The Book-Hunter Part 16

Keenly alive to this want, he resolved to devote himself, not merely to supply to the hungry the necessary food, but to impart to the poor and ardent scholar the mental sustenance which might possibly enable him to burst the bonds of circ.u.mstance, and, triumphing over his sordid lot, freely communicate to mankind the blessings which it is the function of cultivated genius to distribute.

The Bishop was a great and powerful man, for he went over Europe commissioned as the spiritual adviser of the great conqueror, Edward III. Wherever he went on public business--to Rome, France, or the other states of Europe--"on tedious emba.s.sies and in perilous times," he carried about with him "that fondness for books which many waters could not extinguish," and gathered up all that his power, his wealth, and his vigilance brought within his reach. In Paris he becomes quite ecstatic: "Oh blessed G.o.d of G.o.ds in Zion! what a rush of the glow of pleasure rejoiced our heart as often as we visited Paris--the Paradise of the world! There we longed to remain, where, on account of the greatness of our love, the days ever appeared to us to be few. There are delightful libraries in cells redolent of aromatics--there flouris.h.i.+ng greenhouses of all sorts of volumes: there academic meads trembling with the earthquake of Athenian peripatetics pacing up and down: there the promontories of Parna.s.sus and the porticos of the stoics."

The most powerful instrument in his policy was encouraging and bringing round him, as dependents and followers, the members of the mendicant orders--the labourers called to the vineyard in the eleventh hour, as he calls them. These he set to cater for him, and he triumphantly asks, "Among so many of the keenest hunters, what leveret could lie hid? What fry could evade the hook, the net, or the trawl of these men? From the body of divine law down to the latest controversial tract of the day, nothing could escape the notice of these scrutinisers." In further revelations of his method he says, "When, indeed, we happened to turn aside to the towns and places where the aforesaid paupers had convents, we were not slack in visiting their chests and other repositories of books; for there, amidst the deepest poverty, we found the most exalted riches treasured up; there, in their satchels and caskets, we discovered not only the crumbs that fell from the master's table for the little dogs, but, indeed, the shew-bread without leaven--the bread of angels containing all that is delectable." He specially marks the zeal of the Dominicans or Preachers; and in exulting over his success in the field, he affords curious glimpses into the ways of the various humble a.s.sistants who were glad to lend themselves to the hobby of one of the most powerful prelates of his day.[56]

[Footnote 56: "Indeed, although we had obtained abundance both of old and new works, through an extensive communication with all the religious orders, yet we must in justice extol the Preachers with a special commendation in this respect; for we found them, above all other religious devotees, ungrudging of their most acceptable communications, and overflowing with a certain divine liberality; we experienced them not to be selfish h.o.a.rders, but meet professors of enlightened knowledge. Besides all the opportunities already touched upon, we easily acquired the notice of the stationers and librarians, not only within the provinces of our native soil, but of those dispersed over the kingdoms of France, Germany, and Italy, by the prevailing power of money; no distance whatever impeded, no fury of the sea deterred them; nor was cash wanting for their expenses, when they sent or brought us the wished-for books; for they knew to a certainty that their hopes reposed in our bosoms could not be disappointed, but ample redemption, with interest, was secure with us. Lastly, our common captivatrix of the love of all men (money), did not neglect the rectors of country schools, nor the pedagogues of clownish boys, but rather, when we had leisure to enter their little gardens and paddocks, we culled redolent flowers upon the surface, and dug up neglected roots (not, however, useless to the studious), and such coa.r.s.e digests of barbarism, as with the gift of eloquence might be made sanative to the pectoral arteries. Amongst productions of this kind, we found many most worthy of renovation, which, when the foul rust was skilfully polished off, and the mask of old age removed, deserved to be once more remodelled into comely countenances, and which we, having applied a sufficiency of the needful means, resuscitated for an exemplar of future resurrection, having in some measure restored them to renewed soundness. Moreover, there was always about us in our halls no small a.s.semblage of antiquaries, scribes, bookbinders, correctors, illuminators, and, generally, of all such persons as were qualified to labour advantageously in the service of books.

"To conclude. All of either s.e.x, of every degree, estate, or dignity, whose pursuits were in any way connected with books, could, with a knock, most easily open the door of our heart, and find a convenient reposing place in our bosom. We so admitted all who brought books, that neither the mult.i.tude of first-comers could produce a fastidiousness of the last, nor the benefit conferred yesterday be prejudicial to that of to-day. Wherefore, as we were continually resorted to by all the aforesaid persons, as to a sort of adamant attractive of books, the desired accession of the vessels of science, and a multifarious flight of the best volumes were made to us. And this is what we undertook to relate at large in the present chapter."]

The manner in which Richard of Bury dedicated his stores to the intellectual nurture of the poor scholar, was by converting them into a library for Durham College, which merged into Trinity of Oxford. It would have been a pleasant thing to look upon the actual collection of ma.n.u.scripts which awakened so much recorded zeal and tenderness in the great ecclesiastic of five hundred years ago; but in later troubles they became dispersed, and all that seems to be known of their whereabouts is, that some of them are in the library of Baliol.[57] Another eminent English prelate made a worthy, but equally ineffectual, attempt to found a great university library. This was the Rev. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who gave what was called "the n.o.blest library in England" to the newly founded college of St John's. It was not a bequest. To make his gift secure, it was made over directly to the college, but as he could not part with his favourites while he lived, he borrowed the whole back for life. This is probably the most extensive book loan ever negotiated; but the Reformation, and his own tragic destiny, were coming on apace, and the books were lost both to himself and his favourite college.[58]

[Footnote 57: Edwards on Libraries, vol. i. p. 586.]

[Footnote 58: Edwards on Libraries, vol. i. p. 609.]

The Preservation of Literature.

The benefactors whose private collections have, by a generous act of endowment, been thus rendered at the same time permanent and public, could be counted by hundreds. It is now, however, my function to describe a more subtle, but no less powerful influence which the book-hunter exercises in the preservation and promulgation of literature, through the mere exercise of that instinct or pa.s.sion which makes him what he is here called. What has been said above must have suggested--if it was not seen before--how great a pull it gives to any public library, that it has had an early start; and how hard it is, with any amount of wealth and energy, to make up for lost time, and raise a later inst.i.tution to the level of its senior. The Imperial Library of Paris, which has so marvellously lived through all the storms that have swept round its walls, was founded in the fourteenth century. It began, of course, with ma.n.u.scripts; possessing, before the beginning of the fifteenth century, the then enormous number of a thousand volumes. The reason, however, of its present greatness, so far beyond the rivalry of later establishments, is, that it was in active operation at the birth of printing, and received the first-born of the press. There they have been sheltered and preserved, while their unprotected brethren, tossed about in the world outside, have long disappeared, and pa.s.sed out of existence for ever.

Among the popular notions pa.s.sing current as duly certified axioms, just because they have never been questioned and examined, one is, that, since the age of printing, no book once put to press has ever died. The notion is quite inconsistent with fact. When we count by hundreds of thousands the books that are in the Paris Library, and not to be had for the British Museum, we know the number of books which a chance refuge has protected from the general destruction, and can readily see, in shadowy bulk, though we cannot estimate in numbers, the great ma.s.s which, having found no refuge, have disappeared out of separate existence, and been mingled up with the other elements of the earth's crust.

We have many accounts of the marvellous preservation of books after they have become rare--the s.n.a.t.c.hing of them as brands from the burning; their hairbreadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach. It would be interesting, also, to have some account of the progress of destruction among books. A work dedicated apparently to this object, which I have been unable to find in the body, is mentioned under a very tantalising t.i.tle. It is by a certain John Charles Conrad Oelrichs, author of several sc.r.a.ps of literary history, and is called a Dissertation concerning the Fates of Libraries and Books, and, in the first place, concerning the books that have been eaten--such I take to be the meaning of "Dissertatio de Bibliothecarum ac Librorum Fatis, imprimis libris comestis." This is nearly as tantalising as the wooden-legged Britisher's explanation to the inquisitive Yankee, who solemnly engaged to ask not another question were he told how that leg was lost, and was accordingly told that "it was bitten off."

Nor is there anything to allay the curiosity thus excited in finding that the French, in the all-comprehensive spirit of their cla.s.sification and nomenclature, include the book-eater with the decorous t.i.tle Bibliophage, seeing that in so gossiping a work as Peignot's Dictionnaire de Bibliologie, all that is communicated under this department is, "Bibliophage signifie celui qui mange des livres." We are not favoured with any examples explanatory of the kind of books most in demand by those addicted to this species of food, nor of the effect of the different cla.s.ses of books on the digestive organs.

Religious and political intolerance has, as all the world knows, been a terrible enemy to literature, not only by absolute suppression, but by the restraints of the licenser. So little was literary freedom indeed understood anywhere until recent days, that it was only by an accident after the Revolution that the licensing of books was abolished in England. The new licenser, Edmond Bohun, happened in fact to be a Jacobite, and though he professed to conform to the Revolution Settlement, his sympathies with the exiled house disabled him from detecting disaffection skilfully smothered, and the House of Commons, in a rage, abolished his office by refusing to renew the Licensing Act. Of the extent to which literature has suffered by suppression, there are no data for a precise estimate. It might bring out some curious results, however, were any investigator to tell us of the books which had been effectually put down after being in existence. It would of course be found that the weak were crushed, while the strong flourished. Among the valuable bibliographical works of Peignot, is a dictionary of books which have been condemned to the flames, suppressed, or censured. We do not require to go far through his alphabet to see how futile the burnings and condemnations have been in their effect on the giants of literature. The first name of all is that of Abelard, and so going on we pick up the witty scamp Aretin, then pa.s.s on to D'Aubigne the great warrior and historian, Bayle, Beaumarchais, Boulanger, Catullus, Charron, Condillac, Crebillon, and so on, down to Voltaire and Wicliffe.

Wars and revolutions have of course done their natural work on many libraries, yet the mischief effected by them has often been more visible than real, since they have tended rather to dispersion than destruction.

The total loss to literature by the dispersion of the libraries of the monastic establishments in England, is probably not nearly so great as that which has accompanied the chronic mouldering away of the treasures preserved so obstinately by the lazy monks of the Levant, who were found by Mr Curzon at their public devotions laying down priceless volumes which they could not read, to protect their dirty feet from the cold floor. In the wildest times the book repository often partakes in the good fortune of the humble student whom the storm pa.s.ses over. In the hour of danger, too, some friend who keeps a quiet eye upon its safety may interpose at the critical moment. The treasures of the French libraries were certainly in terrible danger when Robespierre had before him the draft of a decree, that "the books of the public libraries of Paris and the departments should no longer be permitted to offend the eyes of the republic by shameful marks of servitude." The word would have gone forth, and a good deal beyond the mere marks of servitude would have been doubtless destroyed, had not the emergency called forth the courage and energies of Renouard and Didot.[59]

[Footnote 59: Edwards on Libraries, vol. ii. p. 272.]

There are probably false impressions abroad as to the susceptibility of literature to destruction by fire. Books are not good fuel, as, fortunately, many a housemaid has found, when, among other frantic efforts and failures in fire-lighting, she has reasoned from the false data of the inflammability of a piece of paper. In the days when heretical books were burned, it was necessary to place them on large wooden stages, and after all the pains taken to demolish them, considerable readable ma.s.ses were sometimes found in the embers; whence it was supposed that the devil, conversant in fire and its effects, gave them his special protection. In the end it was found easier and cheaper to burn the heretics themselves than their books.

Thus books can be burned, but they don't burn, and though in great fires libraries have been wholly or partially destroyed, we never hear of a library making a great conflagration like a cotton mill or a tallow warehouse. Nay, a story is told of a house seeming irretrievably on fire, until the flames, coming in contact with the folio Corpus Juris and the Statutes at Large, were quite unable to get over this joint barrier, and sank defeated. When anything is said about the burning of libraries, Alexandria at once flares up in the memory; but it is strange how little of a satisfactory kind investigators have been able to make out, either about the formation or destruction of the many famous libraries collected from time to time in that city. There seems little doubt that Caesar's auxiliaries unintentionally burnt one of them; its contents were probably written on papyrus, a material about as inflammable as dried reeds or wood-shavings. As to that other burning in detail, when the collection was used for fuel to the baths, and lasted some six weeks--surely never was there a greater victim of historical prejudice and calumny than the "ignorant and fanatical" Caliph Omar al Raschid. Over and over has this act been disproved, and yet it will continue to be rea.s.serted with uniform pertinacity in successive rolling sentences, all as like each other as the successive billows in a swell at sea.[60]

[Footnote 60: One of the latest inquirers who has gone over the ground concludes his evidence thus: "Omar ne vint pas a Alexandrie; et s'il y fut venu, il n'eut pas trouve des livres a brler. La bibliotheque n'existait plus depuis deux siecles et demi."--Fournier, L'Esprit dans l'Histoire. What shall we say to the story told by Zonaras and repeated by Pancirole, of the burning, in the reign of the Emperor Basilisc, of the library of Constantinople, containing one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, and among them a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in golden letters on parchment made from the intestines of the dragon?]

Apart, however, from violence and accident, there is a constant decay of books from what might be called natural causes, keeping, like the decay of the human race, a proportion to their reproduction, which varies according to place or circ.u.mstance; here showing a rapid increase where production outruns decay, and there a decrease where the morbid elements of annihilation are stronger than the active elements of reproduction.

Indeed, volumes are in their varied external conditions very like human beings. There are some stout and others frail--some healthy and others sickly; and it happens often that the least robust are the most precious. The full fresh health of some of the folio fathers and schoolmen, ranged side by side in solemn state on the oaken shelves of some venerable repository, is apt to surprise those who expect mouldy decay; the stiff hard binding is as angular as ever,--there is no abrasion of the leaves, not a single dog-ear or a spot, or even a dust-border on the mellowed white of the margin. So, too, of those quarto civilians and canonists of Leyden and Amsterdam, with their smooth white vellum coats, bearing so generic a resemblance to Dutch cheeses, that they might be supposed to represent the experiments of some Gouda dairyman on the quadrature of the circle. An easy life and an established position in society are the secret of their excellent preservation and condition. Their repose has been little disturbed by intrusive readers or unceremonious investigators, and their repute for solid learning has given them a claim to attention and careful preservation. It has sometimes happened to me, as it probably has to many another inquisitive person, to penetrate to the heart of one of these solid volumes and find it closed in this wise:--As the binder of a book is himself bound to cut off as little as possible of its white margin, it may take place, if any of the leaves are inaccurately folded, that their edges are not cut, and that, as to such leaves, the book is in the uncut condition so often denounced by impatient readers. So have I sometimes had to open with a paper-cutter the pages which had shut up for two hundred years that knowledge which the ponderous volume, like any solemn holder-forth whom no one listens to, pretended to be distributing abroad from its place of dignity on the shelf. Sometimes, also, there will drop out of a heavy folio a little slip of orange-yellow paper covered with some cabalistic-looking characters, which a careful study discovers to be a hint, conveyed in high or low Dutch, that the dealer from whom the volume was purchased, about the time of some crisis in the Thirty Years' War, would be rather gratified than otherwise should the purchaser be pleased to remit to him the price of it.

Though quartos and folios are dwindling away, like many other conventional distinctions of rank, yet are authors of the present day not entirely divested of the opportunity of taking their place on the shelf like these old dignitaries. It would be as absurd, of course, to appear in folio as to step abroad in the small-clothes and queue of our great-grandfathers' day, and even quarto is reserved for science and some departments of the law. But then, on the other hand, octavos are growing as large as some of the folios of the seventeenth century, and a solid roomy-looking book is still practicable. Whoever desires to achieve a sure, though it may be but a humble, niche in the temple of fame, let him write a few solid volumes with respectably sounding t.i.tles, and matter that will rather repel the reader than court him to such familiarity as may beget contempt. Such books are to the frequenter of a library like country gentlemen's seats to travellers, something to know the name and owners.h.i.+p of in pa.s.sing. The stage-coachman of old used to proclaim each in succession--the guide-book tells them now. So do literary guide-books in the shape of library-catalogues and bibliographies, tell of these steady and respectable mansions of literature. No one speaks ill of them, or even proclaims his ignorance of their nature, and your "man who knows everything" will profess some familiarity with them, the more readily that the verity of his pretensions is not likely to be tested. A man's name may have resounded for a time through all the newspapers as the gainer of a great victory or the speaker of marvellous speeches--he may have been the most brilliant wit of some distinguished social circle--the head of a great profession--even a leading statesman; yet his memory has utterly evaporated with the departure of his own generation. Had he but written one or two of these solid books, now, his name would have been perpetuated in catalogues and bibliographical dictionaries; nay, biographies and encyclopaedias would contain their t.i.tles, and perhaps the day of the author's birth and death. Let those who desire posthumous fame, counting recollection as equivalent to fame, think of this.

It is with no desire to further the annihilation or decay of the stout and long-lived cla.s.s of books of which I have been speaking, that I now draw attention to the book-hunter's services in the preservation of some that are of a more fragile nature, and are liable to droop and decay. We can see the process going on around us, just as we see other things travelling towards extinction. Look, for instance, at school-books, how rapidly and obviously they go to ruin. True, there are plenty of them, but save of those preserved in the privileged libraries, or of some that may be tossed aside among lumber in which they happen to remain until they become curiosities, what chance is there of any of them being in existence a century hence? Collectors know well the extreme rarity and value of ancient school-books. Nor is their value by any means fanciful.

The dominie will tell us that they are old-fas.h.i.+oned, and the pedagogue who keeps a school, "and ca's it a acaudemy," will sneer at them as "obsolete and incompatible with the enlightened adjuncts of modern tuition;" but if we are to consider that the condition of the human intellect at any particular juncture is worth studying, it is certainly of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of children's play-books as well as their work-books; these are as ephemeral as their other toys. Retaining dear recollections of some that were the favourites, and desiring to awaken from them old recollections of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try whether your own children inherit the paternal susceptibility to their beauties, you make application to the bookseller--but, behold, they have disappeared from existence as entirely as the rabbits you fed, and the terrier that followed you with his cheery clattering bark. Neither name nor description--not the announcement of the benevolent publishers, "Darton, Harvey, and Darton"--can recover the faintest traces of their vestiges.[61] Old cookery-books, almanacs, books of prognostication, directories for agricultural operations, guides to handicrafts, and other works of a practical nature, are infinitely valuable when they refer to remote times, and also infinitely rare.

[Footnote 61: I question if Toy Literature, as it may be called, has received the consideration it deserves, when one remembers how great an influence it must have on the formation of the infant mind. I am not prepared to argue that it should be put under regulation--perhaps it is best that it should be left to the wild luxuriance of nature--but its characteristics and influence are surely worthy of studious observation.

It happened to me once to observe in the library of an eminent divine a large heap of that cla.s.s of works which used to be known as "penny bookies." My reverend friend explained, in relation to them, that they were intended to counteract some pernicious influences at work--that he had made the important and painful discovery that the influence of this cla.s.s of literature had been noticed and employed by the enemies of the Church. In confirmation of this view, he showed me some pa.s.sages, of which I remember the following:--

"B was a Bishop who loved his repose, C was a Curate who had a red nose,"

D was a Dean, but how characterised I forget. I did not think, however, that the proposed antidote, in which the mysteries of religion and the specialties of a zealous cla.s.s in the English Church were mixed up with childish prattle, was much more decorous or appropriate than what it was intended to counteract.]

But of course the most interesting of all are the relics of pure literature, of poems and plays. Whence have arisen all the anxious searches and disappointments, and the bitter contests, and the rare triumphs, about the early editions of Shakespeare, separately or collectively, save from this, that they pa.s.sed from one impatient hand to another, and were subjected to an unceasing greedy perusal, until they were at last used up and put out of existence? True it was to be with him--

"So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a long age digging and searching for some fragment of intellectual treasure.

One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the dilapidating effects of use. The Bible seems to have been ever touched with reverent gentleness, and, when the sordid effects of long handling had become inevitably conspicuous, to have been generally removed out of sight, and, as it were, decently interred. Hence it is that, of the old editions of the Bible, the copies are so comparatively numerous and in such fine preservation. Look at those two folios from the types of Guttenburg and Fust, running so far back into the earliest stage of the art of printing, that of them is told the legend of a combination with the devil, which enabled one man to write so many copies identically the same. See how clean and spotless is the paper, and how black, glossy, and distinct the type, telling us how little progress printing has made since the days of its inventors, in anything save the greater rapidity with which, in consequence of the progress of machinery, it can now be executed.

The reason of the extreme rarity of the books printed by the early English printers is that, being very amusing, they were used up, thumbed out of existence. Such were Caxton's Book of the Ordre of Chyualry; his Knyght of the Toure; the Myrour of the World; and the Golden Legende; c.o.c.ke Lorell's Bote, by De Worde; his Kalender of Shepeherdes, and suchlike. If any one feels an interest in the process of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may easily witness it in the _debris_ of a circulating library; and perhaps he will find the phenomenon in still more distinct operation at any book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a choice of Watts's Hymns and Pilgrim's Progresses. Here, too, it is possible that the enlightened onlooker may catch sight of the book-hunter plying his vocation, much after the manner in which, in some ill-regulated town, he may have beheld the _chiffonniers_, at early dawn, rummaging among the cinder heaps for ejected treasures. A ragged morsel is perhaps carefully severed from the heap, wrapped in paper to keep its leaves together, and deposited in the purchaser's pocket. You would probably find it difficult to recognise the fragment, if you should see it in the brilliancy of its resuscitation. A skilled and cautious workman has applied a bituminous solvent to its ragged edges, and literally incorporated, by a sort of paper-making process, each mouldering page into a broad leaf of fine strong paper, in which the print, according to a simile used for such occasions, seems like a small rivulet in a wide meadow of margin. This is termed inlaying, and is a very lofty department in the art of binding. Then there is, besides, the grandeur of russia or morocco, with gilding, and tooling, and marbling, and perhaps a ribbon marker, dangling out with a decoration at its end--all tending, like stars, and garters, and official robes, to stamp the outer insignia of importance on the book, and to warn all the world to respect it, and save it from the risks to which the common herd of literature is liable. The French have, as usual, dignified the process which restores diseased books to health and condition by an appropriate technical name--it is Bibliuguiancie; and under that t.i.tle it will be found fitly and appropriately discussed in the Dictionnaire de Bibliologie of Peignot, who specially mentions two pract.i.tioners of this kind as having conferred l.u.s.tre on their profession by their skill and success--Vialard and Heudier.[62]

[Footnote 62: There is something exceedingly curious, not only in its bearing on the matter of the text, but as a record of some peculiar manners and habits of the fourteenth century, in Richard of Bury's injunctions as to the proper treatment of the ma.n.u.scripts which were read in his day, and the signal contrast offered by the practice both of the clergy and laity to his decorous precepts:--

"We not only set before ourselves a service to G.o.d in preparing volumes of new books, but we exercise the duties of a holy piety, if we first handle so as not to injure them, then return them to their proper places and commend them to undefiling custody, that they may rejoice in their purity while held in the hand, and repose in security when laid up in their repositories. Truly, next to the vestments and vessels dedicated to the body of the Lord, holy books deserve to be most decorously handled by the clergy, upon which injury is inflicted as often as they presume to touch them with a dirty hand. Wherefore, we hold it expedient to exhort students upon various negligencies which can always be avoided, but which are wonderfully injurious to books.

"In the first place, then, let there be a mature decorum in opening and closing of volumes, that they may neither be unclasped with precipitous haste, nor thrown aside after inspection without being duly closed; for it is necessary that a book should be much more carefully preserved than a shoe. But school folks are in general perversely educated, and, if not restrained by the rule of their superiors, are puffed up with infinite absurdities; they act with petulance, swell with presumption, judge of everything with certainty, and are unexperienced in anything.

"You will perhaps see a stiff-necked youth, lounging sluggishly in his study, while the frost pinches him in winter time, oppressed with cold, his watery nose drops, nor does he take the trouble to wipe it with his handkerchief till it has moistened the book beneath it with its vile dew. For such a one I would subst.i.tute a cobbler's ap.r.o.n in the place of his book. He has a nail like a giant's, perfumed with stinking filth, with which he points out the place of any pleasant subject. He distributes innumerable straws in various places, with the ends in sight, that he may recall by the mark what his memory cannot retain.

These straws, which the stomach of the book never digests, and which n.o.body takes out, at first distend the book from its accustomed closure, and, being carelessly left to oblivion, at last become putrid. He is not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to transfer his empty cup from side to side upon it; and because he has not his alms-bag at hand, he leaves the rest of the fragments in his books. He never ceases to chatter with eternal garrulity to his companions; and while he adduces a mult.i.tude of reasons void of physical meaning, he waters the book, spread out upon his lap, with the sputtering of his saliva. What is worse, he next reclines with his elbows on the book, and by a short study invites a long nap; and by way of repairing the wrinkles, he twists back the margins of the leaves, to the no small detriment of the volume. He goes out in the rain, and now flowers make their appearance upon our soil. Then the scholar we are describing, the neglecter rather than the inspector of books, stuffs his volume with firstling violets, roses, and quadrifoils. He will next apply his wet hands, oozing with sweat, to turning over the volumes, then beat the white parchment all over with his dusty gloves, or hunt over the page, line by line, with his forefinger covered with dirty leather. Then, as the flea bites, the holy book is thrown aside, which, however, is scarcely closed in a month, and is so swelled with the dust that has fallen into it, that it will not yield to the efforts of the closer.

"But impudent boys are to be specially restrained from meddling with books, who, when they are learning to draw the forms of letters, if copies of the most beautiful books are allowed them, begin to become incongruous annotators, and wherever they perceive the broadest margin about the text, they furnish it with a monstrous alphabet, or their unchastened pen immediately presumes to draw any other frivolous thing whatever that occurs to their imagination. There the Latinist, there the sophist, there every sort of unlearned scribe tries the goodness of his pen, which we have frequently seen to have been most injurious to the fairest volumes, both as to utility and price. There are also certain thieves who enormously dismember books by cutting off the side margins for letter-paper (leaving only the letters or text), or the fly-leaves put in for the preservation of the book, which they take away for various uses and abuses, which sort of sacrilege ought to be prohibited under a threat of anathema.

"But it is altogether befitting the decency of a scholar that was.h.i.+ng should without fail precede reading, as often as he returns from his meals to study, before his fingers, besmeared with grease, loosen a clasp or turn over the leaf of a book. Let not a crying child admire the drawings in the capital letters, lest he pollute the parchment with his wet fingers, for he instantly touches whatever he sees.

"Furthermore, laymen, to whom it matters not whether they look at a book turned wrong side upwards or spread before them in its natural order, are altogether unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk also take order that the dirty scullion, stinking from the pots, do not touch the leaves of books unwashed; but he who enters without spot shall give his services to the precious volumes.

"The cleanliness of delicate hands, as if scabs and postules could not be clerical characteristics, might also be most important, as well to books as to scholars, who, as often as they perceive defects in books, should attend to them instantly, for nothing enlarges more quickly than a rent, as a fracture neglected at the time will afterwards be repaired with increased trouble."--Philobiblion, p. 101.]

I have recourse to our old friend Monkbarns again for a brilliant description of the prowler among the book-stalls, in the performance of the function a.s.signed to him in the dispensation of things,--renewing my already recorded protest against the legitimacy of the commercial part of the transaction:--

"'Snuffy Davie bought the game of Chess, 1474, the first book ever printed in England, from a stall in Holland, for about two groschen, or twopence of our money. He sold it to Osborne for twenty pounds, and as many books as came to twenty pounds more. Osborne resold this inimitable windfall to Dr Askew for sixty guineas. At Dr Askew's sale,' continued the old gentleman, kindling as he spoke, 'this inestimable treasure blazed forth in its full value, and was purchased by royalty itself for one hundred and seventy pounds! Could a copy now occur, Lord only knows,' he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with a deep sigh and lifted-up hands,--'Lord only knows what would be its ransom!--and yet it was originally secured, by skill and research, for the easy equivalent of twopence sterling. Happy, thrice happy, Snuffy Davie!--and blessed were the times when thy industry could be so rewarded!'"

In such manner is it that books are saved from annihilation, and that their preservers become the feeders of the great collections in which, after their value is established, they find refuge; and herein it is that the cla.s.s to whom our attention is at present devoted perform an inestimable service to literature. It is, as you will observe, the general ambition of the cla.s.s to find value where there seems to be none, and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, enabling the operator, in the midst of a heap of rubbish, to put his finger on those things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and curious. The adept will at once intuitively separate from its friends the book that either is or will become curious. There must be something more than mere rarity to give it this value, although high authorities speak of the paucity of copies as being everything. David Clement, the ill.u.s.trious French bibliographer, who seems to have antic.i.p.ated the positive philosophy by an attempt to make bibliography, as the Germans have named it, one of the exact sciences, lays it down with authority, that "a book which it is difficult to find in the country where it is sought ought to be called simply _rare_; a book which it is difficult to find in any country may be called _very rare_; a book of which there are only fifty or sixty copies existing, or which appears so seldom as if there never had been more at any time than that number of copies, ranks as _extremely rare_; and when the whole number of copies does not exceed ten, this const.i.tutes _excessive rarity_, or rarity in the highest degree." This has been received as a settled doctrine in bibliography; but it is utter pedantry. Books may be rare enough in the real or objective sense of the term, but if they are not so in the nominal or subjective sense, by being sought after, their rarity goes for nothing.

A volume may be unique--may stand quite alone in the world--but whether it is so, or one of a numerous family, is never known, for no one has ever desired to possess it, and no one ever will.

But it is a curious phenomenon in the old-book trade, that rarities do not always remain rare; volumes seeming to multiply through some cryptogamic process, when we know perfectly that no additional copies are printed and thrown off. The fact is, that the rumour of scarcity, and value, and of a hunt after them, draws them from their hiding-places. If we may judge from the esteem in which they were once held, the Elzevirs must have been great rarities in this country; but they are now plentiful enough--the heavy prices in the British market having no doubt sucked them out of dingy repositories in Germany and Holland--so that, even in this department of commerce the law of supply and demand is not entirely abrogated. He who dashes at all the books called rare, or even very rare, by Clement and his brethren, will be apt to suffer the keen disappointment of finding that there are many who partic.i.p.ate with him in the possession of the same treasures. In fact, let a book but make its appearance in that author's Bibliotheque Curieuse, Historique, et Critique, ou Catalogue Raisonne des Livres difficiles a trouver; or in Graesses's Tresor des Livres Rares et Precieux; or in the Dictionnaire Bibliographique des Livres Rares, published by Caileau--or let it be mentioned as a rarity in Eibert's Allgemeines Bibliographisches Lexicon, or in Debure, Clement, Osmont, or the Repertorium Bibliographic.u.m,--such proclamation is immediate notice to many fortunate possessors who were no more aware of the value of their dingy-looking volumes than Monsieur Jourdain knew himself to be in the habitual daily practice of talking prose.

So are we brought again back to the conclusion that the true book-hunter must not be a follower of any abstract external rules, but must have an inward sense and literary taste. It is not absolutely that a book is rare, or that it is run after, that must commend it to him, but something in the book itself. Hence the relics which he s.n.a.t.c.hes from ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them. They will not be of that unhappy kind which n.o.body has desired to possess for their own sake, and n.o.body ever will. Something there will be of original genius, or if not that, yet of curious, odd, out-of-the-way information, or of quaintness of imagination, or of characteristics pervading some cla.s.s of men, whether a literary or a polemical,--something, in short, which people desirous of information will some day or other be anxious to read,--such are the volumes which it is desirable to save from annihilation, that they may find their place at last in some of the great magazines of the world's literary treasures.

Librarians.