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The Love Affairs Of A Bibliomaniac

by Eugene Field

February, 1996  [Etext #443]


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THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF A BIBLIOMANIAC



BY EUGENE FIELD



Introduction


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                  ``Fuge quo descendere gestis:
            Non erit emisso reditis tibi.''


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

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

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

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

                    ROSWELL MARTIN FIELD
Buena Park, December, 1895.


 The Chapters in this Book

MY FIRST LOVE
THE BIRTH OF A NEW PASSION
THE LUXURY OF READING IN BED
THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME
BALDNESS AND INTELLECTUALITY
MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA
THE DELIGHTS OF FENDER-FISHING
BALLADS AND THEIR MAKERS
BOOKSELLERS AND PRINTERS, OLD AND NEW
WHEN FANCHONETTE BEWITCHED ME
DIAGNOSIS OF THE BACILLUS LIBRORUM
THE PLEASURES OF EXTRA-ILLUSTRATION
ON THE ODORS WHICH MY BOOKS EXHALE
ELZEVIRS AND DIVERS OTHER MATTERS
A BOOK THAT BRINGS SOLACE AND CHEER
THE MALADY CALLED CATALOGITIS
THE NAPOLEONIC RENAISSANCE
MY WORKSHOP AND OTHERS
OUR DEBT TO MONKISH MEN




I

MY FIRST LOVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

               My Book and Heart
               Must never part.


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

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

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

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





 II

THE BIRTH OF A NEW PASSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





III

THE LUXURY OF READING IN BED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

``From Sophocles,''quoth the vain fellow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IV

THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





V

BALDNESS AND INTELLECTUALITY

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VI

MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Ah, Yseult! hadst thou but been a book!





VII

THE DELIGHTS OF FENDER-FISHING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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




VIII

BALLADS AND THEIR MAKERS

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IX

BOOKSELLERS AND PRINTERS, OLD AND NEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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





X

WHEN FANCHONETTE BEWITCHED ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

``You would make a better porter,'' said he.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


                    FRANCOIS VILLON

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

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

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

     .    .    .    .    .    .    .

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




XI

DIAGNOSIS OF THE BACILLUS LIBRORUM

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

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

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

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

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

``Sold?'' I cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reckless buyer.

The shrewd buyer.

The timid buyer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




XII

THE PLEASURES OF EXTRA-ILLUSTRATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

              MARCUS VARRO

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     My Book and Heart
     Must never part.

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

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




XIII

ON THE ODORS WHICH MY BOOKS EXHALE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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




XIV

ELZEVIRS AND DIVERS OTHER MATTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




XV

A BOOK THAT BRINGS SOLACE AND CHEER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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





 XVI

THE MALADY CALLED CATALOGITIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

``What, in plain terms,'' asked Judge Methuen, ``is
catalogitis?''

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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





 XVII

THE NAPOLEONIC RENAISSANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





 XVIII

MY WORKSHOP AND OTHERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same inquirer subsequently asked Dickens how he liked
Wordsworth.

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





 XIX

OUR DEBT TO MONKISH MEN

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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




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