The Book-Hunter Part 10

No--it is probable that, stored away in some forgotten repositories, these miscellaneous relics still remain; and should they be brought forth, some excitement might be created; for, ignorant as the monster was, he had an instinct for knowing what other people wanted, and was thus enabled to s.n.a.t.c.h rare and curious volumes from the grasp of systematic collectors. It was his great glory to get hold of a unique book and shut it up. There were known to be just two copies of a spare quarto called Rout upon Rout, or the Rabblers Rabbled, by Felix Nixon, Gent. He possessed one copy; the other, by indomitable perseverance, he also got hold of, and then his heart was glad within him; and he felt it glow with well-merited pride when an accomplished scholar, desiring to complete an epoch in literary history on which that book threw some light, besought the owner to allow him a sight of it, were it but for a few minutes, and the request was refused. "I might as well ask him,"

said the animal, who was rather proud of his firmness than ashamed of his churlishness, "to make me a present of his brains and reputation."

It was among his pleasant ways to attend book-sales, there to watch the biddings of persons on whose judgment he relied, and cut in as the contest was becoming critical. This practice soon betrayed to those he had so provoked the c.h.i.n.ks in the monster's armour. He was a.s.sailable and punishable at last, then, this potent tyrant--but the attack must be made warily and cautiously. Accordingly, impartial bystanders, ignorant of the plot, began to observe that he was degenerating by degrees in the rank of his purchases, and at last becoming utterly reckless, buying, at the prices of the sublimest rarities, common works of ordinary literature to be found in every book-shop. Such was the result of judiciously drawing him on, by biddings for valueless books, on the part of those whom he had outbid in the objects of their desire. Auctioneers were surprised at the gradual change coming over the book-market, and a few fortunate people obtained considerable prices for articles they were told to expect nothing for. But this farce, of course, did not last long; and whether or not he found out that he had been beaten at his own weapons, the devouring monster disappeared as mysteriously as he had come.

Reminiscences.

Such incidents bring vividly before the eye the scenes in which they took place long long ago. If any one in his early youth has experienced some slight symptoms of the malady under discussion, which his const.i.tution, through a tough struggle with the world, and a busy training in after life, has been enabled to throw off, he will yet look back with fond a.s.sociations to the scenes of his dangerous indulgence.

The auction-room is often the centre of fatal attraction towards it, just as the billiard-room and the _rouge-et-noir_ table are to excesses of another kind. There is that august tribunal over which at one time reigned Scott's genial friend Ballantyne, succeeded by the sententious Tait, himself a man of taste and a collector, and since presided over by the great Nisbet, whose hand has dropped the ensign of office even before the present lot has an opportunity of obtaining from it the crowning honour. I bow with deferential awe to the august tribunal before which so vast a ma.s.s of literature has changed hands, and where the future destinies of so many thousands--or, shall it be rather said, millions--of volumes have been decided, each carrying with it its own little train of suspense and triumph.

More congenial, however, in my recollection, is that remote and dingy hall where rough Carfrae, like Thor, flourished his thundering hammer.

There it was that one first marked, with a sort of sympathetic awe, the strange and varied influence of their peculiar maladies on the book-hunters of the last generation. There it was that one first handled those pretty little pets, the Elzevir cla.s.sics, a sort of literary bantams, which are still dear to memory, and awaken old a.s.sociations by their dwarfish ribbed backs like those of ponderous folios, and their exquisite, but now, alas! too minute type. The eyesight that could formerly peruse them with ease has suffered decay, but _they_ remain unchanged; and in this they are unlike to many other objects of early interest. Children, flowers, animals, scenery even, all have undergone mutation, but no perceptible shade of change has pa.s.sed over these little reminders of old times.

There it was that one first could comprehend how a tattered dirty fragment of a book once common might be worth a deal more than its weight in gold. There it was too, that, seduced by bad example, the present respected pastor of Ardsnischen purchased that beautiful Greek New Testament, by Jansen of Amsterdam, which he loved so, in the freshness of its acquisition, that he took it with him to church, and, turning up the text, handed it to a venerable woman beside him, after the fas.h.i.+on of an absorbed and absent student who was apt to forget whether he was reading Greek or English. The presiding genius of the place, with his strange accent, odd sayings, and angular motions, accompanied by good-natured grunts of grotesque wrath, became a sort of household figure. The dorsal breadth of p.r.o.nunciation with which he would expose Mr Ivory's Erskine, used to produce a t.i.tter which he was always at a loss to understand. Though not the fas.h.i.+onable mart where all the thorough libraries in perfect condition went to be hammered off--though it was rather a place where miscellaneous collections were sold, and therefore bargains might be expected by those who knew what they were about--yet sometimes extraordinary and valuable collections of rare books came under his hammer, and created an access of more than common excitement among the denizens of the place. On one of these occasions a succession of valuable fragments of early English poetry brought prices so high and far beyond those of ordinary expensive books in the finest condition, that it seemed as if their imperfections were their merit; and the auctioneer, momentarily carried off with this feeling, when the high prices began to sink a little, remonstrated thus, "Going so low as thirty s.h.i.+llings, gentlemen,--this curious book--so low as thirty s.h.i.+llings--and _quite imperfect_!"

Those who frequented this howf, being generally elderly men, have now nearly all departed. The thunderer's hammer, too, has long been silenced by the great quieter. One living memorial still exists of that scene--the genial and then youthful a.s.sistant, whose partiality for letters and literary pursuits made him often the monitor and kindly guide of the raw student, and who now, in a higher field, exercises a more important influence on the destinies of literature. I pa.s.sed the spot the other day--it was not desolate and forsaken, with the moss growing on the hearthstone; on the contrary, it flared with many lights--a thronged gin-palace. When one heard the sounds that issued from the old familiar spot, the reflection not unnaturally occurred that, after all, there are worse pursuits in the world than book-hunting.

Cla.s.sification.

Perhaps it would be a good practical distribution of the cla.s.s of persons under examination, to divide them into private prowlers and auction-hunters. There are many other modes of cla.s.sifying them, but none so general. They might be cla.s.sified by the different sizes of books they affect--as folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos--but this would be neither an expressive nor a dignified cla.s.sification. In enumerating the various orders to which Fitzpatrick Smart did _not_ belong, I have mentioned many of the species, but a great many more might be added. Some collectors lay themselves out for vellum-printed volumes almost solely. There are such not only among very old books, but among very new; for of a certain cla.s.s of modern books it frequently happens that a copy or two may be printed on vellum, to catch the cla.s.s whose weakness takes that direction.

It may be cited as a signal instance of the freaks of book-collecting, that of all men in the world Junot, the hard-fighting soldier, had a vellum library--but so it was. It was sold in London for about 1400.

"The crown octavos," says Dibdin, "especially of ancient cla.s.sics, and a few favourite English authors, brought from four to six guineas. The first virtually solid article of any importance, or rather of the greatest importance, in the whole collection, was the matchless Didot Horace, of 1799, folio, containing the original drawings from which the exquisite copperplate vignettes were executed. This was purchased by the gallant Mr George Hibbert for 140. Nor was it in any respect an extravagant or even dear purchase." It now worthily adorns the library of Norton Hall.

Some collectors may be styled Rubricists, being influenced by a sacred rage for books having the contents and marginal references printed in red ink. Some "go at" flowered capitals, others at broad margins. These have all a certain amount of magnificence in their tastes; but there are others again whose priceless collections are like the stock-in-trade of a wholesale ballad-singer, consisting of chap-books, as they are termed--the articles dealt in by pedlars and semi-mendicants for the past century or two. Some affect collections relating to the drama, and lay great store by heaps of play-bills arranged in volumes, and bound, perhaps, in costly russia. Of a more dignified grade are perhaps those who have lent themselves to the collection of the theses on which aspirants after university honours held their disputations or impugnments. Sometimes out of a great ma.s.s of rubbish of this kind the youthful production of some man who has afterwards become great turns up. Of these theses and similar tracts a German, Count Dietrich, collected some hundred and forty thousand, which are now in this country.

Those collectors whose affections are invested in the devices or trade emblems of special favourites among the old printers must not be pa.s.sed without a word of recognition.

Men who have had the opportunity of rummaging among old libraries in their boyhood are the most likely to cultivate pets of this kind. There is a rich variety of choice in the luxuriantly floral Gothic, the cold serene cla.s.sic, and that prolific style combining both, which a popular writer on the aesthetics of Art has stigmatised by the term "sensual,"

ordering all his votaries to abjure it accordingly. To intellects not far enough advanced to acknowledge the influence of such terms, or to comprehend their application to what we should or should not like and admire, there is a fortunate element even in their deficiencies. They can admire the devices of the old printers from a.s.sociation with the boyish days when they were first noticed, from an absolute liking for their fantastic fancies, and possibly from an observation in some of them of the indications of the gradual development of artistic purity and beauty. In many of them in which the child has seen only an attractive little picture, the man has afterwards found a touch of poetic or religious thought.

There is the hand pouring oil into a lamp of pure Etruscan shape, symbolical of the nutriment supplied to the intellectual flame. In another, the gardener carefully plants the seedlings which are to bear the fruit of knowledge to the coming generations; in another, the sun rising bright over the eastern sea signifies the dawn of the restoration of cla.s.sical learning to the European nations.

Other interpretations of the kind, called quaint conceits, can be read from these printers' devices. There is Gesner's Bibliotheca swarming with frogs and tadpoles like a quagmire in honour of its printer, a German Frog, latinised Christopherus Froshoverus. The _Quae Extant_ of Varro, printed at Dort, are adorned with many lively cuts of bears and their good-humoured cubs, because the printer's name is Joannis Berewout. So the Aulus Gellius, printed by Gryphius of Lyons, more than a hundred years earlier, begins and ends with formidable effigies of griffins. The device of Michael and Phillip Lenoir is a jet-black s.h.i.+eld, with an Ethiopian for crest, and Ethiopians for supporters; and Apiarius has a neat little cut representing a bear robbing a bee's nest in a hollow tree. Most instructive of them all, Ascensius has bequeathed to posterity the lively and accurate representation, down to every nail and screw, of the press in which the great works of the sixteenth century were printed, with the brawny pressman pulling his proof.

Collectors there have been, not unimportant for number and zeal, whose mission it is to purchase books marked by peculiar mistakes or errors of the press. The celebrated Elzevir Caesar of 1635 is known by this, that the number of the 149th page is misprinted 153. All that want this peculiar distinction are counterfeits. The little volume being, as Brunet says, "une des plus jolies et plus rares de la collection des Elsevier," gave a temptation to fraudulent imitators, who, as if by a providential arrangement for their detection, lapsed into accuracy at the critical figure. How common errors are in editions of the cla.s.sics, is attested by the one or two editions which claim a sort of canonisation as immaculate--as, for instance, the Virgil of Didot, and the Horace of Foulis. A collector, with a taste for the inaccurate, might easily satiate it in the editions so attractive in their deceptive beauty of the great Birmingham printer Baskerville.

The mere printers' blunders that have been committed upon editions of the Bible are reverenced in literary history; and one edition--the Vulgate issued under the authority of Sixtus V.--achieved immense value from its mult.i.tude of errors. The well-known story of the German printer's wife, who surrept.i.tiously altered the pa.s.sage importing that her husband should be her lord (Herr) so as to make him be her fool (Narr), needs confirmation. If such a misprint were found, it might quite naturally be attributed to carelessness. Valarian Flavigny, who had many controversies on his hand, brought on the most terrible of them all with Abraham Ecch.e.l.lensis by a mere dropped letter. In the rebuke about the mote in thy brother's eye and the beam in thine own, the first letter in the Latin for eye was carelessly dropped out, and left a word which may be found occasionally in Martial's Epigrams, but not in books of purer Latin and purer ideas.[29]

[Footnote 29: A traditional anecdote represents the Rev. William Thomson, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, as having got into a sc.r.a.pe by a very indecorous alteration of a word in Scripture. A young divine, on his first public appearance, had to read the solemn pa.s.sage in 1st Corinthians, "Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump." Thomson scratched the letter _c_ out of the word changed. The effect of the pa.s.sage so mutilated can easily be tested. The person who could play such tricks was ill suited for his profession, and being relieved of its restraints, he found a more congenial sphere of life among the unsettled crew of men of letters in London, over whom Smollett had just ceased to reign. He did a deal of hard work, and the world owes him at least one good turn in his translation of Cunningham's Latin History of Britain from the Revolution to the Hanover Succession. The value of this work, in the minute light thrown by it on one of the most memorable periods of British history, is too little known. The following extract may give some notion of the curious and instructive nature of this neglected book. It describes the influences which were in favour of the French alliance, and against the Whigs, during Marlborough's campaign. "And now I shall take this opportunity to speak of the French wine-drinkers as truly and briefly as I can. On the first breaking out of the Confederate war, the merchants in England were prohibited from all commerce with France, and a heavy duty was laid upon French wine. This caused a grievous complaint among the topers, who have great interest in the Parliament, as if they had been poisoned by port wines. Mr Portman Seymour, who was a jovial companion, and indulged his appet.i.tes, but otherwise a good man; General Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough's brother, a man of courage, but a lover of wine; Mr Pereira, a Jew and smell-feast, and other hard drinkers, declared, that the want of French wine was not to be endured, and that they could hardly bear up under so great a calamity. These were joined by Dr Aldridge, who, though nicknamed the priest of Bacchus, was otherwise an excellent man, and adorned with all kinds of learning. Dr Ratcliffe, a physician of great reputation, who ascribed the cause of all diseases to the want of French wines, though he was very rich, and much addicted to wine, yet, being extremely covetous, bought the cheaper wines; but at the same time he imputed the badness of his wine to the war, and the difficulty of getting better. Therefore the Duke of Beaufort and the Earl of Scarsdale, two young n.o.blemen of great interest among their acquaintance, who had it in their power to live at their ease in magnificence or luxury, merrily attributed all the doctor's complaints to his avarice. All those were also for peace rather than war. And all the bottle-companions, many physicians, and great numbers of the lawyers and inferior clergy, and, in fine, the loose women too, were united together in the faction against the Duke of Marlborough."--ii. 200.]

Questions as to typographical blunders in editions of the cla.s.sics are mixed up with larger critical inquiries into the purity of the ascertained text, and thus run in veins through the mighty strata of philological and critical controversy which, from the days of Poggio downwards, have continued to form that voluminous ma.s.s of learning which the outer world contemplates with silent awe.

To some extent the same spirit of critical inquiry has penetrated into our own language. What we have of it cl.u.s.ters almost exclusively around the mighty name of Shakespeare. Shakespearian criticism is a branch of knowledge by itself. To record its triumphs--from that greatest one by which the senseless "Table of Greenfield," which interrupted the touching close of Falstaff's days, was replaced by "'a babbled of green fields"--would make a large book of itself. He who would undertake it, in a perfectly candid and impartial spirit, would give us, varied no doubt with much erudition and acuteness, a curious record of blundering ignorance and presumptuous conceit, the one so intermingling with the other that it would be often difficult to distinguish them.[30]

[Footnote 30: Without venturing too near to this very turbulent arena, where hard words have lately been cast about with much reckless ferocity, I shall just offer one amended reading, because there is something in it quite peculiar, and characteristic of its literary birthplace beyond the Atlantic. The pa.s.sage operated upon is the wild soliloquy, where Hamlet resolves to try the test of the play, and says--

"The devil hath power T' a.s.sume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to d.a.m.n me."

The amended reading stands--

"As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me too--damme."]

The quant.i.ty of typographical errors exposed in those pages, where they are least to be expected, and are least excusable, opens up some curious considerations. It may surely be believed that, between the compositors who put the types together and the correctors of the press, the printing of the Bible has generally been executed with more than average care.

Yet the editions of the sacred book have been the great mine of discovered printers' blunders. The inference from this, however, is not that blunders abound less in other literature, but that they are not worth finding there. The issuing of the true reading of the Scripture is of such momentous consequence, that a mistake is sure of exposure, like those minute incidents of evidence which come forth when a murder has been committed, but would never have left their privacy for the detection of a petty fraud.

The value to literature of a pure Shakespearian text, has inspired the zeal of the detectives who work on this ground. Some casual detections have occurred in minor literature,--as, for instance, when Akenside's description of the Pantheon, which had been printed as "serenely great,"

was restored to "severely great." The reason, however, why such detections are not common in common books, is the rather humiliating one that they are not worth making. The specific weight of individual words is in them of so little influence, that one does as well as another.

Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to achieve--as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which the cunning of his hand cannot accomplish. Poetry in this way sometimes endures the most alarming oscillations without being in any way damaged, but, on the contrary, sometimes rather improved. I might refer to a signal instance of this, where, by some mysterious accident at press, the lines of a poem written in quatrains got their order inverted, so that the second and fourth of each quatrain changed places. This transposition was p.r.o.nounced to operate a decided improvement on the spirit and originality of the piece,--an opinion in which, unfortunately, the author did not concur; nor could he appreciate the compliment of a critic, who remarked that the experiment tested the soundness of the lines, which could find their feet whatever way they were thrown about.[31]

[Footnote 31: One curious service of printers' blunders, of a character quite distinct from their bibliological influence, is their use in detecting plagiarisms. It may seem strange that there should be any difficulty in critically determining the question, when the plagiarism is so close as to admit of this test; but there are pieces of very hard work in science, tables of reference, and the like, where, if two people go through the same work, they will come to the same conclusion. In such cases, the prior worker has sometimes identified his own by a blunder, as he would a stolen china vase by a crack. Peignot complains that some thirty or forty pages of his Dictionnaire Bibliographique were incorporated in the Siecles Litteraires de la France, "avec une exact.i.tude si admirable, qu'on y a precieus.e.m.e.nt conserve toutes les fautes typographiques."]

There have been, no doubt, cruel instances of printers' blunders in our own days, like the fate of the youthful poetess in the Fudge family:--

"When I talked of the dewdrops on freshly-blown roses, The nasty things printed it--freshly-blown noses."

Suchlike was the fatality which suddenly dried up the tears of those who read a certain pathetic ode, in which the desolate widow was printed as "dissolute;" and the accident which destroyed a poetic reputation by making the "pale martyr in his sheet of fire" come forward with "his s.h.i.+rt on fire." So also a certain printer, whose solemn duty it was to have announced to the world that "intoxication is folly," whether actuated by simplicity of soul or by malignity, was unable to resist the faint amendment which announced the more genial doctrine that "intoxication is jolly."[32]

[Footnote 32: See this and other cases in point set forth in an amusing article on "Literary Mishaps," in Hedderwick's Miscellany, part ii.]

A solid scholar there was, who, had he been called to his account at a certain advanced period of his career, might have challenged all the world to say that he had ever used a false quant.i.ty, or committed an anomaly in syntax, or misspelt a foreign name, or blundered in a quotation from a Greek or Latin cla.s.sic--to misquote an English author is a far lighter crime, but even to this he could have pleaded not guilty. He never made a mistake in a date, or left out a word in copying the t.i.tle-page of a volume; nor did he ever, in affording an intelligent a.n.a.lysis of its contents, mistake the number of pages devoted to one head. As to the higher literary virtues, too, his sentences were all carefully balanced in a pair of logical and rhetorical scales of the most sensitive kind; and he never perpetrated the atrocity of ending a sentence with a monosyllable, or using the same word twice within the same five lines, choosing always some judicious method of circ.u.mlocution to obviate reiteration. Poor man! in the pride of his unspotted purity, he little knew what a humiliation fate had prepared for him. It happened to him to have to state how Theodore Beza, or some contemporary of his, went to sea in a Candian vessel. This statement, at the last moment, when the sheet was going through the press, caught the eye of an intelligent and judicious corrector, more conversant with s.h.i.+pping-lists than with the literature of the sixteenth century, who saw clearly what had been meant, and took upon himself, like a man who hated all pottering nonsense, to make the necessary correction without consulting the author. The consequence was, that people read with some surprise, under the authority of the paragon of accuracy, that Theodore Beza had gone to sea in a _Canadian_ vessel. The victim of this calamity had undergone minor literary trials, which he had borne with philosophical equanimity; as, for instance, when inconsiderate people, dest.i.tute of the organ of veneration, thoughtlessly asked him about the last new popular work, as if it were something that he had read or even heard of, and actually went so far in their contumelious disrespect as to speak to him about the productions of a certain Charles d.i.c.kens. The "Canadian vessel," however, was a more serious disaster, and was treated accordingly. A charitable friend broke his calamity to the author at a judicious moment, to prevent him from discovering it himself at an unsuitable time, with results the full extent of which no one could foresee. It was an affair of much anxiety among his friends, who made frequent inquiries as to how he bore himself in his affliction, and what continued to be the condition of his health, and especially of his spirits. And although he was a confirmed book-hunter, and not unconscious of the merits of the peculiar cla.s.s of books now under consideration, it may be feared that it was no consolation to him to reflect that, some century or so hence, his books and himself would be known only by the curious blunder which made one of them worth the notice of the book-fanciers. Consequences from printers' blunders of a still more tragic character even than this, have been preserved--as for instance, the fate of Guidi the Italian poet, whose end is said to have been hastened by the misprints in his poetical paraphrase of the Homilies of his patron, Clement XI.

An odd accident occurred to a well-known book lately published, called Men of the Time. It sometimes happens in a printing-office that some of the types, perhaps a printed line or two, fall out of "the forme." Those in whose hands the accident occurs generally try to put things to rights as well as they can, and may be very successful in restoring appearances with the most deplorable results to the sense. It happened thus in the instance referred to. A few lines dropping out of the Life of Robert Owen, the parallelogram Communist, were hustled, as the nearest place of refuge, into the biography of his closest alphabetical neighbour--"Oxford, Bishop of." The consequence is that the article begins as follows:--

"OXFORD, THE RIGHT REVEREND SAMUEL WILBERFORCE, BISHOP OF, was born in 1805. A more kind-hearted and truly benevolent man does not exist. A sceptic, as regards religious revelation, he is nevertheless an out-and-out believer in spirit movements."

Whenever this blunder was discovered, the leaf was cancelled; but a few copies of the book had got into circulation, which some day or other may be very valuable.

From errors of the press there is a natural transition to the cla.s.s who incur the guilt of perpetrating them, and whose peculiar mental qualities impart to them their special characteristics. That mysterious body called compositors, through whose hands all literature pa.s.ses, are reputed to be a placid and unimpressionable race of practical stoics, who do their work dutifully, without yielding to the intellectual influences represented by it. A clause of an Act of Parliament, with all its whereases, and be it enacteds, and hereby repealeds, creates, it is said, quite as much emotion in them as the most brilliant burst of the fas.h.i.+onable poet of the day. They will set you up a psalm or a blasphemous ditty with the same equanimity, not retaining in their minds any clear distinction between them. Your writing must be something very wonderful indeed, before they distinguish it from other "copy," except by the goodness or badness of the hand. A State paper which all the world is mad to know about, is quite safe in a printing-office; and, if report speak truly, they will set up what is here set down of them, without noting that it refers to themselves. It is said that this stoic indifference is a wonderful provision for the preservation of the purity of literature, and that, were compositors to think with the author under the "stick," they might make dire havoc.

We are not to suppose, however, that they take less interest in, or are less observant of, the work of their hands than other workmen. The point of view, however, from which their observation is taken, is not exactly the same as that of their co-operator, the author whose writing they set up, nor is their notification of specialties of a kind which would always be felt by him as complimentary. The tremendous philippic of Junius Brutus against the scandalous and growing corruptions of the age, is remembered in the "chapel" solely because its fiery periods exhausted the largest font of italics possessed by the establishment. The exhaustive inquiry by a great metaphysician into the Quantification of the predicate, is solely a.s.sociated with the characteristic fact that the press was stopped during the casting of an additional hundredweight of parentheses for its special use. A youthful poet I could recall, who, with a kind of exulting indignation, thought he had discovered a celebrated brother of the lyre appropriating his ewe lamb in a flagrant plagiarism. There was at least one man who had the opportunity of being acquainted with the productions of his unappreciated muse--the printer.

To him, accordingly, he appealed for confirmation of his suspicions, demanding if he did not see in the two productions a similarity that in some places even approached ident.i.ty. The referee turned over page after page with the scrupulous attention of one whose acuteness is on trial.

After due deliberation he admitted that there was a very striking similarity, only it seemed to him that the other's brevier was a shade thinner in the hair-stroke than his own, and the small caps. would go a thought more to the pound; while as to the semicolons and marks of interrogation, they looked as if they came out of a different font altogether.

It is pleasant to be remembered for something, and the present author has the a.s.surance that these pages will be imprinted on the memory of the "chapel" by the decorated capitals and Gothic devices with which a better taste than his own has strewed them. The position, indeed, conceded to him in the book-hunting field through the influence of these becoming decorations has communicated to him something of the uneasiness of Juvenal's

"Miserum est aliorum incubere famae, Ne collapsa ruant subductis tecta columnis."

And having so disburdened himself, he rejoices in the thought that whoever compliments him again on the taste and talent displayed in the printing and adorning of this volume, will only prove that he has not read it.

Returning to compositors, and what they note and do not note, if the fresh author has happened to feel it a rather damping forecast of his reception by the public that those who have had the first and closest contact with his efforts are not in any way aroused by their remarkable originality, yet one who may have had opportunities of taking a wide view of the functions of the compositor will not wonder that, like the deaf adder, he systematically closes his ear to the voice of the charmer.