The Book-Hunter Part 20

This imposture, professing to be taken down from the recitation of a woman eighty years old, was accompanied with some explanatory notes, characteristic of the dry antiquary, thus: "Hardriding d.i.c.k is not an epithet referring to horsemans.h.i.+p, but means Richard Ridley of Hardriding, the seat of another family of that name, which, in the time of Charles I., was sold on account of expenses incurred by the loyalty of the proprietor, the immediate ancestor of Sir Matthew Ridley. Will o'

the Wa' seems to be William Ridley of Walltown, so called from its situation on the great Roman wall. Thirlwall Castle, whence the clan of Thirlwalls derived their name, is situated on the small river of Tippell, near the western boundary of Northumberland. It is near the wall, and takes its name from the rampart having been _thirled_--that is, pierced or breached--in its vicinity."

In the Life of Surtees, the evidence of the crime is thus dryly set forth, in following up a statement of the transmission of the ma.n.u.script, and of its publication: "Yet all this was a mere figment of Surtees's imagination, originating probably in some whim of ascertaining how far he could identify himself with the stirring times, scenes, and poetical compositions which his fancy delighted to dwell on. This is proved by more than one copy among his papers of this ballad, corrected and interlined, in order to mould it to the language, the manners, and the feelings of the period and of the district to which it refers. Mr Surtees no doubt had wished to have the success of his attempt tested by the unbia.s.sed opinion of the very first authority on the subject; and the result must have been gratifying to him."

In Scott's acknowledgment of the contribution, printed also in the Life of Surtees, there are some words that must have brought misgivings and fear of detection to the heart of the culprit, since Scott, without apparently allowing doubts to enter his mind, yet marked some peculiarities in the piece, in which it differed from others. "Your notes upon the parties concerned give it all the interest of authority, and it must rank, I suppose, among those half-serious, half-ludicrous songs, in which the poets of the Border delighted to describe what they considered as the _sport of swords_. It is perhaps remarkable, though it may be difficult to guess a reason, that these c.u.mbrian ditties are of a different stanza and character, and obviously sung to a different kind of music, from those on the northern Border. The gentleman who collected the words may perhaps be able to describe the tune."

There is perhaps no system of ethics which lays down with perfect precision the moral code on literary forgeries, or enables us to judge of the exact enormity of such offences. The world looks leniently on them, and sometimes sympathises with them as good jokes. Allan Cunningham, who, like Ramsay, was called "honest Allan," did not lose that character by the tremendous "rises" which he took out of Cromek about those remains of Nithsdale and Galloway song--a case in point so far as principle goes, but differing somewhat in the intellectual rank of the victim to the hoax. The temptation to commit such offences is often extremely strong, and the injury seems slight, while the offender probably consoles himself with the reflection that he can immediately counteract it by confession. Vanity, indeed, often joins conscientiousness in hastening on a revelation. Surtees, however, remained in obdurate silence, and I am not aware that any edition of the Minstrelsy draws attention to his handiwork. Lockhart seems not only to have been ignorant of it, but to have been totally unconscious of the risk of such a thing, since he always speaks of its author as a respectable local antiquary, useful to Scott as a harmless drudge.

Perhaps Surtees was afraid of what he had done, like that teller in the House of Commons who is said by tradition to have attempted to make a bad joke in the division on the Habeas Corpus Act by counting a fat man as ten, and, seeing that the trick pa.s.sed unnoticed, and also pa.s.sed the measure, became afraid to confess it.

The literary history of "The Death of Featherstonhaugh" naturally excited uneasiness about the touching ballad of "Barthram's Dirge," also contributed to the Minstrelsy as the fruit of the industrious investigations of Surtees. Most readers will remember this:--

"They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig, Beside the headless cross, And they left him lying in his blood, Upon the moor and moss."

After this stanza, often admired for its clearness as a picture, there is a judicious break, and then come stanzas originally deficient of certain words, which, as hypothetically supplied by Surtees, were good-naturedly allowed to remain within brackets, as ingenious suggestions:--

"They made a bier of the broken bough, The sauch and the aspine grey, And they bore him to the Lady Chapel, And waked him there all day.

A lady came to that lonely bower, And threw her robes aside; She tore her ling [long] yellow hair, And knelt at Barthram's side.

She bathed him in the Lady Well, His wounds sae deep and sair, And she plaited a garland for his breast, And a garland for his hair."

A glance at the reprint of the Life of Surtees for the book club called after his name, confirms the suspicions raised by the exposure of the other ballad--this also is an imposition.[75]

[Footnote 75: The editor of the Life prints the following note by Mr Raine, the coadjutor of Surtees in his investigations into the history of the North of England: "I one evening in looking through Scott's Minstrelsy wrote opposite to this dirge, _Aut Robertus aut Diabolus_.

Surtees called shortly after, and, pouncing upon the remark, justified me by his conversation on the subject, in adding to my note, _Ita, teste seipso_."--P. 87.]

Altogether, such affairs create an unpleasant uncertainty about the paternity of that delightful department of literature, our ballad poetry. Where next are we to be disenchanted? Of the way in which ancient ballads have come into existence, there is one sad example within my own knowledge. Some mad young wags, wis.h.i.+ng to test the critical powers of an experienced collector, sent him a new-made ballad, which they had been enabled to secure only in a fragmentary form. To the surprise of its fabricator, it was duly printed; but what naturally raised his surprise to astonishment, and revealed to him a secret, was, that it was no longer a fragment, but a complete ballad,--the collector, in the course of his industrious inquiries among the peasantry, having been so fortunate as to recover the missing fragments! It was a case where neither could say anything to the other, though Cato might wonder _quod non rideret haruspex, haruspicem c.u.m vidisset_. This ballad has been printed in more than one collection, and admired as an instance of the inimitable simplicity of the genuine old versions!

It may perhaps do something to mitigate Surtees's offence in the eye of the world, that it was he who first suggested to Scott the idea of improving the Jacobite insurrections, and, in fact, writing Waverley. In the very same letter, quoted above, where Scott acknowledges the treacherous gift, he also acknowledges the hints he has received; and, mentioning the Highland stories he had imbibed from old Stewart of Invernahyle, says: "I believe there never was a man who united the ardour of a soldier and tale-teller--or man of talk, as they call it in Gaelic--in such an excellent degree; and as he was as fond of telling as I was of hearing, I became a violent Jacobite at the age of ten years old; and even since reason and reading came to my a.s.sistance, I have never got rid of the impression which the gallantry of Prince Charles made on my imagination. Certainly I will not renounce the idea of doing something to preserve these stories, and the memory of times and manners which, though existing as it were yesterday, have so strangely vanished from our eyes."

So much for certain men of mark whose pursuits or hobbies induced them to cl.u.s.ter round the cradle of this new literary organisation. When it was full grown it gathered about it a large body of systematic workers, who had their own special departments in the great republic of letters.

To offer a just and discriminating account of these men's services would draw me through an extensive tract of literary biography.

There is a shallow prejudice very acceptable to all blockheads, that men who are both learned and laborious must necessarily be stupid. It is best to meet the approach of such a prejudice at once, by saying that the editors of club books are not mere dreary drudges, seeing the works of others accurately through the press, and attending only to dates and headings. Around and throughout the large library of volumes issued by these inst.i.tutions, there run prolific veins of fresh literature pregnant with learning and ability. The style of work thus set agoing has indeed just the other day been incorporated into a sort of department of state literature since the great collection called The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, of which the Master of the Rolls accepts the responsibility, is carried out in the very spirit of the book clubs, in which indeed most of the editors of the Chronicles have been trained.

Without prejudice to others, let me just name a few of those to whom the world is under obligation for services in this field of learned labour.

For England, there are James Orchard Halliwell, Sir Frederic Madden, Beriah Botfield, Sir Henry Ellis, Alexander Dyce, Thomas Stapleton, William J. Thoms, Crofton Croker, Albert Way, Joseph Hunter, John Bruce, Thomas Wright, John Gough Nichols, Payne Collier, Joseph Stevenson, and George Watson Taylor, who edited that curious and melancholy book of poems, composed by the Duke of Orleans while he was a prisoner in England after the battle of Agincourt--poems composed, singularly enough, in the English language, and at a period extremely deficient in native vernacular literature.

In Scotland, it was in the earlier issues of the Bannatyne that Thomas Thomson, too indolent or fastidious to commit himself to the writing of a book, left the most accessible vestiges of that power of practically grasping historical facts and conditions, which Scott admired so greatly, and acknowledged so much benefit from. He was followed by Professor Innes, who found and taught the secret of extracting from ecclesiastical chartularies, and other early records, the light they throw upon the social condition of their times, and thus collected matter for the two pleasant volumes which have become so popular. The Bannatyne Club, lately finding no more to do, wound up with a graceful compliment to David Laing--the man to whom, after Scott, it has been most indebted. And, lastly, it is in the Scotch book clubs that Joseph Robertson has had the opportunity of exercising those subtle powers of investigation and critical ac.u.men, peculiarly his own, which have had a perceptible and substantial effect in raising archaeology out of that quackish repute which it had long to endure under the name of antiquarianism. For Ireland, of which I have something farther to say at length, let it suffice in the mean time to name Dean Butler, Dr Reeves, Mr O'Donovan, Mr Eugene Curry, and Dr Henthorn Todd.

There is another and distinct cla.s.s of services which have been performed through the medium of the club books. The Roxburghe having been founded on the principle that each member should print a volume, to be distributed among his colleagues, an example was thus set to men of easy fortune and scholarly tastes, which has been followed with a large liberality, of which the public have probably but a faint idea. Not only in those clubs founded on the reciprocity system of each member distributing and receiving, but in those to be presently noticed, where the ordinary members pay an annual sum, to be expended in the printing of their books, have individual gentlemen come forward and borne the expense of printing and distributing costly volumes. In some instances valuable works have thus been presented to the members at the cost of those who have also undergone the literary labour of editing them.

There is something extremely refined and gentlemanlike in this form of liberality. The recipient of the bounty becomes the possessor of a handsome costly book without being subjected in any way to the obligation of receiving a direct gift at the hands of the munificent donor; for the recipient is a sort of corporation--a thing which the lawyers say has no personal responsibility and no conscience, and which all the world knows to have no grat.i.tude.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_PART IV.--BOOK-CLUB LITERATURE._

Generalities.

Nearly a quarter of a century after the birth of the first book club, a new era was ushered in by its brother, the Camden, established for the printing of books and doc.u.ments connected with the early civil, ecclesiastical, and literary history of the British Empire. It discarded the rule which threw on each member the duty of printing and distributing a book, and tried the more equitable adjustment of an annual subscription to create a fund for defraying the expense of printing volumes to be distributed among the members. These, at first limited to 1000, expanded to 1200. Clubs with various objects now thickly followed. Any attempt to cla.s.sify them as a whole, is apt to resemble Whately's ill.u.s.tration of illogical division--"_e.g._, if you were to divide 'book' into 'poetical, historical, folio, quarto, French, Latin,'" &c. One of the systems of arrangement is topographical, as the Chetham, "for the purpose of publis.h.i.+ng biographical and historical books connected with the counties palatine of Lancaster and Chester."[76] The Surtees, again, named after our friend the ballad-monger, affects "those parts of England and Scotland included in the east between the Humber and the Firth of Forth, and in the west between the Mersey and the Clyde--a region which const.i.tuted the ancient kingdom of Northumberland." The Maitland, with its headquarters in Glasgow, gives a preference to the west of Scotland, but has not been exclusive. The Spalding Club, established in Aberdeen, the granite capital of the far north, is the luminary of its own district, and has produced fully as much valuable historical matter as any other club in Britain. Then there is the Irish Archaeological--perhaps the most learned of all--with its casual a.s.sistants, the Ossianic, the Celtic, and the Iona. The aelfric may be counted their ethnical rival, as dealing with the productions of the Anglo-Saxon enemies of the Celt. The Camden professes, as we have seen, to be general to the British Empire. The name of the club called "The Oriental Translation Fund," tells its own story.

[Footnote 76: Among other volumes of interest, the Chetham has issued a very valuable and amusing collection of doc.u.ments about the siege of Preston, and other incidents of the insurrection of 1715 in Lancas.h.i.+re.]

There are others, too, with no topographical connection, which express pretty well their purpose in their names--as the Shakespeare, for the old drama--the Percy, for old ballads and lyrical pieces. The Hakluyt has a delightful field--old voyages and travels. The Rae Society sticks to zoology and botany; and the Wernerian, the Cavendish, and the Sydenham, take the other departments in science, which the names given to them readily indicate.

In divinity and ecclesiastical history we have the Parker Society, named after the archbishop. Its tendencies are "Low," or, at all events, "Broad;" and as it counted some seven thousand members, it could not be allowed the run of the public mind without an antidote being accessible.

Hence "The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology," the tendency of which was not only shown in its name, but in its possessing among its earliest adherents the Rev. E.B. Pusey and the Rev. John Keble. The same party strengthened themselves by a series of volumes called the "Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division of the East and West, translated by Members of the English Church." In Scotland, the two branches which deny the supremacy of Rome (it would give offence to call them both Protestant) are well represented by the Spottiswoode, already referred to as the organ of Episcopacy; and the more prolific Wodrow, which, named after the zealous historian of the Troubles, was devoted to the history of Presbyterianism, and the works of the Presbyterian fathers.

Thus are the book clubs eminently the republic of letters, in which no party or cla.s.s has an absolute predominance, but each enjoys a fair hearing. And whereas if we saw people for other purposes than literature combining together according to ecclesiastical divisions, as High Church or Low, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, we should probably find that each excluded from its circle all that do not spiritually belong to it, we are a.s.sured it is quite otherwise in the book clubs--that High Churchmen or Romanists have not been excluded from the Parker, or Evangelical divines prohibited from investing in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Nay, the most zealous would incline to encourage the communication of their own peculiar literary treasures to their avowed theological opponents, as being likely to soften their hearts, and turn them towards the truth. Some adherents of these theological clubs there also are of slightly lat.i.tudinarian propensities, to whom the aspirations of honest religious zeal, and the records of endurance and martyrdom for conscience' sake, can never be void of interest, or fail in summoning up feelings of respectful sympathy, whatever be the denominational banner under which they have been exhibited. Some of these clubs now rest from their labours, the literary strata in which they were employed having been in fact worked out. Whether dead or living, however, their books are now a considerable and varied intellectual garden, in which the literary busy bee may gather honey all the day and many a day.

It will be readily supposed from the different and utterly separate grooves in which they run, and is very well known to the prowler among club books, that although these volumes profess to be printed from old ma.n.u.scripts, or to be mere reprints of rare books, they take a considerable portion of their tone and tendency from the editor. In fact, the editor of a club book is, in the general case, a sort of literary sportsman, who professes to follow entirely his own humour or caprice, or, say, his own taste and enjoyment, in the matter which he selects, and the manner in which he lays it before his friends. Hence, many of these volumes, heavy and unimpressible as they look, yet are stamped strongly with the marks of the individuality, or of the peculiar intellectual cast, of living men. Take down, for instance, the volume of the Camden called "De Antiquis Legibus Liber," otherwise, "Cronica Majorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum," printed from "a small folio, nine inches and a half in length and seven inches in breadth, the binding of white leather covering wooden backs, and containing 159 leaves of parchment, paged continuously with Arabic cyphers." It is partly a record of the old munic.i.p.al laws of the city of London, partly a chronicle of events. Had it fallen to be edited by a philosophical inquirer into the origin and principles of jurisprudence, or an investigator of the rise and progress of cities, or a social philosopher of any kind, it is hard to say what might have been made of it--easy to say that it would have been made something very different from what it is. The editor was an ill.u.s.trious genealogist. Accordingly, early in his career as expositor of the character of the volume, he alights upon a proper name, not entirely isolated, but capable of being a.s.sociated with other names. Thus, he is placed on a groove, and off he goes travelling in the fas.h.i.+on following over 220 pages of printed quarto: "Henry de Cornhill, husband of Alice de Courcy, the heiress of the Barony of Stoke Courcy Com. Somerset, and who, after his decease, re-married Warine Fitz-Gerald the king's chamberlain, leaving by each an only daughter, co-heirs of this Barony, of whom Joan de Cornhill was the wife of Hugh de Neville, Proto Forester of England, wife first of Baldwine de Riviers, eldest son and heir-apparent of William de Vernon, Earl of Devon, deceased in his father's lifetime; and, secondly, of the well-known favourite of King John, Fulk de Breaute, who had name from a commune of the Canton of G.o.derville, arrondiss.e.m.e.nt of Le Havre, department of La Seine Inferieure, rendered accompt of this his debt in the same roll;" and so on over the remainder of the 220 pages. If you turn over a few of them you will find the same sort of thing: "Agnes, the first daughter, was married to William de Vesey, of whom John de Vesey, issueless, and William de Vesey, who had issue, John de Vesey, who died before his father; and afterwards the said William de Vesey, the father, without heir of his body;" and so on.

The reader whose fortune it has been to pa.s.s a portion of his early days among venerable Scottish gentlewomen of the old school, will perhaps experience an uneasy consciousness of having encountered matter of this description before. It may recall to him misty recollections of communications which followed a course something like this: "And so ye see, auld Pittoddles, when his third wife deed, he got married upon the laird o' Blaithers.h.i.+n's aughteenth daughter, that was sister to Jemima, that was married intil Tam Flumexer, that was first and second cousin to the Pittoddleses, whase brither became laird afterwards, and married Blaithers.h.i.+n's Baubie--and that way Jemima became in a kind o' way her ain niece and her ain aunty, an' as we used to say, her gude-brither was married to his ain grannie."

But there is the deep and the shallow in genealogy, as in other arts and sciences, and, incoherent as it may sound to the uninitiated, the introduction to the Liber de Antiquis Legibus is no old woman's work, but full of science and strange matter.[77] It all grows, however, in genealogical trees, these being the predominant intellectual growth in the editor's mind. In fact, your thorough genealogist is quite a peculiar intellectual phenomenon. He is led on by a special and irresistible internal influence or genius. If he should for some time endeavour to strive after a more cosmopolite intellectual vitality, the ruling spirit conquers all other pursuits. The organism of the tree resumes its predominance, and if he have healthy st.u.r.dy brains, whatever other matter they may have collected is betimes dragged into the growth, and absorbed in the vitality of the majestic bole and huge branches.

There is perhaps no pursuit more thoroughly absorbing. The reason is this: No man having yet made out for himself an articulate pedigree from Adam--Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, to be sure, made one for himself, but he had his tongue in his cheek all the while--no clear pedigree going back to the first of men, every one, whether short or long, Celtic or Saxon, comes into the clouds at last. It is when a pedigree approaches extinction that the occasion opens for the genealogist to exercise his subtlety and skill, and his exertions become all the more zealous and exciting that he knows he must be baffled somewhere. The pursuit is described as possessing something like the same absorbing influence which is exercised over certain minds by the higher mathematics. The devotees get to think that all human knowledge centres in their peculiar science and the cognate mysteries and exquisite scientific manipulations of heraldry, and they may be heard talking with compa.s.sionate contempt of some one so grossly ignorant as not to know a bar-dexter from a bend-sinister, or who asks what is meant by a cross potent quadrate party per pale.

[Footnote 77: I remember hearing of an instance at a jury trial in Scotland, where counsel had an extremely subtle point of genealogy to make out, and no one but a ploughman witness, totally dest.i.tute of the genealogical faculty, to a.s.sist him to it. His plan--and probably a very judicious one in the general case--was to get the witness on a table-land of broad unmistakable principle, and then by degrees lure him farther on. Thus he got the witness readily to admit that his own mother was older than himself, but no exertion of ingenuity could get his intellect a step beyond that broad admission.]

These are generally great readers--reading is absolutely necessary for their pursuit; but they have a faculty of going over literary ground, picking up the proper names, and carrying them away, unconscious of anything else, as pointers go over stubble fields and raise the partridges, without taking any heed of the valuable examples of cryptogamic botany or palaeozoic entomology they may have trodden over. A certain writer on logic and metaphysics was once as much astonished as gratified by an eminent genealogical antiquary's expression of interest in a discovery which his last book contained. The philosopher thought his views on the subjectivity of the nominalists and the objectivity of the realists had at last been appreciated; but the discovery was merely this, that the name of a person who, according to the previously imperfect science of the genealogist, ought not to have existed then and there, was referred to in a letter from Spinoza, cited in defence of certain views upon the absolute.

The votaries of this pursuit become powers in the world of rank and birth, from the influence they are able to bring upon questions of succession and inheritance. Hence they are, like all great influences, courted and feared. Their ministry is often desired and sometimes necessary; but it is received with misgiving and awe, since, like the demons of old summoned by incantation, they may destroy the audacious mortal who demands their services. The most sagacious and sceptical men are apt to be mildly susceptible to conviction in the matter of their own pedigrees, and, a little conscious of their weakness, they shrink from letting the sacred tree be handled by relentless and unsympathising adepts. One of these intellectual tyrants, a man of great ability, when he quarrelled with any one, used to threaten to "b.a.s.t.a.r.dise" him, or to find the bend-sinister somewhere in his ancestry; and his experience in long genealogies made him feel a.s.sured, in the general case, of finding what he sought if he went far enough back for it.

The next volume you lay hand on is manifestly edited by an Ecclesiologist, or a votary of that recent addition to the const.i.tuted "ologies," which has come into existence as the joint offspring of the revival of Gothic architecture and the study of primitive-church theology. Through this dim religious light he views all the things in heaven and earth that are dealt with in his philosophy. His notes are profusely decorated with a rich array of rood screens, finial crockets, lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia, credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in bestiology, otherwise called b.e.s.t.i.a.l eikonography; and if he be requested to give a more explicit definition of the article, he will perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to exhibit to you this solemn record, which he will open with befitting reverence, the faintest suspicion of a smile curling on your lip will suffuse him with a lively sorrow for your lost condition, mixed with righteous indignation towards the irreverent folly whereof you have been guilty. He finds a great deal beyond sermons in stones, and can point out to you a certain piece of rather confused-looking architecture, which he terms a symbolical epitome of all knowledge, human and divine--an eikonographic encyclopaedia.

If you desire an antidote to all this, you may find it in the editor in true blue who so largely refers to the Book of the Universal Kirk, The Hynd Let Loose, The Cloud of Witnesses, Naphtali, and Faithful Witness-Bearing Exemplified, and is great in his observations on the Auchinshauch Testimony, the Sanquhar Declaration, and that fine amalgamation of humility and dogmatism, the Informatory Vindication.[78]

[Footnote 78: "An Informatory Vindication of a poor, wasted, misrepresented remnant of the suffering anti-popish, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, anti-sectarian, _only true_ church of Christ in Scotland."]

There is no occasion for quarrelling with these specialties. They are typical of a zeal often prolific both in amus.e.m.e.nt and instruction; and when a man has gone through the labour of rendering many hundreds of pages from a crabbed old ma.n.u.script, or of translating as much from a nearly unknown tongue, it would be hard to deny him the recreation of a few capers on his own hobby. Keep in mind that everything of this kind is outside the substance of the book. The editor has his swing in the introduction and appendix, and the notes; perhaps also in the t.i.tle and index, if he can make anything of them. But it is a principle of honour throughout the clubs that the purity of the text shall not be tampered with; and so, whether dark or light, faint or strong, it is a true impression of the times, as the reader will perhaps find in the few specimens I propose to show him. As touching the literary value of what is thus restored, there are some who will say, and get applause for doing so, that there are too many bad or second-rate books in existence already; that every work of great genius finds its way to the world at once; and that the very fact of its long obscurity proves a piece of literature to be of little value. For all this, and all that can be added to it, there are those who love these recovered relics of ancestral literature, and are prepared to give reasons for their attachment. In the first place, and apart from their purely literary merits, they are records of the intellect and manners of their age.

Whoever desires to be really acquainted with the condition of a nation at any particular time--say with that of England during Elizabeth's reign, or the Commonwealth--will not attain his object by merely reading the most approved histories of the period. He must endeavour as far as he can to live back into the times, and to do this most effectually he had better saturate himself to the utmost with its fugitive literature, reading every sc.r.a.p he may lay hand on until he can find no more.

Looking at these relics, on the other hand, as pure literature, no doubt what is recalled out of the past loses the freshness and the fitness to surrounding conditions which gave it pungency and emphasis in its own day, while it has not that hold on our sympathies and attachment possessed by the household literature which generation after generation has been educated to admire, and which, indeed, has made itself a part of our method of thought and our form of language. But precisely because it wants this qualification has resuscitated literature a peculiar value of its own. It breaks in with a new light upon the intellect of the day, and its conventional forms and colours. There is not in the intellectual history of mankind any so effective and brilliant an awakening as the resuscitation of cla.s.sical literature. It was not one solitary star arising after another at long intervals and far apart in s.p.a.ce, but a sudden blazing forth of a whole firmament of light. But that is a phenomenon to all appearance not to be repeated, or, more correctly speaking, not to be completed, since it broke up unfinished, leaving the world in partial darkness. Literature has been ever since wailing the loss of the seventy per cent of Livy's History, of the eighty per cent of Tacitus and of Euripides, of the still larger proportion of aeschylus and Sophocles, of the mysterious triumphs of Menander, and of the whole apparatus of the literary renown of Varro and of Atticus.[79] What would the learned world give for the restoration of these things? It may safely offer an indefinite reward, for so well has its surface been ransacked for them that their existence is hardly possible, though some sanguine people enjoy the expectation of finding them in some obscure back-shelves in the Sultan's library. The literary results of the costly and skilful scientific process for restoring the baked books found in Herculaneum were so appallingly paltry, as to discourage the pursuit of the lost cla.s.sics. The best thing brought to light during the present century, indeed, is that Inst.i.tute of Gaius which cost Angelo Ma such a world of trouble, and was the glory and boast of his life; but it is not a very popular or extensively read book after all. The ma.n.u.scripts that have been extracted from the dirty greedy fingers of the Armenian and Abyssinian monks, are the most valuable pieces of literature that have been rescued from the far past. Important light on the early history of Eastern Christianity will no doubt be extracted from them; but they are written in those Oriental tongues which are available only to the privileged few.

[Footnote 79: The applicability of this to Varro has been questioned. It is a matter in which every one is ent.i.tled to hold his own opinion. To say nothing of the other extant shreds of his writings--and I never found any one who had anything to say for them--I cannot account even the De Re Rustica as much higher in literary rank than a Farmers' and Gardeners' Calendar. No doubt it is valuable, as any such means of insight into the practical life of the Egyptians or the Phoenicians would be, even were it less methodical than what we have from Varro. But this, or other writing like it, will hardly account for his great fame among contemporaries. Look, for instance, to Cicero at the outset of the Academics: "Tu aetatem patriae, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum jura, tu sacerdotum munera, tu domesticam, tu bellicam disciplinam, tu sedem regionum et locorum, tu omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum nomina, genera officia, causas aperuiste: plurimumque poetis nostris omninoque latinis, et literis luminis attulisti, et verbis: atque ipse varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti: philosophiamque multis locis inchoasti--ad impellendum satis, ad edocendum parum." Laudation could scarcely be pitched in higher tone towards the works of the great Youatt, or Mr Huxtable's contributions to the department of literature devoted to manure and pigs. The De Re Rustica, written when its author was eighty years old, seems to have been about the last of what he calls his seven times seventy works, and it is natural to suppose that somewhere in the remaining four hundred and eighty-nine lay the merits which excited such encomiums. The story about Gregory the Great suppressing the best of Varro's works to hide St Augustine's pilferings from them, would be a valuable curiosity of literature if it could be established.]

Unlikely as the treasures opened by the revival of cla.s.sic literature are to be to any extent increased, let us not despise the harvest of our own home gleaners. They do not find now and then a buried Hamlet, or Paradise Lost, or Hudibras--though, by the way, the Poetical Remains of Butler, which in wit and sarcasm are second only to his great work, were rescued from oblivion by the drudging antiquary Thyer, who was so conceited of the performance that he had the portrait of his own respectable and stupid face engraved beside that of Butler, in order perhaps that all men might see how incapable he was of fabricating the pieces to which it is prefixed. There is a good deal of the poetry of the club books of which it may at least be said, that worse is printed and praised as the produce of our contemporaries.

It is not so much, however, in Poetry or the Drama as in Historical literature that the clubs develop their strength. It is difficult to estimate the greatness of the obligations of British history to these inst.i.tutions. They have dug up, cleansed, and put in order for immediate inspection and use, a mult.i.tude of written monuments bearing on the greatest events and the most critical epochs in the progress of the empire. The time thus saved to investigators is great and priceless. In no other department of knowledge can the intellectual labourer more forcibly apply the Latin proverb which warns him that his work is indefinite, but his life brief. In the ordinary sciences the philosopher may and often does content himself with the well-rounded and professedly completed system of the day. But no one can grapple with history without feeling its inexhaustibleness. Its final boundaries seem only to retreat to a farther distance the more ground we master, as Mr Buckle found, when he betook himself, like another Atlas, to grapple with the history of the whole world.

The more an investigator finds his materials printed for him, the farther he can go. No doubt it is sometimes desirable, even necessary, to look to some ma.n.u.script authority for the clearing-up of a special point; but too often the profession of having perused a great ma.s.s of ma.n.u.script authorities is an affectation and a pedantry. He who searches for and finds the truth in any considerable portion of history, performs too great an achievement to care for the praise of deciphering a few specimens of difficult handwriting, and revealing the sense hidden in certain words couched in obsolete spelling. If casual discoveries of this kind do really help him to great truths, it is well; but it too often happens that he exaggerates their value, because they are his own game, shot on his own manor. Until he has exhausted all that is in print, the student of history wastes his time in struggling with ma.n.u.scripts. Hence the value of the services of the book clubs in immensely widening the arena of his immediate materials. To him their volumes are as new tools to the mechanic, or new machinery to the manufacturer. They economise, as it is termed, his labour: more correctly speaking, they increase its productiveness.