
himself to other quarters, which in turn would eventually become quite
as littered up, cluttered up, and impassable as the first rooms.

From all that can be gathered upon the subject it would appear that De
Quincey was careless in his treatment of books; I have read somewhere
(but I forget where) that he used his forefinger as a paper-cutter and
that he did not hesitate to mutilate old folios which he borrowed.  But
he was extraordinarily tender with his manuscripts; and he was wont to
carry in his pockets a soft brush with which he used to dust off his
manuscripts most carefully before handing them to the publisher.

Sir Walter Scott was similarly careful with his books, and he used, for
purposes of dusting them, the end of a fox's tail set in a handle of
silver.  Scott, was, however, particular and systematic in the
arrangement of his books, and his work-room, with its choice
bric-a-brac and its interesting collection of pictures and framed
letters, was a veritable paradise to the visiting book-lover and
curio-lover.  He was as fond of early rising as Francis Jeffrey was
averse to it, and both these eminent men were strongly attached to
animal pets.  Jeffrey particularly affected an aged and garrulous
parrot and an equally disreputable little dog.  Scott was so stanch a
friend of dogs that wherever he went he was accompanied by one or
two--sometimes by a whole kennel--of these faithful brutes.

In Mrs. Gordon's noble "Memoirs" we have a vivid picture of Professor
Wilson's workroom.  All was confusion there: "his room was a strange
mixture of what may be called order and untidiness, for there was not a
scrap of paper or a book that his hand could not light upon in a
moment, while to the casual eye, in search of discovery, it would
appear chaos."  Wilson had no love for fine furniture, and he seems to
have crowded his books together without regard to any system of
classification.  He had a habit of mixing his books around with
fishing-tackle, and his charming biographer tells us it was no uncommon
thing to find the "Wealth of Nations," "Boxiana," the "Faerie Queen,"
Jeremy Taylor, and Ben Jonson occupying close quarters with
fishing-rods, boxing-gloves, and tins of barley-sugar.

Charles Lamb's favorite workshop was in an attic; upon the walls of
this room he and his sister pasted old prints and gay pictures, and
this resulted in giving the place a cheery aspect. Lamb loved old
books, old friends, old times; "he evades the present, he works at the
future, and his affections revert to and settle on the past,"--so says
Hazlitt.  His favorite books seem to have been Bunyan's "Holy War,"
Browne's "Urn-Burial," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Fuller's
"Worthies," and Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying."  Thomas Westwood
tells us that there were few modern volumes in his library, it being
his custom to give away and throw away (as the same writer asserts)
presentation copies of contemporaneous literature.  Says Barry
Cornwall:  "Lamb's pleasures lay amongst the books of the old English
writers," and Lamb himself uttered these memorable words:  "I cannot
sit and think--books think for me."

Wordsworth, on the other hand, cared little for books; his library was
a small one, embracing hardly more than five hundred volumes.  He drew
his inspiration not from books, but from Nature.  From all that I have
heard of him I judge him to have been a very dull man.  Allibone
relates of him that he once remarked that he did not consider himself a
witty poet. "Indeed," quoth he, "I don't think I ever was witty but
once in my life."

His friends urged him to tell them about it.  After some hesitation, he
said:  "Well, I will tell you.  I was standing some time ago at the
entrance of Rydal Mount.  A man accosted me with the question:  'Pray,
sir, have you seen my wife pass by?' Whereupon I retorted, 'Why, my
good friend, I didn't know till this moment that you had a wife.'"

Illustrative of Wordsworth's vanity, it is told that when it was
reported that the next Waverley novel was to be "Rob Roy," the poet
took down his "Ballads" and read to the company "Rob Roy's Grave."
Then he said gravely:  "I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to
say on the subject."

Wordsworth and Dickens disliked each other cordially.  Having been
asked his opinion of the young novelist, Wordsworth answered:  "Why,
I'm not much given to turn critic on people I meet; but, as you ask me,
I will cordially avow that I thought him a very talkative young
person--but I dare say he may be very clever.  Mind, I don't want to
say a word against him, for I have never read a line he has written."

The same inquirer subsequently asked Dickens how he liked Wordsworth.

"Like him!" roared Dickens, "not at all; he is a dreadful Old Ass!"



XIX

OUR DEBT TO MONKISH MEN

Where one has the time and the money to devote to the collection of
missals and illuminated books, the avocation must be a very delightful
one.  I never look upon a missal or upon a bit of antique illumination
that I do not invest that object with a certain poetic romance, and I
picture to myself long lines of monkish men bending over their tasks,
and applying themselves with pious enthusiasm thereto.  We should not
flatter ourselves that the enjoyment of the delights of bibliomania was
reserved to one time and generation; a greater than any of us lived
many centuries ago, and went his bibliomaniacal way, gathering together
treasures from every quarter, and diffusing every where a veneration
and love for books.

Richard de Bury was the king, if not the father, of bibliomaniacs; his
immortal work reveals to us that long before the invention of printing
men were tormented and enraptured by those very same desires, envies,
jealousies, greeds, enthusiasms, and passions which possess and control
bibliomaniacs at the present time.  That vanity was sometimes the
controlling passion with the early collectors is evidenced in a passage
in Barclay's satire, "The Ship of Fools"; there are the stanzas which
apply so neatly to certain people I know that sometimes I actually
suspect that Barclay's prophetic eye must have had these
nineteenth-century charlatans in view.

  But yet I have them in great reverence
      And honor, saving them from filth and ordure
  By often brushing and much diligence.
      Full goodly bound in pleasant coverture
      Of damask, satin, or else of velvet pure,
  I keep them sure, fearing lest they should be lost,
  For in them is the cunning wherein I me boast.

  But if it fortune that any learned man
      Within my house fall to disputation,
  I draw the curtains to show my books them,
       That they of my cunning should make probation;
      I love not to fall into altercation,
  And while they come, my books I turn and wind,
  For all is in them, and nothing in my mind.


Richard de Bury had exceptional opportunities for gratifying his
bibliomaniac passions.  He was chancellor and treasurer of Edward III.,
and his official position gained him access to public and private
libraries and to the society of literary men.  Moreover, when it became
known that he was fond of such things, people from every quarter sent
him and brought him old books; it may be that they hoped in this wise
to court his official favor, or perhaps they were prompted by the less
selfish motive of gladdening the bibliomaniac soul.

"The flying fame of our love," says de Bury, "had already spread in all
directions, and it was reported not only that we had a longing desire
for books, and especially for old ones, but that any one could more
easily obtain our favors by quartos than by money.  Wherefore, when
supported by the bounty of the aforesaid prince of worthy memory, we
were enabled to oppose or advance, to appoint or to discharge; crazy
quartos and tottering folios, precious however in our sight as in our
affections, flowed in most rapidly from the great and the small,
instead of new year's gifts and remunerations, and instead of presents
and jewels.  Then the cabinets of the most noble monasteries were
opened, cases were unlocked, caskets were unclasped, and sleeping
volumes which had slumbered for long ages in their sepulchres were
roused up, and those that lay hid in dark places were overwhelmed with
the rays of a new light.  Among these, as time served, we sat down more
voluptuously than the delicate physician could do amidst his stores of
aromatics, and where we found an object of love we found also an
assuagement."

"If," says de Bury, "we would have amassed cups of gold and silver,
excellent horses, or no mean sums of money, we could in those days have
laid up abundance of wealth for ourselves.  But we regarded books, not
pounds; and valued codices more than florins, and preferred paltry
pamphlets to pampered palfreys.  On tedious embassies and in perilous
times, we carried  about with us that fondness for books which many
waters could not extinguish."

And what books they were in those old days!  What tall folios! What
stout quartos!  How magnificent were the bindings, wrought often in
silver devices, sometimes in gold, and not infrequently in silver and
gold, with splendid jewels and precious stones to add their value to
that of the precious volume which they adorned.  The works of Justin,
Seneca, Martial, Terence, and Claudian were highly popular with the
bibliophiles of early times; and the writings of Ovid, Tully, Horace,
Cato, Aristotle, Sallust, Hippocrates, Macrobius, Augustine, Bede,
Gregory, Origen, etc.  But for the veneration and love for books which
the monks of the mediaeval ages had, what would have been preserved to
us of the classics of the Greeks and the Romans?

The same auspicious fate that prompted those bibliomaniacal monks to
hide away manuscript treasures in the cellars of their monasteries,
inspired Poggio Bracciolini several centuries later to hunt out and
invade those sacred hiding-places, and these quests  were rewarded with
finds whose value cannot be overestimated.  All that we have of the
histories of Livy come to us through Poggio's industry as a
manuscript-hunter; this same worthy found and brought away from
different monasteries a perfect copy of Quintilian, a Cicero's oration
for Caecina, a complete Tertullian, a Petronius Arbiter, and fifteen or
twenty other classics almost as valuable as those I have named.  From
German monasteries, Poggio's friend, Nicolas of Treves, brought away
twelve comedies of Plautus and a fragment of Aulus Gellius.

Dear as their pagan books were to the monkish collectors, it was upon
their Bibles, their psalters, and their other religious books that
these mediaeval bibliomaniacs expended their choicest art and their
most loving care.  St. Cuthbert's "Gospels," preserved in the British
Museum, was written by Egfrith, a monk, circa 720; Aethelwald bound the
book in gold and precious stones, and Bilfrid, a hermit, illuminated it
by prefixing to each gospel a beautiful painting representing one of
the Evangelists, and a tessellated cross, executed in a most elaborate
manner.  Bilfrid also illuminated the large capital letters at the
beginning of the gospels.  This precious volume was still further
enriched by Aldred of Durham, who interlined it with a Saxon Gloss, or
version of the Latin text of St. Jerome.

"Of the exact pecuniary value of books during the middle ages," says
Merryweather, "we have no means of judging.  The few instances that
have accidentally been recorded are totally inadequate to enable us to
form an opinion.  The extravagant estimate given by some as to the
value of books in those days is merely conjectural, as it necessarily
must be when we remember that the price was guided by the accuracy of
the transcription, the splendor of the binding (which was often
gorgeous to excess), and by the beauty and richness of the
illuminations.  Many of the manuscripts of the middle ages are
magnificent in the extreme; sometimes inscribed in liquid gold on
parchment of the richest purple, and adorned with illuminations of
exquisite workmanship."

With such a veneration and love for books obtaining in the cloister and
at the fireside,  what pathos is revealed to us in the supplication
which invited God's blessing upon the beloved tomes:  "O Lord, send the
virtue of thy Holy Spirit upon these our books; that cleansing them
from all earthly things, by thy holy blessing, they may mercifully
enlighten our hearts and give us true understanding; and grant that by
thy teachings they may brightly preserve and make full an abundance of
good works according to thy will."

And what inspiration and cheer does every book-lover find in the letter
which that grand old bibliomaniac, Alcuin, addressed to Charlemagne:
"I, your Flaccus, according to your admonitions and good will,
administer to some in the house of St. Martin the sweets of the Holy
Scriptures; others I inebriate with the study of ancient wisdom; and
others I fill with the fruits of grammatical lore.  Many I seek to
instruct in the order of the stars which illuminate the glorious vault
of heaven, so that they may be made ornaments to the holy church of God
and the court of your imperial majesty; that the goodness of God and
your kindness may not  be altogether unproductive of good.  But in
doing this I discover the want of much, especially those exquisite
books of scholastic learning which I possessed in my own country,
through the industry of my good and most devout master, Egbert.  I
therefore entreat your Excellence to permit me to send into Britain
some of our youths to procure those books which we so much desire, and
thus transplant into France the flowers of Britain, that they may
fructify and perfume, not only the garden at York, but also the
Paradise of Tours, and that we may say in the words of the song:  'Let
my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruit;' and to the
young:  'Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved;' or
exhort in the words of the prophet Isaiah:  'Every one that thirsteth
to come to the waters, and ye that have no money, come ye, buy and eat:
yea, come buy wine and milk, without money and without price.'"

I was meaning to have somewhat to say about Alcuin, and had intended to
pay my respects to Canute, Alfred, the Abbot of St. Albans, the
Archbishop of Salzburg, the  Prior of Dover, and other mediaeval
worthies, when Judge Methuen came in and interrupted the thread of my
meditation.  The Judge brings me some verses done recently by a
poet-friend of his, and he asks me to give them a place in these
memoirs as illustrating the vanity of human confidence.


  One day I got a missive
      Writ in a dainty hand,
  Which made my manly bosom
      With vanity expand.
  'T was from a "young admirer"
      Who asked me would I mind
  Sending her "favorite poem"
      "In autograph, and signed."

  She craved the boon so sweetly
      That I had been a churl
  Had I repulsed the homage
      Of this gentle, timid girl;
  With bright illuminations
      I decked the manuscript,
  And in my choicest paints and inks
      My brush and pen I dipt.

  Indeed it had been tedious
      But that a flattered smile
  Played on my rugged features
      And eased my toil the while.
  I was assured my poem
      Would fill her with delight--
  I fancied she was pretty--
      I knew that she was bright!

  And for a spell thereafter
      That unknown damsel's face
  With its worshipful expression
      Pursued me every place;
  Meseemed to hear her whisper:
      "O, thank you, gifted sir,
  For the overwhelming honor
      You so graciously confer!"

  But a catalogue from Benjamin's
      Disproves what things meseemed--
  Dispels with savage certainty
      The flattering dreams I dreamed;
  For that poor "favorite poem,"
      Done and signed in autograph,
  Is listed in "Cheap Items"
      At a dollar-and-a-half.





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