The Book-Hunter Part 17

It will often be fortunate for these great inst.i.tutions if they obtain the services of the hunter himself, along with his spoils of the chase.

The leaders in the German wars often found it an exceedingly sound policy to subsidise into their own service some captain of free lances, who might have been a curse to all around him. Your great game-preservers sometimes know the importance of taking the most notorious poacher in the district into pay as a keeper. So it is sometimes of the nature of the book-hunter, if he be of the genial sort, and free of some of the more vicious peculiarities of his kind, to make an invaluable librarian. Such an arrangement will sometimes be found to be like mercy twice blessed,--it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. The imprisoned spirit probably finds freedom at last, and those purchases and acc.u.mulations which, to the private purse, were profuse and culpable recklessness, may become veritable duty; while the wary outlook and the vigilant observation, which before were only leading a poor victim into temptation, may come forth as commendable attention and zealous activity.

Sometimes mistakes have been made in selections on this principle, and a zeal has been embarked which has been found to tend neither to profit nor edification; for there have been known, at the head of public libraries, men of the Cerberus kind, who loved the books so dearly as to be unable to endure the handling of them by the vulgar herd of readers and searchers--even by those for whose special aid and service they are employed. They who have this morbid terror of the profanation of the treasures committed to their charge suffer in themselves the direst torments--something like those of a cat beholding her kittens tossed by a dog--whenever their favourites are handled; and the excruciating extent of their agonies, when any ardent and careless student dashes right into the heart of some _editio princeps_ or tall copy, or perhaps lays it open with its face on the table while he s.n.a.t.c.hes another edition that he may collate a pa.s.sage, is not to be conceived. It is then the dog _worrying_ the kittens. Such men will only give satisfaction in great private libraries little disturbed by their proprietors, or in monastic or other corporate inst.i.tutions, where it is the worthy object of the patrons to keep their collection in fine condition, and, at the same time, to take order that it shall be of the least possible service to education or literature. Angelo Ma, the great librarian of the Vatican, who made so many valuable discoveries himself, had the character of taking good care that no one else should make any within his own strictly preserved hunting grounds.

In the general case, however, a bibliophile at the head of a public library is genial and communicative, and has a pleasure in helping the investigator through the labyrinth of its stores. Such men feel their strength; and the immense value of the service which they may sometimes perform by a brief hint in the right direction which the inquiry should take, or by handing down a volume, or recommending the best directory to all the learning on the matter in hand, has laid many men of letters under great obligations to them.

The most eminent type of this cla.s.s of men was Magliabecchi, librarian to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, who could direct you to any book in any part of the world, with the precision with which the metropolitan policeman directs you to St Paul's or Piccadilly. It is of him that the stories are told of answers to inquiries after books, in these terms: "There is but one copy of that book in the world. It is in the Grand Seignior's library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book in the second shelf on the right hand as you go in." His faculties were, like those of all great men, self-born and self-trained. So little was the impoverished soil in which he pa.s.sed his infancy congenial to his pursuits in after life, that it was not within the parental intentions to teach him to read, and his earliest labours were in the shop of a greengrocer. Had his genius run on natural science, he might have fed it here, but it was his felicity and his fortune to be transferred to the shop of a patronising bookseller. Here he drank in an education such as no academic forcing machinery could ever infuse. He devoured books, and the printed leaves became as necessary to his existence as the cabbage-leaves to the caterpillars which at times made their not welcome appearance in the abjured greengrocery. Like these verdant reptiles, too, he became a.s.similated to the food he fed on, insomuch that he was in a manner hot-pressed, bound, marble-topped, lettered, and shelved. He could bear nothing but books around him, and would allow no s.p.a.ce for aught else; his furniture, according to repute, being limited to two chairs, the second of which was admitted in order that the two together might serve as a bed.

Another enthusiast of the same kind was Adrien Baillet, the author, or, more properly speaking, the compiler, of the Jugemens des Savans. Some copies of this book, which has a quant.i.ty of valuable matter scattered through it, have Baillet's portrait, from which his calm scholarly countenance looks genially forth, with this appropriate motto, "Dans une douce solitude, a l'abri du mensonge et de la vanite, j'adoptai la critique, et j'en fis mon etude, pour decouvrir la verite." Him, struggling with poverty, aggravated with a thirst for books, did Lamoignon the elder place at the head of his library, thus at once pasturing him in clover. When the patron told his friend, Hermant, of his desire to find a librarian possessed of certain fabulous qualifications for the duty, his correspondent said, "I will bring the very man to you;" and Baillet, a poor, frail, attenuated, diseased scholar, was produced. His kind patron fed him up, so far as a man who could not tear himself from his books, unless when nature became entirely exhausted, could be fed up. The statesman and his librarian were the closest of friends; and on the elder Lamoignon's death, the son, still more distinguished, looked up to Baillet as a father and instructor.

Men of this stamp are generally endowed with deep and solid learning.

For any one, indeed, to take the command of a great public library, without large accomplishments, especially in the languages, is to put himself in precisely the position where ignorance, superficiality, and quackery are subjected to the most potent test, and are certain of detection. The number of librarians who have united great learning to a love of books, is the best practical answer to all sneers about the two being incompatible. Nor, while we count among us such names as Panizzi, Birch, Halkett, Naudet, Laing, Cogswell, Jones, Pertz, and Todd, is the race of learned librarians likely to decay.

It will be worth while for the patrons of public libraries, even in appointments to small offices, to have an eye on bookish men for filling them. One librarian differs greatly from another, and on this difference will often depend the entire utility of an inst.i.tution, and the question whether it is worth keeping it open or closing its door. Of this cla.s.s of workman it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, that he is born, not made. The usual testimonies to qualification--steadiness, sobriety, civility, intelligence, &c.--may all be up to the mark that will const.i.tute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of books. Such a person ought to go to his task with something totally different from the impulses which induce a man to sort dry goods or make up invoices with eminent success. In short, your librarian would need to be in some way touched with the malady which has been the object of these desultory remarks.

Bibliographies.

A pa.s.sing remark is due to the place and function in literature of those books which act the part of gentleman-usher towards other books, by introducing them to the notice of strangers. The talk about librarians, in fact, brings these naturally before us by the law of a.s.sociation, since the duties of the librarian are congenial to this special department of the literary world, the work of which has indeed been chiefly performed by eminent librarians.

The best general name for the cla.s.s of books which I refer to, is that of Bibliographies, given to them by the French. Like most other products of human ingenuity, they are varied in their objects and their merits.

At the one end of the scale is the Leipsic Bibliotheca Horatiana, ambitious only of commemorating the several editions of Horace, or Kuster's Bibliotheca Historica Brandenburgica, sacred to the histories of that duchy; while the other extremity aims at universality, an object which has not yet been accomplished, and seems every day fleeing farther off from those who are daring enough to pursue it. In 1545, when the world of literature was rather smaller than it now is, Conrade Gesner, in his Bibliotheca, made the first attempt at a universal bibliography.

The incompleteness of the result is confessed in the Epitome of the Bibliotheca, printed five years afterwards, which professes only to record _nearly_ all the books written since the world began, and yet boasts of adding more than two thousand names of authors to the number mentioned in the original Bibliotheca.[63]

[Footnote 63: Gesner's is a work in which many curious things may be found, as, for instance the following, which would have gladdened the heart of Scott, had it been his fortune to alight on it: "Thomas Leirmant, vel Ersiletonus, natione Scotus, edidit Rhythmica quaedam, et ob id Rhythmicus apud Anglos cognominatus est. Vixit anno 1286."]

Of what any list of all the books that have appeared in the world might be, one may form some conception by the effort of Dr Watt, accomplished nearly fifty years ago. The work is said to have killed him; and no one who turns over the densely printed leaves of his four quartos, can feel surprised at such a result. It is by no means perfect or complete, even as a guide to books in the compiler's native tongue, yet stands in honourable contrast with the failure of several efforts to continue this portion of it down to later days. The voluminous France Litteraire of Querard confesses its imperfections even to accomplish its limited object, by professing to devote its special attention to books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As to bibliographies of the present century aiming at universality, the Allgemeines Gelehrten Lexicon of Jocher--when accompanied by Adelung's supplement, which is its better-half--for scholars.h.i.+p and completeness casts into shade anything produced either in France or here. It is a guide which few people consult without pa.s.sing a compliment either internally or aloud on the satisfactory result. That it contains an account of every, or nearly every, book is at once contradicted by its bulk, yet it is often remarked that no one appeals to it in vain--a specialty which seems to have arisen from the peculiar capacity of its editors to dive, as it were, into the hearts of those likely to seek their aid.

Naturally, the most satisfactory of bibliographies are those limited to books of a special cla.s.s. These are frequent in law and divinity, but are most numerous in history. Hence have we such valued guides as Lelong, Dupin, Dufresnoy, and our own dynasty of historical bibliographers, which, including Leland, Bale, Pitts, and Tanner, reached its climax in Bishop Nicholson, whose introduction to the sources of British history, hitherto so valuable, will be superseded for most practical purposes on the completion of Mr Duffus Hardy's Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland. Science, though it can boast of the great compilations of Haller, and of other sources of reference to its literature, takes less aid from such guides than other departments of intellectual labour, for the obvious reason that, except to the few who are pursuing its history through its dawn and progress, the latest books on any department generally supersede their predecessors. They are, in fact, themselves the guides which show the scientific inquirer his work, not lying like that of the historian and divine in old books, but in existing things and practical experiments. Of books intended to show what is to be found in others, an extremely curious history attaches to one, the Bibliotheca of Photius. It is known of course to all divines, but not necessarily, perhaps, to every other person, that this turbulent and ambitious patriarch, during what he calls his emba.s.sy to Syria, occupied himself in taking down notes of the contents of theological treatises by his predecessors and contemporaries, with his judgments on their merits. Being a man of controversial propensities, he selected for criticism the works of the authors with whom he was at war. Ranking himself among the orthodox, he thus collected notes of the works of heterodox writers, and, among these, of several eminent Arians; and the rather startling result of his labours is, that a considerable quant.i.ty of Arian literature has thus been preserved, which, but for the exertions of the man who intended to exterminate it by his censure, would have been entirely lost to the world.

There are among bibliographers many highly meritorious leaders through the mysteries of occult literature--as, for instance, those who, like Placcius, Mylius, Barbiere, and Melzi, have devoted themselves to the discovery and publication of the authors.h.i.+p of anonymous works. Their function is, on the whole, a rather cruel one, and suggests that those who betake themselves to it are men of austere character. Sometimes, to be sure, it falls to their lot to place the laurel wreath of fame on the deserving brow, but very seldom before the grave has closed over it. The resuscitation of books which have pa.s.sed unnoticed because they were beyond their age, or failed to touch its sympathies, has been the cla.s.s of instances in which honour has been thus conferred; and it has seldom fallen to the lot of the living, for the reason that it is the nature of the human being not very resolutely to conceal from an inquiring public those of his actions which receive the approval of his own conscience and taste. In dealing with the living, and often the recently departed, it is the function of this cla.s.s of investigators to expose the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the wise and great. It is they who have told the world about the youthful Jacobitism of the eminent pillar of the const.i.tution; of the early Radicalism of the distinguished Conservative; of the more than questionable escapades of the popular, yet sedate divine, whose works are the supreme model of decorous piety.

In this wise, indeed, the function of the bibliographer of the anonymous much resembles the detective's. Like that functionary, he must not let feelings of delicacy or humanity interfere with the relentless execution of his duty, for of those who have achieved eminence as public teachers, all that they have ever told the world is the world's property. Whatever mercy may be shown to the history of their private life, cannot be claimed for the sayings which they have made or tried to make public. If they have at other times uttered opinions different from those which have achieved for them fame and eminence, those early utterances are an effective test of the value and sincerity of the later, and were it for this object only, the world is ent.i.tled to look at them. This is one of the penalties which can only be escaped by turning aside from the path to eminence.[64]

[Footnote 64: It will be agreeable news to the severely disposed, to know that a wholesale exposure of those British authors who attempt to hide their deeds in darkness is now in progress, the work having been undertaken, as police reports say, by "a thoroughly efficient officer of indomitable activity."]

Pa.s.sing from this cla.s.s of interesting though rather unamiable elucidations, I come to another cla.s.s of bibliographies, of which it is difficult to speak with patience--those which either profess to tell you how to find the best books to consult on every department of learning, or undertake to point out to you the books which you should select for your library, or for your miscellaneous reading. As to those which profess to be universal mentors, at hand to help you with the best tools for your work, in whichever department of intellectual labour it may happen to be, _they_ break down at once. Whoever has set himself to any special line of investigation, cannot open one of those books without discovering its utter worthlessness and incapacity to aid him in his own specialty. As to the other cla.s.s of bibliographers, who profess to act the guide, philosopher, and friend to the collector and the reader, I cannot imagine anything more offensively audacious than the function they a.s.sume. It is an attempt of the pedagogue to a.s.sert a jurisdiction over grown intellects, and hence such books naturally develop in flagrant exaggeration the pragmatical priggism which is the pedagogue's characteristic defect. I would except from this condemnation a few bibliographers, who, instead of sitting in the schoolmaster's chair and dictating to you what it is proper that you should read, rather give you a sly hint that they are going a-vagabondising through the byways of literature, and will take you with them if you like. Among these I would chiefly be inclined to affect the company of Peignot, whose wild and wayward course of reading provides for you something like to a ramble over the mountains with an Alpine hunter, the only kind of guide to whom the thorough pedestrian wanderer should give up his freedom. One of Peignot's books, called Predicatoriana, ou Revelations Singulieres et Amusantes sur les Predicateurs, brings one into scenes apt to shock a mind not tolerably hardened by eclectic reading. It is an anonymous publication, but has been traced home by the literary detectives. It may be characterised as a collection of the Buffooneries of Sermons. A little book enlivened by something like the same spirit, called The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, is known among ourselves; and there is an answer to it a.s.sailing the Episcopal Church of Scotland, in a tone which decidedly improves on the lesson of sarcasm and malignity taught by the other side. Both writers are dishonest in the statements they make and the pa.s.sages they quote from their adversaries, and both are grotesque and profane. Peignot, not being influenced by polemical rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the persons who preached the pa.s.sages quoted by him uttered them in all religious sincerity. Yet wide as the Christian world stretches beyond our corner of it, by so far does the Frenchman's book in grotesqueness and profanity out-shadow the attempts of the Scottish polemical combatants.

Of that highly patrician cla.s.s of bibliographies which offer their services exclusively to the collectors of rare, curious, and costly books, there are so many notices dotted over this volume, that I shall only stop here to mark the recentness of their appearance in literature.

To judge from the t.i.tle-page, one might trace them as far back as 1676, in John Hallervord's Bibliotheca Curiosa, in which the editor professes to indicate many authors which are very rare and known to few; but this book would give no satisfaction to pure rarity seekers. Hallervord takes curious in its old sense, which corresponds in some measure with the present use of the word interesting; and the specialty of the books being known to few, seems to refer to their profundity and the rarity of learning sufficient to sound their depths. Nor does the list published a few years later by the London bookseller Hartley, though it professes to signalise very rare books, show that nice sense which discriminates game of a high order from the vulgar and useful.[65] I suspect that before we reach the dawn of this cla.s.s of literature proper, we must descend at once to the year 1750, distinguished by the simultaneous appearance of Clement's Bibliotheque Curieuse, and Freytag's a.n.a.lecta de Libris Rarioribus.[66]

[Footnote 65: Catalogus Universalis Librorum in omni facultate linguaque insignium et rarissimorum, &c. Londini, apud Joannem Hartley, Bibliopolam, exadversum Hospitio Grayensi, in vico vulgo Holborn dicto.

MDCXCIX.]

[Footnote 66: Of course the Bibliographers prey relentlessly on each other, and bibliographical notices of Bibliographies abound. Le Brun sets aside a department for them, but the most handy reference to them that has come my way is a chronological list in the Dictionnaire Bibliographique, ou Nouveau Manuel du Libraire, by M. P*****--identified by his brother detectives as M. Psaume.]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_PART III.--HIS CLUB._

Clubs in General.

An author of the last generation, professing to deal with any branch of human affairs, if he were ambitious of being considered philosophical, required to go at once to the beginning of all things, where, finding man alone in the world, he would describe how the biped set about his own special business, for the supply of his own wants and desires; and then finding that the human being was, by his instincts, not a solitary but a social animal, the ambitious author would proceed in well-balanced sentences to describe how men aggregated themselves into hamlets, villages, towns, cities, counties, parishes, corporations, select vestries, and so on. I find that, without the merit of entertaining any philosophical views, I have followed, unconsciously, the same routine.

Having discussed the book-hunter as he individually pursues his object, I now propose to look in upon him at his club, and say something about its peculiarities, as the shape in which he takes up the pursuit collectively with others who happen to be like-minded to himself.

Those who are so very old as to remember the Episcopal Church of Scotland in that brief period of stagnant depression when the repeal of the penal laws had removed from her the l.u.s.tre of martyrdom, and she had not yet attained the more secular l.u.s.tre which the zeal of her wealthy votaries has since conferred on her, will be familiar with the name of Bishop Robert Jolly. To the ordinary reader, however, it may be necessary to introduce him more specifically. He was a man of singular purity, devotedness, and learning. If he had no opportunity of attesting the sincerity of his faith by undergoing stripes and bondage for the Church of his adoption, he developed in its fulness that un.o.btrusive self-devotion, not inferior to martyrdom, which dedicates to obscure duties the talent and energy that, in the hands of the selfish and ambitious, would be the sure apparatus of wealth and station. He had no doubt risen to an office of dignity in his own Church--he was a bishop.

But to understand the position of a Scottish bishop in those days, one must figure Parson Adams, no richer than Fielding has described him, yet enc.u.mbered by a t.i.tle ever a.s.sociated with wealth and dignity, and only calculated, when allied with so much poverty and social humility, to deepen the incongruity of his lot, and throw him more than ever on the mercy of the scorner. The office was indeed conspicuous, not by its dignities or emoluments, but by the extensive opportunities it afforded for self-devotion. One may have noticed his successor of later times giving l.u.s.tre to newspaper paragraphs as "The Lord Bishop of Moray and Ross." It did not fall to the lot of him of whom I write to render his t.i.tle so flagrantly incongruous. A lords.h.i.+p was not necessary, but it was the principle of his Church to require a bishop, and in him she got a bishop. In reality, however, he was the parish clergyman of the small and poor remnant of the Episcopal persuasion who inhabited the odoriferous fis.h.i.+ng-town of Fraserburgh. There he lived a long life of such simplicity and abstinence as the poverty of the poorest of his flock scarcely drove them to. He had one failing to link his life with this nether world--he was a book-hunter. How with his poor income, much of which went to feed the necessities of those still poorer, he should have accomplished anything in a pursuit generally considered expensive, is among other unexplained mysteries. But somehow he managed to sc.r.a.pe together a curious and interesting collection, so that his name became a.s.sociated with rare books, as well as with rare Christian virtues.

When it was proposed to establish an inst.i.tution for reprinting the works of the fathers of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, it was naturally deemed that no more worthy or characteristic name could be attached to it than that of the venerable prelate who, by his learning and virtues, had so long adorned the Episcopal chair of Moray and Ross, and who had shown a special interest in the department of literature to which the inst.i.tution was to be devoted. Hence it came to pa.s.s that, through a perfectly natural process, the a.s.sociation for the purpose of reprinting the works of certain old divines was to be ushered into the world by the style and t.i.tle of THE JOLLY CLUB.

There happened to be amongst those concerned, however, certain persons so corrupted with the wisdom of this world, as to apprehend that the miscellaneous public might fail to trace this designation to its true origin, and might indeed totally mistake the nature and object of the inst.i.tution, attributing to it aims neither consistent with the ascetic life of the departed prelate, nor with the pious and intellectual objects of its founders. The counsels of these worldly-minded persons prevailed. The Jolly Club was never inst.i.tuted,--at least, as an a.s.sociation for the reprinting of old books of divinity, though I am not prepared to say that inst.i.tutions more than one so designed may not exist for other purposes. The object, however, was not entirely abandoned. A body of gentlemen united themselves together under the name of another Scottish prelate, whose fate had been more distinguished, if not more fortunate; and the Spottiswoode Society was established. Here, it will be observed, there was a pa.s.sing to the opposite extreme; and so intense seems to have been the anxiety to escape from all excuse for indecorous jokes or taint of joviality, that the word Club, wisely adopted by other bodies of the same kind, was abandoned, and this one called itself a Society. To that abandonment of the _medio tutissimus_ has been attributed its early death by those who contemn the taste of those other communities, essentially Book Clubs, which have taken to the devious course of calling themselves "Societies."

In fact, all our _societies_, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat--not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite dest.i.tute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of _Clubs_. Societies there are, indeed, which identify themselves through their very nomenclature with misfortune and misery, seeming proudly to proclaim themselves victims to all the saddest ills that flesh is heir to--as, for instance, Dest.i.tute Sick Societies, Indigent Blind Societies, Deaf and Dumb Societies, Burial Societies, and the like. The nomenclature of some of these benevolent inst.i.tutions seems likely to test the etymological skill of the next generation of learned men. Perhaps some ethnological philosopher will devote himself to the special investigation and development of the phenomenon; and if such things are done then in the way in which they are now, the result will appear in something like the following shape:--

"Man, as we pursue his destiny from century to century, is still found inevitably to resolve himself into a connected and ant.i.thetic series of consecutive cycles. The eighteenth century having been an age of individuative, the nineteenth necessarily became an age of a.s.sociative or coinonomic development. He, the man--to himself the _ego_, and to others the mere _h.o.m.o_--ceased to revolve around the centre of gravity of his own personality, and, following the instincts of his adhesive nature, resolved himself into a.s.sociative community. In this necessary development of their nature all partook, from the congresses of mighty monarchs down to those humbler but not less majestic types of the predominant influence, which, in the expressive language of that age, were recognised as twopenny goes. It is known only to those whose researches have led them through the intricacies of that phase of human progress, how multifarious and varied were the forms in which the inner spirit, objectively at work in mankind, had its external subjective development. Not only did a.s.sociativeness shake the monarch on his throne, and prevail over the counsels of the a.s.sembled magnates of the realm, but it was the form in which each shape and quality of humanity, down even to penury and disease, endeavoured to express its instincts; and so the blind and the lame, the deaf and dumb, the sick and poor, made common stock of their privations, and endeavoured by the force of union to convert weakness into strength," &c.

When the history of clubs is fully written, let us hope that it will be in another fas.h.i.+on. If it sufficiently abound in details, such a history would be full of marvels, from the vast influences which it would describe as arising from time to time by silent obscure growth out of nothing, as it were. Just look at what clubs have been, and have done; a mere enumeration is enough to recall the impression. Not to dwell on the inst.i.tutions which have made Pall Mall and its neighbourhood a conglomerate of palaces, or on such lighter affairs as "the Four-in-Hand," which the railways have left behind, or the "Alpine,"

whose members they carry to the field of their enjoyment: there was the Mermaid, counting among its members Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Jonson; then came the King's Head; the October; the Kit-Cat; the Beef-Steak; the Terrible Calves Head; Johnson's club, where he had Bozzy, Goldie, Burke, and Reynolds; the Poker, where Hume, Carlyle, Ferguson, and Adam Smith took their claret.

In these, with all their varied objects--literary, political, or convivial--the one leading peculiarity was the powerful influence they exercised on the condition of their times. A certain club there was with a simple una.s.suming name,--differing, by the way, only in three letters from that which would have commemorated the virtues of Bishop Jolly. The club in question, though nothing in the eye of the country but an easy knot of gentlemen who a.s.sembled for their amus.e.m.e.nt, cast defiance at a sovereign prince, and shook the throne and inst.i.tutions of the greatest of modern states. But if we want to see the club culminating to its highest pitch of power, we must go across the water and saturate ourselves with the horrors of the Jacobin clubs, the Breton, and the Feuillans. The scenes we will there find stand forth in eternal protest against Johnson's genial definition in his Dictionary, where he calls a club "an a.s.sembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions."

The Structure of the Book Clubs.

There has been an addition, by no means contemptible, to the influence exercised by these inst.i.tutions on the course of events, in the Book Clubs, or Printing Clubs as they are otherwise termed, of the present day. They have within a few years added a department to literature. The collector who has been a member of several may count their fruit by the thousand, all ranging in symmetrical and portly volumes. Without interfering either with the author who seeks in his copyrights the reward of his genius and labour, or with the publisher who calculates on a return for his capital, skill, and industry, the book clubs have ministered to literary wants, which these legitimate sources of supply have been unable to meet.

I hope no one is capable of reading so far through this book who is so grossly ignorant as not to know that the Book Clubs are a set of a.s.sociations for the purpose of printing and distributing among their members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which has brought them together and united them into a club. An opportunity may perhaps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian efficiency of this arrangement--on the blank in the order of terrestrial things which the Book Club was required to fill, and the manner in which it has accomplished its function.

There is a cla.s.s of books of which the production has in this country always been uphill work;--large solid books, more fitted for authors and students than for those termed the reading public at large--books which may hence, in some measure, be termed the raw materials of literature, rather than literature itself. They are eminently valuable; but, since it is to the intellectual manufacturer who is to produce an article of saleable literature that they are valuable, rather than to the general consumer, they do not secure an extensive sale. Of this kind of literature the staple materials are old state papers and letters--old chronicles--specimens of poetic, dramatic, and other literature, more valuable as vestiges of the style and customs of their age than for their absolute worth as works of genius--ma.s.sive volumes of old divinity--disquisitions on obsolete science, and the like.

It is curious, by the way, that costly books of this sort seem to succeed better with the French than with us, though we do not generally give that people credit for excelling us in the outlay of money. Perhaps it is because they enjoy the British market as well as their own that they are enabled to excel us; but they certainly do so in the publication, through private enterprise, of great costly works, having a sort of national character. The efforts to rival them in this country have been considerable and meritorious, but in many instances signally unfortunate. Take, for instance, the n.o.ble edition of Hollingshed and the other chroniclers, published in quarto volumes by the London trade; the Parliamentary History, in thirty-six volumes, each containing about as much reading as Gibbon's Decline and Fall; the State Trials; Sadler's and Thurlow's State Papers; the Harleian Miscellany, and several other ponderous publications of the same kind. All of them are to be had cheap, some at just a percentage above the price of waste paper. When an attempt was made to publish in the English language a really thorough Biographical Dictionary, an improvement on the French Biographie Universelle, it stuck in letter A, after the completion of seven dense octavo volumes--an abortive fragment bearing melancholy testimony to what such a work ought to be. Publications of this kind have, in several instances, caused great losses to some, while they have brought satisfaction to no one concerned in them. A publisher has just the same distaste as any other ordinary member of the human family to the loss of five or ten thousand pounds in hard cash. Then, as touching the purchasers,--no doubt the throwing of a "remnant" on the market may sometimes bring the book into the possession of one who can put it to good use, and would have been unable to purchase it at the original price. But the rich deserve some consideration as well as the poor. It will be hard to find the man so liberal and benevolent that he will joyfully see his neighbour obtain for thirty s.h.i.+llings the precise article for which he has himself paid thirty pounds; nor does there exist the descendant of Adam who, whatever he may say or pretend, will take such an ant.i.thesis with perfect equanimity. Even the fortunate purchasers of portions of "the remnant," or "the broken book," as another pleasant technicality of the trade has it, are not always absolutely happy in their lot. They have been tempted by sheer cheapness to admit some bulky and unwieldy articles into their abodes, and they look askance at the commodity as being rather a sacrifice to mammon than a monument of good taste.

It has been the object of the machinery here referred to, to limit the impressions of such works to those who want and can pay for them--an extremely simple object, as all great ones are. There is, however, a minute nicety in the adjustment of the machinery, which was not obvious until it came forth in practice--a nicety without which the whole system falls to pieces. It was to accomplish this nicety that the principle of the club was found to be so well adapted. A club is essentially a body to which more people want admission than can gain it; if it do not manage to preserve this characteristic, it falls to pieces for want of pressure from without, like a cask divested of its hoops. To make the books retain their value, and be an object of desire, it was necessary that the impressions should be slightly within the natural circulation--that there should be rather a larger number desirous of obtaining each volume than the number that could be supplied with it.

The club effected this by its own natural action. So long as there were candidates for vacancies and the ballot-box went round, so long were the books printed in demand and valuable to their possessors. If there were 110 or 120 people willing to possess and pay for a certain cla.s.s of books, the secret of keeping up the pressure from without and the value of the books, was to limit the number of members and partic.i.p.ators to 100. There is nothing n.o.ble or disinterested in this. The arrangement has no pretension to either of these qualities; nor, when we come to the great forces which influence the supply and demand of human wants, whether in the higher or the humbler departments, will we find these qualities in force, or indeed any other motive than common selfishness.