The Library

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Title: The Library
Author: Lang, Andrew
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Library" ***

Transcribed from the 1881 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pgflaf.org

[Picture: Book cover]

[Picture: Frontispiece]

THE LIBRARY

BY
ANDREW LANG

WITH A CHAPTER ON
MODERN ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS BY
AUSTIN DOBSON

[Picture: Decorative graphic, ‘Art at Home’]

London
MACMILLAN & CO.
1881

_The right of reproduction is reserved_.

* * * * *

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARKE, _Edinburgh_.

* * * * *

TO
DR. JOHN BROWN
AUTHOR OF
_RAB AND HIS FRIENDS_.

PREFATORY NOTE

THE pages in this volume on illuminated and other MSS. (with the
exception of some anecdotes about Bussy Rabutin and Julie de Rambouillet)
have been contributed by the Rev. W. J. Loftie, who has also written on
early printed books (pp. 94–95). The pages on the Biblioklept (pp.
46–56) are reprinted, with the Editor’s kind permission, from the
_Saturday Review_; and a few remarks on the moral lessons of bookstalls
are taken from an essay in the same journal.

Mr. Ingram Bywater, Fellow of Exeter College, and lately sub-Librarian of
the Bodleian, has very kindly read through the proofs of chapters I.,
II., and III., and suggested some alterations.

Thanks are also due to Mr. T. R. Buchanan, Fellow of All Souls College,
for two plates from his “Book-bindings in All Souls Library” (printed for
private circulation), which he has been good enough to lend me. The
plates are beautifully drawn and coloured by Dr. J. J. Wild. Messrs.
George Bell & Sons, Messrs. Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., and Messrs. Chatto &
Windus, must be thanked for the use of some of the woodcuts which
illustrate the concluding chapter.

A. L.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
CHAPTER I.
AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER 1
“Every man his own Librarian”—Bibliography
and Literature—Services of the French to
Bibliography—A defence of the taste of the
Book-collector—Should Collectors buy for
the purpose of selling again?—The sport of
Book-hunting—M. de Resbecq’s
anecdotes—Stories of success of
Book-hunters—The lessons of old
Bookstalls—Booksellers’
catalogues—Auctions of Books—Different
forms of the taste for collecting—The
taste serviceable to critical
Science—Books considered as literary
relics—Examples—The “Imitatio Christi” of
J. J. Rousseau—A brief vision of mighty
Book-hunters.
CHAPTER II.
THE LIBRARY 31
The size of modern collections—The Library
in English houses—Bookcases—Enemies of
Books—Damp, dust, dirt—The
bookworm—Careless readers—Book
plates—Borrowers—Book stealers—Affecting
instance of the Spanish Monk—The
Book-ghoul—Women the natural foes of
books—Some touching exceptions—Homage to
Madame Fertiault—Modes of preserving
books; binding—Various sorts of coverings
for books—Half-bindings—Books too good to
bind, how to be entertained—Iniquities of
Binders—Cruel case of a cropped play of
Molière—Recipes (not infallible) for
cleaning books—Necessity of possessing
bibliographical works, such as catalogues.
CHAPTER III.
THE BOOKS OF THE COLLECTOR 76
Manuscripts, early and late—Early Printed
Books—How to recognise them—Books printed
on VELLUM—“Uncut” copies—“Livres de Luxe,”
and Illustrated Books—Invective against
“Christmas Books”—The “Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili”—Old woodcuts—French vignettes
of the eighteenth century—Books of the
Aldi—Books of the Elzevirs—“Curious”
Books—Singular old English poems—First
editions—Changes of fashion in
Book-collecting—Examples of the variations
in prices—Books valued for their bindings,
and as relics—Anecdotes of Madame du Barry
and Marie Antoinette.
CHAPTER IV.
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS 123
Beginnings of Modern Book-Illustration in
England—Stothard, Blake, Flaxman—Boydell’s
“Shakespeare,” Macklin’s “Bible,” Martin’s
“Milton”—The “Annuals”—Rogers’s “Italy”
and “Poems”—Revival of
Wood-Engraving—Bewick—Bewick’s Pupils—The
“London School”—Progress of
Wood-Engraving—Illustrated “Christmas” and
other Books—The Humorous
Artists—Cruikshank—Doyle—Thackeray—Leech—
Tenniel—Du Maurier—Sambourne—Keene—Minor
Humorous Artists—Children’s
Books—Crane—Miss Greenaway—Caldecott—The
“New American School”—Conclusion.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PLATES.
PAGE
M. ANNEI LUCANI DE BELLO CIVILI LIBRI X. APUD SEB. 62
GRYPHIUM LUGDUNI. 1551 _To face_
PUB. VIRGILII MARONIS OPERA PARISIIS. APUD HIERONYMUM DE 64
MARNEF, SUB PELICANO, MONTE D’HILURII. 1558 _To face_
TITLE-PAGE of “Le Rommant de la Rose,” Paris, 1539 _To 94
face_
WOODCUTS.
FRONTISPIECE. _Drawn by Walter Crane_; _engraved by
Swain_.
INITIAL. _Drawn by Walter Crane_; _engraved by Swain_ 1
GROUP OF CHILDREN. _Drawn by Kate Greenaway_; _engraved by 122
O. Lacour_
INITIAL. From Hughes’s “Scouring of the White Horse, 123
1858.” _Drawn by Richard Doyle_; _engraved by W. J.
Linton_
“INFANT JOY.” From Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” 1789. 129
_Engraved by J. F. Jungling_
“COUNSELLOR, KING, WARRIOR, MOTHER AND CHILD, IN THE TOMB.” 131
From Blair’s “Grave,” 1808. _Designed by William Blake_;
_facsimiled on wood from the engraving by Louis
Schiavonetti_
“THE WOODCOCK.” From Jackson & Chatto’s “History of 141
Wood-Engraving,” 1839. _Engraved_, _after T. Bewick_, _by
John Jackson_
TAILPIECE. From the same. _Engraved_, _after T. Bewick_, 143
_by John Jackson_
HEADPIECE. From Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory, with other 145
Poems,” 1810. _Drawn by T. Stothard_; _engraved_, _after
Luke Clennell_, _by O. Lacour_
“GOLDEN HEAD BY GOLDEN HEAD.” From Christina Rossetti’s 149
“Goblin Market and other Poems,” 1862. _Drawn by D. G.
Rossetti_; _engraved by W. J. Linton_
“THE DEAF POST-BOY.” From Clarke’s “Three Courses and a 153
Dessert,” 1830. _Drawn by G. Cruikshank_; _engraved by S.
Williams_ [?]
“THE MAD TEA-PARTY.” From “Alice’s Adventures in 162
Wonderland,” 1865. _Drawn by John Tenniel_; _engraved by
Dalziel Brothers_
BLACK KITTEN. From “Through the Looking-Glass,” 1871. 163
_Drawn by John Tenniel_; _engraved by Dalziel Brothers_
“THE MUSIC OF THE PAST.” From “Punch’s Almanack,” 1877. 165
_Drawn by George du Maurier_; _engraved by Swain_
LION AND TUB. From “Punch’s Pocket-Book,” 1879. _Drawn by 167
Linley Sambourne_; _engraved by Swain_
BOY AND HIPPOCAMPUS. From Miss E. Keary’s “Magic Valley,” 171
1877. _Drawn by_ “_E. V. B._” (Hon. Mrs. Boyle); _engraved
by T. Quartley_
“LOVE CHARMS.” From Irving’s “Bracebridge Hall,” 1876. 173
_Drawn by Randolph Caldecott_; _engraved by J. D. Cooper_

* * * * *

Books, books again, and books once more!
These are our theme, which some miscall
Mere madness, setting little store
By copies either short or tall.
But you, O slaves of shelf and stall!
We rather write for you that hold
Patched folios dear, and prize “the small,
Rare volume, black with tarnished gold.”

A. D.

CHAPTER I.
AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER

“ALL men,” says Dr. Dibdin, “like to be their own librarians.” A writer
on the library has no business to lay down the law as to the books that
even the most inexperienced amateurs should try to collect. There are
books which no lover of literature can afford to be without; classics,
ancient and modern, on which the world has pronounced its verdict. These
works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the
necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and
Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Molière, Thucydides,
Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will
desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list
of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the tastes of
men begin to differ very widely. An assortment of broadsheet ballads and
scrap-books, bought in boyhood, was the nucleus of Scott’s library, rich
in the works of poets and magicians, of alchemists, and anecdotists. A
childish liking for coloured prints of stage characters, may be the germ
of a theatrical collection like those of Douce, and Malone, and Cousin.
People who are studying any past period of human history, or any old
phase or expression of human genius, will eagerly collect little
contemporary volumes which seem trash to other amateurs. For example, to
a student of Molière, it is a happy chance to come across “La Carte du
Royaume des Prétieuses”—(The map of the kingdom of the
“Précieuses”)—written the year before the comedian brought out his famous
play “Les Précieuses Ridicules.” This geographical tract appeared in the
very “Recueil des Pieces Choisies,” whose authors Magdelon, in the play,
was expecting to entertain, when Mascarille made his appearance. There
is a faculty which Horace Walpole named “serendipity,”—the luck of
falling on just the literary document which one wants at the moment. All
collectors of out of the way books know the pleasure of the exercise of
serendipity, but they enjoy it in different ways. One man will go home
hugging a volume of sermons, another with a bulky collection of
catalogues, which would have distended the pockets even of the wide
great-coat made for the purpose, that Charles Nodier used to wear when he
went a book-hunting. Others are captivated by black letter, others by
the plays of such obscurities as Nabbes and Glapthorne. But however
various the tastes of collectors of books, they are all agreed on one
point,—the love of printed paper. Even an Elzevir man can sympathise
with Charles Lamb’s attachment to “that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which
he dragged home late at night from Barker’s in Covent Garden.” But it is
another thing when Lamb says, “I do not care for a first folio of
Shakespeare.” A bibliophile who could say this could say anything.

No, there are, in every period of taste, books which, apart from their
literary value, all collectors admit to possess, if not for themselves,
then for others of the brotherhood, a peculiar preciousness. These books
are esteemed for curiosity, for beauty of type, paper, binding, and
illustrations, for some connection they may have with famous people of
the past, or for their rarity. It is about these books, the method of
preserving them, their enemies, the places in which to hunt for them,
that the following pages are to treat. It is a subject more closely
connected with the taste for curiosities than with art, strictly so
called. We are to be occupied, not so much with literature as with
books, not so much with criticism as with bibliography, the quaint
_duenna_ of literature, a study apparently dry, but not without its
humours. And here an apology must be made for the frequent allusions and
anecdotes derived from French writers. These are as unavoidable, almost,
as the use of French terms of the sport in tennis and in fencing. In
bibliography, in the care for books _as_ books, the French are still the
teachers of Europe, as they were in tennis and are in fencing. Thus,
Richard de Bury, Chancellor of Edward III., writes in his “Philobiblon:”
“Oh God of Gods in Zion! what a rushing river of joy gladdens my heart as
often as I have a chance of going to Paris! There the days seem always
short; there are the goodly collections on the delicate fragrant
book-shelves.” Since Dante wrote of—

“L’onor di quell’ arte
Ch’ allumare è chiamata in Parisi,”

“the art that is called illuminating in Paris,” and all the other arts of
writing, printing, binding books, have been most skilfully practised by
France. She improved on the lessons given by Germany and Italy in these
crafts. Twenty books about books are written in Paris for one that is
published in England. In our country Dibdin is out of date (the second
edition of his “Bibliomania” was published in 1811), and Mr. Hill
Burton’s humorous “Book-hunter” is out of print. Meanwhile, in France,
writers grave and gay, from the gigantic industry of Brunet to Nodier’s
quaint fancy, and Janin’s wit, and the always entertaining bibliophile
Jacob (Paul Lacroix), have written, or are writing, on books,
manuscripts, engravings, editions, and bindings. In England, therefore,
rare French books are eagerly sought, and may be found in all the
booksellers’ catalogues. On the continent there is no such care for our
curious or beautiful editions, old or new. Here a hint may be given to
the collector. If he “picks up” a rare French book, at a low price, he
would act prudently in having it bound in France by a good craftsman.
Its value, when “the wicked day of destiny” comes, and the collection is
broken up, will thus be made secure. For the French do not suffer our
English bindings gladly; while we have no narrow prejudice against the
works of Lortic and Capé, but the reverse. For these reasons then, and
also because every writer is obliged to make the closest acquaintance
with books in the direction where his own studies lie, the writings of
French authorities are frequently cited in the following pages.

This apology must be followed by a brief defence of the taste and passion
of book-collecting, and of the class of men known invidiously as
book-worms and book-hunters. They and their simple pleasures are the
butts of a cheap and shrewish set of critics, who cannot endure in others
a taste which is absent in themselves. Important new books have actually
been condemned of late years because they were printed on good paper, and
a valuable historical treatise was attacked by reviewers quite angrily
because its outward array was not mean and forbidding. Of course,
critics who take this view of new books have no patience with persons who
care for “margins,” and “condition,” and early copies of old books. We
cannot hope to convert the adversary, but it is not necessary to be
disturbed by his clamour. People are happier for the possession of a
taste as long as they possess it, and it does not, like the demons of
Scripture, possess them. The wise collector gets instruction and
pleasure from his pursuit, and it may well be that, in the long run, he
and his family do not lose money. The amusement may chance to prove a
very fair investment.

As to this question of making money by collecting, Mr. Hill Burton speaks
very distinctly in “The Book-hunter:” “Where money is the object let a
man speculate or become a miser. . . Let not the collector ever, unless
in some urgent and necessary circumstances, part with any of his
treasures. Let him not even have recourse to that practice called
barter, which political philosophers tell us is the universal resource of
mankind preparatory to the invention of money. Let him confine all his
transactions in the market to purchasing only. No good comes of
gentlemen-amateurs buying and selling.” There is room for difference of
opinion here, but there seems to be most reason on the side of Mr. Hill
Burton. It is one thing for the collector to be able to reflect that the
money he expends on books is not lost, and that his family may find
themselves richer, not poorer, because he indulged his taste. It is
quite another thing to buy books as a speculator buys shares, meaning to
sell again at a profit as soon as occasion offers. It is necessary also
to warn the beginner against indulging extravagant hopes. He must buy
experience with his books, and many of his first purchases are likely to
disappoint him. He will pay dearly for the wrong “Cæsar” of 1635, the
one _without_ errors in pagination; and this is only a common example of
the beginner’s blunders. Collecting is like other forms of sport; the
aim is not certain at first, the amateur is nervous, and, as in angling,
is apt to “strike” (a bargain) too hurriedly.

I often think that the pleasure of collecting is like that of sport.
People talk of “book-hunting,” and the old Latin motto says that “one
never wearies of the chase in this forest.” But the analogy to angling
seems even stronger. A collector walks in the London or Paris streets,
as he does by Tweed or Spey. Many a lordly mart of books he passes, like
Mr. Quaritch’s, Mr. Toovey’s, or M. Fontaine’s, or the shining store of
M.M. Morgand et Fatout, in the Passage des Panoramas. Here I always feel
like Brassicanus in the king of Hungary’s collection, “non in
Bibliotheca, sed in gremio Jovis;” “not in a library, but in paradise.”
It is not given to every one to cast angle in these preserves. They are
kept for dukes and millionaires. Surely the old Duke of Roxburghe was
the happiest of mortals, for to him both the chief bookshops and auction
rooms, and the famous salmon streams of Floors, were equally open, and he
revelled in the prime of book-collecting and of angling. But there are
little tributary streets, with humbler stalls, shy pools, as it were,
where the humbler fisher of books may hope to raise an Elzevir, or an old
French play, a first edition of Shelley, or a Restoration comedy. It is
usually a case of hope unfulfilled; but the merest nibble of a rare book,
say Marston’s poems in the original edition, or Beddoes’s “Love’s Arrow
Poisoned,” or Bankes’s “Bay Horse in a Trance,” or the “Mel Heliconicum”
of Alexander Ross, or “Les Oeuvres de Clement Marot, de Cahors, Vallet de
Chambre du Roy, A Paris, Ches Pierre Gaultier, 1551;” even a chance at
something of this sort will kindle the waning excitement, and add a
pleasure to a man’s walk in muddy London. Then, suppose you purchase for
a couple of shillings the “Histoire des Amours de Henry IV, et autres
pieces curieuses, A Leyde, Chez Jean Sambyx (Elzevir), 1664,” it is
certainly not unpleasant, on consulting M. Fontaine’s catalogue, to find
that he offers the same work at the ransom of £10. The beginner thinks
himself in singular luck, even though he has no idea of vending his
collection, and he never reflects that _condition_—spotless white leaves
and broad margins, make the market value of a book.

Setting aside such bare considerations of profit, the sport given by
bookstalls is full of variety and charm. In London it may be pursued in
most of the cross streets that stretch a dirty net between the British
Museum and the Strand. There are other more shy and less frequently
poached resorts which the amateur may be allowed to find out for himself.
In Paris there is the long sweep of the _Quais_, where some eighty
_bouquinistes_ set their boxes on the walls of the embankment of the
Seine. There are few country towns so small but that books, occasionally
rare and valuable, may be found lurking in second-hand furniture
warehouses. This is one of the advantages of living in an old country.
The Colonies are not the home for a collector. I have seen an Australian
bibliophile enraptured by the rare chance of buying, in Melbourne, an
early work on—the history of Port Jackson! This seems but poor game.
But in Europe an amateur has always occupation for his odd moments in
town, and is for ever lured on by the radiant apparition of Hope. All
collectors tell their anecdotes of wonderful luck, and magnificent
discoveries. There is a volume “Voyages Littéraires sur les Quais de
Paris” (Paris, Durand, 1857), by M. de Fontaine de Resbecq, which might
convert the dullest soul to book-hunting. M. de Resbecq and his friends
had the most amazing good fortune. A M. N— found six original plays of
Molière (worth perhaps as many hundreds of pounds), bound up with Garth’s
“Dispensary,” an English poem which has long lost its vogue. It is worth
while, indeed, to examine all volumes marked “Miscellanea,” “Essays,” and
the like, and treasures may possibly lurk, as Snuffy Davy knew, within
the battered sheepskin of school books. Books lie in out of the way
places. Poggio rescued “Quintilian” from the counter of a wood merchant.
The best time for book-hunting in Paris is the early morning. “The
take,” as anglers say, is “on” from half-past seven to half-past nine
a.m. At these hours the vendors exhibit their fresh wares, and the
agents of the more wealthy booksellers come and pick up everything worth
having. These agents quite spoil the sport of the amateur. They keep a
strict watch on every country dealer’s catalogue, snap up all he has
worth selling, and sell it over again, charging pounds in place of
shillings. But M. de Resbecq vows that he once picked up a copy of the
first edition of La Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims” out of a box which two
booksellers had just searched. The same collector got together very
promptly all the original editions of La Bruyère, and he even found a
copy of the Elzevir “Pastissier Français,” at the humble price of six
sous. Now the “ Pastissier Français,” an ill-printed little cookery-book
of the Elzevirs, has lately fetched £600 at a sale. The Antiquary’s
story of Snuffy Davy and the “Game of Chess,” is dwarfed by the luck of
M. de Resbecq. Not one amateur in a thousand can expect such good
fortune. There is, however, a recent instance of a Rugby boy, who picked
up, on a stall, a few fluttering leaves hanging together on a flimsy
thread. The old woman who kept the stall could hardly be induced to
accept the large sum of a shilling for an original quarto of
Shakespeare’s “King John.” These stories are told that none may despair.
That none may be over confident, an author may recount his own
experience. The only odd _trouvaille_ that ever fell to me was a clean
copy of “La Journée Chrétienne,” with the name of Léon Gambetta, 1844, on
its catholic fly-leaf. Rare books grow rarer every day, and often ’tis
only Hope that remains at the bottom of the fourpenny boxes. Yet the
Paris book-hunters cleave to the game. August is their favourite season;
for in August there is least competition. Very few people are, as a
rule, in Paris, and these are not tempted to loiter. The bookseller is
drowsy, and glad not to have the trouble of chaffering. The English go
past, and do not tarry beside a row of dusty boxes of books. The heat
threatens the amateur with sunstroke. Then, says M. Octave Uzanne, in a
prose _ballade_ of book-hunters—then, calm, glad, heroic, the
_bouquineurs_ prowl forth, refreshed with hope. The brown old calf-skin
wrinkles in the sun, the leaves crackle, you could poach an egg on the
cover of a quarto. The dome of the Institute glitters, the sickly trees
seem to wither, their leaves wax red and grey, a faint warm wind is
walking the streets. Under his vast umbrella the book-hunter is secure
and content; he enjoys the pleasures of the sport unvexed by poachers,
and thinks less of the heat than does the deer-stalker on the bare
hill-side.

There is plenty of morality, if there are few rare books in the stalls.
The decay of affection, the breaking of friendship, the decline of
ambition, are all illustrated in these fourpenny collections. The
presentation volumes are here which the author gave in the pride of his
heart to the poet who was his “Master,” to the critic whom he feared, to
the friend with whom he was on terms of mutual admiration. The critic
has not even cut the leaves, the poet has brusquely torn three or four
apart with his finger and thumb, the friend has grown cold, and has let
the poems slip into some corner of his library, whence they were removed
on some day of doom and of general clearing out. The sale of the library
of a late learned prelate who had Boileau’s hatred of a dull book was a
scene to be avoided by his literary friends. The Bishop always gave the
works which were offered to him a fair chance. He read till he could
read no longer, cutting the pages as he went, and thus his progress could
be traced like that of a backwoodsman who “blazes” his way through a
primeval forest. The paper-knife generally ceased to do duty before the
thirtieth page. The melancholy of the book-hunter is aroused by two
questions, “Whence?” and “Whither?” The bibliophile asks about his books
the question which the metaphysician asks about his soul. Whence came
they? Their value depends a good deal on the answer. If they are
stamped with arms, then there is a book (“Armorial du Bibliophile,” by M.
Guigard) which tells you who was their original owner. Any one of twenty
coats-of-arms on the leather is worth a hundred times the value of the
volume which it covers. If there is no such mark, the fancy is left to
devise a romance about the first owner, and all the hands through which
the book has passed. That Vanini came from a Jesuit college, where it
was kept under lock and key. That copy of Agrippa “De Vanitate
Scientiarum” is marked, in a crabbed hand and in faded ink, with cynical
Latin notes. What pessimist two hundred years ago made his grumbling so
permanent? One can only guess, but part of the imaginative joys of the
book-hunter lies ‘ in the fruitless conjecture. That other question
“Whither?” is graver. Whither are our treasures to be scattered? Will
they find kind masters? or, worst fate of books, fall into the hands of
women who will sell them to the trunk-maker? Are the leaves to line a
box or to curl a maiden’s locks? Are the rarities to become more and
more rare, and at last fetch prodigious prices? Some unlucky men are
able partly to solve these problems in their own lifetime. They are
constrained to sell their libraries—an experience full of bitterness,
wrath, and disappointment.

Selling books is nearly as bad as losing friends, than which life has no
worse sorrow. A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If
you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it
years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself. As a
man’s tastes and opinions are developed his books put on a different
aspect. He hardly knows the “Poems and Ballads” he used to declaim, and
cannot recover the enigmatic charm of “Sordello.” Books change like
friends, like ourselves, like everything; but they are most piquant in
the contrasts they provoke, when the friend who gave them and wrote them
is a success, though we laughed at him; a failure, though we believed in
him; altered in any case, and estranged from his old self and old days.
The vanished past returns when we look at the pages. The vicissitudes of
years are printed and packed in a thin octavo, and the shivering ghosts
of desire and hope return to their forbidden home in the heart and fancy.
It is as well to have the power of recalling them always at hand, and to
be able to take a comprehensive glance at the emotions which were so
powerful and full of life, and now are more faded and of less account
than the memory of the dreams of childhood. It is because our books are
friends that do change, and remind us of change, that we should keep them
with us, even at a little inconvenience, and not turn them adrift in the
world to find a dusty asylum in cheap bookstalls. We are a part of all
that we have read, to parody the saying of Mr. Tennyson’s Ulysses, and we
owe some respect, and house-room at least, to the early acquaintances who
have begun to bore us, and remind us of the vanity of ambition and the
weakness of human purpose. Old school and college books even have a
reproachful and salutary power of whispering how much a man knew, and at
the cost of how much trouble, that he has absolutely forgotten, and is
neither the better nor the worse for it. It will be the same in the case
of the books he is eager about now; though, to be sure, he will read with
less care, and forget with an ease and readiness only to be acquired by
practice.

But we were apologising for book-hunting, not because it teaches moral
lessons, as “dauncyng” also does, according to Sir Thomas Elyot, in the
“Boke called the Gouvernour,” but because it affords a kind of sportive
excitement. Bookstalls are not the only field of the chase. Book
catalogues, which reach the collector through the post, give him all the
pleasures of the sport at home. He reads the booksellers’ catalogues
eagerly, he marks his chosen sport with pencil, he writes by return of
post, or he telegraphs to the vendor. Unfortunately he almost always
finds that he has been forestalled, probably by some bookseller’s agent.
When the catalogue is a French one, it is obvious that Parisians have the
pick of the market before our slow letters reach M. Claudin, or M.
Labitte. Still the catalogues themselves are a kind of lesson in
bibliography. You see from them how prices are ruling, and you can
gloat, in fancy, over De Luyne’s edition of Molière, 1673, two volumes in
red morocco, _doublé_ (“Trautz Bauzonnet”), or some other vanity
hopelessly out of reach. In their catalogues, MM. Morgand and Fatout
print a facsimile of the frontispiece of this very rare edition. The
bust of Molière occupies the centre, and portraits of the great actor, as
Sganarelle and Mascarille (of the “Précieuses Ridicules”), stand on
either side. In the second volume are Molière, and his wife Armande,
crowned by the muse Thalia. A catalogue which contains such exact
reproductions of rare and authentic portraits, is itself a work of art,
and serviceable to the student. When the shop of a bookseller, with a
promising catalogue which arrives over night, is not too far distant,
bibliophiles have been known to rush to the spot in the grey morning,
before the doors open. There are amateurs, however, who prefer to stay
comfortably at home, and pity these poor fanatics, shivering in the rain
outside a door in Oxford Street or Booksellers’ Row. There is a length
to which enthusiasm cannot go, and many collectors draw the line at
rising early in the morning. But, when we think of the sport of
book-hunting, it is to sales in auction-rooms that the mind naturally
turns. Here the rival buyers feel the passion of emulation, and it was
in an auction-room that Guibert de Pixérécourt, being outbid, said, in
tones of mortal hatred, “I will have the book when your collection is
sold after your death.” And he kept his word. The fever of gambling is
not absent from the auction-room, and people “bid jealous” as they
sometimes “ride jealous” in the hunting-field. Yet, the neophyte, if he
strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be surprised at the spectacle.
The chamber has the look of a rather seedy “hell.” The crowd round the
auctioneer’s box contains many persons so dingy and Semitic, that at
Monte Carlo they would be refused admittance; while, in Germany, they
would be persecuted by Herr von Treitschke with Christian ardour.
Bidding is languid, and valuable books are knocked down for trifling
sums. Let the neophyte try his luck, however, and prices will rise
wonderfully. The fact is that the sale is a “knock out.” The bidders
are professionals, in a league to let the volumes go cheap, and to
distribute them afterwards among themselves. Thus an amateur can have a
good deal of sport by bidding for a book till it reaches its proper
value, and by then leaving in the lurch the professionals who combine to
“run him up.” The amusement has its obvious perils, but the presence of
gentlemen in an auction-room is a relief to the auctioneer and to the
owner of the books. A bidder must be able to command his temper, both
that he may be able to keep his head cool when tempted to bid recklessly,
and that he may disregard the not very carefully concealed sneers of the
professionals.

In book-hunting the nature of the quarry varies with the taste of the
collector. One man is for bibles, another for ballads. Some pursue
plays, others look for play bills. “He was not,” says Mr. Hill Burton,
speaking of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, “he was not a black-letter man, or a tall
copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an early-English
dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a pasquinader, or an old
brown calf man, or a Grangerite, {1} or a tawny moroccoite, or a gilt
topper, or a marbled insider, or an _editio princeps_ man.” These
nicknames briefly dispose into categories a good many species of
collectors. But there are plenty of others. You may be a
historical-bindings man, and hunt for books that were bound by the great
artists of the past and belonged to illustrious collectors. Or you may
be a Jametist, and try to gather up the volumes on which Jamet, the
friend of Louis Racine, scribbled his cynical “Marginalia.” Or you may
covet the earliest editions of modern poets—Shelley, Keats, or Tennyson,
or even Ebenezer Jones. Or the object of your desires may be the books
of the French romanticists, who flourished so freely in 1830. Or, being
a person of large fortune and landed estate, you may collect country
histories. Again, your heart may be set on the books illustrated by
Eisen, Cochin, and Gravelot, or Stothard and Blake, in the last century.
Or you may be so old-fashioned as to care for Aldine classics, and for
the books of the Giunta press. In fact, as many as are the species of
rare and beautiful books, so many are the species of collectors. There
is one sort of men, modest but not unwise in their generations, who buy
up the pretty books published in very limited editions by French
booksellers, like MM. Lemerre and Jouaust. Already their reprints of
Rochefoucauld’s first edition, of Beaumarchais, of La Fontaine, of the
lyrics attributed to Molière, and other volumes, are exhausted, and fetch
high prices in the market. By a singular caprice, the little volumes of
Mr. Thackeray’s miscellaneous writings, in yellow paper wrappers (when
they are first editions), have become objects of desire, and their old
modest price is increased twenty fold. It is not always easy to account
for these freaks of fashion; but even in book-collecting there are
certain definite laws. “Why do you pay a large price for a dingy, old
book,” outsiders ask, “when a clean modern reprint can be procured for
two or three shillings?” To this question the collector has several
replies, which he, at least, finds satisfactory. In the first place,
early editions, published during a great author’s lifetime, and under his
supervision, have authentic texts. The changes in them are the changes
that Prior or La Bruyère themselves made and approved. You can study, in
these old editions, the alterations in their taste, the history of their
minds. The case is the same even with contemporary authors. One likes
to have Mr. Tennyson’s “Poems, chiefly Lyrical” (London: Effingham
Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830). It is fifty years old, this
little book of one hundred and fifty-four pages, this first fruit of a
stately tree. In half a century the poet has altered much, and withdrawn
much, but already, in 1830, he had found his distinctive note, and his
“Mariana” is a masterpiece. “Mariana” is in all the collections, but
pieces of which the execution is less certain must be sought only in the
old volume of 1830. In the same way “The Strayed Reveller, and other
poems, by A.” (London: B. Fellowes, Ludgate Street, 1849) contains much
that Mr. Matthew Arnold has altered, and this volume, like the suppressed
“Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, by A.” (1852), appeals more to the
collector than do the new editions which all the world may possess.
There are verses, curious in their way, in Mr. Clough’s “Ambarvalia”
(1849), which you will not find in his posthumous edition, but which
“repay perusal.” These minutiæ of literary history become infinitely
more important in the early editions of the great classical writers, and
the book-collector may regard his taste as a kind of handmaid of critical
science. The preservation of rare books, and the collection of materials
for criticism, are the useful functions, then, of book-collecting. But
it is not to be denied that the sentimental side of the pursuit gives it
most of its charm. Old books are often literary _relics_, and as dear
and sacred to the lover of literature as are relics of another sort to
the religious devotee. The amateur likes to see the book in its form as
the author knew it. He takes a pious pleasure in the first edition of
“Les Précieuses Ridicules,” (M.DC.LX.) just as Molière saw it, when he
was fresh in the business of authorship, and wrote “Mon Dieu, qu’un
Autheur est neuf, la première fois qu’on l’imprime.” All editions
published during a great man’s life have this attraction, and seem to
bring us closer to his spirit. Other volumes are relics, as we shall see
later, of some famed collector, and there is a certain piety in the care
we give to books once dear to Longepierre, or Harley, or d’Hoym, or
Buckle, to Madame de Maintenon, or Walpole, to Grolier, or Askew, or De
Thou, or Heber. Such copies should be handed down from worthy owners to
owners not unworthy; such servants of literature should never have
careless masters. A man may prefer to read for pleasure in a good clear
reprint. M. Charpentier’s “Montaigne” serves the turn, but it is natural
to treasure more “Les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne,” that were
printed by Francoise le Febre, of Lyon, in 1595. It is not a beautiful
book; the type is small, and rather blunt, but William Drummond of
Hawthornden has written on the title-page his name and his device,
_Cipresso e Palma_. There are a dozen modern editions of Molière more
easily read than the four little volumes of Wetstein (Amsterdam, 1698),
but these contain reduced copies of the original illustrations, and here
you see Arnolphe and Agnes in their habits as they lived, Molière and
Mdlle. de Brie as the public of Paris beheld them more than two hundred
years ago. Suckling’s “Fragmenta Aurea” contain a good deal of dross,
and most of the gold has been gathered into Miscellanies, but the
original edition of 1646, “after his own copies,” with the portrait of
the jolly cavalier who died _ætatis suae_ 28, has its own allurement.
Theocritus is more easily read, perhaps, in Wordsworth’s edition, or
Ziegler’s; but that which Zacharias Calliergi printed in Rome (1516),
with an excommunication from Leo X. against infringement of copyright,
will always be a beautiful and desirable book, especially when bound by
Derome. The gist of the pious Prince Conti’s strictures on the
wickedness of comedy may be read in various literary histories, but it is
natural to like his “Traité de la Comedie selon la tradition de l’Eglise,
Tirée des Conciles et des saints Pères,” published by Lovys Billaine in
1660, especially when the tract is a clean copy, arrayed in a decorous
black morocco.

These are but a few common examples, chosen from a meagre little library,
a “twopenny treasure-house,” but they illustrate, on a minute scale, the
nature of the collector’s passion,—the character of his innocent
pleasures. He occasionally lights on other literary relics of a more
personal character than mere first editions. A lucky collector lately
bought Shelley’s copy of Ossian, with the poet’s signature on the
title-page, in Booksellers’ Row. Another possesses a copy of Foppens’s
rare edition of Petrarch’s “Le Sage Resolu contre l’une et l’autre
Fortune,” which once belonged to Sir Hudson Lowe, the gaoler of Napoleon,
and may have fortified, by its stoical maxims, the soul of one who knew
the extremes of either fortune, the captive of St. Helena. But the best
example of a book, which is also a relic, is the “Imitatio Christi,”
which belonged to J. J. Rousseau. Let M. Tenant de Latour, lately the
happy owner of this possession, tell his own story of his treasure: It
was in 1827 that M. de Latour was walking on the quai of the Louvre.
Among the volumes in a shop, he noticed a shabby little copy of the
“Imitatio Christi.” M. de Latour, like other bibliophiles, was not in
the habit of examining stray copies of this work, except when they were
of the Elzevir size, for the Elzevirs published a famous undated copy of
the “Imitatio,” a book which brings considerable prices. However, by
some lucky chance, some Socratic dæmon whispering, may be, in his ear, he
picked up the little dingy volume of the last century. It was of a Paris
edition, 1751, but what was the name on the fly-leaf. M. de Latour read
_à J. J. Rousseau_. There was no mistake about it, the good bibliophile
knew Rousseau’s handwriting perfectly well; to make still more sure he
paid his seventy-five centimes for the book, and walked across the Pont
des Arts, to his bookbinder’s, where he had a copy of Rousseau’s works,
with a _facsimile_ of his handwriting. As he walked, M. de Latour read
in his book, and found notes of Rousseau’s on the margin. The
_facsimile_ proved that the inscription was genuine. The happy de Latour
now made for the public office in which he was a functionary, and rushed
into the bureau of his friend the Marquis de V. The Marquis, a man of
great strength of character, recognised the signature of Rousseau with
but little display of emotion. M. de Latour now noticed some withered
flowers among the sacred pages; but it was reserved for a friend to
discover in the faded petals Rousseau’s favourite flower, the periwinkle.
Like a true Frenchman, like Rousseau himself in his younger days, M. de
Latour had not recognised the periwinkle when he saw it. That night, so
excited was M. de Latour, he never closed an eye! What puzzled him was
that he could not remember, in all Rousseau’s works, a single allusion to
the “Imitatio Christi.” Time went on, the old book was not rebound, but
kept piously in a case of Russia leather. M. de Latour did not suppose
that “dans ce bas monde it fût permis aux joies du bibliophile d’aller
encore plus loin.” He imagined that the delights of the amateur could
only go further, in heaven. It chanced, however, one day that he was
turning over the “Oeuvres Inédites” of Rousseau, when he found a letter,
in which Jean Jacques, writing in 1763, asked Motiers-Travers to send him
the “Imitatio Christi.” Now the date 1764 is memorable, in Rousseau’s
“Confessions,” for a burst of sentiment over a periwinkle, the first he
had noticed particularly since his residence at _Les Charmettes_, where
the flower had been remarked by Madame de Warens. Thus M. Tenant de
Latour had recovered the very identical periwinkle, which caused the tear
of sensibility to moisten the fine eyes of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

We cannot all be adorers of Rousseau. But M. de Latour was an
enthusiast, and this little anecdote of his explains the sentimental side
of the bibliophile’s pursuit. Yes, it is _sentiment_ that makes us feel
a lively affection for the books that seem to connect us with great poets
and students long ago dead. Their hands grasp ours across the ages. I
never see the first edition of Homer, that monument of typography and of
enthusiasm for letters, printed at Florence (1488) at the expense of
young Bernardo and Nerio Nerli, and of their friend Giovanni Acciajuoli,
but I feel moved to cry with Heyne, “salvete juvenes, nobiles et
generosi; _χαίρετέ μοι καὶ ἐιν Άΐδαο δόμοισι_.”

Such is our apology for book-collecting. But the best defence of the
taste would be a list of the names of great collectors, a “vision of
mighty book-hunters.” Let us say nothing of Seth and Noah, for their
reputation as amateurs is only based on the authority of the tract _De
Bibliothecis Antediluvianis_. The library of Assurbanipal I pass over,
for its volumes were made, as Pliny says, of _coctiles laterculi_, of
baked tiles, which have been deciphered by the late Mr. George Smith.
Philosophers as well as immemorial kings, Pharaohs and Ptolemys, are on
our side. It was objected to Plato, by persons answering to the cheap
scribblers of to-day, that he, though a sage, gave a hundred minae (£360)
for three treatises of Philolaus, while Aristotle paid nearly thrice the
sum for a few books that had been in the library of Speusippus. Did not
a Latin philosopher go great lengths in a laudable anxiety to purchase an
Odyssey “as old as Homer,” and what would not Cicero, that great
collector, have given for the Ascraean _editio princeps_ of Hesiod,
scratched on mouldy old plates of lead? Perhaps Dr. Schliemann may find
an original edition of the “Iliad” at Orchomenos; but of all early copies
none seems so attractive as that engraved on the leaden plates which
Pausanias saw at Ascra. Then, in modern times, what “great allies” has
the collector, what brethren in book-hunting? The names are like the
catalogue with which Villon fills his “Ballade des Seigneurs du Temps
Jadis.” A collector was “le preux Charlemaigne” and our English Alfred.
The Kings of Hungary, as Mathias Corvinus; the Kings of France, and their
queens, and their mistresses, and their lords, were all amateurs. So was
our Henry VIII., and James I., who “wished he could be chained to a shelf
in the Bodleian.” The middle age gives us Richard de Bury, among
ecclesiastics, and the Renaissance boasts Sir Thomas More, with that
“pretty fardle of books, in the small type of Aldus,” which he carried
for a freight to the people of Utopia. Men of the world, like Bussy
Rabutin, queens like our Elizabeth; popes like Innocent X.; financiers
like Colbert (who made the Grand Turk send him Levant morocco for
bindings); men of letters like Scott and Southey, Janin and Nodier, and
Paul Lacroix; warriors like Junot and Prince Eugène; these are only
leaders of companies in the great army of lovers of books, in which it is
honourable enough to be a private soldier.

CHAPTER II.
THE LIBRARY

THE Library which is to be spoken of in these pages, is all unlike the
halls which a Spencer or a Huth fills with treasure beyond price. The
age of great libraries has gone by, and where a collector of the old
school survives, he is usually a man of enormous wealth, who might, if he
pleased, be distinguished in parliament, in society, on the turf itself,
or in any of the pursuits where unlimited supplies of money are strictly
necessary. The old amateurs, whom La Bruyère was wont to sneer at, were
not satisfied unless they possessed many thousands of books. For a
collector like Cardinal Mazarin, Naudé bought up the whole stock of many
a bookseller, and left great towns as bare of printed paper as if a
tornado had passed, and blown the leaves away. In our modern times, as
the industrious Bibliophile Jacob, says, the fashion of book-collecting
has changed; “from the vast hall that it was, the library of the amateur
has shrunk to a closet, to a mere book-case. Nothing but a neat article
of furniture is needed now, where a great gallery or a long suite of
rooms was once required. The book has become, as it were, a jewel, and
is kept in a kind of jewel-case.” It is not quantity of pages, nor lofty
piles of ordinary binding, nor theological folios and classic quartos,
that the modern amateur desires. He is content with but a few books of
distinction and elegance, masterpieces of printing and binding, or relics
of famous old collectors, of statesmen, philosophers, beautiful dead
ladies; or, again, he buys illustrated books, or first editions of the
modern classics. No one, not the Duc d’Aumale, or M. James Rothschild
himself, with his 100 books worth £40,000, can possess very many copies
of books which are inevitably rare. Thus the adviser who would offer
suggestions to the amateur, need scarcely write, like Naudé and the old
authorities, about the size and due position of the library. He need
hardly warn the builder to make the _salle_ face the east, “because the
eastern winds, being warm and dry of their nature, greatly temper the
air, fortify the senses, make subtle the humours, purify the spirits,
preserve a healthy disposition of the whole body, and, to say all in one
word, are most wholesome and salubrious.” The east wind, like the
fashion of book-collecting, has altered in character a good deal since
the days when Naudé was librarian to Cardinal Mazarin. One might as well
repeat the learned Isidorus his counsels about the panels of green marble
(that refreshes the eye), and Boethius his censures on library walls of
ivory and glass, as fall back on the ancient ideas of librarians dead and
gone.

The amateur, then, is the person we have in our eye, and especially the
bibliophile who has but lately been bitten with this pleasant mania of
collecting. We would teach him how to arrange and keep his books orderly
and in good case, and would tell him what to buy and what to avoid. By
the _library_ we do not understand a study where no one goes, and where
the master of the house keeps his boots, an assortment of walking-sticks,
the “Waverley Novels,” “Pearson on the Creed,” “Hume’s Essays,” and a
collection of sermons. In, alas! too many English homes, the Library is
no more than this, and each generation passes without adding a book,
except now and then a Bradshaw or a railway novel, to the collection on
the shelves. The success, perhaps, of circulating libraries, or, it may
be, the Aryan tendencies of our race, “which does not read, and lives in
the open air,” have made books the rarest of possessions in many houses.
There are relics of the age before circulating libraries, there are
fragments of the lettered store of some scholarly great-grandfather, and
these, with a few odd numbers of magazines, a few primers and manuals,
some sermons and novels, make up the ordinary library of an English
household. But the amateur, whom we have in our thoughts, can never be
satisfied with these commonplace supplies. He has a taste for books more
or less rare, and for books neatly bound; in short, for books, in the
fabrication of which _art_ has not been absent. He loves to have his
study, like Montaigne’s, remote from the interruption of servants, wife,
and children; a kind of shrine, where he may be at home with himself,
with the illustrious dead, and with the genius of literature. The room
may look east, west, or south, provided that it be dry, warm, light, and
airy. Among the many enemies of books the first great foe is _damp_, and
we must describe the necessary precautions to be taken against this
peril. We will suppose that the amateur keeps his ordinary working
books, modern tomes, and all that serve him as literary tools, on open
shelves. These may reach the roof, if he has books to fill them, and it
is only necessary to see that the back of the bookcases are slightly
removed from contact with the walls. The more precious and beautifully
bound treasures will naturally be stored in a case with closely-fitting
glass-doors. {2} The shelves should be lined with velvet or chamois
leather, that the delicate edges of the books may not suffer from contact
with the wood. A leather lining, fitted to the back of the case, will
also help to keep out humidity. Most writers recommend that the
bookcases should be made of wood close in the grain, such as
well-seasoned oak; or, for smaller tabernacles of literature, of
mahogany, satin-wood lined with cedar, ebony, and so forth. These
close-grained woods are less easily penetrated by insects, and it is
fancied that book-worms dislike the aromatic scents of cedar, sandal
wood, and Russia leather. There was once a bibliophile who said that a
man could only love one book at a time, and the darling of the moment he
used to carry about in a charming leather case. Others, men of few
books, preserve them in long boxes with glass fronts, which may be
removed from place to place as readily as the household gods of Laban.
But the amateur who not only worships but reads books, needs larger
receptacles; and in the open oak cases for modern authors, and for books
with common modern papers and bindings, in the closed _armoire_ for books
of rarity and price, he will find, we think, the most useful mode of
arranging his treasures. His shelves will decline in height from the
lowest, where huge folios stand at case, to the top ranges, while
Elzevirs repose on a level with the eye. It is well that each upper
shelf should have a leather fringe to keep the dust away.

As to the shape of the bookcases, and the furniture, and ornaments of the
library, every amateur will please himself. Perhaps the satin-wood or
mahogany tabernacles of rare books are best made after the model of what
furniture-dealers indifferently call the “Queen Anne” or the
“Chippendale” style. There is a pleasant quaintness in the carved
architectural ornaments of the top, and the inlaid flowers of marquetry
go well with the pretty florid editions of the last century, the books
that were illustrated by Stothard and Gravelot. Ebony suits theological
tomes very well, especially when they are bound in white vellum. As to
furniture, people who can afford it will imitate the arrangements of
Lucullus, in Mr. Hill Burton’s charming volume “The Book-hunter”
(Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1862).—“Everything is of perfect finish,—the
mahogany-railed gallery, the tiny ladders, the broad winged lecterns,
with leathern cushions on the edges to keep the wood from grazing the
rich bindings, the books themselves, each shelf uniform with its facings,
or rather backings, like well-dressed lines at a review.” The late Sir
William Stirling-Maxwell, a famous bibliophile, invented a very nice
library chair. It is most comfortable to sit on; and, as the top of the
back is broad and flat, it can be used as a ladder of two high steps,
when one wants to reach a book on a lofty shelf. A kind of square
revolving bookcase, an American invention, manufactured by Messrs.
Trübner, is useful to the working man of letters. Made in oak, stained
green, it is not unsightly. As to ornaments, every man to his taste.
You may have a “pallid bust of Pallas” above your classical collection,
or fill the niches in a shrine of old French light literature, pastoral
and comedy, with delicate shepherdesses in Chelsea china. On such
matters a modest writer, like Mr. Jingle when Mr. Pickwick ordered
dinner, “will not presume to dictate.”

Next to damp, dust and dirt are the chief enemies of books. At short
intervals, books and shelves ought to be dusted by the amateur himself.
Even Dr. Johnson, who was careless of his person, and of volumes lent to
him, was careful about the cleanliness of his own books. Boswell found
him one day with big gloves on his hands beating the dust out of his
library, as was his custom. There is nothing so hideous as a dirty
thumb-mark on a white page. These marks are commonly made, not because
the reader has unwashed hands, but because the dust which settles on the
top edge of books falls in, and is smudged when they are opened.
Gilt-top edges should be smoothed with a handkerchief, and a small brush
should be kept for brushing the tops of books with rough edges, before
they are opened. But it were well that all books had the top edge gilt.
There is no better preservative against dust. Dust not only dirties
books, it seems to supply what Mr. Spencer would call a fitting
environment for book-worms. The works of book-worms speak for
themselves, and are manifest to all. How many a rare and valuable volume
is spoiled by neat round holes drilled through cover and leaves! But as
to the nature of your worm, authorities differ greatly. The ancients
knew this plague, of which Lucian speaks. Mr. Blades mentions a white
book-worm, slain by the librarian of the Bodleian. In Byzantium the
black sort prevailed. Evenus, the grammarian, wrote an epigram against
the black book-worm (“Anthol. Pal.,” ix. 251):—

Pest of the Muses, devourer of pages, in crannies that lurkest,
Fruits of the Muses to taint, labour of learning to spoil;
Wherefore, oh black-fleshed worm! wert thou born for the evil thou
workest?
Wherefore thine own foul form shap’st thou with envious toil?

The learned Mentzelius says he hath heard the book-worm crow like a cock
unto his mate, and “I knew not,” says he, “whether some local fowl was
clamouring or whether there was but a beating in mine ears. Even at that
moment, all uncertain as I was, I perceived, in the paper whereon I was
writing, a little insect that ceased not to carol like very chanticleer,
until, taking a magnifying glass, I assiduously observed him. He is
about the bigness of a mite, and carries a grey crest, and the head low,
bowed over the bosom; as to his crowing noise, it comes of his clashing
his wings against each other with an incessant din.” Thus far
Mentzelius, and more to the same purpose, as may be read in the “Memoirs
of famous Foreign Academies” (Dijon, 1755–59, 13 vol. in quarto). But,
in our times, the learned Mr. Blades having a desire to exhibit
book-worms in the body to the Caxtonians at the Caxton celebration, could
find few men that had so much as seen a book-worm, much less heard him
utter his native wood-notes wild. Yet, in his “Enemies of Books,” he
describes some rare encounters with the worm. Dirty books, damp books,
dusty books, and books that the owner never opens, are most exposed to
the enemy; and “the worm, the proud worm, is the conqueror still,” as a
didactic poet sings, in an ode on man’s mortality. As we have quoted
Mentzelius, it may not be amiss to give D’Alembert’s theory of
book-worms: “I believe,” he says, “that a little beetle lays her eggs in
books in August, thence is hatched a mite, like the cheese-mite, which
devours books merely because it is compelled to gnaw its way out into the
air.” Book-worms like the paste which binders employ, but D’Alembert
adds that they cannot endure absinthe. Mr. Blades finds too that they
disdain to devour our adulterate modern paper.

“Say, shall I sing of rats,” asked Grainger, when reading to Johnson his
epic, the “Sugar-cane.” “No,” said the Doctor; and though rats are the
foe of the bibliophile, at least as much as of the sugar-planter, we do
not propose to sing of them. M. Fertiault has done so already in “Les
Sonnets d’un Bibliophile,” where the reader must be pleased with the
beautiful etchings of rats devouring an illuminated MS., and battening on
morocco bindings stamped with the bees of De Thou. It is unnecessary and
it would be undignified, to give hints on rat-catching, but the amateur
must not forget that these animals have a passion for bindings.

The book-collector must avoid gas, which deposits a filthy coat of oil
that catches dust. Mr. Blades found that three jets of gas in a small
room soon reduced the leather on his book-shelves to a powder of the
consistency of snuff, and made the backs of books come away in his hand.
Shaded lamps give the best and most suitable light for the library. As
to the risks which books run at the hands of the owner himself, we surely
need not repeat the advice of Richard de Bury. Living in an age when
tubs (if not unknown as M. Michelet declares) were far from being common,
the old collector inveighed against the dirty hands of readers, and
against their habit of marking their place in a book with filthy straws,
or setting down a beer pot in the middle of the volume to keep the pages
open. But the amateur, however refined himself, must beware of men who
love not fly leaves neither regard margins, but write notes over the
latter, and light their pipes with the former. After seeing the wreck of
a book which these persons have been busy with, one appreciates the fine
Greek hyperbole. The Greeks did not speak of “thumbing” but of “walking
up and down” on a volume (_πατεῖν_). To such fellows it matters not that
they make a book dirty and greasy, cutting the pages with their fingers,
and holding the boards over the fire till they crack. All these
slatternly practices, though they destroy a book as surely as the flames
of Cæsar’s soldiers at Alexandria, seem fine manly acts to the grobians
who use them. What says Jules Janin, who has written “Contre
l’indifference des Philistins,” “il faut à l’homme sage et studieux un
tome honorable et digne de sa louange.” The amateur, and all decent men,
will beware of lending books to such rude workers; and this consideration
brings us to these great foes of books, the borrowers and robbers. The
lending of books, and of other property, has been defended by some great
authorities; thus Panurge himself says, “it would prove much more easy in
nature to have fish entertained in the air, and bullocks fed in the
bottom of the ocean, than to support or tolerate a rascally rabble of
people that will not lend.” Pirckheimer, too, for whom Albert Durer
designed a book-plate, was a lender, and took for his device _Sibi et
Amicis_; and _Jo. Grolierii et amicorum_, was the motto of the renowned
Grolier, whom mistaken writers vainly but frequently report to have been
a bookbinder. But as Mr. Leicester Warren says, in his “Study of
Book-plates” (Pearson, 1880), “Christian Charles de Savigny leaves all
the rest behind, exclaiming _non mihi sed aliis_.” But the majority of
amateurs have chosen wiser, though more churlish devices, as “the ungodly
borroweth and payeth not again,” or “go to them that sell, and buy for
yourselves.” David Garrick engraved on his book-plate, beside a bust of
Shakspeare, these words of Ménage, “La première chose qu’on doit faire,
quand on a emprunte’ un livre, c’est de le lire, afin de pouvoir le
rendre plûtôt.” But the borrower is so minded that the last thing he
thinks of is to read a borrowed book, and the penultimate subject of his
reflections is its restoration. Ménage (Menagiana, Paris, 1729, vol. i.
p. 265), mentions, as if it were a notable misdeed, this of Angelo
Politian’s, “he borrowed a ‘Lucretius’ from Pomponius Laetus, and kept it
for four years.” Four years! in the sight of the borrower it is but a
moment. Ménage reports that a friend kept his “Pausanias” for three
years, whereas four months was long enough.

“At quarto saltem mense redire decet.”

There is no satisfaction in lending a book; for it is rarely that
borrowers, while they deface your volumes, gather honey for new stores,
as De Quincey did, and Coleridge, and even Dr. Johnson, who “greased and
dogs-eared such volumes as were confided to his tender mercies, with the
same indifference wherewith he singed his own wigs.” But there is a race
of mortals more annoying to a conscientious man than borrowers. These
are the spontaneous lenders, who insist that you shall borrow their
tomes. For my own part, when I am oppressed with the charity of such, I
lock their books up in a drawer, and behold them not again till the day
of their return. There is no security against borrowers, unless a man
like Guibert de Pixérécourt steadfastly refuses to lend. The device of
Pixérécourt was _un livre est un ami qui ne change jamais_. But he knew
that our books change when they have been borrowed, like our friends when
they have been married; when “a lady borrows them,” as the fairy queen
says in the ballad of “Tamlane.”

“But had I kenn’d, Tamlane,” she says,
“A lady wad borrowed thee,
I wad ta’en out thy twa gray een,
Put in twa een o’ tree!

“Had I but kenn’d, Tamlane,” she says,
“Before ye came frae hame,
I wad ta’en out your heart o’ flesh,
Put in a heart o’ stane!”

Above the lintel of his library door, Pixérécourt had this couplet
carved—

“Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prêté,
Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gâté.”

M. Paul Lacroix says he would not have lent a book to his own daughter.
Once Lacroix asked for the loan of a work of little value. Pixérécourt
frowned, and led his friend beneath the doorway, pointing to the motto.
“Yes,” said M. Lacroix, “but I thought that verse applied to every one
but me.” So Pixérécourt made him a present of the volume.

We cannot all imitate this “immense” but unamiable amateur. Therefore,
bibliophiles have consoled themselves with the inventions of book-plates,
quaint representations, perhaps heraldic, perhaps fanciful, of their
claims to the possession of their own dear volumes. Mr. Leicester Warren
and M. Poulet Malassis have written the history of these slender works of
art, and each bibliophile may have his own engraved, and may formulate
his own anathemas on people who borrow and restore not again. The
process is futile, but may comfort the heart, like the curses against
thieves which the Greeks were wont to scratch on leaden tablets, and
deposit in the temple of Demeter. Each amateur can exercise his own
taste in the design of a book-plate; and for such as love and collect
rare editions of “Homer,” I venture to suggest this motto, which may move
the heart of the borrower to send back an Aldine copy of the epic—

_πέμψον ἐπισταμένως_, _δύνασαι γάρ_
_ὥς κε γάλ’ ἀσκηθὴς ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται_. {3}

Mr. William Blades, in his pleasant volume, “The Enemies of Books”
(Trübner), makes no account of the book-thief or biblioklept. “If they
injure the owners,” says Mr. Blades, with real tolerance, “they do no
harm to the books themselves, by merely transferring them from one set of
book-shelves to another.” This sentence has naturally caused us to
reflect on the ethical character of the biblioklept. He is not always a
bad man. In old times, when language had its delicacies, and moralists
were not devoid of sensibility, the French did not say “un voleur de
livres,” but “un chipeur de livres;” as the papers call lady shoplifters
“kleptomaniacs.” There are distinctions. M. Jules Janin mentions a
great Parisian bookseller who had an amiable weakness. He was a
bibliokleptomaniac. His first motion when he saw a book within reach was
to put it in his pocket. Every one knew his habit, and when a volume was
lost at a sale the auctioneer duly announced it, and knocked it down to
the enthusiast, who regularly paid the price. When he went to a private
view of books about to be sold, the officials at the door would ask him,
as he was going out, if he did not happen to have an Elzevir Horace or an
Aldine Ovid in his pocket. Then he would search those receptacles and
exclaim, “Yes, yes, here it is; so much obliged to you; I am so absent.”
M. Janin mentions an English noble, a “Sir Fitzgerald,” who had the same
tastes, but who unluckily fell into the hands of the police. Yet M.
Janin has a tenderness for the book-stealer, who, after all, is a lover
of books. The moral position of the malefactor is so delicate and
difficult that we shall attempt to treat of it in the severe, though
_rococo_, manner of Aristotle’s “Ethics.” Here follows an extract from
the lost Aristotelian treatise “Concerning Books”:—

“Among the contemplative virtues we reckon the love of books. Now
this virtue, like courage or liberality, has its mean, its excess,
and its defect. The defect is indifference, and the man who is
defective as to the love of books has no name in common parlance.
Therefore, we may call him the Robustious Philistine. This man will
cut the leaves of his own or his friend’s volumes with the
butter-knife at breakfast. Also he is just the person wilfully to
mistake the double sense of the term ‘fly-leaves,’ and to stick the
‘fly-leaves’ of his volumes full of fly-hooks. He also loves
dogs’-ears, and marks his place with his pipe when he shuts a book in
a hurry; or he will set the leg of his chair on a page to keep it
open. He praises those who tear off margins for pipe-lights, and he
makes cigarettes with the tissue-paper that covers engravings. When
his books are bound, he sees that the margin is cut to the quick. He
tells you too, that ‘_he_ buys books to read them.’ But he does not
say why he thinks it needful to spoil them. Also he will drag off
bindings—or should we perhaps call this crime _θηριοτης_, or
brutality, rather than mere vice? for vice is essentially human, but
to tear off bindings is bestial. Thus they still speak of a certain
monster who lived during the French Revolution, and who, having
purchased volumes attired in morocco, and stamped with the devices of
the oligarchs, would rip off the leather or vellum, and throw them
into the fire or out of the window, saying that ‘now he could read
with unwashed hands at his ease.’ Such a person, then, is the man
indifferent to books, and he sins by way of defect, being deficient
in the contemplative virtue of book-loving. As to the man who is
exactly in the right mean, we call him the book-lover. His happiness
consists not in reading, which is an active virtue, but in the
contemplation of bindings, and illustrations, and title-pages. Thus
his felicity partakes of the nature of the bliss we attribute to the
gods, for that also is contemplative, and we call the book-lover
‘happy,’ and even ‘blessed,’ but within the limits of mortal
happiness. But, just as in the matter of absence of fear there is a
mean which we call courage, and a defect which we call cowardice, and
an excess which is known as foolhardiness; so it is in the case of
the love of books. As to the mean, we have seen that it is the
virtue of the true book-lover, while the defect constitutes the sin
of the Robustious Philistine. But the extreme is found in
covetousness, and the covetous man who is in the extreme state of
book-loving, is the biblioklept, or book-stealer. Now his vice shows
itself, not in contemplation (for of contemplation there can be no
excess), but in action. For books are procured, as we say, by
purchase, or by barter, and these are voluntary exchanges, both the
seller and the buyer being willing to deal. But books are, again,
procured in another way, by involuntary contract—that is, when the
owner of the book is unwilling to part with it, but he whose own the
book is not is determined to take it. The book-stealer is such a man
as this, and he possesses himself of books with which the owner does
not intend to part, by virtue of a series of involuntary contracts.
Again, the question may be raised, whether is the Robustious
Philistine who despises books, or the biblioklept who adores them out
of measure and excessively, the worse citizen? Now, if we are to
look to the consequences of actions only (as the followers of Bentham
advise), clearly the Robustious Philistine is the worse citizen, for
he mangles, and dirties, and destroys books which it is the interest
of the State to preserve. But the biblioklept treasures and adorns
the books he has acquired; and when he dies, or goes to prison, the
State receives the benefit at his sale. Thus Libri, who was the
greatest of biblioklepts, rescued many of the books he stole from
dirt and misuse, and had them bound royally in purple and gold.
Also, it may be argued that books naturally belong to him who can
appreciate them; and if good books are in a dull or indifferent man’s
keeping, this is the sort of slavery which we call “unnatural” in our
_Politics_, and which is not to be endured. Shall we say, then, that
the Robustious Philistine is the worse citizen, while the Biblioklept
is the worse man? But this is perhaps matter for a separate
disquisition.”

This fragment of the lost Aristotelian treatise “Concerning Books,” shows
what a difficulty the Stagirite had in determining the precise nature of
the moral offence of the biblioklept. Indeed, both as a collector and as
an intuitive moralist, Aristotle must have found it rather difficult to
condemn the book-thief. He, doubtless, went on to draw distinctions
between the man who steals books to sell them again for mere pecuniary
profit (which he would call “chrematistic,” or “unnatural,”
book-stealing), and the man who steals them because he feels that he is
their proper and natural possessor. The same distinction is taken by
Jules Janin, who was a more constant student of Horace than of Aristotle.
In his imaginary dialogue of bibliophiles, Janin introduces a character
who announces the death of M. Libri. The tolerant person who brings the
sad news proposes “to cast a few flowers on the melancholy tomb. He was
a bibliophile, after all. What do you say to it? Many a good fellow has
stolen books, and died in grace at the last.” “Yes,” replies the
president of the club, “but the good fellows did not sell the books they
stole . . . Cest une grande honte, une grande misère.” This Libri was an
Inspector-General of French Libraries under Louis Philippe. When he was
tried, in 1848, it was calculated that the sum of his known thefts
amounted to £20,000. Many of his robberies escaped notice at the time.
It is not long since Lord Ashburnham, according to a French journal, “Le
Livre,” found in his collection some fragments of a Pentateuch. These
relics had been in the possession of the Lyons Library, whence Libri
stole them in 1847. The late Lord Ashburnham bought them, without the
faintest idea of Libri’s dishonesty; and when, after eleven years, the
present peer discovered the proper owners of his treasure, he immediately
restored the Pentateuch to the Lyons Library.

Many eminent characters have been biblioklepts. When Innocent X. was
still Monsignor Pamphilio, he stole a book—so says Tallemant des
Réaux—from Du Monstier, the painter. The amusing thing is that Du
Monstier himself was a book-thief. He used to tell how he had lifted a
book, of which he had long been in search, from a stall on the Pont-Neuf;
“but,” says Tallemant (whom Janin does not seem to have consulted),
“there are many people who don’t think it thieving to steal a book unless
you sell it afterwards.” But Du Monstier took a less liberal view where
his own books were concerned. The Cardinal Barberini came to Paris as
legate, and brought in his suite Monsignor Pamphilio, who afterwards
became Innocent X. The Cardinal paid a visit to Du Monstier in his
studio, where Monsignor Pamphilio spied, on a table, “L’Histoire du
Concile de Trent”—the good edition, the London one. “What a pity,”
thought the young ecclesiastic, “that such a man should be, by some
accident, the possessor of so valuable a book.” With these sentiments
Monsignor Pamphilio slipped the work under his _soutane_. But little Du
Monstier observed him, and said furiously to the Cardinal, that a holy
man should not bring thieves and robbers in his company. With these
words, and with others of a violent and libellous character, he recovered
the “History of the Council of Trent,” and kicked out the future Pope.
Amelot de la Houssaie traces to this incident the hatred borne by
Innocent X. to the Crown and the people of France. Another Pope, while
only a cardinal, stole a book from Ménage—so M. Janin reports—but we have
not been able to discover Ménage’s own account of the larceny. The
anecdotist is not so truthful that cardinals need flush a deeper scarlet,
like the roses in Bion’s “Lament for Adonis,” on account of a scandal
resting on the authority of Ménage. Among Royal persons, Catherine de
Medici, according to Brantôme, was a biblioklept. “The Marshal Strozzi
had a very fine library, and after his death the Queen-Mother seized it,
promising some day to pay the value to his son, who never got a farthing
of the money.” The Ptolemies, too, were thieves on a large scale. A
department of the Alexandrian Library was called “The Books from the
Ships,” and was filled with rare volumes stolen from passengers in
vessels that touched at the port. True, the owners were given copies of
their ancient MSS., but the exchange, as Aristotle says, was an
“involuntary” one, and not distinct from robbery.

The great pattern of biblioklepts, a man who carried his passion to the
most regrettable excesses, was a Spanish priest, Don Vincente, of the
convent of Pobla, in Aragon. When the Spanish revolution despoiled the
convent libraries, Don Vincente established himself at Barcelona, under
the pillars of Los Encantes, where are the stalls of the merchants of
_bric-à-brac_ and the seats of them that sell books. In a gloomy den the
Don stored up treasures which he hated to sell. Once he was present at
an auction where he was out-bid in the competition for a rare, perhaps a
unique, volume. Three nights after that, the people of Barcelona were
awakened by cries of “Fire!” The house and shop of the man who had
bought “Ordinacions per los gloriosos reys de Arago” were blazing. When
the fire was extinguished, the body of the owner of the house was found,
with a pipe in his blackened hand, and some money beside him. Every one
said, “He must have set the house on fire with a spark from his pipe.”
Time went on, and week by week the police found the bodies of slain men,
now in the street, now in a ditch, now in the river. There were young
men and old, all had been harmless and inoffensive in their lives,
and—all had been _bibliophiles_. A dagger in an invisible hand had
reached their hearts but the assassin had spared their purses, money, and
rings. An organised search was made in the city, and the shop of Don
Vincente was examined. There, in a hidden recess, the police discovered
the copy of “Ordinacions per los gloriosis reys de Arago,” which ought by
rights to have been burned with the house of its purchaser. Don Vincente
was asked how he got the book. He replied in a quiet voice, demanded
that his collection should be made over to the Barcelona Library, and
then confessed a long array of crimes. He had strangled his rival,
stolen the “Ordinacions,” and burned the house. The slain men were
people who had bought from him books which he really could not bear to
part with. At his trial his counsel tried to prove that his confession
was false, and that he might have got his books by honest means. It was
objected that there was in the world only one book printed by Lambert
Palmart in 1482, and that the prisoner must have stolen this, the only
copy, from the library where it was treasured. The defendant’s counsel
proved that there was another copy in the Louvre; that, therefore, there
might be more, and that the defendant’s might have been honestly
procured. Here Don Vincente, previously callous, uttered an hysterical
cry. Said the Alcalde:—“At last, Vincente, you begin to understand the
enormity of your offence?” “Ah, Señor Alcalde, my error was clumsy
indeed. If you only knew how miserable I am!” “If human justice prove
inflexible, there is another justice whose pity is inexhaustible.
Repentance is never too late.” “Ah, Señor Alcalde, but my copy was not
unique!” With the story of this impenitent thief we may close the roll
of biblioklepts, though Dibdin pretends that Garrick was of the company,
and stole Alleyne’s books at Dulwich.

There is a thievish nature more hateful than even the biblioklept. The
Book-Ghoul is he who combines the larceny of the biblioklept with the
abominable wickedness of breaking up and mutilating the volumes from
which he steals. He is a collector of title-pages, frontispieces,
illustrations, and book-plates. He prowls furtively among public and
private libraries, inserting wetted threads, which slowly eat away the
illustrations he covets; and he broods, like the obscene demon of Arabian
superstitions, over the fragments of the mighty dead. His disgusting
tastes vary. He prepares books for the American market. Christmas books
are sold in the States stuffed with pictures cut out of honest volumes.
Here is a quotation from an American paper:—

“Another style of Christmas book which deserves to be mentioned,
though it is out of the reach of any but the very rich, is the
historical or literary work enriched with inserted plates. There has
never, to our knowledge, been anything offered in America so
supremely excellent as the $5000 book on Washington, we
think—exhibited by Boston last year, but not a few fine specimens of
books of this class are at present offered to purchasers. Scribner
has a beautiful copy of Forster’s ‘Life of Dickens,’ enlarged from
three volumes octavo to nine volumes quarto, by taking to pieces,
remounting, and inlaying. It contains some eight hundred engravings,
portraits, views, playbills, title-pages, catalogues, proof
illustrations from Dickens’s works, a set of the Onwhyn plates, rare
engravings by Cruikshank and ‘Phiz,’ and autograph letters. Though
this volume does not compare with Harvey’s Dickens, offered for $1750
two years ago, it is an excellent specimen of books of this sort, and
the veriest tyro in bibliographical affairs knows how scarce are
becoming the early editions of Dickens’s works and the plates
illustrating them. {4} Anything about Dickens in the beginning of
his career is a sound investment from a business point of view.
Another work of the same sort, valued at $240, is Lady Trevelyan’s
edition of Macaulay, illustrated with portraits, many of them very
rare. Even cheaper, all things considered, is an extra-illustrated
copy of the ‘Histoire de la Gravure,’ which, besides its
seventy-three reproductions of old engravings, is enriched with two
hundred fine specimens of the early engravers, many of the
impressions being in first and second states. At $155 such a book is
really a bargain, especially for any one who is forming a collection
of engravings. Another delightful work is the library edition of
Bray’s ‘Evelyn,’ illustrated with some two hundred and fifty
portraits and views, and valued at $175; and still another is
Boydell’s ‘Milton,’ with plates after Westall, and further
illustrations in the shape of twenty-eight portraits of the painter
and one hundred and eighty-one plates, and many of them before
letter. The price of this book is $325.”

But few book-ghouls are worse than the moral ghoul. He defaces, with a
pen, the passages, in some precious volume, which do not meet his idea of
moral propriety. I have a Pine’s “Horace,” with the engravings from
gems, which has fallen into the hands of a moral ghoul. Not only has he
obliterated the verses which hurt his delicate sense, but he has actually
scraped away portions of the classical figures, and “the breasts of the
nymphs in the brake.” The soul of Tartuffe had entered into the body of
a sinner of the last century. The antiquarian ghoul steals title-pages
and colophons. The aesthetic ghoul cuts illuminated initials out of
manuscripts. The petty, trivial, and almost idiotic ghoul of our own
days, sponges the fly-leaves and boards of books for the purpose of
cribbing the book-plates. An old “Complaint of a Book-plate,” in dread
of the wet sponge of the enemy, has been discovered by Mr. Austin
Dobson:—{5}

THE BOOK-PLATE’S PETITION.

_By a Gentleman of the Temple_.

While cynic CHARLES still trimm’d the vane
’Twixt Querouaille and Castlemaine,
In days that shocked JOHN EVELYN,
My First Possessor fix’d me in.
In days of Dutchmen and of frost,
The narrow sea with JAMES I cross’d,
Returning when once more began
The Age of Saturn and of ANNE.
I am a part of all the past;
I knew the GEORGES, first and last;
I have been oft where else was none
Save the great wig of ADDISON;
And seen on shelves beneath me grope
The little eager form of POPE.
I lost the Third that own’d me when
French NOAILLES fled at Dettingen;
The year JAMES WOLFE surpris’d Quebec,
The Fourth in hunting broke his neck;
The day that WILLIAM HOGARTH dy’d,
The Fifth one found me in Cheapside.
This was a Scholar, one of those
Whose Greek is sounder than their hose;
He lov’d old Books and nappy ale,
So liv’d at Streatham, next to THRALE.
’Twas there this stain of grease I boast
Was made by Dr. JOHNSON’S toast.
(He did it, as I think, for Spite;
My Master call’d him Jacobite!)
And now that I so long to-day
Have rested post discrimina,
Safe in the brass-wir’d book-case where
I watch’d the Vicar’s whit’ning hair,
Must I these travell’d bones inter
In some Collector’s sepulchre!
Must I be torn from hence and thrown
With frontispiece and colophon!
With vagrant E’s, and I’s, and O’s,
The spoil of plunder’d Folios!
With scraps and snippets that to ME
Are naught but kitchen company!
Nay, rather, FRIEND, this favour grant me:
Tear me at once; but don’t transplant me.

CHELTENHAM, _Septr_. 31, 1792.

The conceited ghoul writes his notes across our fair white margins, in
pencil, or in more baneful ink. Or he spills his ink bottle at large
over the pages, as André Chénier’s friend served his copy of Malherbe.
It is scarcely necessary to warn the amateur against the society of
book-ghouls, who are generally snuffy and foul in appearance, and by no
means so insinuating as that fair lady-ghoul, Amina, of the Arabian
Nights.

Another enemy of books must be mentioned with the delicacy that befits
the topic. Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of
course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy
of the name. It is true that Isabelle d’Este, and Madame de Pompadour,
and Madame de Maintenon, were collectors; and, doubtless, there are other
brilliant exceptions to a general rule. But, broadly speaking, women
detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they
don’t understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious
charms; third, books cost money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady
to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper
scored with crabbed characters. Thus ladies wage a skirmishing war
against booksellers’ catalogues, and history speaks of husbands who have
had to practise the guile of smugglers when they conveyed a new purchase
across their own frontier. Thus many married men are reduced to
collecting Elzevirs, which go readily into the pocket, for you cannot
smuggle a folio volume easily. This inveterate dislike of books often
produces a very deplorable result when an old collector dies. His
“womankind,” as the Antiquary called them, sell all his treasures for the
price of waste-paper, to the nearest country bookseller. It is a
melancholy duty which forces one to introduce such topics into a volume
on “Art at Home.” But this little work will not have been written in
vain if it persuades ladies who inherit books not to sell them hastily,
without taking good and disinterested opinion as to their value. They
often dispose of treasures worth thousands, for a ten pound note, and
take pride in the bargain. Here, let history mention with due honour the
paragon of her sex and the pattern to all wives of book-collecting
men—Madame Fertiault. It is thus that she addresses her lord in a
charming triolet (“Les Amoureux du Livre,” p. xxxv):—

“Le livre a ton esprit . . . tant mieux!
Moi, j’ai ton coeur, et sans partage.
Puis-je désirer davantage?
Le livre a ton esprit . . . tant mieux!
Heureuse de te voir joyeux,
Je t’en voudrais . . . tout un étage.
Le livre a ton esprit . . . tant mieux!
Moi, j’ai ton coeur, et sans partage.”

Books rule thy mind, so let it be!
Thy heart is mine, and mine alone.
What more can I require of thee?
Books rule thy mind, so let it be!
Contented when thy bliss I see,
I wish a world of books thine own.
Books rule thy mind, so let it be!
Thy heart is mine, and mine alone.

[Picture: M. Annei Lucani de Bello Civili Libri X. Apud Seb. Gryphium
Lugduni. 1551]

There is one method of preserving books, which, alas, only tempts the
borrower, the stealer, the rat, and the book-worm; but which is
absolutely necessary as a defence against dust and neglect. This is
binding. The bookbinder’s art too often destroys books when the artist
is careless, but it is the only mode of preventing our volumes from
falling to pieces, and from being some day disregarded as waste-paper. A
well-bound book, especially a book from a famous collection, has its
price, even if its literary contents be of trifling value. A leather
coat fashioned by Derome, or Le Gascon, or Duseuil, will win respect and
careful handling for one specimen of an edition whereof all the others
have perished. Nothing is so slatternly as the aspect of a book merely
stitched, in the French fashion, when the threads begin to stretch, and
the paper covers to curl and be torn. Worse consequences follow, whole
sheets are lost, the volume becomes worthless, and the owner must often
be at the expense of purchasing another copy, if he can, for the edition
may now be out of print. Thus binding of some sort not only adds a grace
to the library, presenting to the eye the cheerful gilded rows of our
volumes, but is a positive economy. In the case of our cloth-covered
English works, the need of binding is not so immediately obvious. But
our publishers have a taste for clothing their editions in tender tones
of colour, stamped, often, with landscapes printed in gold, in white, or
what not. Covers like this, may or may not please the eye while they are
new and clean, but they soon become dirty and hideous. When a book is
covered in cloth of a good dark tint it may be allowed to remain unbound,
but the primrose and lilac hues soon call out for the aid of the binder.

[Picture: Pub. Virgilii Maronis Opera Parisiis. Apud Hieronymum de
Marnef, sub Pelicano, Monte D’Hilurii. 1558]

Much has been written of late about book-binding. In a later part of
this manual we shall have something to say about historical examples of
the art, and the performances of the great masters. At present one must
begin by giving the practical rule, that a book should be bound in
harmony with its character and its value. The bibliophile, if he could
give the rein to his passions, would bind every book he cares to possess
in a full coat of morocco, or (if it did not age so fast) of Russia
leather. But to do this is beyond the power of most of us. Only works
of great rarity or value should be full bound in morocco. If we have the
luck to light on a Shakespeare quarto, on some masterpiece of Aldus
Manutius, by all means let us entrust it to the most competent binder,
and instruct him to do justice to the volume. Let old English books, as
More’s “Utopia,” have a cover of stamped and blazoned calf. Let the
binder clothe an early Rabelais or Marot in the style favoured by
Grolier, in leather tooled with geometrical patterns. Let a Molière or
Corneille be bound in the graceful contemporary style of Le Gascon, where
the lace-like pattern of the gilding resembles the Venetian point-lace,
for which La Fontaine liked to ruin himself. Let a binding, _à la
fanfare_, in the style of Thouvenin, denote a novelist of the last
century, let panelled Russia leather array a folio of Shakespeare, and
let English works of a hundred years ago be clothed in the sturdy fashion
of Roger Payne. Again, the bibliophile may prefer to have the leather
stamped with his arms and crest, like de Thou, Henri III., D’Hoym, Madame
du Barry, and most of the collectors of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Yet there are books of great price which one would hesitate
to bind in new covers. An Aldine or an Elzevir, in its old vellum or
paper wrapper, with uncut leaves, should be left just as it came from the
presses of the great printers. In this condition it is a far more
interesting relic. But a morocco case may be made for the book, and
lettered properly on the back, so that the volume, though really unbound,
may take its place with the bound books on the shelves. A copy of any of
Shelley’s poems, in the original wrappers, should I venture to think be
treated thus, and so should the original editions of Keats’s and of Mr.
Tennyson’s works. A collector, who is also an author, will perhaps like
to have copies of his own works in morocco, for their coats will give
them a chance of surviving the storms of time. But most other books, not
of the highest rarity and interest, will be sufficiently clothed in
half-bindings, that is, with leather backs and corners, while the rest of
the cover is of cloth or paper, or whatever other substance seems most
appropriate. An Oxford tutor used to give half-binding as an example of
what Aristotle calls _Μικροπρέπεια_, or “shabbiness,” and when we
recommend such coverings for books it is as a counsel of expediency, not
of perfection. But we cannot all be millionaires; and, let it be
remembered, the really wise amateur will never be extravagant, nor let
his taste lead him into “the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary
embarrassment.” Let the example of Charles Nodier be our warning; nay,
let us remember that while Nodier could get out of debt by selling his
collection, _ours_ will probably not fetch anything like what we gave for
it. In half-bindings there is a good deal of room for the exercise of
the collector’s taste. M. Octave Uzanne, in a tract called “Les Caprices
d’un Bibliophile,” gives some hints on this topic, which may be taken or
let alone. M. Uzanne has noticed the monotony, and the want of meaning
and suggestion in ordinary half-bindings. The paper or cloth which
covers the greater part of the surface of half-bound books is usually
inartistic and even ugly. He proposes to use old scraps of brocade,
embroidery, Venice velvet, or what not; and doubtless a covering made of
some dead fair lady’s train goes well with a romance by Crébillon, and
engravings by Marillier. “Voici un cartonnage Pompadour de notre
invention,” says M. Uzanne, with pride; but he observes that it needs a
strong will to make a bookbinder execute such orders. For another class
of books, which our honest English shelves reject with disgust, M. Uzanne
proposes a binding of the skin of the boa constrictor; undoubtedly
appropriate and “admonishing.” The leathers of China and Japan, with
their strange tints and gilded devices may be used for books of fantasy,
like “Gaspard de la Nuit,” or the “Opium Eater,” or Poe’s poems, or the
verses of Gérard de Nerval. Here, in short, is an almost unexplored
field for the taste of the bibliophile, who, with some expenditure of
time, and not much of money, may make half-binding an art, and give
modern books a peculiar and appropriate raiment.

M. Ambrose Firmin Didot has left some notes on a more serious topic,—the
colours to be chosen when books are full-bound in morocco. Thus he would
have the “Iliad” clothed in red, the “Odyssey” in blue, because the old
Greek rhapsodists wore a scarlet cloak when they recited the Wrath of
Achilles, a blue one when they chanted of the Return of Odysseus. The
writings of the great dignitaries of the Church, M. Didot would array in
violet; scarlet goes well with the productions of cardinals; philosophers
have their sober suit of black morocco, poets like Panard may be dressed
in rose colour. A collector of this sort would like, were it possible,
to attire Goldsmith’s poems in a “coat of Tyrian bloom, satin grain.” As
an antithesis to these extravagant fancies, we may add that for ordinary
books no binding is cheaper, neater, and more durable, than a coat of
buckram.

The conditions of a well bound book may be tersely enumerated. The
binding should unite solidity and elegance. The book should open easily,
and remain open at any page you please. It should never be necessary, in
reading, to squeeze back the covers; and no book, however expensively
bound, has been properly treated, if it does not open with ease. It is a
mistake to send recently printed books to the binder, especially books
which contain engravings. The printing ink dries slowly, and, in the
process called “beating,” the text is often transferred to the opposite
page. M. Rouveyre recommends that one or two years should pass before
the binding of a newly printed book. The owner will, of course, implore
the binder to, spare the margins; and, almost equally of course, the
binder, _durus arator_, will cut them down with his abominable plough.
One is almost tempted to say that margins should always be left
untouched, for if once the binder begins to clip he is unable to resist
the seductive joy, and cuts the paper to the quick, even into the printed
matter. Mr. Blades tells a very sad story of a nobleman who handed over
some Caxtons to a provincial binder, and received them back _minus_ £500
worth of margin. Margins make a book worth perhaps £400, while their
absence reduces the same volume to the box marked “all these at
fourpence.” _Intonsis capillis_, with locks unshorn, as Motteley the old
dealer used to say, an Elzevir in its paper wrapper may be worth more
than the same tome in morocco, stamped with Longepierre’s fleece of gold.
But these things are indifferent to bookbinders, new and old. There lies
on the table, as I write, “Les Provinciales, ou Les Lettres Ecrites par
Louis de Montalte à un Provincial de ses amis, & aux R.R. P.P. Jesuites.
A Cologne, Ches PIERRE de la VALLÉE, M.DC.LVIII.” It is the Elzevir
edition, or what passes for such; but the binder has cut down the margin
so that the words “Les Provinciales” almost touch the top of the page.
Often the wretch—he lived, judging by his style, in Derome’s time, before
the Revolution—has sliced into the head-titles of the pages. Thus the
book, with its old red morocco cover and gilded flowers on the back, is
no proper companion for “Les Pensées de M. PASCAL (Wolfganck, 1672),”
which some sober Dutchman has left with a fair allowance of margin, an
inch “taller” in its vellum coat than its neighbour in morocco. Here
once more, is “LES FASCHEUX, Comedie de I. B. P. MOLIÈRE, Representee sur
Le _Theatre du Palais Royal_. A Paris, Chez GABRIEL QUINET, au Palais,
dans la Galerie des Prisonniers, à l’Ange Gabriel, M.DCLXIII. Avec
privilege du Roy.” What a crowd of pleasant memories the bibliophile,
and he only, finds in these dry words of the title. Quinet, the
bookseller, lived “au Palais,” in that pretty old arcade where Corneille
cast the scene of his comedy, “La Galerie du Palais.” In the Geneva
edition of Corneille, 1774, you can see Gravelot’s engraving of the
place; it is a print full of exquisite charm (engraved by Le Mure in
1762). Here is the long arcade, in shape exactly like the galleries of
the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The bookseller’s booth is arched over,
and is open at front and side. Dorimant and Cléante are looking out; one
leans on the books on the window-sill, the other lounges at the door, and
they watch the pretty Hippolyte who is chaffering with the lace-seller at
the opposite shop. “Ce visage vaut mieux que toutes vos chansons,” says
Dorimant to the bookseller. So they loitered, and bought books, and
flirted in their lace ruffles, and ribbons, and flowing locks, and wide
_canons_, when Molière was young, and when this little old book was new,
and lying on the shelves of honest Quinet in the Palace Gallery. The
very title-page, and pagination, not of this second edition, but of the
first of “Les Fascheux,” had their own fortunes, for the dedication to
Fouquet was perforce withdrawn. That favourite entertained La Vallière
and the King with the comedy at his house of Vaux, and then instantly
fell from power and favour, and, losing his place and his freedom,
naturally lost the flattery of a dedication. But _retombons à nos
__coches_, as Montaigne says. This pleasant little copy of the play,
which is a kind of relic of Molière and his old world, has been
ruthlessly bound up with a treatise, “Des Pierres Précieuses,” published
by Didot in 1776. Now the play is naturally a larger book than the
treatise on precious stones, so the binder has cut down the margins to
the size of those of the work on amethysts and rubies. As the Italian
tyrant chained the dead and the living together, as Procrustes maimed his
victims on his cruel bed, so a hard-hearted French binder has tied up,
and mutilated, and spoiled the old play, which otherwise would have had
considerable value as well as interest.

We have tried to teach the beginner how to keep his books neat and clean;
what men and monsters he should avoid; how he should guard himself
against borrowers, book-worms, damp, and dirt. But we are sometimes
compelled to buy books already dirty and dingy, foxed, or spotted with
red, worn by greasy hands, stained with ink spots, or covered with MS.
notes. The art of man has found a remedy for these defects. I have
never myself tried to wash a book, and this care is best left to
professional hands. But the French and English writers give various
recipes for cleaning old books, which the amateur may try on any old
rubbish out of the fourpenny box of a bookstall, till he finds that he
can trust his own manipulations. There are “fat stains” on books, as
thumb marks, traces of oil (the midnight oil), flakes of old pasty crust
left in old Shakespeares, and candle drippings. There are “thin stains,”
as of mud, scaling-wax, ink, dust, and damp. To clean a book you first
carefully unbind it, take off the old covers, cut the old stitching, and
separate sheet from sheet. Then take a page with “fat stains” of any
kind of grease (except finger-marks), pass a hot flat iron over it, and
press on it a clean piece of blotting paper till the paper sucks up the
grease. Then charge a camel-hair brush with heated turpentine, and pass
it over the places that were stained. If the paper loses its colour
press softly over it a delicate handkerchief, soaked in heated spirits of
wine. Finger-marks you will cover with clean soap, leave this on for
some hours, and then rub with a sponge filled with hot water. Afterwards
dip in weak acid and water, and then soak the page in a bath of clean
water. Ink-stained pages you will first dip in a strong solution of
oxalic acid and then in hydrochloric acid mixed in six times its quantity
of water. Then bathe in clean water and allow to dry slowly.

Some English recipes may also be given. “Grease or wax spots,” says
Hannett, in “Bibliopegia,” “may be removed by washing the part with
ether, chloroform, or benzine, and placing it between pieces of white
blotting paper, then pass a hot iron over it.” “Chlorine water,” says
the same writer, removes ink stains, and bleaches the paper at the same
time. Of chloride of lime, “a piece the size of a nut” (a cocoa nut or a
hazel nut?) in a pint of water, may be applied with a camel’s hair
pencil, and plenty of patience. To polish old bindings, “take the yolk
of an egg, beat it up with a fork, apply it with a sponge, having first
cleaned the leather with a dry flannel.” The following, says a writer in
“Notes and Queries,” with perfect truth, is “an easier if not a better
method; purchase some bookbinder’s varnish,” and use it as you did the
rudimentary omelette of the former recipe. Vellum covers may be cleaned
with soap and water, or in bad cases by a weak solution of salts of
lemon.

Lastly, the collector should acquire such books as Lowndes’s
“Bibliography,” Brunet’s “Manuel,” and as many priced catalogues as he
can secure. The catalogues of Mr. Quaritch, Mr. Bohn, M. Fontaine, M.M.
Morgand et Fatout, are excellent guides to a knowledge of the market
value of books. Other special works, as Renouard’s for Aldines,
Willems’s for Elzevirs, and Cohen’s for French engravings, will be
mentioned in their proper place. Dibdin’s books are inaccurate and
long-winded, but may occasionally be dipped into with pleasure.

CHAPTER III.
THE BOOKS OF THE COLLECTOR.

THE easiest way to bring order into the chaos of desirable books, is,
doubtless, to begin historically with manuscripts. Almost every age that
has left any literary remains, has bequeathed to us relics which are
cherished by collectors. We may leave the clay books of the Chaldeans
out of the account. These tomes resemble nothing so much as sticks of
chocolate, and, however useful they may be to the student, the clay MSS.
of Assurbanipal are not coveted by the collector. He finds his earliest
objects of desire in illuminated manuscripts. The art of decorating
manuscripts is as old as Egypt; but we need not linger over the beautiful
papyri, which are silent books to all but a few Egyptologists. Greece,
out of all her tomes, has left us but a few ill-written papyri. Roman
and early Byzantine art are represented by a “Virgil,” and fragments of
an “Iliad”; the drawings in the latter have been reproduced in a splendid
volume (Milan 1819), and shew Greek art passing into barbarism. The
illumination of MSS. was a favourite art in the later empire, and is said
to have been practised by Boethius. The iconoclasts of the Eastern
empire destroyed the books which contained representations of saints and
of the persons of the Trinity, and the monk Lazarus, a famous artist, was
cruelly tortured for his skill in illuminating sacred works. The art was
decaying in Western Europe when Charlemagne sought for painters of MSS.
in England and Ireland, where the monks, in their monasteries, had
developed a style with original qualities. The library of Corpus Christi
at Cambridge, contains some of the earliest and most beautiful of extant
English MSS. These parchments, stained purple or violet, and inscribed
with characters of gold; are too often beyond the reach of the amateur
for whom we write. The MSS. which he can hope to acquire are neither
very early nor very sumptuous, and, as a rule, MSS. of secular books are
apt to be out of his reach.

Yet a collection of MSS. has this great advantage over a collection of
printed books, that every item in it is absolutely unique, no two MSS.
being ever really the same. This circumstance alone would entitle a good
collection of MSS. to very high consideration on the part of
book-collectors. But, in addition to the great expense of such a
collection, there is another and even more serious drawback. It is
sometimes impossible, and is often extremely difficult, to tell whether a
MS. is perfect or not.

This difficulty can only be got over by an amount of learning on the part
of the collector to which, unfortunately, he is too often a stranger. On
the other hand, the advantages of collecting MSS. are sometimes very
great.

In addition to the pleasure—a pleasure at once literary and
artistic—which the study of illuminated MSS. affords, there is the
certainty that, as years go on, the value of such a collection increases
in a proportion altogether marvellous.

I will take two examples to prove this point. Some years ago an eminent
collector gave the price of £30 for a small French book of Hours, painted
in _grisaille_. It was in a country town that he met with this treasure,
for a treasure he considered the book, in spite of its being of the very
latest school of illumination. When his collection was dispersed a few
years ago this one book fetched £260.

In the celebrated Perkins sale, in 1873, a magnificent early MS., part of
which was written in gold on a purple ground, and which was dated in the
catalogue “ninth or tenth century,” but was in reality of the end of the
tenth or beginning of the eleventh, was sold for £565 to a dealer. It
found its way into Mr. Bragge’s collection, at what price I do not know,
and was resold, three years later, for £780.

Any person desirous of making a collection of illuminated MSS., should
study seriously for some time at the British Museum, or some such place,
until he is thoroughly acquainted (1) with the styles of writing in use
in the Middle Ages, so that he can at a glance make a fairly accurate
estimate of the age of the book submitted to him; and (2) with the proper
means of collating the several kinds of service-books, which, in nine
cases out of ten, were those chosen for illumination.

A knowledge of the styles of writing can be acquired at second hand in a
book lately published by Mr. Charles Trice Martin, F.S.A., being a new
edition of “Astle’s Progress of Writing.” Still better, of course, is
the actual inspection and comparison of books to which a date can be with
some degree of certainty assigned.

It is very common for the age of a book to be misstated in the catalogues
of sales, for the simple reason that the older the writing, the plainer,
in all probability, it is. Let the student compare writing of the
twelfth century with that of the sixteenth, and he will be able to judge
at once of the truth of this assertion. I had once the good fortune to
“pick up” a small Testament of the early part of the twelfth century, if
not older, which was catalogued as belonging to the fifteenth, a date
which would have made it of very moderate value.

With regard to the second point, the collation of MSS., I fear there is
no royal road to knowing whether a book is perfect or imperfect. In some
cases the catchwords remain at the foot of the pages. It is then of
course easy to see if a page is lost, but where no such clue is given the
student’s only chance is to be fully acquainted with what a book _ought_
to contain. He can only do this when he has a knowledge of the different
kinds of service-books which were in use, and of their most usual
contents.

I am indebted to a paper, read by the late Sir William Tite at a meeting
of the Society of Antiquaries, for the collation of “Books of Hours,” but
there are many kinds of MSS. besides these, and it is well to know
something of them. The Horae, or Books of Hours, were the latest
development of the service-books used at an earlier period. They cannot,
in fact, be strictly called service-books, being intended only for
private devotion. But in the thirteenth century and before it, Psalters
were in use for this purpose, and the collation of a Psalter is in truth
more important than that of a Book of Hours. It will be well for a
student, therefore, to begin with Psalters, as he can then get up the
Hours in their elementary form. I subjoin a bibliographical account of
both kinds of MSS. In the famous Exhibition at the Burlington Club in
1874, a number of volumes was arranged to show how persistent one type of
the age could be. The form of the decorations, and the arrangement of
the figures in borders, once invented, was fixed for generations. In a
Psalter of the thirteenth century there was, under the month of January
in the calendar, a picture of a grotesque little figure warming himself
at a stove. The hearth below, the chimney-pot above, on which a stork
was feeding her brood, with the intermediate chimney shaft used as a
border, looked like a scientific preparation from the interior anatomy of
a house of the period. In one of the latest of the MSS. exhibited on
that occasion was the self-same design again. The little man was no
longer a grotesque, and the picture had all the high finish and
completeness in drawing that we might expect in the workmanship of a
contemporary of Van Eyck. There was a full series of intermediate books,
showing the gradual growth of the picture.

With regard to chronology, it may be roughly asserted that the earliest
books which occur are Psalters of the thirteenth century. Next to them
come Bibles, of which an enormous issue took place before the middle of
the fourteenth century. These are followed by an endless series of books
of Hours, which, as the sixteenth century is reached, appear in several
vernacular languages. Those in English, being both very rare and of
great importance in liturgical history, are of a value altogether out of
proportion to the beauty of their illuminations. Side by side with this
succession are the Evangelistina, which, like the example mentioned
above, are of the highest merit, beauty, and value; followed by sermons
and homilies, and the Breviary, which itself shows signs of growth as the
years go on. The real Missal, with which all illuminated books used to
be confounded, is of rare occurrence, but I have given a collation of it
also. Besides these devotional or religious books, I must mention
chronicles and romances, and the semi-religious and moral allegories,
such as the “Pélérinage de l’Ame,” which is said to have given Bunyan the
machinery of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Chaucer’s and Gower’s poetry
exists in many MSS., as does the “Polychronicon” of Higden; but, as a
rule, the mediæval chronicles are of single origin, and were not copied.
To collate MSS. of these kinds is quite impossible, unless by carefully
reading them, and seeing that the pages run on without break.

I should advise the young collector who wishes to make sure of success
not to be too catholic in his tastes at first, but to confine his
attention to a single period and a single school. I should also advise
him to make from time to time a careful catalogue of what he buys, and to
preserve it even after he has weeded out certain items. He will then be
able to make a clear comparative estimate of the importance and value of
his collection, and by studying one species at a time, to become
thoroughly conversant with what it can teach him. When he has, so to
speak, burnt his fingers once or twice, he will find himself able to
distinguish at sight what no amount of teaching by word of mouth or by
writing could ever possibly impart to any advantage.

One thing I should like if possible to impress very strongly upon the
reader. That is the fact that a MS. which is not absolutely perfect, if
it is in a genuine state, is of much more value than one which has been
made perfect by the skill of a modern restorer. The more skilful he is,
that is to say the better he can forge the style of the original, the
more worthless he renders the volume.

Printing seems to have superseded the art of the illuminator more
promptly and completely in England than on the Continent. The _dames
galantes_ of Brantôme’s memoirs took pleasure in illuminated Books of
Hours, suited to the nature of their devotions. As late as the time of
Louis XIV., Bussy Rabutin had a volume of the same kind, illuminated with
portraits of “saints,” of his own canonisation. The most famous of these
modern examples of costly MSS. was “La Guirlande de Julie,” a collection
of madrigals by various courtly hands, presented to the illustrious
Julie, daughter of the Marquise de Rambouillet, most distinguished of the
_Précieuses_, and wife of the Duc de Montausier, the supposed original of
Molière’s Alceste. The MS. was copied on vellum by Nicholas Jarry, the
great calligraph of his time. The flowers on the margin were painted by
Robert. Not long ago a French amateur was so lucky as to discover the
MS. book of prayers of Julie’s noble mother, the Marquise de Rambouillet.
The Marquise wrote these prayers for her own devotions, and Jarry, the
illuminator, declared that he found them most edifying, and delightful to
study. The manuscript is written on vellum by the famous Jarry, contains
a portrait of the fair Julie herself, and is bound in morocco by Le
Gascon. The happy collector who possesses the volume now, heard vaguely
that a manuscript of some interest was being exposed for sale at a
trifling price in the shop of a country bookseller. The description of
the book, casual as it was, made mention of the monogram on the cover.
This was enough for the amateur. He rushed to a railway station,
travelled some three hundred miles, reached the country town, hastened to
the bookseller’s shop, and found that the book had been withdrawn by its
owner. Happily the possessor, unconscious of his bliss, was at home.
The amateur sought him out, paid the small sum demanded, and returned to
Paris in triumph. Thus, even in the region of manuscript-collecting,
there are extraordinary prizes for the intelligent collector.

TO KNOW IF A MANUSCRIPT IS PERFECT.

If the manuscript is of English or French writing of the twelfth,
thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth centuries, it is probably either—(1)
a Bible, (2) a Psalter, (3) a book of Hours, or (4), but rarely, a
Missal. It is not worth while to give the collation of a gradual, or a
hymnal, or a processional, or a breviary, or any of the fifty different
kinds of service-books which are occasionally met with, but which are
never twice the same.

To collate one of them, the reader must go carefully through the book,
seeing that the catch-words, if there are any, answer to the head lines;
and if there are “signatures,” that is, if the foot of the leaves of a
sheet of parchment has any mark for enabling the binder to “gather” them
correctly, going through them, and seeing that each signed leaf has its
corresponding “blank.”

1. To collate a Bible, it will be necessary first to go through the
catch-words, if any, and signatures, as above; then to notice the
contents. The first page should contain the Epistle of St. Jerome to the
reader. It will be observed that there is nothing of the nature of a
title-page, but I have often seen title-pages supplied by some ignorant
imitator in the last century, with the idea that the book was imperfect
without one. The books of the Bible follow in order—but the order not
only differs from ours, but differs in different copies. The Apocryphal
books are always included. The New Testament usually follows on the Old
without any break; and the book concludes with an index of the Hebrew
names and their signification in Latin, intended to help preachers to the
figurative meaning of the biblical types and parables. The last line of
the Bible itself usually contains a colophon, in which sometimes the name
of the writer is given, sometimes the length of time it has taken him to
write, and sometimes merely the “Explicit. Laus Deo,” which has found its
way into many modern books. This colophon, which comes as a rule
immediately before the index, often contains curious notes, hexameters
giving the names of all the books, biographical or local memoranda, and
should always be looked for by the collector. One such line occurs to
me. It is in a Bible written in Italy in the thirteenth century—

“Qui scripsit scribat. Vergilius spe domini vivat.”

Vergilius was, no doubt, in this case the scribe. The Latin and the
writing are often equally crabbed. In the Bodleian there is a Bible with
this colophon—

“Finito libro referemus gratias Christo m.cc.lxv. indict. viij.
Ego Lafräcus de Päcis de Cmoa scriptor scripsi.”

This was also written in Italy. English colophons are often very
quaint—“Qui scripsit hunc librum fiat collocatus in Paradisum,” is an
example. The following gives us the name of one Master Gerard, who, in
the fourteenth century, thus poetically described his ownership:—

“Si Ge ponatur—et _rar_ simul associatur—
Et _dus_ reddatur—cui pertinet ita vocatur.”

In a Bible written in England, in the British Museum, there is a long
colophon, in which, after the name of the writer—“hunc librum scripsit
Wills de Hales,”—there is a prayer for Ralph of Nebham, who had called
Hales to the writing of the book, followed by a date—“Fes. fuit liber
anno M.cc.i. quarto ab incarnatione domini.” In this Bible the books of
the New Testament were in the following order:—the Evangelists, the Acts,
the Epistles of S. Peter, S. James, and S. John, the Epistles of S. Paul,
and the Apocalypse. In a Bible at Brussels I found the colophon after
the index:—“Hic expliciunt interpretationes Hebrayorum nominum Do gris
qui potens est p. süp. omia.” Some of these Bibles are of marvellously
small dimensions. The smallest I ever saw was at Ghent, but it was very
imperfect. I have one in which there are thirteen lines of writing in an
inch of the column. The order of the books of the New Testament in
Bibles of the thirteenth century is usually according to one or other of
the three following arrangements:—

(1.) The Evangelists, Romans to Hebrews, Acts, Epistles of S. Peter, S.
James, and S. John, Apocalypse.

(2.) The Evangelists, Acts, Epistles of S. Peter, S. James, and S. John,
Epistles of S. Paul, Apocalypse. This is the most common.

(3.) The Evangelists, Acts, Epistles of S. Peter, S. James, and S. John,
Apocalypse, and Epistles of S. Paul.

On the fly leaves of these old Bibles there are often very curious
inscriptions. In one I have this:—“Hæc biblia emi Haquinas prior
monasterii Hatharbiensis de dono domini regis Norwegie.” Who was this
King of Norway who, in 1310, gave the Prior of Hatherby money to buy a
Bible, which was probably written at Canterbury? And who was Haquinas?
His name has a Norwegian sound, and reminds us of St. Thomas of that
surname. In another manuscript I have seen:—

“Articula Fidei:—
Nascitur, abluitur, patitur, descendit at ima
Surgit et ascendit, veniens discernere cuncta.”

In another this:—

“Sacramenta ecclesiæ:—
Abluo, fumo, cibo, piget, ordinat, uxor et ungit.”

I will conclude these notes on MS. Bibles with the following colophon
from a copy written in Italy in the fifteenth century:—

“Finito libro vivamus semper in Christo—
Si semper in Christo carebimus ultimo leto.
Explicit Deo gratias; Amen. Stephanus de
Tantaldis scripsit in pergamo.”

2. The “Psalter” of the thirteenth century is usually to be considered a
forerunner of the “Book of Hours.” It always contains, and usually
commences with, a Calendar, in which are written against certain days the
“obits” of benefactors and others, so that a well-filled Psalter often
becomes a historical document of high value and importance. The first
page of the psalms is ornamented with a huge B, which often fills the
whole page, and contains a representation of David and Goliath
ingeniously fitted to the shape of the letter. At the end are usually to
be found the hymns of the Three Children, and others from the Bible
together with the Te Deum; and sometimes, in late examples, a litany. In
some psalters the calendar is at the end. These Psalters, and the Bibles
described above, are very frequently of English work; more frequently,
that is, than the books of Hours and Missals. The study of the
Scriptures was evidently more popular in England than in the other
countries of Europe during the Middle Ages; and the early success of the
Reformers here, must in part, no doubt, be attributed to the wide
circulation of the Bible even before it had been translated from the
Latin. I need hardly, perhaps, observe that even fragments of a Psalter,
a Testament, or a Bible in English, are so precious as to be practically
invaluable.

3. We are indebted to Sir W. Tite for the following collation of a
Flemish “Book of Hours”:—

1. The Calendar.

2. Gospels of the Nativity and the Resurrection.

3. Preliminary Prayers (inserted occasionally).

4. Horæ—(Nocturns and Matins).

5. ,, (Lauds).

6. ,, (Prime).

7. ,, (Tierce).

8. ,, (Sexte).

9. ,, (None).

10. ,, (Vespers).

11. ,, (Compline).

12. The seven penitential Psalms

13. The Litany.

14. Hours of the Cross.

15. Hours of the Holy Spirit.

16. Office of the Dead.

17. The Fifteen Joys of B. V. M.

18. The seven requests to our Lord.

19. Prayers and Suffrages to various Saints.

20. Several prayers, petitions, and devotions.

This is an unusually full example, but the calendar, the hours, the seven
psalms, and the litany, are in almost all the MSS. The buyer must look
carefully to see that no miniatures have been cut out; but it is only by
counting the leaves in their gatherings that he can make sure. This is
often impossible without breaking the binding.

The most valuable “Horæ” are those written in England. Some are of the
English use (Sarum or York, or whatever it may happen to be), but were
written abroad, especially in Normandy, for the English market. These
are also valuable, even when imperfect. Look for the page before the
commencement of the Hours (No. 4 in the list above), and at the end will
be found a line in red,—“Incipit Horæ secundum usum Sarum,” or otherwise,
as the case may be.

4. Missals do not often occur, and are not only very valuable but very
difficult to collate, unless furnished with catch-words or signatures.
But no Missal is complete without the Canon of the Mass, usually in the
middle of the book, and if there are any illuminations throughout the
volume, there will be a full page Crucifixion, facing the Canon. Missals
of large size and completeness contain—(1) a Calendar; (2) “the proper of
the Season;” (3) the ordinary and Canon of the Mass; (4) the Communal of
Saints; (5) the proper of Saints and special occasions; (6) the lessons,
epistles, and gospels; with (7) some hymns, “proses,” and canticles.
This is Sir W. Tite’s list; but, as he remarks, MS. Missals seldom
contain so much. The collector will look for the Canon, which is
invariable.

Breviaries run to an immense length, and are seldom illuminated. It
would be impossible to give them any kind of collation, and the same may
be said of many other kinds of old service-books, and of the chronicles,
poems, romances, and herbals, in which mediæval literature abounded, and
which the collector must judge as best he can.

The name of “missal” is commonly and falsely given to all old
service-books by the booksellers, but the collector will easily
distinguish one when he sees it, from the notes I have given. In a Sarum
Missal, at Alnwick, there is a colophon quoted by my lamented friend Dr.
Rock in his “Textile Fabrics.” It is appropriate both to the labours of
the old scribes and also to those of their modern readers:—

“Librum Scribendo—Jon Whas Monachus laborabat—
Et mane Surgendo—multum corpus macerabat.”

It is one of the charms of manuscripts that they illustrate, in their
minute way, all the art, and even the social condition, of the period in
which they were produced. Apostles, saints, and prophets wear the
contemporary costume, and Jonah, when thrown to the hungry whale, wears
doublet and trunk hose. The ornaments illustrate the architectural taste
of the day. The backgrounds change from diapered patterns to landscapes,
as the modern way of looking at nature penetrates the monasteries and
reaches the _scriptorium_ where the illuminator sits and refreshes his
eyes with the sight of the slender trees and blue distant hills. Printed
books have not such resources. They can only show varieties of type,
quaint frontispieces, printers’ devices, and _fleurons_ at the heads of
chapters. These attractions, and even the engravings of a later day,
seem meagre enough compared with the allurements of manuscripts. Yet
printed books must almost always make the greater part of a collection,
and it may be well to give some rules as to the features that distinguish
the productions of the early press. But no amount of “rules” is worth
six months’ practical experience in bibliography. That experience the
amateur, if he is wise, will obtain in a public library, like the British
Museum or the Bodleian. Nowhere else is he likely to see much of the
earliest of printed books, which very seldom come into the market.

[Picture: Title-page of “Le Rommant de la Rose,” Paris, 1539]

Those of the first German press are so rare that practically they never
reach the hands of the ordinary collector. Among them are the famous
Psalters printed by Fust and Schoffer, the earliest of which is dated
1457; and the bible known as the Mazarine Bible. Two copies of this last
were in the Perkins sale. I well remember the excitement on that
occasion. The first copy put up was the best, being printed upon vellum.
The bidding commenced at £1000, and very speedily rose to £2200, at which
point there was a long pause; it then rose in hundreds with very little
delay to £3400, at which it was knocked down to a bookseller. The second
copy was on paper, and there were those present who said it was better
than the other, which had a suspicion attaching to it of having been
“restored” with a facsimile leaf. The first bid was again £1000, which
the buyer of the previous copy made guineas, and the bidding speedily
went up to £2660, at which price the first bidder paused. A third bidder
had stepped in at £1960, and now, amid breathless excitement, bid £10
more. This he had to do twice before the book was knocked down to him at
£2690.

A scene like this has really very little to do with book-collecting. The
beginner must labour hard to distinguish different kinds of printing; he
must be able to recognise at a glance even fragments from the press of
Caxton. His eye must be accustomed to all the tricks of the trade and
others, so that he may tell a facsimile in a moment, or detect a forgery.

But now let us return to the distinctive marks of early printed books.
The first is, says M. Rouveyre,—

1. _The absence of a separate title-page_. It was not till 1476–1480
that the titles of books were printed on separate pages. The next mark
is—

2. _The absence of capital letters at the beginnings of divisions_. For
example, in an Aldine Iliad, the fifth book begins thus—

Νθ αυ τὖδέιδῃ Διυμήδεῑ
ἔ παλλὰς ἀθήνη
δῶκε μένος καὶ θάρσος ἵν’
ἔκδηλος μετὰ πᾶσιν
ἀργείοισι γένοιτο, ἰδέ κλέος ἐσθλὸν ἄροιτο.

It was intended that the open space, occupied by the small epsilon (ἔ),
should be filled up with a coloured and gilded initial letter by the
illuminator. Copies thus decorated are not very common, but the Aldine
“Homer” of Francis I., rescued by M. Didot from a rubbish heap in an
English cellar, had its due illuminations. In the earliest books the
guide to the illuminator, the small printed letter, does not appear, and
he often puts in the wrong initial.

3. _Irregularity and rudeness of type_ is a “note” of the primitive
printing press, which very early disappeared. Nothing in the history of
printing is so remarkable as the beauty of almost its first efforts.
Other notes are—

4. _The absence of figures at the top of the pages_, _and of signatures
at the foot_. The thickness and solidity of the paper, the absence of
the printer’s name, of the date, and of the name of the town where the
press stood, and the abundance of crabbed abbreviations, are all marks,
more or less trustworthy, of the antiquity of books. It must not be
supposed that all books published, let us say before 1500, are rare, or
deserve the notice of the collector. More than 18,000 works, it has been
calculated, left the press before the end of the fifteenth century. All
of these cannot possibly be of interest, and many of them that are
“rare,” are rare precisely because they are uninteresting. They have not
been preserved because they were thought not worth preserving. This is a
great cause of rarity; but we must not hastily conclude that because a
book found no favour in its own age, therefore it has no claim on our
attention. A London bookseller tells me that he bought the “remainder”
of Keats’s “Endymion” for fourpence a copy! The first edition of
“Endymion” is now rare and valued. In trying to mend the binding of an
old “Odyssey” lately, I extracted from the vellum covers parts of two
copies of a very scarce and curious French dictionary of slang, “Le
Jargon, ou Langage de l’Argot Reformé.” This treatise may have been
valueless, almost, when it appeared, but now it is serviceable to the
philologist, and to all who care to try to interpret the slang _ballades_
of the poet Villon. An old pamphlet, an old satire, may hold the key to
some historical problem, or throw light on the past of manners and
customs. Still, of the earliest printed books, collectors prefer such
rare and beautiful ones as the oldest printed Bibles: German, English,—as
Taverner’s and the Bishop’s,—or Hebrew and Greek, or the first editions
of the ancient classics, which may contain the readings of MSS. now lost
or destroyed. Talking of early Bibles, let us admire the luck and
prudence of a certain Mr. Sandford. He always longed for the first
Hebrew Bible, but would offer no fancy price, being convinced that the
book would one day fall in his way. His foreboding was fulfilled, and he
picked up his treasure for ten shillings in a shop in the Strand. The
taste for _incunabula_, or very early printed books, slumbered in the
latter half of the sixteenth, and all the seventeenth century. It
revived with the third jubilee of printing in 1740, and since then has
refined itself, and only craves books very early, very important, or
works from the press of Caxton, the St. Albans Schoolmaster, or other
famous old artists. Enough has been said to show the beginner, always
enthusiastic, that all old books are not precious. For further
information, the “Biography and Typography of William Caxton,” by Mr.
Blades (Trübner, London, 1877), may be consulted with profit.

Following the categories into which M. Brunet classifies desirable books
in his invaluable manual, we now come to books printed on vellum, and on
peculiar papers. At the origin of printing, examples of many books,
probably presentation copies, were printed on vellum. There is a vellum
copy of the celebrated Florentine first edition of Homer; but it is truly
sad to think that the twin volumes, Iliad and Odyssey, have been
separated, and pine in distant libraries. Early printed books on vellum
often have beautifully illuminated capitals. Dibdin mentions in
“Bibliomania” (London, 1811), p. 90, that a M. Van Praet was compiling a
catalogue of works printed on vellum, and had collected more than 2000
articles. When hard things are said about Henry VIII., let us remember
that this monarch had a few copies of his book against Luther printed on
vellum. The Duke of Marlborough’s library possessed twenty-five books on
vellum, all printed before 1496. The chapter-house at Padua has a
“Catullus” of 1472 on vellum; let Mr. Robinson Ellis think wistfully of
that treasure. The notable Count M’Carthy of Toulouse had a wonderful
library of books in _membranis_, including a book much coveted for its
rarity, oddity, and the beauty of its illustrations, the
“Hypnerotomachia” of Poliphilus (Venice, 1499). Vellum was the favourite
“vanity” of Junot, Napoleon’s general. For reasons connected with its
manufacture, and best not inquired into, the Italian vellum enjoyed the
greatest reputation for smooth and silky whiteness. Dibdin calls “our
modern books on vellum little short of downright wretched.” But the
editor of this series could, I think, show examples that would have made
Dibdin change his opinion.

Many comparatively expensive papers, large in _format_, are used in
choice editions of books. Whatman papers, Dutch papers, Chinese papers,
and even _papier vergé_, have all their admirers. The amateur will soon
learn to distinguish these materials. As to books printed on coloured
paper—green, blue, yellow, rhubarb-coloured, and the like, they are an
offence to the eyes and to the taste. Yet even these have their admirers
and collectors, and the great Aldus himself occasionally used azure
paper. Under the head of “large paper,” perhaps “uncut copies” should be
mentioned. Most owners of books have had the edges of the volumes gilded
or marbled by the binders. Thus part of the margin is lost, an offence
to the eye of the bibliomaniac, while copies untouched by the binder’s
shears are rare, and therefore prized. The inconvenience of uncut copies
is, that one cannot easily turn over the leaves. But, in the present
state of the fashion, a really rare uncut Elzevir may be worth hundreds
of pounds, while a cropped example scarcely fetches as many shillings. A
set of Shakespeare’s quartoes, uncut, would be worth more than a
respectable landed estate in Connemara. For these reasons the amateur
will do well to have new books of price bound “uncut.” It is always easy
to have the leaves pared away; but not even the fabled fountain at Argos,
in which Hera yearly renewed her maidenhood, could restore margins once
clipped away. So much for books which are chiefly precious for the
quantity and quality of the material on which they are printed. Even
this rather foolish weakness of the amateur would not be useless if it
made our publishers more careful to employ a sound clean hand-made paper,
instead of drugged trash, for their more valuable new productions.
Indeed, a taste for hand-made paper is coming in, and is part of the
revolt against the passion for everything machine-made, which ruined art
and handiwork in the years between 1840 and 1870.

The third of M. Brunet’s categories of books of prose, includes _livres
de luxe_, and illustrated literature. Every Christmas brings us _livres
de luxe_ in plenty, books which are no books, but have gilt and magenta
covers, and great staring illustrations. These are regarded as
drawing-room ornaments by people who never read. It is scarcely
necessary to warn the collector against these gaudy baits of unregulated
Christmas generosity. All ages have not produced quite such garish
_livres de luxe_ as ours. But, on the whole, a book brought out merely
for the sake of display, is generally a book ill “got up,” and not worth
reading. Moreover, it is generally a folio, or quarto, so large that he
who tries to read it must support it on a kind of scaffolding. In the
class of illustrated books two sorts are at present most in demand. The
ancient woodcuts and engravings, often the work of artists like Holbein
and Dürer, can never lose their interest. Among old illustrated books,
the most famous, and one of the rarest, is the “Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili,” “wherein all human matters are proved to be no more than a
dream.” This is an allegorical romance, published in 1499, for Francesco
Colonna, by Aldus Manucius. _Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna
peramavit_. “Brother Francesco Colonna dearly loved Polia,” is the
inscription and device of this romance. Poor Francesco, of the order of
preachers, disguised in this strange work his passion for a lady of
uncertain name. Here is a translation of the passage in which the lady
describes the beginning of his affection. “I was standing, as is the
manner of women young and fair, at the window, or rather on the balcony,
of my palace. My yellow hair, the charm of maidens, was floating round
my shining shoulders. My locks were steeped in unguents that made them
glitter like threads of gold, and they were slowly drying in the rays of
the burning sun. A handmaid, happy in her task, was drawing a comb
through my tresses, and surely these of Andromeda seemed not more lovely
to Perseus, nor to Lucius the locks of Photis. {6} On a sudden,
Poliphilus beheld me, and could not withdraw from me his glances of fire,
and even in that moment a ray of the sun of love was kindled in his
heart.”

The fragment is itself a picture from the world of the Renaissance. We
watch the blonde, learned lady, dreaming of Perseus, and Lucius, Greek
lovers of old time, while the sun gilds her yellow hair, and the young
monk, passing below, sees and loves, and “falls into the deep waters of
desire.” The lover is no less learned than the lady, and there is a
great deal of amorous archæology in his account of his voyage to Cythera.
As to the designs in wood, quaint in their vigorous effort to be
classical, they have been attributed to Mantegna, to Bellini, and other
artists. Jean Cousin is said to have executed the imitations, in the
Paris editions of 1546, 1556, and 1561.

The “Hypnerotomachia” seems to deserve notice, because it is the very
type of the books that are dear to collectors, as distinct from the books
that, in any shape, are for ever valuable to the world. A cheap
Tauchnitz copy of the Iliad and Odyssey, or a Globe Shakespeare, are,
from the point of view of literature, worth a wilderness of
“Hypnerotomachiæ.” But a clean copy of the “Hypnerotomachia,” especially
on VELLUM, is one of the jewels of bibliography. It has all the right
qualities; it is very rare, it is very beautiful as a work of art, it is
curious and even _bizarre_, it is the record of a strange time, and a
strange passion; it is a relic, lastly, of its printer, the great and
good Aldus Manutius.

Next to the old woodcuts and engravings, executed in times when artists
were versatile and did not disdain even to draw a book-plate (as Dürer
did for Pirckheimer), the designs of the French “little masters,” are at
present in most demand. The book illustrations of the seventeenth
century are curious enough, and invaluable as authorities on manners and
costume. But the attitudes of the figures are too often stiff and
ungainly; while the composition is frequently left to chance. England
could show nothing much better than Ogilby’s translations of Homer,
illustrated with big florid engravings in sham antique style. The years
between 1730 and 1820, saw the French “little masters” in their
perfection. The dress of the middle of the eighteenth century, of the
age of Watteau, was precisely suited to the gay and graceful pencils of
Gravelot, Moreau, Eisen, Boucher, Cochin, Marillier, and Choffard. To
understand their merits, and the limits of their art, it is enough to
glance through a series of the designs for Voltaire, Corneille, or
Molière. The drawings of society are almost invariably dainty and
pleasing, the serious scenes of tragedy leave the spectator quite
unmoved. Thus it is but natural that these artists should have shone
most in the illustration of airy trifles like Dorat’s “Baisers,” or tales
like Manon Lescaut, or in designing tailpieces for translations of the
Greek idyllic poets, such as Moschus and Bion. In some of his
illustrations of books, especially, perhaps, in the designs for “La
Physiologie de Gout” (Jouaust, Paris, 1879), M. Lalauze has shown himself
the worthy rival of Eisen and Cochin. Perhaps it is unnecessary to add
that the beauty and value of all such engravings depends almost entirely
on their “state.” The earlier proofs are much more brilliant than those
drawn later, and etchings on fine papers are justly preferred. For
example, M. Lalauze’s engravings on “Whatman paper,” have a beauty which
could scarcely be guessed by people who have only seen specimens on
“papier vergé.” Every collector of the old French _vignettes_, should
possess himself of the “Guide de l’amateur,” by M. Henry Cohen
(Rouquette, Paris, 1880). Among English illustrated books, various
tastes prefer the imaginative works of William Blake, the etchings of
Cruikshank, and the woodcuts of Bewick. The whole of the last chapter of
this sketch is devoted, by Mr. Austin Dobson, to the topic of English
illustrated books. Here it may be said, in passing, that an early copy
of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” written, illustrated, printed,
coloured, and boarded by the author’s own hand, is one of the most
charming objects that a bibliophile can hope to possess. The verses of
Blake, in a framework of birds, and flowers, and plumes, all softly and
magically tinted, seem like some book out of King Oberon’s library in
fairyland, rather than the productions of a mortal press. The pictures
in Blake’s “prophetic books,” and even his illustrations to “Job,” show
an imagination more heavily weighted by the technical difficulties of
drawing.

The next class of rare books is composed of works from the famous presses
of the Aldi and the Elzevirs. Other presses have, perhaps, done work as
good, but Estienne, the Giunta, and Plantin, are comparatively neglected,
while the taste for the performances of Baskerville and Foulis is not
very eager. A safe judgment about Aldines and Elzevirs is the gift of
years and of long experience. In this place it is only possible to say a
few words on a wide subject. The founder of the Aldine press, Aldus Pius
Manutius, was born about 1450, and died at Venice in 1514. He was a man
of careful and profound learning, and was deeply interested in Greek
studies, then encouraged by the arrival in Italy of many educated Greeks
and Cretans. Only four Greek authors had as yet been printed in Italy,
when (1495) Aldus established his press at Venice. Theocritus, Homer,
Æsop, and Isocrates, probably in very limited editions, were in the hands
of students. The purpose of Aldus was to put Greek and Latin works,
beautifully printed in a convenient shape, within the reach of all the
world. His reform was the introduction of books at once cheap,
studiously correct, and convenient in actual use. It was in 1498 that he
first adopted the small octavo size, and in his “Virgil” of 1501, he
introduced the type called _Aldine_ or _Italic_. The letters were united
as in writing, and the type is said to have been cut by Francesco da
Bologna, better known as Francia, in imitation of the hand of Petrarch.
For full information about Aldus and his descendants and successors, the
work of M. Firmin Didot, (“Alde Manuce et l’Hellénisme à Venise: Paris
1875),” and the Aldine annals of Renouard, must be consulted. These two
works are necessary to the collector, who will otherwise be deceived by
the misleading assertions of the booksellers. As a rule, the volumes
published in the lifetime of Aldus Manutius are the most esteemed, and of
these the Aristotle, the first Homer, the Virgil, and the Ovid, are
perhaps most in demand. The earlier Aldines are consulted almost as
studiously as MSS. by modern editors of the classics.

Just as the house of Aldus waned and expired, that of the great Dutch
printers, the Elzevirs, began obscurely enough at Leyden in 1583. The
Elzevirs were not, like Aldus, ripe scholars and men of devotion to
learning. Aldus laboured for the love of noble studies; the Elzevirs
were acute, and too often “smart” men of business. The founder of the
family was Louis (born at Louvain, 1540, died 1617). But it was in the
second and third generations that Bonaventura and Abraham Elzevir began
to publish at Leyden, their editions in small duodecimo. Like Aldus,
these Elzevirs aimed at producing books at once handy, cheap, correct,
and beautiful in execution. Their adventure was a complete success. The
Elzevirs did not, like Aldus, surround themselves with the most learned
scholars of their time. Their famous literary adviser, Heinsius, was
full of literary jealousies, and kept students of his own calibre at a
distance. The classical editions of the Elzevirs, beautiful, but too
small in type for modern eyes, are anything but exquisitely correct.
Their editions of the contemporary. French authors, now classics
themselves, are lovely examples of skill in practical enterprise. The
Elzevirs treated the French authors much as American publishers treat
Englishmen. They stole right and left, but no one complained much in
these times of slack copyright; and, at all events, the piratic larcenous
publications of the Dutch printers were pretty, and so far satisfactory.
They themselves, in turn, were the victims of fraudulent and
untradesmanlike imitations. It is for this, among other reasons, that
the collector of Elzevirs must make M. Willems’s book (“Les Elzevier,”
Brussels and Paris, 1880) his constant study. Differences so minute that
they escape the unpractised eye, denote editions of most various value.
In Elzevirs a line’s breadth of margin is often worth a hundred pounds,
and a misprint is quoted at no less a sum. The fantastic caprice of
bibliophiles has revelled in the bibliography of these Dutch editions.
They are at present very scarce in England, where a change in fashion
some years ago had made them common enough. No Elzevir is valuable
unless it be clean and large in the margins. When these conditions are
satisfied the question of rarity comes in, and Remy Belleau’s Macaronic
poem, or “Le Pastissier Français,” may rise to the price of four or five
hundred pounds. A Rabelais, Molière, or Corneille, of a “good” edition,
is now more in request than the once adored “Imitatio Christi”
(dateless), or the “Virgil”’ of 1646, which is full of gross errors of
the press, but is esteemed for red characters in the letter to Augustus,
and another passage at page 92. The ordinary marks of the Elzevirs were
the sphere, the old hermit, the Athena, the eagle, and the burning
faggot. But all little old books marked with spheres are not Elzevirs,
as many booksellers suppose. Other printers also stole the designs for
the tops of chapters, the Aegipan, the Siren, the head of Medusa, the
crossed sceptres, and the rest. In some cases the Elzevirs published
their books, especially when they were piracies, anonymously. When they
published for the Jansenists, they allowed their clients to put fantastic
pseudonyms on the title pages. But, except in four cases, they had only
two pseudonyms used on the titles of books published by and for
themselves. These disguises are “Jean Sambix” for Jean and Daniel
Elzevir, at Leyden, and for the Elzevirs of Amsterdam, “Jacques le
Jeune.” The last of the great representatives of the house, Daniel, died
at Amsterdam, 1680. Abraham, an unworthy scion, struggled on at Leyden
till 1712. The family still prospers, but no longer prints, in Holland.
It is common to add duodecimos of Foppens, Wolfgang, and other printers,
to the collections of the Elzevirs. The books of Wolfgang have the sign
of the fox robbing a wild bee’s nest, with the motto _Quaerendo_.

_Curious and singular books_ are the next in our classification. The
category is too large. The books that be “curious” (not in the
booksellers’ sense of “prurient” and “disgusting,”) are innumerable. All
suppressed and condemned books, from “Les Fleurs du Mal” to Vanini’s
“Amphitheatrum,” or the English translation of Bruno’s “Spaccia della
Bestia Trionfante,” are more or less rare, and more or less curious.
Wild books, like William Postel’s “Three Marvellous Triumphs of Women,”
are “curious.” Freakish books, like macaronic poetry, written in a
medley of languages, are curious. Books from private presses are
singular. The old English poets and satirists turned out many a book
curious to the last degree, and priced at a fantastic value. Such are
“Jordan’s Jewels of Ingenuity,” “Micro-cynicon, six Snarling Satyres”
(1599), and the “Treatize made of a Galaunt,” printed by Wynkyn de Worde,
and found pasted into the fly-leaf, on the oak-board binding of an
imperfect volume of Pynson’s “Statutes.” All our early English poems and
miscellanies are curious; and, as relics of delightful singers, are most
charming possessions. Such are the “Songes and Sonnettes of Surrey”
(1557), the “Paradyce of daynty Deuices” (1576), the “Small Handful of
Fragrant Flowers,” and “The Handful of Dainty Delights, gathered out of
the lovely Garden of Sacred Scripture, fit for any worshipful Gentlewoman
to smell unto,” (1584). “The Teares of Ireland” (1642), are said, though
one would not expect it, to be “extremely rare,” and, therefore,
precious. But there is no end to the list of such desirable rarities.
If we add to them all books coveted as early editions, and, therefore, as
relics of great writers, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Milton, Sterne, Walton, and
the rest, we might easily fill a book with remarks on this topic alone.
The collection of such editions is the most respectable, the most useful,
and, alas, the most expensive of the amateur’s pursuits. It is curious
enough that the early editions of Swift, Scott, and Byron, are little
sought for, if not wholly neglected; while early copies of Shelley,
Tennyson, and Keats, have a great price set on their heads. The quartoes
of Shakespeare, like first editions of Racine, are out of the reach of
any but very opulent purchasers, or unusually lucky, fortunate
book-hunters. Before leaving the topic of books which derive their value
from the taste and fantasy of collectors, it must be remarked that, in
this matter, the fashion of the world changes. Dr. Dibdin lamented,
seventy years ago, the waning respect paid to certain editions of the
classics. He would find that things have become worse now, and modern
German editions, on execrable paper, have supplanted his old favourites.
Fifty years ago, M. Brunet expressed his contempt for the designs of
Boucher; now they are at the top of the fashion. The study of old
booksellers’ catalogues is full of instruction as to the changes of
caprice. The collection of Dr. Rawlinson was sold in 1756. “The Vision
of Pierce Plowman” (1561), and the “Creede of Pierce Plowman” (1553),
brought between them no more than three shillings and sixpence. Eleven
shillings were paid for the “Boke of Chivalrie” by Caxton. The “Boke of
St. Albans,” by Wynkyn de Worde, cost £ 1: 1s., and this was the highest
sum paid for any one of two hundred rare pieces of early English
literature. In 1764, a copy of the “Hypnerotomachia” was sold for two
shillings, “A Pettie Pallace of Pettie his Pleasures,” (ah, what a
thought for the amateur!) went for three shillings, while “Palmerin of
England” (1602), attained no more than the paltry sum of fourteen
shillings. When Osborne sold the Harley collection, the scarcest old
English books fetched but three or four shillings. If the wandering Jew
had been a collector in the last century he might have turned a pretty
profit by selling his old English books in this age of ours. In old
French, too, Ahasuerus would have done a good stroke of business, for the
prices brought by old Villons, Romances of the Rose, “Les Marguerites de
Marguerite,” and so forth, at the M’Carthy sale, were truly pitiable. A
hundred years hence the original editions of Thackeray, or of Miss
Greenaway’s Christmas books, or “Modern Painters,” may be the ruling
passion, and Aldines and Elzevirs, black letter and French vignettes may
all be despised. A book which is commonplace in our century is curious
in the next, and disregarded in that which follows. Old books of a
heretical character were treasures once, rare unholy possessions. Now we
have seen so many heretics that the world is indifferent to the
audacities of Bruno, and the veiled impieties of Vanini.

The last of our categories of books much sought by the collector includes
all volumes valued for their ancient bindings, for the mark and stamp of
famous amateurs. The French, who have supplied the world with so many
eminent binders,—as Eve, Padeloup, Duseuil, Le Gascon, Derome, Simier,
Bozérian, Thouvenin, Trautz-Bauzonnet, and Lortic—are the chief patrons
of books in historical bindings. In England an historical binding, a
book of Laud’s, or James’s, or Garrick’s, or even of Queen Elizabeth’s,
does not seem to derive much added charm from its associations. But, in
France, peculiar bindings are now the objects most in demand among
collectors. The series of books thus rendered precious begins with those
of Maioli and of Grolier (1479–1565), remarkable for their mottoes and
the geometrical patterns on the covers. Then comes De Thou (who had
three sets of arms), with his blazon, the bees stamped on the morocco.
The volumes of Marguerite of Angoulême are sprinkled with golden daisies.
Diane de Poictiers had her crescents and her bow, and the initial of her
royal lover was intertwined with her own. The three daughters of Louis
XV. had each their favourite colour, and their books wear liveries of
citron, red, and olive morocco. The Abbé Cotin, the original of
Molière’s Trissotin, stamped his books with intertwined C’s. Henri III.
preferred religious emblems, and sepulchral mottoes—skulls, crossbones,
tears, and the insignia of the Passion. _Mort m’est vie_ is a favourite
device of the effeminate and voluptuous prince. Molière himself was a
collector, _il n’es pas de bouquin qui s’échappe de ses mains_,—“never an
old book escapes him,” says the author of “La Guerre Comique,” the last
of the pamphlets which flew from side to side in the great literary
squabble about “L’École des Femmes.” M. Soulié has found a rough
catalogue of Molière’s library, but the books, except a little Elzevir,
have disappeared. {7} Madame de Maintenon was fond of bindings. Mr.
Toovey possesses a copy of a devotional work in red morocco, tooled and
gilt, which she presented to a friendly abbess. The books at Saint-Cyr
were stamped with a crowned cross, besprent with _fleurs-de-lys_. The
books of the later collectors—Longepierre, the translator of Bion and
Moschus; D’Hoym the diplomatist; McCarthy, and La Vallière, are all
valued at a rate which seems fair game for satire.

Among the most interesting bibliophiles of the eighteenth century is
Madame Du Barry. In 1771, this notorious beauty could scarcely read or
write. She had rooms, however, in the Château de Versailles, thanks to
the kindness of a monarch who admired those native qualities which
education may polish, but which it can never confer. At Versailles,
Madame Du Barry heard of the literary genius of Madame de Pompadour. The
Pompadour was a person of taste. Her large library of some four thousand
works of the lightest sort of light literature was bound by Biziaux. Mr.
Toovey possesses the Brantôme of this _dame galante_. Madame herself had
published etchings by her own fair hands; and to hear of these things
excited the emulation of Madame Du Barry. She might not be _clever_, but
she could have a library like another, if libraries were in fashion. One
day Madame Du Barry astonished the Court by announcing that her
collection of books would presently arrive at Versailles. Meantime she
took counsel with a bookseller, who bought up examples of all the cheap
“remainders,” as they are called in the trade, that he could lay his
hands upon. The whole assortment, about one thousand volumes in all, was
hastily bound in rose morocco, elegantly gilt, and stamped with the arms
of the noble house of Du Barry. The bill which Madame Du Barry owed her
enterprising agent is still in existence. The thousand volumes cost
about three francs each; the binding (extremely cheap) came to nearly as
much. The amusing thing is that the bookseller, in the catalogue which
he sent with the improvised library, marked the books which Madame Du
Barry possessed _before_ her large order was so punctually executed.
There were two “Mémoires de Du Barry,” an old newspaper, two or three
plays, and “L’Historie Amoureuse de Pierre le Long.” Louis XV. observed
with pride that, though Madame Pompadour had possessed a larger library,
that of Madame Du Barry was the better selected. Thanks to her new
collection, the lady learned to read with fluency, but she never overcame
the difficulties of spelling.

A lady collector who loved books not very well perhaps, but certainly not
wisely, was the unhappy Marie Antoinette. The controversy in France
about the private character of the Queen has been as acrimonious as the
Scotch discussion about Mary Stuart. Evidence, good and bad, letters as
apocryphal as the letters of the famous “casket,” have been produced on
both sides. A few years ago, under the empire, M. Louis Lacour found a
manuscript catalogue of the books in the Queen’s _boudoir_. They were
all novels of the flimsiest sort,—“L’Amitié Dangereuse,” “Les Suites d’un
Moment d’Erreur,” and even the stories of Louvet and of Rétif de la
Bretonne. These volumes all bore the letters “C. T.” (Château de
Trianon), and during the Revolution they were scattered among the various
public libraries of Paris. The Queen’s more important library was at the
Tuileries, but at Versailles she had only three books, as the
commissioners of the Convention found, when they made an inventory of the
property of _la femme Capet_. Among the three was the “Gerusalemme
Liberata,” printed, with eighty exquisite designs by Cochin, at the
expense of “Monsieur,” afterwards Louis XVIII. Books with the arms of
Marie Antoinette are very rare in private collections; in sales they are
as much sought after as those of Madame Du Barry.

With these illustrations of the kind of interest that belongs to books of
old collectors, we may close this chapter. The reader has before him a
list, with examples, of the kinds of books at present most in vogue among
amateurs. He must judge for himself whether he will follow the fashion,
by aid either of a long purse or of patient research, or whether he will
find out new paths for himself. A scholar is rarely a rich man. He
cannot compete with plutocrats who buy by deputy. But, if he pursues the
works he really needs, he may make a valuable collection. He cannot go
far wrong while he brings together the books that he finds most congenial
to his own taste and most useful to his own studies. Here, then, in the
words of the old “sentiment,” I bid him farewell, and wish “success to
his inclinations, provided they are virtuous.” There is a set of
collectors, alas! whose inclinations are not virtuous. The most famous
of them, a Frenchman, observed that his own collection of bad books was
unique. That of an English rival, he admitted, was respectable,—“_mais
milord se livre à des autres préoccupations_!” He thought a collector’s
whole heart should be with his treasures.

* * * * *

En bouquinant se trouve grand soulas.
Soubent m’en vay musant, à petis pas,
Au long des quais, pour flairer maint bieux livre.
Des Elzevier la Sphere me rend yure,
Et la Sirène aussi m’esmeut. Grand cas
Fais-je d’Estienne, Aide, ou Dolet. Mais Ias!
Le vieux Caxton ne se rencontre pas,
Plus qu’ agneau d’or parmi jetons de cuivre,
En bouquinant!

Pour tout plaisir que l’on goute icy-bas
La Grace a Dieu. Mieux vaut, sans altercas,
Chasser bouquin: Nul mal n’en peult s’ensuivre.
Dr sus au livre: il est le grand appas.
Clair est le ciel. Amis, qui veut me suivre
En bouquinant?

A. L.

[Picture: Group of Children. Drawn by Kate Greenaway; engraved by O.
Lacour]

CHAPTER IV.
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS {123}

[Picture: Highly decorative letter M, first letter of Modern] ODERN
English book-illustration—to which the present chapter is restricted—has
no long or doubtful history, since to find its first beginnings, it is
needless to go farther back than the last quarter of the eighteenth
century. Not that “illustrated” books of a certain class were by any
means unknown before that period. On the contrary, for many years
previously, literature had boasted its “sculptures” of be-wigged and
be-laurelled “worthies,” its “prospects” and “land-skips,” its phenomenal
monsters and its “curious antiques.” But, despite the couplet in the
“Dunciad” respecting books where

“ . . . the pictures for the page atone,
And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own;”—

illustrations, in which the designer attempted the actual delineation of
scenes or occurrences in the text, were certainly not common when Pope
wrote, nor were they for some time afterwards either very numerous or
very noteworthy. There are Hogarth’s engravings to “Hudibras” and “Don
Quixote;” there are the designs of his crony Frank Hayman to Theobald’s
“Shakespeare,” to Milton, to Pope, to Cervantes; there are Pine’s
“Horace” and Sturt’s “Prayer-Book” (in both of which text and ornament
were alike engraved); there are the historical and topographical drawings
of Sandby, Wale, and others; and yet—notwithstanding all these—it is with
Bewick’s cuts to Gay’s “Fables” in 1779, and Stothard’s plates to
Harrison’s “Novelist’s Magazine” in 1780, that book-illustration by
imaginative compositions really begins to flourish in England. Those
little masterpieces of the Newcastle artist brought about a revival of
wood-engraving which continues to this day; but engraving upon metal, as
a means of decorating books, practically came to an end with the
“Annuals” of thirty years ago. It will therefore be well to speak first
of illustrations upon copper and steel.

* * * * *

Stothard, Blake, and Flaxman are the names that come freshest to memory
in this connection. For a period of fifty years Stothard stands
pre-eminent in illustrated literature. Measuring time by poets, he may
be said to have lent something of his fancy and amenity to most of the
writers from Cowper to Rogers. As a draughtsman he is undoubtedly weak:
his figures are often limp and invertebrate, and his type of beauty
insipid. Still, regarded as groups, the majority of his designs are
exquisite, and he possessed one all-pervading and un-English quality—the
quality of grace. This is his dominant note. Nothing can be more
seductive than the suave flow of his line, his feeling for costume, his
gentle and chastened humour. Many of his women and children are models
of purity and innocence. But he works at ease only within the limits of
his special powers; he is happier in the pastoral and domestic than the
heroic and supernatural, and his style is better fitted to the formal
salutations of “Clarissa” and “Sir Charles Grandison,” than the rough
horse-play of “Peregrine Pickle.” Where Rowlandson would have revelled,
Stothard would be awkward and constrained; where Blake would give us a
new sensation, Stothard would be poor and mechanical. Nevertheless the
gifts he possessed were thoroughly recognised in his own day, and brought
him, if not riches, at least competence and honour. It is said that more
than three thousand of his drawings have been engraved, and they are
scattered through a hundred publications. Those to the “Pilgrim’s
Progress” and the poems of Rogers are commonly spoken of as his best,
though he never excelled some of the old-fashioned plates (with their
pretty borders in the style of Gravelot and the Frenchmen) to
Richardson’s novels, and such forgotten “classics” as “Joe Thompson”,
“Jessamy,” “Betsy Thoughtless,” and one or two others in Harrison’s very
miscellaneous collection.

Stothard was fortunate in his engravers. Besides James Heath, his best
interpreter, Schiavonetti, Sharp, Finden, the Cookes, Bartolozzi, most of
the fashionable translators into copper were busily employed upon his
inventions. Among the rest was an artist of powers far greater than his
own, although scarcely so happy in turning them to profitable account.
The genius of William Blake was not a marketable commodity in the same
way as Stothard’s talent. The one caught the trick of the time with his
facile elegance; the other scorned to make any concessions, either in
conception or execution, to the mere popularity of prettiness.

“Give pensions to the learned pig,
Or the hare playing on a tabor;
Anglus can never see perfection
But in the journeyman’s labour,”—

he wrote in one of those rough-hewn and bitter epigrams of his. Yet the
work that was then so lukewarmly received—if, indeed, it can be said to
have been received at all—is at present far more sought after than
Stothard’s, and the prices now given for the “Songs of Innocence and
Experience,” the “Inventions to the Book of Job,” and even “The Grave,”
would have brought affluence to the struggling artist, who (as Cromek
taunted him) was frequently “reduced so low as to be obliged to live on
half a guinea a week.” Not that this was entirely the fault of his
contemporaries. Blake was a visionary, and an untuneable man; and, like
others who work for the select public of all ages, he could not always
escape the consequence that the select public of his own, however
willing, were scarcely numerous enough to support him. His most
individual works are the “Songs of Innocence,” 1789, and the “Songs of
Experience,” 1794. These, afterwards united in one volume, were unique
in their method of production; indeed, they do not perhaps strictly come
within the category of what is generally understood to be copperplate
engraving. The drawings were outlined and the songs written upon the
metal with some liquid that resisted the action of acid, and the
remainder of the surface of the plate was eaten away with _aqua-fortis_,
leaving the design in bold relief, like a rude stereotype. This was then
printed off in the predominant tone—blue, brown, or yellow, as the case
might be—and delicately tinted by the artist in a prismatic and ethereal
fashion peculiarly his own. Stitched and bound in boards by Mrs. Blake,
a certain number of these leaflets—twenty-seven in the case of the first
issue—made up a tiny _octavo_ of a wholly exceptional kind. Words indeed
fail to exactly describe the flower-like beauty—the fascination of these
“fairy missals,” in which, it has been finely said, “the thrilling music
of the verse, and the gentle bedazzlement of the lines and colours so
intermingle, that the mind hangs in a pleasant uncertainty as to whether
it is a picture that is singing, or a song which has newly budded and
blossomed into colour and form.” The accompanying woodcut, after one of
the illustrations to the “Songs of Innocence,” gives some indication of
the general composition, but it can convey no hint of the gorgeous
purple, and crimson, and orange of the original.

[Picture: “Infant Joy.” From Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” 1789.
Engraved by J. F. Jungling]

Of the “Illustrations to the Book of Job,” 1826, there are excellent
reduced facsimiles by the recently-discovered photo-intaglio process, in
the new edition of Gilchrist’s “Life.” The originals were engraved by
Blake himself in his strong decisive fashion, and they are his best work.
A kind of _deisidaimonia_—a sacred awe—falls upon one in turning over
these wonderful productions of the artist’s declining years and failing
hand.

“Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new,”

sings Waller; and it is almost possible to believe for a moment that
their creator was (as he said) “under the direction of messengers from
Heaven.” But his designs for Blair’s “Grave,” 1808, popularised by the
burin of Schiavonetti, attracted greater attention at the time of
publication; and, being less rare, they are even now perhaps better known
than the others. The facsimile here given is from the latter book. The
worn old man, the trustful woman, and the guileless child are sleeping
peacefully; but the king with his sceptre, and the warrior with his hand
on his sword-hilt, lie open-eyed, waiting the summons of the trumpet.
One cannot help fancying that the artist’s long vigils among the Abbey
tombs, during his apprenticeship to James Basire, must have been present
to his mind when he selected this impressive monumental subject.

[Picture: “Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother and Child, in the Tomb.”
From Blair’s “Grave,” 1808. Designed by William Blake; facsimiled on
wood from the engraving by Louis Schiavonetti]

To one of Blake’s few friends—to the “dear Sculptor of Eternity,” as he
wrote to Flaxman from Felpham—the world is indebted for some notable book
illustrations. Whether the greatest writers—the Homers, the
Shakespeares, the Dantes—can ever be “illustrated” without loss may
fairly be questioned. At all events, the showy dexterities of the Dorés
and Gilberts prove nothing to the contrary. But now and then there comes
to the graphic interpretation of a great author an artist either so
reverential, or so strongly sympathetic at some given point, that, in
default of any relation more narrowly intimate, we at once accept his
conceptions as the best attainable. In this class are Flaxman’s outlines
to Homer and Æschylus. Flaxman was not a Hellenist as men are Hellenists
to-day. Nevertheless, his Roman studies had saturated him with the
spirit of antique beauty, and by his grand knowledge of the nude, his
calm, his restraint, he is such an illustrator of Homer as is not likely
to arise again. For who—with all our added knowledge of classical
antiquity—who, of our modern artists, could hope to rival such thoroughly
Greek compositions as the ball-play of Nausicaa in the “Odyssey,” or that
lovely group from Æschylus of the tender-hearted, womanly Oceanides,
cowering like flowers beaten by the storm under the terrible anger of
Zeus? In our day Flaxman’s drawings would have been reproduced by some
of the modern facsimile processes, and the gain would have been great.
As it is, something is lost by their transference to copper, even though
the translators be Piroli and Blake. Blake, in fact, did more than he is
usually credited with, for (beside the acknowledged and later “Hesiod,”
1817) he really engraved the whole of the “Odyssey,” Piroli’s plates
having been lost on the voyage to England. The name of the Roman artist,
nevertheless, appears on the title-page (1793). But Blake was too
original to be a successful copyist of other men’s work, and to
appreciate the full value of Flaxman’s drawings, they should be studied
in the collections at University College, the Royal Academy, and
elsewhere. {9}

Flaxman and Blake had few imitators. But a host of clever designers,
such as Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Westall, Uwins, Smirke, Burney,
Corbould, Dodd, and others, vied with the popular Stothard in
“embellishing” the endless “Poets,” “novelists,” and “essayists” of our
forefathers. Some of these, and most of the recognised artists of the
period, lent their aid to that boldly-planned but unhappily-executed
“Shakespeare” of Boydell,—“black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum
Northcotes, straddling Fuselis,” as Thackeray calls it. They are
certainly not enlivening—those cumbrous “atlas” _folios_ of 1803–5, and
they helped to ruin the worthy alderman. Even courtly Sir Joshua is
clearly ill at ease among the pushing Hamiltons and Mortimers; and, were
it not for the whimsical discovery that Westall’s “Ghost of Cæsar”
strangely resembles Mr. Gladstone, there would be no resting-place for
the modern student of these dismal masterpieces. The truth is, Reynolds
excepted, there were no contemporary painters strong enough for the task,
and the honours of the enterprise belong almost exclusively to Smirke’s
“Seven Ages” and one or two plates from the lighter comedies. The great
“Bible” of Macklin, a rival and even more incongruous publication, upon
which some of the same designers were employed, has fallen into completer
oblivion. A rather better fate attended another book of this class,
which, although belonging to a later period, may be briefly referred to
here. The “Milton” of John Martin has distinct individuality, and some
of the needful qualities of imagination. Nevertheless, posterity has
practically decided that scenic grandeur and sombre effects alone are not
a sufficient pictorial equipment for the varied story of “Paradise Lost.”

It is to Boydell of the Shakespeare gallery that we owe the “Liber
Veritatis” of Claude, engraved by Richard Earlom; and indirectly, since
rivalry of Claude prompted the attempt, the famous “Liber Studiorum” of
Turner. Neither of these, however—which, like the “Rivers of France” and
the “Picturesque Views in England and Wales” of the latter artist, are
collections of engravings rather than illustrated books—belongs to the
present purpose. But Turner’s name may fitly serve to introduce those
once familiar “Annuals” and “Keepsakes,” that, beginning in 1823 with
Ackermann’s “Forget-me-Not,” enjoyed a popularity of more than thirty
years. Their general characteristics have been pleasantly satirised in
Thackeray’s account of the elegant miscellany of Bacon the publisher, to
which Mr. Arthur Pendennis contributed his pretty poem of “The Church
Porch.” His editress, it will be remembered, was the Lady Violet Lebas,
and his colleagues the Honourable Percy Popjoy, Lord Dodo, and the gifted
Bedwin Sands, whose “Eastern Ghazuls” lent so special a distinction to
the volume in watered-silk binding. The talented authors, it is true,
were in most cases under the disadvantage of having to write to the
plates of the talented artists, a practice which even now is not extinct,
though it is scarcely considered favourable to literary merit. And the
real “Annuals” were no exception to the rule. As a matter of fact, their
general literary merit was not obtrusive, although, of course, they
sometimes contained work which afterwards became famous. They are now so
completely forgotten and out of date, that one scarcely expects to find
that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Macaulay, and Southey, were among the
occasional contributors. Lamb’s beautiful “Album verses” appeared in the
“Bijou,” Scott’s “Bonnie Dundee” in the “Christmas Box,” and Tennyson’s
“St. Agnes’ Eve” in the “Keepsake.” But the plates were, after all, the
leading attraction. These, prepared for the most part under the
superintendence of the younger Heath, and executed on the steel which by
this time had supplanted the old “coppers,” were supplied by, or were
“after,” almost every contemporary artist of note. Stothard, now growing
old and past his prime, Turner, Etty, Stanfield, Leslie, Roberts, Danby,
Maclise, Lawrence, Cattermole, and numbers of others, found profitable
labour in this fashionable field until 1856, when the last of the
“Annuals” disappeared, driven from the market by the rapid development of
wood engraving. About a million, it is roughly estimated, was squandered
in producing them.

In connection with the “Annuals” must be mentioned two illustrated books
which were in all probability suggested by them—the “Poems” and “Italy”
of Rogers. The designs to these are chiefly by Turner and Stothard,
although there are a few by Prout and others. Stothard’s have been
already referred to; Turner’s are almost universally held to be the most
successful of his many vignettes. It has been truly said—in a recent
excellent life of this artist {10}—that it would be difficult to find in
the whole of his works two really greater than the “Alps at Daybreak,”
and the “Datur Hora Quieti,” in the former of these volumes. Almost
equally beautiful are the “Valombré Falls” and “Tornaro’s misty brow.”
Of the “Italy” set Mr. Ruskin writes:—“They are entirely exquisite;
poetical in the highest and purest sense, exemplary and delightful beyond
all praise.” To such words it is not possible to add much. But it is
pretty clear that the poetical vitality of Rogers was secured by these
well-timed illustrations, over which he is admitted by his nephew Mr.
Sharpe to have spent about £7000, and far larger sums have been named by
good authorities. The artist received from fifteen to twenty guineas for
each of the drawings; the engravers (Goodall, Miller, Wallis, Smith, and
others), sixty guineas a plate. The “Poems” and the “Italy,” in the
original issues of 1830 and 1834, are still precious to collectors, and
are likely to remain so. Turner also illustrated Scott, Milton,
Campbell, and Byron; but this series of designs has not received equal
commendation from his greatest eulogist, who declares them to be “much
more laboured, and more or less artificial and unequal.” Among the
numerous imitations directly induced by the Rogers books was the “Lyrics
of the Heart,” by Alaric Attila Watts, a forgotten versifier and sometime
editor of “Annuals,” but it did not meet with similar success.

Many illustrated works, originating in the perfection and opportunities
of engraving on metal, are necessarily unnoticed in this rapid summary.
As far, however, as book-illustration is concerned, copper and steel
plate engraving may be held to have gone out of fashion with the
“Annuals.” It is still, indeed, to be found lingering in that mine of
modern art-books—the “Art Journal;” and, not so very long ago, it made a
sumptuous and fugitive reappearance in Doré’s “Idylls of the King,”
Birket Foster’s “Hood,” and one or two other imposing volumes. But it
was badly injured by modern wood-engraving; it has since been crippled
for life by photography; and it is more than probable that the present
rapid rise of modern etching will give it the _coup de grace_. {11}

By the end of the seventeenth century the art of engraving on wood had
fallen into disuse. Writing _circa_ 1770, Horace Walpole goes so far as
to say that it “never was executed in any perfection in England;” and,
speaking afterwards of Papillon’s “Traité de la Gravure,” 1766, he takes
occasion to doubt if that author would ever “persuade the world to return
to wooden cuts.” Nevertheless, with Bewick, a few years later,
wood-engraving took a fresh departure so conspicuous that it amounts to a
revival. In what this consisted it is clearly impossible to show here
with any sufficiency of detail; but between the method of the old
wood-cutters who reproduced the drawings of Dürer, and the method of the
Newcastle artist, there are two marked and well-defined differences. One
of these is a difference in the preparation of the wood and the tool
employed. The old wood-cutters carved their designs with knives and
chisels on strips of wood sawn lengthwise—that is to say, upon the
_plank_; Bewick used a graver, and worked upon slices of box or pear cut
across the grain,—that is to say upon the _end_ of the wood. The other
difference, of which Bewick is said to have been the inventor, is less
easy to describe. It consisted in the employment of what is technically
known as “white line.” In all antecedent wood-cutting the cutter had
simply cleared away those portions of the block left bare by the design,
so that the design remained in relief to be printed from like type.
Using the smooth box block as a uniform surface from which, if covered
with printing ink, a uniformly black impression might be obtained,
Bewick, by cutting white lines across it at greater or lesser intervals,
produced gradations of shade, from the absolute black of the block to the
lightest tints. The general result of this method was to give a greater
depth of colouring and variety to the engraving, but its advantages may
perhaps be best understood by a glance at the background of the
“Woodcock” on the following page.

Bewick’s first work of any importance was the Gay’s “Fables” of 1779. In
1784 he did another series of “Select Fables.” Neither of these books,
however, can be compared with the “General History of Quadrupeds,” 1790,
and the “British Land and Water Birds,” 1797 and 1804. The illustrations
to the “Quadrupeds” are in many instances excellent, and large additions
were made to them in subsequent issues. But in this collection Bewick
laboured to a great extent under the disadvantage of representing animals
with which he was familiar only through the medium of stuffed specimens
or incorrect drawings. In the “British Birds,” on the contrary, his
facilities for study from the life were greater, and his success was
consequently more complete. Indeed, it may be safely affirmed that of
all the engravers of the present century, none have excelled Bewick for
beauty of black and white, for skilful rendering of plumage and foliage,
and for fidelity of detail and accessory. The “Woodcock” (here given),
the “Partridge,” the “Owl,” the “Yellow-Hammer,” the “Yellow-Bunting,”
the “Willow-Wren,” are popular examples of these qualities. But there
are a hundred others nearly as good.

[Picture: “The Woodcock.” From Jackson & Chatto’s “History of
Wood-Engraving,” 1839. Engraved, after T. Bewick, by John Jackson]

Among sundry conventional decorations after the old German fashion in the
first edition of the “Quadrupeds,” there are a fair number of those
famous tail-pieces which, to a good many people, constitute Bewick’s
chief claim to immortality. That it is not easy to imitate them is plain
from the failure of Branston’s attempts, and from the inferior character
of those by John Thompson in Yarrell’s “Fishes.” The genius of Bewick
was, in fact, entirely individual and particular. He had the humour of a
Hogarth in little, as well as some of his special
characteristics,—notably his faculty of telling a story by suggestive
detail. An instance may be taken at random from vol. I. of the “Birds.”
A man, whose wig and hat have fallen off, lies asleep with open mouth
under some bushes. He is manifestly drunk, and the date “4 June,” on a
neighbouring stone, gives us the reason and occasion of his catastrophe.
He has been too loyally celebrating the birthday of his majesty King
George III. Another of Bewick’s gifts is his wonderful skill in
foreshadowing a tragedy. Take as an example, this truly appalling
incident from the “Quadrupeds.” The tottering child, whose nurse is seen
in the background, has strayed into the meadow, and is pulling at the
tail of a vicious-looking colt, with back-turned eye and lifted heel.
Down the garden-steps the mother hurries headlong; but she can hardly be
in time. And of all this—sufficient, one would say, for a fairly-sized
canvas—the artist has managed to give a vivid impression in a block of
three inches by two! Then, again, like Hogarth once more, he rejoices in
multiplications of dilemma. What, for instance, can be more comically
pathetic than the head-piece to the “Contents” in vol. I. of the “Birds”?
The old horse has been seized with an invincible fit of stubbornness.
The day is both windy and rainy. The rider has broken his stick and lost
his hat; but he is too much encumbered with his cackling and excited
stock to dare to dismount. Nothing can help him but a _Deus ex
machinâ_,—of whom there is no sign.

[Picture: Tailpiece. From the same. Engraved, after T. Bewick, by John
Jackson]

Besides his humour, Bewick has a delightfully rustic side, of which
Hogarth gives but little indication. From the starved ewe in the snow
nibbling forlornly at a worn-out broom, to the cow which has broken
through the rail to reach the running water, there are numberless designs
which reveal that faithful lover of the field and hillside, who, as he
said, “would rather be herding sheep on Mickle bank top” than remain in
London to be made premier of England. He loved the country and the
country-life; and he drew them as one who loved them. It is this rural
quality which helps to give such a lasting freshness to his quaint and
picturesque fancies; and it is this which will continue to preserve their
popularity, even if they should cease to be valued for their wealth of
whimsical invention.

In referring to these masterpieces of Bewick’s, it must not be forgotten
that he had the aid of some clever assistants. His younger brother John
was not without talent, as is clear from his work for Somervile’s
“Chace,” 1796, and that highly edifying book, the “Blossoms of Morality.”
Many of the tail-pieces to the “Water Birds” were designed by Robert
Johnson, who also did most of the illustrations to Bewick’s “Fables” of
1818, which were engraved by Temple and Harvey, two other pupils.
Another pupil was Charlton Nesbit, an excellent engraver, who was
employed upon the “Birds,” and did good work in Ackermann’s “Religious
Emblems” of 1808, and the second series of Northcote’s “Fables.” But by
far the largest portion of the tail-pieces in the second volume of the
“Birds” was engraved by Luke Clennell, a very skilful but unfortunate
artist, who ultimately became insane. To him we owe the woodcuts, after
Stothard’s charming sketches, to the Rogers volume of 1810, an edition
preceding those already mentioned as illustrated with steel-plates, and
containing some of the artist’s happiest pictures of children and
_amorini_. Many of these little groups would make admirable designs for
gems, if indeed they are not already derived from them, since one at
least is an obvious copy of a well-known sardonyx—(“The Marriage of Cupid
and Psyche.”) This volume, generally known by the name of the
“Firebrand” edition, is highly prized by collectors; and, as intelligent
renderings of pen and ink, there is little better than these engravings
of Clennell’s. {12} Finally, among others of Bewick’s pupils, must be
mentioned William Harvey, who survived to 1866. It has been already
stated that he engraved part of the illustrations to Bewick’s “Fables,”
but his best known block is the large one of Haydon’s “Death of
Dentatus.” Soon after this he relinquished wood-engraving in favour of
design, and for a long period was one of the most fertile and popular of
book-illustrators. His style, however, is unpleasantly mannered; and it
is sufficient to make mention of his masterpiece, the “Arabian Nights” of
Lane, the illustrations to which, produced under the supervision of the
translator, are said to be so accurate as to give the appropriate turbans
for every hour of the day. They show considerable freedom of invention
and a large fund of Orientalism.

[Picture: Headpiece. From Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory, with other
Poems,” 1810. Drawn by T. Stothard; engraved, after Luke Clennell, by O.
Lacour]

Harvey came to London in 1817; Clennell had preceded him by some years;
and Nesbit lived there for a considerable time. What distinguishes these
pupils of Bewick especially is, that they were artists as well as
engravers, capable of producing the designs they engraved. The “London
School” of engravers, on the contrary, were mostly engravers, who
depended upon others for their designs. The foremost of these was Robert
Branston, a skilful renderer of human figures and indoor scenes. He
worked in rivalry with Bewick and Nesbit; but he excelled neither, while
he fell far behind the former. John Thompson, one of the very best of
modern English engravers on wood, was Branston’s pupil. His range was of
the widest, and he succeeded as well in engraving fishes and birds for
Yarrell and Walton’s “Angler,” as in illustrations to Molière and
“Hudibras.” He was, besides, a clever draughtsman, though he worked
chiefly from the designs of Thurston and others. One of the most
successful of his illustrated books is the “Vicar of Wakefield,” after
Mulready, whose simplicity and homely feeling were well suited to
Goldsmith’s style. Another excellent engraver of this date is Samuel
Williams. There is an edition of Thomson’s “Seasons,” with cuts both
drawn and engraved by him, which is well worthy of attention, and (like
Thompson and Branston) he was very skilful in reproducing the designs of
Cruikshank. Some of his best work in this way is to be found in Clarke’s
“Three Courses and a Dessert,” published by Vizetelly in 1830.

From this time forth, however, one hears less of the engraver and more of
the artist. The establishment of the “Penny Magazine” in 1832, and the
multifarious publications of Charles Knight, gave an extraordinary
impetus to wood-engraving. Ten years later came “Punch,” and the
“Illustrated London News,” which further increased its popularity.
Artists of eminence began to draw on or for the block, as they had drawn,
and were still drawing, for the “Annuals.” In 1842–6 was issued the
great “Abbotsford” edition of the “Waverley Novels,” which, besides 120
plates, contained nearly 2000 wood-engravings; and with the “Book of
British Ballads,” 1843, edited by Mr. S. C. Hall, arose that long series
of illustrated Christmas books, which gradually supplanted the “Annuals,”
and made familiar the names of Gilbert, Birket Foster, Harrison Weir,
John Absolon, and a crowd of others. The poems of Longfellow,
Montgomery, Burns, “Barry Cornwall,” Poe, Miss Ingelow, were all
successively “illustrated.” Besides these, there were numerous
selections, such as Willmott’s “Poets of the Nineteenth Century,” Wills’s
“Poets’ Wit and Humour,” and so forth. But the field here grows too wide
to be dealt with in detail, and it is impossible to do more than mention
a few of the books most prominent for merit or originality. Amongst
these there is the “Shakespeare” of Sir John Gilbert. Regarded as an
interpretative edition of the great dramatist, this is little more than a
brilliant _tour de force_; but it is nevertheless infinitely superior to
the earlier efforts of Kenny Meadows in 1843, and also to the fancy
designs of Harvey in Knight’s “Pictorial Shakespeare.” The “Illustrated
Tennyson” of 1858 is also a remarkable production. The Laureate, almost
more than any other, requires a variety of illustrators; and here, for
his idylls, he had Mulready and Millais, and for his romances Rossetti
and Holman Hunt. His “Princess” was afterwards illustrated by Maclise,
and his “Enoch Arden” by Arthur Hughes; but neither of these can be said
to be wholly adequate. The “Lalla Rookh” of John Tenniel, 1860, albeit
somewhat stiff and cold, after this artist’s fashion, is a superb
collection of carefully studied oriental designs. With these may be
classed the illustrations to Aytoun’s “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,”
by Sir Noel Paton, which have the same finished qualities of composition
and the same academic hardness. Several good editions of the “Pilgrim’s
Progress” have appeared,—notably those of C. H. Bennett, J. D. Watson,
and G. H. Thomas. Other books are Millais’s “Parables of our Lord,”
Leighton’s “Romola,” Walker’s “Philip” and “Denis Duval,” the “Don
Quixote,” “Dante,” “La Fontaine” and other works of Doré, Dalziel’s
“Arabian Nights,” Leighton’s “Lyra Germanica” and “Moral Emblems,” and
the “Spiritual Conceits” of W. Harry Rogers. These are some only of the
number, which does not include books like Mrs. Hugh Blackburn’s “British
Birds,” Wolf’s “Wild Animals,” Wise’s “New Forest,” Linton’s “Lake
Country,” Wood’s “Natural History,” and many more. Nor does it take in
the various illustrated periodicals which have multiplied so freely
since, in 1859, “Once a Week” first began to attract and train such
younger draughtsmen as Sandys, Lawless, Pinwell, Houghton, Morten, and
Paul Grey, some of whose best work in this way has been revived in the
edition of Thornbury’s “Ballads and Songs,” recently published by Chatto
and Windus. Ten years later came the “Graphic,” offering still wider
opportunities to wood-cut art, and bringing with it a fresh school of
artists. Herkomer, Fildes, Small, Green, Barnard, Barnes, Crane,
Caldecott, Hopkins, and others,—_quos nunc perscribere longum est_—have
contributed good work to this popular rival of the older, but still
vigorous, “Illustrated.” And now again, another promising serial, the
“Magazine of Art,” affords a supplementary field to modern refinements
and younger energies.

[Picture: “Golden head by golden head.” From Christina Rossetti’s
“Goblin Market and other Poems,” 1862. Drawn by D. G. Rossetti; engraved
by W. J. Linton]

Not a few of the artists named in the preceding paragraph have also
earned distinction in separate branches of the pictorial art, and
specially in that of humorous design,—a department which has always been
so richly recruited in this country that it deserves more than a passing
mention. From the days of Hogarth onwards there has been an almost
unbroken series of humorous draughtsmen, who, both on wood and metal,
play a distinguished part in our illustrated literature. Rowlandson, one
of the earliest, was a caricaturist of inexhaustible facility, and an
artist who scarcely did justice to his own powers. He illustrated
several books, but he is chiefly remembered in this way by his plates to
Combe’s “Three Tours of Dr. Syntax.” Gillray, his contemporary, whose
bias was political rather than social, is said to have illustrated “The
Deserted Village” in his youth; but he is not famous as a
book-illustrator. Another of the early men was Bunbury, whom
“quality”-loving Mr. Walpole calls “the second Hogarth, and first
imitator who ever fully equalled his original (!);” but whose prints to
“Tristram Shandy,” are nevertheless completely forgotten, while, if he be
remembered at all, it is by the plate of “The Long Minuet,” and the
vulgar “Directions to Bad Horsemen.” With the first years of the
century, however, appears the great master of modern humorists, whose
long life ended only a few years since, “the veteran George
Cruikshank”—as his admirers were wont to style him. He indeed may justly
be compared to Hogarth, since, in tragic power and intensity he
occasionally comes nearer to him than any artist of our time. It is
manifestly impossible to mention here all the more important efforts of
this indefatigable worker, from those far-away days when he caricatured
“Boney” and championed Queen Caroline, to that final frontispiece for
“The Rose and the Lily”—“designed and etched (according to the
inscription) by George Cruikshank, age 83;” but the plates to the “Points
of Humour,” to Grimm’s “Goblins,” to “Oliver Twist,” “Jack Sheppard,”
Maxwell’s “Irish Rebellion,” and the “Table Book,” are sufficiently
favourable and varied specimens of his skill with the needle, while the
woodcuts to “Three Courses and a Dessert,” one of which is here given,
are equally good examples of his work on the block. The “Triumph of
Cupid,” which begins the “Table Book,” is an excellent instance of his
lavish wealth of fancy, and it contains beside, one—nay more than one—of
the many portraits of the artist. He is shown _en robe de chambre_,
smoking (this was before his regenerate days!) in front of a blazing
fire, with a pet spaniel on his knee. In the cloud which curls from his
lips is a motley procession of sailors, sweeps, jockeys, Greenwich
pensioners, Jew clothesmen, flunkies, and others more illustrious,
chained to the chariot wheels of Cupid, who, preceded by cherubic
acolytes and banner-bearers, winds round the top of the picture towards
an altar of Hymen on the table. When, by the aid of a pocket-glass, one
has mastered these swarming figures, as well as those in the foreground,
it gradually dawns upon one that all the furniture is strangely
vitalised. Masks laugh round the border of the tablecloth, the markings
of the mantelpiece resolve themselves into rows of madly-racing figures,
the tongs leers in a _degagé_ and cavalier way at the artist, the shovel
and poker grin in sympathy; there are faces in the smoke, in the fire, in
the fireplace,—the very fender itself is a ring of fantastic creatures
who jubilantly hem in the ashes. And it is not only in the grotesque and
fanciful that Cruikshank excels; he is master of the strange, the
supernatural, and the terrible. In range of character (the comparison is
probably a hackneyed one), both by his gifts and his limitations, he
resembles Dickens; and had he illustrated more of that writer’s works the
resemblance would probably have been more evident. In “Oliver Twist,”
for example, where Dickens is strong, Cruikshank is strong; where Dickens
is weak, he is weak too. His Fagin, his Bill Sikes, his Bumble, and
their following, are on a level with Dickens’s conceptions; his Monk and
Rose Maylie are as poor as the originals. But as the defects of Dickens
are overbalanced by his merits, so Cruikshank’s strength is far in excess
of his weakness. It is not to his melodramatic heroes or wasp-waisted
heroines that we must look for his triumphs; it is to his delineations,
from the moralist’s point of view, of vulgarity and vice,—of the “rank
life of towns,” with all its squalid tragedy and comedy. Here he finds
his strongest ground, and possibly, notwithstanding his powers as a comic
artist and caricaturist, his loftiest claim to recollection.

[Picture: “The Deaf Post-Boy.” From Clarke’s “Three Courses and a
Dessert,” 1830. Drawn by G. Cruikshank; engraved by S. Williams [?]]

Cruikshank was employed on two only of Dickens’s books—“Oliver Twist” and
the “Sketches by Boz.” {13} The great majority of them were illustrated
by Hablot K. Browne, an artist who followed the ill-fated Seymour on the
“Pickwick Papers.” To “Phiz,” as he is popularly called, we are indebted
for our pictorial ideas of Sam Weller, Mrs. Gamp, Captain Cuttle, and
most of the author’s characters, down to the “Tale of Two Cities.”
“Phiz” also illustrated a great many of Lever’s novels, for which his
skill in hunting and other Lever-like scenes especially qualified him.

With the name of Richard Doyle we come to the first of a group of artists
whose main work was, or is still, done for the time-honoured miscellany
of Mr. Punch. So familiar an object is “Punch” upon our tables, that one
is sometimes apt to forget how unfailing, and how good on the whole, is
the work we take so complacently as a matter of course. And of this good
work, in the earlier days, a large proportion was done by Mr. Doyle. He
is still living, although he has long ceased to gladden those sprightly
pages. But it was to “Punch” that he contributed his masterpiece, the
“Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe,” a series of outlines illustrating
social life in 1849, and cleverly commented by a shadowy “Mr. Pips,” a
sort of fetch or double of the bustling and garrulous old Caroline
diarist. In these captivating pictures the life of thirty years ago is
indeed, as the title-page has it, “drawn from ye quick.” We see the
Molesworths and Cantilupes of the day parading the Park; we watch
Brougham fretting at a hearing in the Lords, or Peel holding forth to the
Commons (where the Irish members are already obstructive); we squeeze in
at the Haymarket to listen to Jenny Lind, or we run down the river to
Greenwich Fair, and visit “Mr. Richardson, his show.” Many years after,
in the “Bird’s Eye Views of Society,” which appeared in the early numbers
of the “Cornhill Magazine,” Mr. Doyle returned to this attractive theme.
But the later designs were more elaborate, and not equally fortunate.
They bear the same relationship to Mr. Pips’s pictorial chronicle, as the
laboured “Temperance Fairy Tales” of Cruikshank’s old age bear to the
little-worked Grimm’s “Goblins” of his youth. So hazardous is the
attempt to repeat an old success! Nevertheless, many of the initial
letters to the “Bird’s Eye Views” are in the artist’s best and most
frolicsome manner. “The Foreign Tour of Brown, Jones, and Robinson” is
another of his happy thoughts for “Punch;” and some of his most popular
designs are to be found in Thackeray’s “Newcomes,” where his satire and
fancy seem thoroughly suited to his text. He has also illustrated
Locker’s well-known “London Lyrics,” Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River,”
and Hughes’s “Scouring of the White Horse,” from which last the initial
at the beginning of this chapter has been borrowed. His latest important
effort was the series of drawings called “In Fairy Land,” to which Mr.
William Allingham contributed the verses.

In speaking of the “Newcomes,” one is reminded that its illustrious
author was himself a “Punch” artist, and would probably have been a
designer alone, had it not been decreed “that he should paint in colours
which will never crack and never need restoration.” Everyone knows the
story of the rejected illustrator of “Pickwick,” whom that and other
rebuffs drove permanently to letters. To his death, however, he clung
fondly to his pencil. In _technique_ he never attained to certainty or
strength, and his genius was too quick and creative—perhaps also too
desultory—for finished work, while he was always indifferent to costume
and accessory. But many of his sketches for “Vanity Fair,” for
“Pendennis,” for “The Virginians,” for “The Rose and the Ring,” the
Christmas books, and the posthumously published “Orphan of Pimlico,” have
a vigour of impromptu, and a happy suggestiveness which is better than
correct drawing. Often the realisation is almost photographic. Look,
for example, at the portrait in “Pendennis” of the dilapidated Major as
he crawls downstairs in the dawn after the ball at Gaunt House, and then
listen to the inimitable context: “That admirable and devoted Major above
all,—who had been for hours by Lady Clavering’s side ministering to her
and feeding her body with everything that was nice, and her ear with
everything that was sweet and flattering—oh! what an object he was! The
rings round his eyes were of the colour of bistre; those orbs themselves
were like the plovers’ eggs whereof Lady Clavering and Blanche had each
tasted; the wrinkles in his old face were furrowed in deep gashes; and a
silver stubble, _like an elderly morning dew_, was glittering on his
chin, and alongside the dyed whiskers, now limp and out of curl.” A good
deal of this—that fine touch in italics especially—could not possibly be
rendered in black and white, and yet how much is indicated, and how
thoroughly the whole is felt! One turns to the woodcut from the words,
and back again to the words from the woodcut with ever-increasing
gratification. Then again, Thackeray’s little initial letters are
charmingly arch and playful. They seem to throw a shy side-light upon
the text, giving, as it were, an additional and confidential hint of the
working of the author’s mind. To those who, with the present writer,
love every tiny scratch and quirk and flourish of the Master’s hand,
these small but priceless memorials are far beyond the frigid appraising
of academics and schools of art.

After Doyle and Thackeray come a couple of well-known artists—John Leech
and John Tenniel. The latter still lives (may he long live!) to delight
and instruct us. Of the former, whose genial and manly “Pictures of Life
and Character” are in every home where good-humoured raillery is prized
and appreciated, it is scarcely necessary to speak. Who does not
remember the splendid languid swells, the bright-eyed rosy girls (“with
no nonsense about them!”) in pork pie hats and crinolines, the
superlative “Jeames’s,” the hairy “Mossoos,” the music-grinding Italian
desperadoes whom their kind creator hated so? And then the intrepidity
of “Mr. Briggs,” the Roman rule of “Paterfamilias,” the vagaries of the
“Rising Generation!” There are things in this gallery over which the
severest misanthrope must chuckle—they are simply irresistible. Let any
one take, say that smallest sketch of the hapless mortal who has turned
on the hot water in the bath and cannot turn it off again, and see if he
is able to restrain his laughter. In this one gift of producing instant
mirth Leech is almost alone. It would be easy to assail his manner and
his skill, but for sheer fun, for the invention of downright humorous
situation, he is unapproached, except by Cruikshank. He did a few
illustrations to Dickens’s Christmas books; but his best-known
book-illustrations properly so called are to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the
“Comic Histories” of A’Beckett, the “Little Tour in Ireland,” and certain
sporting novels by the late Mr. Surtees. Tenniel now confines himself
almost exclusively to the weekly cartoons with which his name is
popularly associated. But years ago he used to invent the most daintily
fanciful initial letters; and many of his admirers prefer the
serio-grotesque designs of “Punch’s Pocket-Book,” “Alice in Wonderland,”
and “Through the Looking-Glass,” to the always correctly-drawn but
sometimes stiffly-conceived cartoons. What, for example, could be more
delightful than the picture, in “Alice in Wonderland,” of the “Mad Tea
Party?” Observe the hopelessly distraught expression of the March hare,
and the eager incoherence of the hatter! A little further on the pair
are trying to squeeze the dormouse into the teapot; and a few pages back
the blue caterpillar is discovered smoking his hookah on the top of a
mushroom. He was exactly three inches long, says the veracious
chronicle, but what a dignity!—what an oriental flexibility of gesture!
Speaking of animals, it must not be forgotten that Tenniel is a master in
this line. His “British Lion,” in particular, is a most imposing
quadruped, and so often in request that it is not necessary to go back to
the famous cartoons on the Indian mutiny to seek for examples of that
magnificent presence. As a specimen of the artist’s treatment of the
lesser _felidæ_, the reader’s attention is invited to this charming
little kitten from “Through the Looking-Glass.”

[Picture: “The Mad Tea-Party.” From “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,”
1865. Drawn by John Tenniel; engraved by Dalziel Brothers]

[Picture: Black Kitten. From “Through the Looking-Glass,” 1871. Drawn
by John Tenniel; engraved by Dalziel Brothers] Mr. Tenniel is a link
between Leech and the younger school of “Punch” artists, of whom Mr.
George du Maurier, Mr. Linley Sambourne, and Mr. Charles Keene are the
most illustrious. The first is nearly as popular as Leech, and is
certainly a greater favourite with cultivated audiences. He is not so
much a humorist as a satirist of the Thackeray type,—unsparing in his
denunciation of shams, affectations, and flimsy pretences of all kinds.
A master of composition and accomplished draughtsman, he excels in the
delineation of “society”—its bishops, its “professional beauties” and
“æsthetes,” its _nouveaux riches_, its distinguished foreigners,—while
now and then (but not too often) he lets us know that if he chose he
could be equally happy in depicting the lowest classes. There was a
bar-room scene not long ago in “Punch” which gave the clearest evidence
of this. Some of those for whom no good thing is good enough complain,
it is said, that he lacks variety—that he is too constant to one type of
feminine beauty. But any one who will be at the pains to study a group
of conventional “society” faces from any of his “At Homes” or “Musical
Parties” will speedily discover that they are really very subtly
diversified and contrasted. For a case in point, take the decorously
sympathetic group round the sensitive German musician, who is “veeping”
over one of his own compositions. Or follow the titter running round
that amused assembly to whom the tenor warbler is singing “Me-e-e-et me
once again,” with such passionate emphasis that the domestic cat mistakes
it for a well-known area cry. As for his ladies, it may perhaps be
conceded that his type is a little persistent. Still it is a type so
refined, so graceful, so attractive altogether, that in the jarring of
less well-favoured realities it is an advantage to have it always before
our eyes as a standard to which we can appeal. Mr. du Maurier is a
fertile book-illustrator, whose hand is frequently seen in the
“Cornhill,” and elsewhere. Some of his best work of this kind is in
Douglas Jerrold’s “Story of a Feather,” in Thackeray’s “Ballads,” and the
large edition of the “Ingoldsby Legends,” to which Leech, Tenniel, and
Cruikshank also contributed. One of his prettiest compositions is the
group here reproduced from “Punch’s Almanack” for 1877. The talent of
his colleague, Mr. Linley Sambourne, may fairly be styled unique. It is
difficult to compare it with anything in its way, except some of the
happier efforts of the late Mr. Charles Bennett, to which, nevertheless,
it is greatly superior in execution. To this clever artist’s invention
everything seems to present itself with a train of fantastic accessory so
whimsically inexhaustible that it almost overpowers one with its
prodigality. Each fresh examination of his designs discloses something
overlooked or unexpected. Let the reader study for a moment the famous
“Birds of a Feather” of 1875, or that ingenious skit of 1877 upon the
rival Grosvenor Gallery and Academy, in which the late President of the
latter is shown as the proudest of peacocks, the eyes of whose tail are
portraits of Royal Academicians, and whose body-feathers are paint
brushes and shillings of admission. Mr. Sambourne is excellent, too, at
adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than happy parodies of
Herrman’s “À Bout d’Arguments,” and “Une Bonne Histoire.” His
book-illustrations have been comparatively few, those to Burnand’s
laughable burlesque of “Sandford and Merton” being among the best.
Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon Kingsley’s “Water
Babies,” a subject which might almost be supposed to have been created
for his pencil. There are indications, it may be added, that Mr.
Sambourne’s talents are by no means limited to the domain in which for
the present he chooses to exercise them, and it is not impossible that he
may hereafter take high rank as a cartoonist. Mr. Charles Keene, a
selection from whose sketches has recently been issued under the title of
“Our People,” is unrivalled in certain _bourgeois_, military, and
provincial types. No one can draw a volunteer, a monthly nurse, a
Scotchman, an “ancient mariner” of the watering-place species, with such
absolutely humorous verisimilitude. Personages, too, in whose eyes—to
use Mr. Swiveller’s euphemism—“the sun has shone too strongly,” find in
Mr. Keene a merciless satirist of their “pleasant vices.” Like Leech, he
has also a remarkable power of indicating a landscape background with the
fewest possible touches. His book-illustrations have been mainly
confined to magazines and novels. Those in “Once a Week” to a “Good
Fight,” the tale subsequently elaborated by Charles Reade into the
“Cloister and the Hearth,” present some good specimens of his earlier
work. One of these, in which the dwarf of the story is seen climbing up
a wall with a lantern at his back, will probably be remembered by many.

[Picture: “The Music of the Past.” From “Punch’s Almanack,” 1877. Drawn
by George du Maurier; engraved by Swain]

[Picture: Lion and Tub. From “Punch’s Pocket-Book,” 1879. Drawn by
Linley Sambourne; engraved by Swain]

After the “Punch” school there are other lesser luminaries. Mr. W. S.
Gilbert’s drawings to his own inimitable “Bab Ballads” have a perverse
drollery which is quite in keeping with that erratic text. Mr. F.
Barnard, whose exceptional talents have not been sufficiently recognised,
is a master of certain phases of strongly marked character, and, like Mr.
Charles Green, has contributed some excellent sketches to the “Household
Edition” of Dickens. Mr. Sullivan of “Fun,” whose grotesque studies of
the “British Tradesman” and “Workman” have recently been republished, has
abounding _vis comica_, but he has hitherto done little in the way of
illustrating books. For minute pictorial stocktaking and photographic
retention of detail, Mr. Sullivan’s artistic memory may almost be
compared to the wonderful literary memory of Mr. Sala. Mr. John Proctor,
who some years ago (in “Will o’ the Wisp”) seemed likely to rival Tenniel
as a cartoonist, has not been very active in this way; while Mr. Matthew
Morgan, the clever artist of the “Tomahawk,” has transferred his services
to the United States. Of Mr. Bowcher of “Judy,” and various other
professedly humorous designers, space permits no further mention.

* * * * *

There remains, however, one popular branch of book-illustration, which
has attracted the talents of some of the most skilful and original of
modern draughtsmen, i.e. the embellishment of children’s books. From the
days when Mulready drew the old “Butterfly’s Ball” and “Peacock at Home”
of our youth, to those of the delightfully Blake-like fancies of E. V.
B., whose “Child’s Play” has recently been re-published for the
delectation of a new generation of admirers, this has always been a
popular and profitable employment; but of late years it has been raised
to the level of a fine art. Mr. H. S. Marks, Mr. J. D. Watson, Mr.
Walter Crane, have produced specimens of nursery literature which, for
refinement of colouring and beauty of ornament, cannot easily be
surpassed. The equipments of the last named, especially, are of a very
high order. He began as a landscapist on wood; he now chiefly devotes
himself to the figure; and he seems to have the decorative art at his
fingers’ ends as a natural gift. Such work as “King Luckieboy’s Party”
was a revelation in the way of toy books, while the “Baby’s Opera” and
“Baby’s Bouquet” are _petits chefs d’oeuvre_, of which the sagacious
collector will do well to secure copies, not for his nursery, but his
library. Nor can his “Mrs. Mundi at Home” be neglected by the curious in
quaint and graceful invention. {14} Another book—the “Under the Window”
of Miss Kate Greenaway—comes within the same category. Since Stothard,
no one has given us such a clear-eyed, soft-faced, happy-hearted
childhood; or so poetically “apprehended” the coy reticences, the
simplicities, and the small solemnities of little people. Added to this,
the old-world costume in which she usually elects to clothe her
characters, lends an arch piquancy of contrast to their innocent rites
and ceremonies. Her taste in tinting, too, is very sweet and
spring-like; and there is a fresh, pure fragrance about all her pictures
as of new-gathered nosegays; or, perhaps, looking to the fashions that
she favours, it would be better to say “bow-pots.” But the latest “good
genius” of this branch of book-illustrating is Mr. Randolph Caldecott, a
designer assuredly of the very first order. There is a spontaneity of
fun, an unforced invention about everything he does, that is infinitely
entertaining. Other artists draw to amuse us; Mr. Caldecott seems to
draw to amuse himself,—and this is his charm. One feels that he must
have chuckled inwardly as he puffed the cheeks of his “Jovial Huntsmen;”
or sketched that inimitably complacent dog in the “House that Jack
Built;” or exhibited the exploits of the immortal “train-band captain” of
“famous London town.” This last is his masterpiece. Cowper himself must
have rejoiced at it,—and Lady Austen. There are two sketches in this
book—they occupy the concluding pages—which are especially fascinating.
On one, John Gilpin, in a forlorn and flaccid condition, is helped into
the house by the sympathising (and very attractive) Betty; on the other
he has donned his slippers, refreshed his inner man with a cordial, and
over the heaving shoulder of his “spouse,” who lies dissolved upon his
martial bosom, he is taking the spectators into his confidence with a
wink worthy of the late Mr. Buckstone. Nothing more genuine, more
heartily laughable, than this set of designs has appeared in our day.
And Mr. Caldecott has few limitations. Not only does he draw human
nature admirably, but he draws animals and landscapes equally well, so
one may praise him without reserve. Though not children’s books, mention
should here be made of his “Bracebridge Hall,” and “Old Christmas,” the
illustrations to which are the nearest approach to that _beau-ideal_,
perfect sympathy between the artist and the author, with which the writer
is acquainted. The cut on page 173 is from the former of these works.

[Picture: Boy and Hippocampus. From Miss E. Keary’s “Magic Valley,”
1877. Drawn by “E. V. B.” (Hon. Mrs. Boyle); engraved by T. Quartley]

[Picture: “Love Charms.” From Irving’s “Bracebridge Hall,” 1876. Drawn
by Randolph Caldecott; engraved by J. D. Cooper]

* * * * *

Many of the books above mentioned are printed in colours by various
processes, and they are not always engraved on wood. But—to close the
account of modern wood-engraving—some brief reference must be made to
what is styled the “new American School,” as exhibited for the most part
in “Scribner’s” and other Transatlantic magazines. Authorities, it is
reported, shake their heads over these performances. “_C’est magnifique_,
_mais ce nest pas la gravure_,” they whisper. Into the matter in
dispute, it is perhaps presumptuous for an “atechnic” to adventure
himself. But to the outsider it would certainly seem as if the chief
ground of complaint is that the new comers do not play the game according
to the old rules, and that this (alleged) irregular mode of procedure
tends to lessen the status of the engraver as an artist. False or true,
this, it may fairly be advanced, has nothing whatever to do with the
matter, as far, at least, as the public are concerned. For them the
question is, simply and solely—What is the result obtained? The new
school, availing themselves largely of the assistance of photography, are
able to dispense, in a great measure, with the old tedious method of
drawing on the block, and to leave the artist to choose what medium he
prefers for his design—be it oil, water-colour, or black and
white—concerning themselves only to reproduce its characteristics on the
wood. This is, of course, a deviation from the method of Bewick. But
would Bewick have adhered to his method in these days? Even in his last
hours he was seeking for new processes. What we want is to get nearest
to the artist himself with the least amount of interpretation or
intermediation on the part of the engraver. Is engraving on copper to be
reproduced, we want a facsimile if possible, and not a rendering into
something which is supposed to be the orthodox utterance of
wood-engraving. Take, for example, the copy of Schiavonetti’s engraving
of Blake’s _Death’s Door_ in “Scribner’s Magazine” for June 1880, or the
cut from the same source at page 131 of this book. These are faithful
line for line transcriptions, as far as wood can give them, of the
original copper-plates; and, this being the case, it is not to be
wondered at that the public, who, for a few pence can have practical
facsimiles of Blake, of Cruikshank, or of Whistler, are loud in their
appreciation of the “new American School.” Nor are its successes
confined to reproduction in facsimile. Those who look at the exquisite
illustrations, in the same periodical, to the “Tile Club at Play,” to
Roe’s “Success with Small Fruits,” and Harris’s “Insects Injurious to
Vegetation,”—to say nothing of the selected specimens in the recently
issued “Portfolios”—will see that the latest comers can hold their own on
all fields with any school that has gone before. {15}

Besides copperplate and wood, there are many processes which have been
and are still employed for book-illustrations, although the brief limits
of this chapter make any account of them impossible. Lithography was at
one time very popular, and, in books like Roberts’s “Holy Land,”
exceedingly effective. The “Etching Club” issued a number of books
_circa_ 1841–52; and most of the work of “Phiz” and Cruikshank was done
with the needle. It is probable that, as we have already seen, the
impetus given to modern etching by Messrs. Hamerton, Seymour Haden, and
Whistler, will lead to a specific revival of etching as a means of
book-illustration. Already beautiful etchings have for some time
appeared in “L’Art,” the “Portfolio,” and the “Etcher;” and at least one
book of poems has been entirely illustrated in this way,—the poems of Mr.
W. Bell Scott. For reproducing old engravings, maps, drawings, and the
like, it is not too much to say that we shall never get anything much
closer than the facsimiles of M. Amand-Durand and the Typographic Etching
and Autotype Companies. But further improvements will probably have to
be made before these can compete commercially with wood-engraving as
practised by the “new American School.”

“Of making many books,” ’twais said,
“There is no end;” and who thereon
The ever-running ink doth shed
But probes the words of Solomon:
Wherefore we now, for colophon,
From London’s city drear and dark,
In the year Eighteen Eight-One,
Reprint them at the press of Clark.

A. D.

FOOTNOTES

{1} This is the technical name for people who “illustrate” books with
engravings from other works. The practice became popular when Granger
published his “Biographical History of England.”

{2} Mr. William Blades, in his “Enemies of Books” (Trübner, 1880),
decries glass-doors,—“the absence of ventilation will assist the
formation of mould.” But M. Rouveyre bids us open the doors on sunny
days, that the air may be renewed, and, close them in the evening hours,
lest moths should enter and lay their eggs among the treasures. And,
with all deference to Mr. Blades, glass-doors do seem to be useful in
excluding dust.

{3} “Send him back carefully, for you can if you like, that all unharmed
he may return to his own place.”

{4} No wonder the books are scarce, if they are being hacked to pieces
by Grangerites.

{5} These lines appeared in “Notes and Queries,” Jan. 8, 1881.

{6} In the Golden Ass of Apuleius, which Polia should not have read.

{7} M. Arsène Houssaye seems to think he has found them; marked on the
fly-leaves with an impression, in wax, of a seal engraved with the head
of Epicurus.

{123} This chapter was written by Austin Dobson.—DP

{9} The recent Winter Exhibition of the Old Masters (1881) contained a
fine display of Flaxman’s drawings, a large number of which belonged to
Mr. F. T. Palgrave.

{10} By Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse.

{11} These words were written before the “Art Journal” had published its
programme for 1881. From this it appears that the present editor fully
recognises the necessity for calling in the assistance of the needle.

{12} The example, here copied on the wood by M. Lacour, is a very
successful reproduction of Clennell’s style.

{13} He also illustrated the “Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi.” But this was
simply “edited” by “Boz.”

{14} The reader will observe that this volume is indebted to Mr. Crane
for its beautiful frontispiece.

{15} Since this paragraph was first written an interesting paper on the
illustrations in “Scribner,” from the pen of Mr. J. Comyns Carr, has
appeared in “L’Art.”

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