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diff --git a/2018-h/2018-h.htm b/2018-h/2018-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..05434a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/2018-h/2018-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,5330 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" /> +<title>The Library, by Andrew Lang</title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + P.gutsumm { margin-left: 5%;} + P.poetry {margin-left: 3%; } + .GutSmall { font-size: 0.7em; } + H1, H2 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + H3, H4, H5 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + table { border-collapse: collapse; } +table {margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;} + td { vertical-align: top; border: 1px solid black;} + td p { margin: 0.2em; } + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + + .smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + + .pagenum {position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: small; + text-align: right; + font-weight: normal; + color: gray; + } + img { border: none; } + img.dc { float: left; width: 50px; height: 50px; } + p.gutindent { margin-left: 2em; } + div.gapspace { height: 0.8em; } + div.gapline { height: 0.8em; width: 100%; border-top: 1px solid;} + div.gapmediumline { height: 0.3em; width: 40%; margin-left:30%; + border-top: 1px solid; } + div.gapmediumdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 40%; margin-left:30%; + border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} + div.gapshortdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 20%; + margin-left: 40%; border-top: 1px solid; + border-bottom: 1px solid; } + div.gapdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 50%; + margin-left: 25%; border-top: 1px solid; + border-bottom: 1px solid;} + div.gapshortline { height: 0.3em; width: 20%; margin-left:40%; + border-top: 1px solid; } + .citation {vertical-align: super; + font-size: .8em; + text-decoration: none;} + img.floatleft { float: left; + margin-right: 1em; + margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; } + img.floatright { float: right; + margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0.5em; + margin-bottom: 0.5em; } + img.clearcenter {display: block; + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0.5em; + margin-bottom: 0.5em} + --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> +</head> +<body> +<pre> + +The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Library, by Andrew Lang, et al + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most +other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions +whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of +the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at +www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have +to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. + + + + +Title: The Library + + +Author: Andrew Lang + + + +Release Date: October 5, 2014 [eBook #2018] +[This file was first posted on April 4, 1999] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIBRARY*** +</pre> +<p>Transcribed from the 1881 Macmillan and Co. edition by David +Price, email ccx074@pgflaf.org</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/coverb.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Book cover" +title= +"Book cover" + src="images/covers.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/fpb.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Frontispiece" +title= +"Frontispiece" + src="images/fps.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<h1>THE LIBRARY</h1> +<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br +/> +ANDREW LANG</p> +<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">WITH A +CHAPTER ON</span><br /> +<span class="GutSmall">MODERN ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED BOOKS +BY</span><br /> +<span class="GutSmall">AUSTIN DOBSON</span></p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/tpb.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Decorative graphic, ‘Art at Home’" +title= +"Decorative graphic, ‘Art at Home’" + src="images/tps.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p style="text-align: center">London<br /> +MACMILLAN & CO.<br /> +1881</p> +<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall"><i>The right +of reproduction is reserved</i></span><span +class="GutSmall">.</span></p> + +<div class="gapspace"> </div> +<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pagevi"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. vi</span><i>Printed by</i> R. & R. <span +class="smcap">Clarke</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.</p> + +<div class="gapspace"> </div> +<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pagevii"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. vii</span><span class="GutSmall">TO</span><br +/> +DR. JOHN BROWN<br /> +<span class="GutSmall">AUTHOR OF</span><br /> +<span class="GutSmall"><i>RAB AND HIS FRIENDS</i></span><span +class="GutSmall">.</span></p> +<h2><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +ix</span>PREFATORY NOTE</h2> +<p><span class="smcap">The</span> pages in this volume on +illuminated and other MSS. (with the exception of some anecdotes +about Bussy Rabutin and Julie de Rambouillet) have been +contributed by the Rev. W. J. Loftie, who has also written on +early printed books (pp. 94–95). The pages on the +Biblioklept (pp. 46–56) are reprinted, with the +Editor’s kind permission, from the <i>Saturday Review</i>; +and a few remarks on the moral lessons of bookstalls are taken +from an essay in the same journal.</p> +<p>Mr. Ingram Bywater, Fellow of Exeter College, and lately +sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, has very kindly read through the +proofs of chapters I., II., and III., and suggested some +alterations.</p> +<p>Thanks are also due to Mr. T. R. Buchanan, Fellow of All Souls +College, for two plates from his “Book-bindings in All +Souls Library” (printed for private circulation), which he +has been good <a name="pagex"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +x</span>enough to lend me. The plates are beautifully drawn +and coloured by Dr. J. J. Wild. Messrs. George Bell & +Sons, Messrs. Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., and Messrs. Chatto +& Windus, must be thanked for the use of some of the woodcuts +which illustrate the concluding chapter.</p> +<p style="text-align: right">A. L.</p> +<h2><a name="pagexi"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +xi</span>CONTENTS.</h2> +<table> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: right"><span +class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER I.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">An Apology for the +Book-hunter</span></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page1">1</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p>“Every man his own +Librarian”—Bibliography and Literature—Services +of the French to Bibliography—A defence of the taste of the +Book-collector—Should Collectors buy for the purpose of +selling again?—The sport of Book-hunting—M. de +Resbecq’s anecdotes—Stories of success of +Book-hunters—The lessons of old +Bookstalls—Booksellers’ catalogues—Auctions of +Books—Different forms of the taste for collecting—The +taste serviceable to critical Science—Books considered as +literary relics—Examples—The “Imitatio +Christi” of J. J. Rousseau—A brief vision of mighty +Book-hunters.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER II.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">The Library</span></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page31">31</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p>The size of modern collections—The +Library in English houses—Bookcases—Enemies of +Books—Damp, dust, dirt—The bookworm—Careless +readers—Book plates—Borrowers—Book +stealers—Affecting instance of the Spanish Monk—The +Book-ghoul—Women the natural foes of books—Some +touching exceptions—Homage to Madame Fertiault—Modes +of preserving books; binding—Various sorts of coverings for +books—Half-bindings—Books too good to bind, how to be +entertained—Iniquities of Binders—Cruel case of a +cropped play of Molière—Recipes (not infallible) for +cleaning books—Necessity of possessing bibliographical +works, such as catalogues.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><a +name="pagexii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xii</span>CHAPTER +III.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">The Books of the Collector</span></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page76">76</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p>Manuscripts, early and late—Early +Printed Books—How to recognise them—Books printed on +<span class="smcap">Vellum</span>—“Uncut” +copies—“Livres de Luxe,” and Illustrated +Books—Invective against “Christmas +Books”—The “Hypnerotomachia +Poliphili”—Old woodcuts—French vignettes of the +eighteenth century—Books of the Aldi—Books of the +Elzevirs—“Curious” Books—Singular old +English poems—First editions—Changes of fashion in +Book-collecting—Examples of the variations in +prices—Books valued for their bindings, and as +relics—Anecdotes of Madame du Barry and Marie +Antoinette.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">CHAPTER IV.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Illustrated Books</span></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page123">123</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p>Beginnings of Modern Book-Illustration in +England—Stothard, Blake, Flaxman—Boydell’s +“Shakespeare,” Macklin’s “Bible,” +Martin’s “Milton”—The +“Annuals”—Rogers’s “Italy” +and “Poems”—Revival of +Wood-Engraving—Bewick—Bewick’s Pupils—The +“London School”—Progress of +Wood-Engraving—Illustrated “Christmas” and +other Books—The Humorous +Artists—Cruikshank—Doyle—Thackeray—Leech—Tenniel—Du +Maurier—Sambourne—Keene—Minor Humorous +Artists—Children’s Books—Crane—Miss +Greenaway—Caldecott—The “New American +School”—Conclusion.</p> +</td> +</tr> +</table> +<h2><a name="pagexiii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +xiii</span>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.</h2> +<table> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">PLATES.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p> </p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span +class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>M. <span class="smcap">Annei Lucani de Bello Civili +Libri</span> X. <span class="smcap">Apud Seb. Gryphium +Lugduni</span>. 1551 <i>To face</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page62">62</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Pub. Virgilii Maronis Opera +Parisiis</span>. <span class="smcap">Apud Hieronymum de +Marnef, sub Pelicano, Monte D’Hilurii</span>. +1558 <i>To face</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page64">64</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Title-page</span> of “Le Rommant +de la Rose,” Paris, 1539 <i>To face</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page94">94</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">WOODCUTS.</p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Frontispiece</span>. <i>Drawn by +Walter Crane</i>; <i>engraved by Swain</i>.</p> +</td> +<td><p> </p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Initial</span>. <i>Drawn by +Walter Crane</i>; <i>engraved by Swain</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page1">1</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Group of Children</span>. +<i>Drawn by Kate Greenaway</i>; <i>engraved by O. Lacour</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page122">122</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Initial</span>. From +Hughes’s “Scouring of the White Horse, +1858.” <i>Drawn by Richard Doyle</i>; <i>engraved by +W. J. Linton</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page123">123</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><a name="pagexiv"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +xiv</span>“<span class="smcap">Infant +Joy</span>.” From Blake’s “Songs of +Innocence,” 1789. <i>Engraved by J. F. +Jungling</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page129">129</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">Counsellor, King, Warrior, +Mother and Child, in the Tomb</span>.” From +Blair’s “Grave,” 1808. <i>Designed by +William Blake</i>; <i>facsimiled on wood from the engraving by +Louis Schiavonetti</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page131">131</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">The +Woodcock</span>.” From Jackson & Chatto’s +“History of Wood-Engraving,” 1839. +<i>Engraved</i>, <i>after T. Bewick</i>, <i>by John +Jackson</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page141">141</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Tailpiece</span>. From the +same. <i>Engraved</i>, <i>after T. Bewick</i>, <i>by John +Jackson</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page143">143</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Headpiece</span>. From +Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory, with other +Poems,” 1810. <i>Drawn by T. Stothard</i>; +<i>engraved</i>, <i>after Luke Clennell</i>, <i>by O. +Lacour</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page145">145</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">Golden head by golden +head</span>.” From Christina Rossetti’s +“Goblin Market and other Poems,” 1862. <i>Drawn +by D. G. Rossetti</i>; <i>engraved by W. J. Linton</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page149">149</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">The Deaf +Post-Boy</span>.” From Clarke’s “Three +Courses and a Dessert,” 1830. <i>Drawn by G. +Cruikshank</i>; <i>engraved by S. Williams</i> [?]</p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a +href="#image153">153</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">The Mad +Tea-Party</span>.” From “Alice’s +Adventures in Wonderland,” 1865. <i>Drawn by John +Tenniel</i>; <i>engraved by Dalziel Brothers</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a +href="#image162">162</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><a name="pagexv"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +xv</span><span class="smcap">Black Kitten</span>. From +“Through the Looking-Glass,” 1871. <i>Drawn by +John Tenniel</i>; <i>engraved by Dalziel Brothers</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page163">163</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">The Music of the +Past</span>.” From “Punch’s +Almanack,” 1877. <i>Drawn by George du Maurier</i>; +<i>engraved by Swain</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a +href="#image165">165</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Lion and Tub</span>. From +“Punch’s Pocket-Book,” 1879. <i>Drawn by +Linley Sambourne</i>; <i>engraved by Swain</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a +href="#image167">167</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p><span class="smcap">Boy and Hippocampus</span>. From +Miss E. Keary’s “Magic Valley,” 1877. +<i>Drawn by</i> “<i>E. V. B.</i>” (Hon. Mrs. Boyle); +<i>engraved by T. Quartley</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a +href="#page171">171</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td><p>“<span class="smcap">Love +Charms</span>.” From Irving’s +“Bracebridge Hall,” 1876. <i>Drawn by Randolph +Caldecott</i>; <i>engraved by J. D. Cooper</i></p> +</td> +<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a +href="#image173">173</a></span></p> +</td> +</tr> +</table> + +<div class="gapspace"> </div> +<blockquote><p>Books, books again, and books once more!<br /> +These are our theme, which some miscall<br /> +Mere madness, setting little store<br /> +By copies either short or tall.<br /> +But you, O slaves of shelf and stall!<br /> +We rather write for you that hold<br /> +Patched folios dear, and prize “the small,<br /> +Rare volume, black with tarnished gold.”</p> +<p style="text-align: right">A. D.</p> +</blockquote> +<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>CHAPTER +I.<br /> +AN APOLOGY FOR THE BOOK-HUNTER</h2> +<p>“<span class="smcap">All</span> men,” says Dr. +Dibdin, “like to be their own librarians.” A +writer on the library has no business to lay down the law as to +the books that even the most inexperienced amateurs should try to +collect. There are books which no lover of literature can +afford to be without; classics, ancient and modern, on which the +world has pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever +shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary +foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante +and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and +Molière, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and +Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess +in the original <a name="page2"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +2</span>languages or in translations. The list of such +classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the tastes of +men begin to differ very widely. An assortment of +broadsheet ballads and scrap-books, bought in boyhood, was the +nucleus of Scott’s library, rich in the works of poets and +magicians, of alchemists, and anecdotists. A childish +liking for coloured prints of stage characters, may be the germ +of a theatrical collection like those of Douce, and Malone, and +Cousin. People who are studying any past period of human +history, or any old phase or expression of human genius, will +eagerly collect little contemporary volumes which seem trash to +other amateurs. For example, to a student of +Molière, it is a happy chance to come across “La +Carte du Royaume des Prétieuses”—(The map of +the kingdom of the “Précieuses”)—written +the year before the comedian brought out his famous play +“Les Précieuses Ridicules.” This +geographical tract appeared in the very “Recueil des Pieces +Choisies,” whose authors Magdelon, in the play, was +expecting to entertain, when Mascarille made his +appearance. There is a faculty which Horace Walpole named +“serendipity,”—the luck of falling on just the +literary document which one wants at the moment. All +collectors of out of the way books know the pleasure of the +exercise of <a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +3</span>serendipity, but they enjoy it in different ways. +One man will go home hugging a volume of sermons, another with a +bulky collection of catalogues, which would have distended the +pockets even of the wide great-coat made for the purpose, that +Charles Nodier used to wear when he went a book-hunting. +Others are captivated by black letter, others by the plays of +such obscurities as Nabbes and Glapthorne. But however +various the tastes of collectors of books, they are all agreed on +one point,—the love of printed paper. Even an Elzevir +man can sympathise with Charles Lamb’s attachment to +“that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which he dragged home +late at night from Barker’s in Covent Garden.” +But it is another thing when Lamb says, “I do not care for +a first folio of Shakespeare.” A bibliophile who +could say this could say anything.</p> +<p>No, there are, in every period of taste, books which, apart +from their literary value, all collectors admit to possess, if +not for themselves, then for others of the brotherhood, a +peculiar preciousness. These books are esteemed for +curiosity, for beauty of type, paper, binding, and illustrations, +for some connection they may have with famous people of the past, +or for their rarity. It is about these books, the method of +preserving them, their enemies, the places in which to hunt for +them, <a name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 4</span>that +the following pages are to treat. It is a subject more +closely connected with the taste for curiosities than with art, +strictly so called. We are to be occupied, not so much with +literature as with books, not so much with criticism as with +bibliography, the quaint <i>duenna</i> of literature, a study +apparently dry, but not without its humours. And here an +apology must be made for the frequent allusions and anecdotes +derived from French writers. These are as unavoidable, +almost, as the use of French terms of the sport in tennis and in +fencing. In bibliography, in the care for books <i>as</i> +books, the French are still the teachers of Europe, as they were +in tennis and are in fencing. Thus, Richard de Bury, +Chancellor of Edward III., writes in his +“Philobiblon:” “Oh God of Gods in Zion! what a +rushing river of joy gladdens my heart as often as I have a +chance of going to Paris! There the days seem always short; +there are the goodly collections on the delicate fragrant +book-shelves.” Since Dante wrote of—</p> +<blockquote><p>“L’onor di quell’ arte<br /> +Ch’ allumare è chiamata in Parisi,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“the art that is called illuminating in Paris,” +and all the other arts of writing, printing, binding books, have +been most skilfully practised by France. She improved on +the lessons given by <a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +5</span>Germany and Italy in these crafts. Twenty books +about books are written in Paris for one that is published in +England. In our country Dibdin is out of date (the second +edition of his “Bibliomania” was published in 1811), +and Mr. Hill Burton’s humorous “Book-hunter” is +out of print. Meanwhile, in France, writers grave and gay, +from the gigantic industry of Brunet to Nodier’s quaint +fancy, and Janin’s wit, and the always entertaining +bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix), have written, or are writing, +on books, manuscripts, engravings, editions, and bindings. +In England, therefore, rare French books are eagerly sought, and +may be found in all the booksellers’ catalogues. On +the continent there is no such care for our curious or beautiful +editions, old or new. Here a hint may be given to the +collector. If he “picks up” a rare French book, +at a low price, he would act prudently in having it bound in +France by a good craftsman. Its value, when “the +wicked day of destiny” comes, and the collection is broken +up, will thus be made secure. For the French do not suffer +our English bindings gladly; while we have no narrow prejudice +against the works of Lortic and Capé, but the +reverse. For these reasons then, and also because every +writer is obliged to make the closest acquaintance with books in +the direction where his <a name="page6"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 6</span>own studies lie, the writings of +French authorities are frequently cited in the following +pages.</p> +<p>This apology must be followed by a brief defence of the taste +and passion of book-collecting, and of the class of men known +invidiously as book-worms and book-hunters. They and their +simple pleasures are the butts of a cheap and shrewish set of +critics, who cannot endure in others a taste which is absent in +themselves. Important new books have actually been +condemned of late years because they were printed on good paper, +and a valuable historical treatise was attacked by reviewers +quite angrily because its outward array was not mean and +forbidding. Of course, critics who take this view of new +books have no patience with persons who care for +“margins,” and “condition,” and early +copies of old books. We cannot hope to convert the +adversary, but it is not necessary to be disturbed by his +clamour. People are happier for the possession of a taste +as long as they possess it, and it does not, like the demons of +Scripture, possess them. The wise collector gets +instruction and pleasure from his pursuit, and it may well be +that, in the long run, he and his family do not lose money. +The amusement may chance to prove a very fair investment.</p> +<p>As to this question of making money by <a +name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>collecting, Mr. +Hill Burton speaks very distinctly in “The +Book-hunter:” “Where money is the object let a man +speculate or become a miser. . . Let not the collector ever, +unless in some urgent and necessary circumstances, part with any +of his treasures. Let him not even have recourse to that +practice called barter, which political philosophers tell us is +the universal resource of mankind preparatory to the invention of +money. Let him confine all his transactions in the market +to purchasing only. No good comes of gentlemen-amateurs +buying and selling.” There is room for difference of +opinion here, but there seems to be most reason on the side of +Mr. Hill Burton. It is one thing for the collector to be +able to reflect that the money he expends on books is not lost, +and that his family may find themselves richer, not poorer, +because he indulged his taste. It is quite another thing to +buy books as a speculator buys shares, meaning to sell again at a +profit as soon as occasion offers. It is necessary also to +warn the beginner against indulging extravagant hopes. He +must buy experience with his books, and many of his first +purchases are likely to disappoint him. He will pay dearly +for the wrong “Cæsar” of 1635, the one +<i>without</i> errors in pagination; and this is only a common +example of the beginner’s blunders. Collecting is +like other <a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +8</span>forms of sport; the aim is not certain at first, the +amateur is nervous, and, as in angling, is apt to +“strike” (a bargain) too hurriedly.</p> +<p>I often think that the pleasure of collecting is like that of +sport. People talk of “book-hunting,” and the +old Latin motto says that “one never wearies of the chase +in this forest.” But the analogy to angling seems +even stronger. A collector walks in the London or Paris +streets, as he does by Tweed or Spey. Many a lordly mart of +books he passes, like Mr. Quaritch’s, Mr. Toovey’s, +or M. Fontaine’s, or the shining store of M.M. Morgand et +Fatout, in the Passage des Panoramas. Here I always feel +like Brassicanus in the king of Hungary’s collection, +“non in Bibliotheca, sed in gremio Jovis;” “not +in a library, but in paradise.” It is not given to +every one to cast angle in these preserves. They are kept +for dukes and millionaires. Surely the old Duke of +Roxburghe was the happiest of mortals, for to him both the chief +bookshops and auction rooms, and the famous salmon streams of +Floors, were equally open, and he revelled in the prime of +book-collecting and of angling. But there are little +tributary streets, with humbler stalls, shy pools, as it were, +where the humbler fisher of books may hope to raise an Elzevir, +or an old French play, a first edition of Shelley, or a <a +name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 9</span>Restoration +comedy. It is usually a case of hope unfulfilled; but the +merest nibble of a rare book, say Marston’s poems in the +original edition, or Beddoes’s “Love’s Arrow +Poisoned,” or Bankes’s “Bay Horse in a +Trance,” or the “Mel Heliconicum” of Alexander +Ross, or “Les Oeuvres de Clement Marot, de Cahors, Vallet +de Chambre du Roy, A Paris, Ches Pierre Gaultier, 1551;” +even a chance at something of this sort will kindle the waning +excitement, and add a pleasure to a man’s walk in muddy +London. Then, suppose you purchase for a couple of +shillings the “Histoire des Amours de Henry IV, et autres +pieces curieuses, A Leyde, Chez Jean Sambyx (Elzevir), +1664,” it is certainly not unpleasant, on consulting M. +Fontaine’s catalogue, to find that he offers the same work +at the ransom of £10. The beginner thinks himself in +singular luck, even though he has no idea of vending his +collection, and he never reflects that +<i>condition</i>—spotless white leaves and broad margins, +make the market value of a book.</p> +<p>Setting aside such bare considerations of profit, the sport +given by bookstalls is full of variety and charm. In London +it may be pursued in most of the cross streets that stretch a +dirty net between the British Museum and the Strand. There +are other more shy and less frequently <a name="page10"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 10</span>poached resorts which the amateur may +be allowed to find out for himself. In Paris there is the +long sweep of the <i>Quais</i>, where some eighty +<i>bouquinistes</i> set their boxes on the walls of the +embankment of the Seine. There are few country towns so +small but that books, occasionally rare and valuable, may be +found lurking in second-hand furniture warehouses. This is +one of the advantages of living in an old country. The +Colonies are not the home for a collector. I have seen an +Australian bibliophile enraptured by the rare chance of buying, +in Melbourne, an early work on—the history of Port +Jackson! This seems but poor game. But in Europe an +amateur has always occupation for his odd moments in town, and is +for ever lured on by the radiant apparition of Hope. All +collectors tell their anecdotes of wonderful luck, and +magnificent discoveries. There is a volume “Voyages +Littéraires sur les Quais de Paris” (Paris, Durand, +1857), by M. de Fontaine de Resbecq, which might convert the +dullest soul to book-hunting. M. de Resbecq and his friends +had the most amazing good fortune. A M. N— found six +original plays of Molière (worth perhaps as many hundreds +of pounds), bound up with Garth’s “Dispensary,” +an English poem which has long lost its vogue. It is worth +while, indeed, to examine all volumes marked <a +name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +11</span>“Miscellanea,” “Essays,” and the +like, and treasures may possibly lurk, as Snuffy Davy knew, +within the battered sheepskin of school books. Books lie in +out of the way places. Poggio rescued +“Quintilian” from the counter of a wood +merchant. The best time for book-hunting in Paris is the +early morning. “The take,” as anglers say, is +“on” from half-past seven to half-past nine +a.m. At these hours the vendors exhibit their fresh wares, +and the agents of the more wealthy booksellers come and pick up +everything worth having. These agents quite spoil the sport +of the amateur. They keep a strict watch on every country +dealer’s catalogue, snap up all he has worth selling, and +sell it over again, charging pounds in place of shillings. +But M. de Resbecq vows that he once picked up a copy of the first +edition of La Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims” out of a +box which two booksellers had just searched. The same +collector got together very promptly all the original editions of +La Bruyère, and he even found a copy of the Elzevir +“Pastissier Français,” at the humble price of +six sous. Now the “ Pastissier +Français,” an ill-printed little cookery-book of the +Elzevirs, has lately fetched £600 at a sale. The +Antiquary’s story of Snuffy Davy and the “Game of +Chess,” is dwarfed by the luck of M. de Resbecq. <a +name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 12</span>Not one +amateur in a thousand can expect such good fortune. There +is, however, a recent instance of a Rugby boy, who picked up, on +a stall, a few fluttering leaves hanging together on a flimsy +thread. The old woman who kept the stall could hardly be +induced to accept the large sum of a shilling for an original +quarto of Shakespeare’s “King John.” +These stories are told that none may despair. That none may +be over confident, an author may recount his own +experience. The only odd <i>trouvaille</i> that ever fell +to me was a clean copy of “La Journée +Chrétienne,” with the name of Léon Gambetta, +1844, on its catholic fly-leaf. Rare books grow rarer every +day, and often ’tis only Hope that remains at the bottom of +the fourpenny boxes. Yet the Paris book-hunters cleave to +the game. August is their favourite season; for in August +there is least competition. Very few people are, as a rule, +in Paris, and these are not tempted to loiter. The +bookseller is drowsy, and glad not to have the trouble of +chaffering. The English go past, and do not tarry beside a +row of dusty boxes of books. The heat threatens the amateur +with sunstroke. Then, says M. Octave Uzanne, in a prose +<i>ballade</i> of book-hunters—then, calm, glad, heroic, +the <i>bouquineurs</i> prowl forth, refreshed with hope. +The brown old calf-skin wrinkles in the <a +name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>sun, the +leaves crackle, you could poach an egg on the cover of a +quarto. The dome of the Institute glitters, the sickly +trees seem to wither, their leaves wax red and grey, a faint warm +wind is walking the streets. Under his vast umbrella the +book-hunter is secure and content; he enjoys the pleasures of the +sport unvexed by poachers, and thinks less of the heat than does +the deer-stalker on the bare hill-side.</p> +<p>There is plenty of morality, if there are few rare books in +the stalls. The decay of affection, the breaking of +friendship, the decline of ambition, are all illustrated in these +fourpenny collections. The presentation volumes are here +which the author gave in the pride of his heart to the poet who +was his “Master,” to the critic whom he feared, to +the friend with whom he was on terms of mutual admiration. +The critic has not even cut the leaves, the poet has brusquely +torn three or four apart with his finger and thumb, the friend +has grown cold, and has let the poems slip into some corner of +his library, whence they were removed on some day of doom and of +general clearing out. The sale of the library of a late +learned prelate who had Boileau’s hatred of a dull book was +a scene to be avoided by his literary friends. The Bishop +always gave the works which were offered to him a fair +chance. <a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +14</span>He read till he could read no longer, cutting the pages +as he went, and thus his progress could be traced like that of a +backwoodsman who “blazes” his way through a primeval +forest. The paper-knife generally ceased to do duty before +the thirtieth page. The melancholy of the book-hunter is +aroused by two questions, “Whence?” and +“Whither?” The bibliophile asks about his books +the question which the metaphysician asks about his soul. +Whence came they? Their value depends a good deal on the +answer. If they are stamped with arms, then there is a book +(“Armorial du Bibliophile,” by M. Guigard) which +tells you who was their original owner. Any one of twenty +coats-of-arms on the leather is worth a hundred times the value +of the volume which it covers. If there is no such mark, +the fancy is left to devise a romance about the first owner, and +all the hands through which the book has passed. That +Vanini came from a Jesuit college, where it was kept under lock +and key. That copy of Agrippa “De Vanitate +Scientiarum” is marked, in a crabbed hand and in faded ink, +with cynical Latin notes. What pessimist two hundred years +ago made his grumbling so permanent? One can only guess, +but part of the imaginative joys of the book-hunter lies ‘ +in the fruitless conjecture. That other question <a +name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +15</span>“Whither?” is graver. Whither are our +treasures to be scattered? Will they find kind masters? or, +worst fate of books, fall into the hands of women who will sell +them to the trunk-maker? Are the leaves to line a box or to +curl a maiden’s locks? Are the rarities to become +more and more rare, and at last fetch prodigious prices? +Some unlucky men are able partly to solve these problems in their +own lifetime. They are constrained to sell their +libraries—an experience full of bitterness, wrath, and +disappointment.</p> +<p>Selling books is nearly as bad as losing friends, than which +life has no worse sorrow. A book is a friend whose face is +constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering +from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed +surely, with the change in yourself. As a man’s +tastes and opinions are developed his books put on a different +aspect. He hardly knows the “Poems and Ballads” +he used to declaim, and cannot recover the enigmatic charm of +“Sordello.” Books change like friends, like +ourselves, like everything; but they are most piquant in the +contrasts they provoke, when the friend who gave them and wrote +them is a success, though we laughed at him; a failure, though we +believed in him; altered in any case, and estranged from his old +self and old days. The vanished past returns when we look +at the pages. <a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +16</span>The vicissitudes of years are printed and packed in a +thin octavo, and the shivering ghosts of desire and hope return +to their forbidden home in the heart and fancy. It is as +well to have the power of recalling them always at hand, and to +be able to take a comprehensive glance at the emotions which were +so powerful and full of life, and now are more faded and of less +account than the memory of the dreams of childhood. It is +because our books are friends that do change, and remind us of +change, that we should keep them with us, even at a little +inconvenience, and not turn them adrift in the world to find a +dusty asylum in cheap bookstalls. We are a part of all that +we have read, to parody the saying of Mr. Tennyson’s +Ulysses, and we owe some respect, and house-room at least, to the +early acquaintances who have begun to bore us, and remind us of +the vanity of ambition and the weakness of human purpose. +Old school and college books even have a reproachful and salutary +power of whispering how much a man knew, and at the cost of how +much trouble, that he has absolutely forgotten, and is neither +the better nor the worse for it. It will be the same in the +case of the books he is eager about now; though, to be sure, he +will read with less care, and forget with an ease and readiness +only to be acquired by practice.</p> +<p><a name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 17</span>But we +were apologising for book-hunting, not because it teaches moral +lessons, as “dauncyng” also does, according to Sir +Thomas Elyot, in the “Boke called the Gouvernour,” +but because it affords a kind of sportive excitement. +Bookstalls are not the only field of the chase. Book +catalogues, which reach the collector through the post, give him +all the pleasures of the sport at home. He reads the +booksellers’ catalogues eagerly, he marks his chosen sport +with pencil, he writes by return of post, or he telegraphs to the +vendor. Unfortunately he almost always finds that he has +been forestalled, probably by some bookseller’s +agent. When the catalogue is a French one, it is obvious +that Parisians have the pick of the market before our slow +letters reach M. Claudin, or M. Labitte. Still the +catalogues themselves are a kind of lesson in bibliography. +You see from them how prices are ruling, and you can gloat, in +fancy, over De Luyne’s edition of Molière, 1673, two +volumes in red morocco, <i>doublé</i> (“Trautz +Bauzonnet”), or some other vanity hopelessly out of +reach. In their catalogues, MM. Morgand and Fatout print a +facsimile of the frontispiece of this very rare edition. +The bust of Molière occupies the centre, and portraits of +the great actor, as Sganarelle and Mascarille (of the +“Précieuses Ridicules”), stand on either +side. In the second volume are <a name="page18"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 18</span>Molière, and his wife Armande, +crowned by the muse Thalia. A catalogue which contains such +exact reproductions of rare and authentic portraits, is itself a +work of art, and serviceable to the student. When the shop +of a bookseller, with a promising catalogue which arrives over +night, is not too far distant, bibliophiles have been known to +rush to the spot in the grey morning, before the doors +open. There are amateurs, however, who prefer to stay +comfortably at home, and pity these poor fanatics, shivering in +the rain outside a door in Oxford Street or Booksellers’ +Row. There is a length to which enthusiasm cannot go, and +many collectors draw the line at rising early in the +morning. But, when we think of the sport of book-hunting, +it is to sales in auction-rooms that the mind naturally +turns. Here the rival buyers feel the passion of emulation, +and it was in an auction-room that Guibert de +Pixérécourt, being outbid, said, in tones of mortal +hatred, “I will have the book when your collection is sold +after your death.” And he kept his word. The +fever of gambling is not absent from the auction-room, and people +“bid jealous” as they sometimes “ride +jealous” in the hunting-field. Yet, the neophyte, if +he strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be surprised at the +spectacle. The chamber has the look of a rather seedy +“hell.” The <a name="page19"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 19</span>crowd round the auctioneer’s +box contains many persons so dingy and Semitic, that at Monte +Carlo they would be refused admittance; while, in Germany, they +would be persecuted by Herr von Treitschke with Christian +ardour. Bidding is languid, and valuable books are knocked +down for trifling sums. Let the neophyte try his luck, +however, and prices will rise wonderfully. The fact is that +the sale is a “knock out.” The bidders are +professionals, in a league to let the volumes go cheap, and to +distribute them afterwards among themselves. Thus an +amateur can have a good deal of sport by bidding for a book till +it reaches its proper value, and by then leaving in the lurch the +professionals who combine to “run him up.” The +amusement has its obvious perils, but the presence of gentlemen +in an auction-room is a relief to the auctioneer and to the owner +of the books. A bidder must be able to command his temper, +both that he may be able to keep his head cool when tempted to +bid recklessly, and that he may disregard the not very carefully +concealed sneers of the professionals.</p> +<p>In book-hunting the nature of the quarry varies with the taste +of the collector. One man is for bibles, another for +ballads. Some pursue plays, others look for play +bills. “He was not,” says Mr. Hill Burton, +speaking of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, <a name="page20"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 20</span>“he was not a black-letter man, +or a tall copyist, or an uncut man, or a rough-edge man, or an +early-English dramatist, or an Elzevirian, or a broadsider, or a +pasquinader, or an old brown calf man, or a Grangerite, <a +name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1" +class="citation">[1]</a> or a tawny moroccoite, or a gilt topper, +or a marbled insider, or an <i>editio princeps</i> +man.” These nicknames briefly dispose into categories +a good many species of collectors. But there are plenty of +others. You may be a historical-bindings man, and hunt for +books that were bound by the great artists of the past and +belonged to illustrious collectors. Or you may be a +Jametist, and try to gather up the volumes on which Jamet, the +friend of Louis Racine, scribbled his cynical +“Marginalia.” Or you may covet the earliest +editions of modern poets—Shelley, Keats, or Tennyson, or +even Ebenezer Jones. Or the object of your desires may be +the books of the French romanticists, who flourished so freely in +1830. Or, being a person of large fortune and landed +estate, you may collect country histories. Again, your +heart may be set on the books illustrated by Eisen, Cochin, and +Gravelot, or Stothard and Blake, in the last century. Or +you may be so old-fashioned as to care for Aldine classics, and +<a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 21</span>for the +books of the Giunta press. In fact, as many as are the +species of rare and beautiful books, so many are the species of +collectors. There is one sort of men, modest but not unwise +in their generations, who buy up the pretty books published in +very limited editions by French booksellers, like MM. Lemerre and +Jouaust. Already their reprints of Rochefoucauld’s +first edition, of Beaumarchais, of La Fontaine, of the lyrics +attributed to Molière, and other volumes, are exhausted, +and fetch high prices in the market. By a singular caprice, +the little volumes of Mr. Thackeray’s miscellaneous +writings, in yellow paper wrappers (when they are first +editions), have become objects of desire, and their old modest +price is increased twenty fold. It is not always easy to +account for these freaks of fashion; but even in book-collecting +there are certain definite laws. “Why do you pay a +large price for a dingy, old book,” outsiders ask, +“when a clean modern reprint can be procured for two or +three shillings?” To this question the collector has +several replies, which he, at least, finds satisfactory. In +the first place, early editions, published during a great +author’s lifetime, and under his supervision, have +authentic texts. The changes in them are the changes that +Prior or La Bruyère themselves made and approved. +You can study, <a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +22</span>in these old editions, the alterations in their taste, +the history of their minds. The case is the same even with +contemporary authors. One likes to have Mr. +Tennyson’s “Poems, chiefly Lyrical” (London: +Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830). It is +fifty years old, this little book of one hundred and fifty-four +pages, this first fruit of a stately tree. In half a +century the poet has altered much, and withdrawn much, but +already, in 1830, he had found his distinctive note, and his +“Mariana” is a masterpiece. +“Mariana” is in all the collections, but pieces of +which the execution is less certain must be sought only in the +old volume of 1830. In the same way “The Strayed +Reveller, and other poems, by A.” (London: B. +Fellowes, Ludgate Street, 1849) contains much that Mr. Matthew +Arnold has altered, and this volume, like the suppressed +“Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, by A.” (1852), +appeals more to the collector than do the new editions which all +the world may possess. There are verses, curious in their +way, in Mr. Clough’s “Ambarvalia” (1849), which +you will not find in his posthumous edition, but which +“repay perusal.” These minutiæ of +literary history become infinitely more important in the early +editions of the great classical writers, and the book-collector +may regard his taste as a kind of handmaid of <a +name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 23</span>critical +science. The preservation of rare books, and the collection +of materials for criticism, are the useful functions, then, of +book-collecting. But it is not to be denied that the +sentimental side of the pursuit gives it most of its charm. +Old books are often literary <i>relics</i>, and as dear and +sacred to the lover of literature as are relics of another sort +to the religious devotee. The amateur likes to see the book +in its form as the author knew it. He takes a pious +pleasure in the first edition of “Les Précieuses +Ridicules,” (<span class="GutSmall">M.DC.LX.</span>) just +as Molière saw it, when he was fresh in the business of +authorship, and wrote “Mon Dieu, qu’un Autheur est +neuf, la première fois qu’on +l’imprime.” All editions published during a +great man’s life have this attraction, and seem to bring us +closer to his spirit. Other volumes are relics, as we shall +see later, of some famed collector, and there is a certain piety +in the care we give to books once dear to Longepierre, or Harley, +or d’Hoym, or Buckle, to Madame de Maintenon, or Walpole, +to Grolier, or Askew, or De Thou, or Heber. Such copies +should be handed down from worthy owners to owners not unworthy; +such servants of literature should never have careless +masters. A man may prefer to read for pleasure in a good +clear reprint. M. Charpentier’s +“Montaigne” serves the turn, but it is natural to +treasure more <a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +24</span>“Les Essais de Michel Seigneur de +Montaigne,” that were printed by Francoise le Febre, of +Lyon, in 1595. It is not a beautiful book; the type is +small, and rather blunt, but William Drummond of Hawthornden has +written on the title-page his name and his device, <i>Cipresso e +Palma</i>. There are a dozen modern editions of +Molière more easily read than the four little volumes of +Wetstein (Amsterdam, 1698), but these contain reduced copies of +the original illustrations, and here you see Arnolphe and Agnes +in their habits as they lived, Molière and Mdlle. de Brie +as the public of Paris beheld them more than two hundred years +ago. Suckling’s “Fragmenta Aurea” contain +a good deal of dross, and most of the gold has been gathered into +Miscellanies, but the original edition of 1646, “after his +own copies,” with the portrait of the jolly cavalier who +died <i>ætatis suae</i> 28, has its own allurement. +Theocritus is more easily read, perhaps, in Wordsworth’s +edition, or Ziegler’s; but that which Zacharias Calliergi +printed in Rome (1516), with an excommunication from Leo X. +against infringement of copyright, will always be a beautiful and +desirable book, especially when bound by Derome. The gist +of the pious Prince Conti’s strictures on the wickedness of +comedy may be read in various literary histories, but it is +natural to like his “Traité de la Comedie selon la +<a name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 25</span>tradition +de l’Eglise, Tirée des Conciles et des saints +Pères,” published by Lovys Billaine in 1660, +especially when the tract is a clean copy, arrayed in a decorous +black morocco.</p> +<p>These are but a few common examples, chosen from a meagre +little library, a “twopenny treasure-house,” but they +illustrate, on a minute scale, the nature of the +collector’s passion,—the character of his innocent +pleasures. He occasionally lights on other literary relics +of a more personal character than mere first editions. A +lucky collector lately bought Shelley’s copy of Ossian, +with the poet’s signature on the title-page, in +Booksellers’ Row. Another possesses a copy of +Foppens’s rare edition of Petrarch’s “Le Sage +Resolu contre l’une et l’autre Fortune,” which +once belonged to Sir Hudson Lowe, the gaoler of Napoleon, and may +have fortified, by its stoical maxims, the soul of one who knew +the extremes of either fortune, the captive of St. Helena. +But the best example of a book, which is also a relic, is the +“Imitatio Christi,” which belonged to J. J. +Rousseau. Let M. Tenant de Latour, lately the happy owner +of this possession, tell his own story of his treasure: It was in +1827 that M. de Latour was walking on the quai of the +Louvre. Among the volumes in a shop, he noticed a shabby +little copy of the “Imitatio Christi.” M. de +Latour, like other <a name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +26</span>bibliophiles, was not in the habit of examining stray +copies of this work, except when they were of the Elzevir size, +for the Elzevirs published a famous undated copy of the +“Imitatio,” a book which brings considerable +prices. However, by some lucky chance, some Socratic +dæmon whispering, may be, in his ear, he picked up the +little dingy volume of the last century. It was of a Paris +edition, 1751, but what was the name on the fly-leaf. M. de +Latour read <i>à J. J. Rousseau</i>. There was no +mistake about it, the good bibliophile knew Rousseau’s +handwriting perfectly well; to make still more sure he paid his +seventy-five centimes for the book, and walked across the Pont +des Arts, to his bookbinder’s, where he had a copy of +Rousseau’s works, with a <i>facsimile</i> of his +handwriting. As he walked, M. de Latour read in his book, +and found notes of Rousseau’s on the margin. The +<i>facsimile</i> proved that the inscription was genuine. +The happy de Latour now made for the public office in which he +was a functionary, and rushed into the bureau of his friend the +Marquis de V. The Marquis, a man of great strength of +character, recognised the signature of Rousseau with but little +display of emotion. M. de Latour now noticed some withered +flowers among the sacred pages; but it was reserved for a friend +to discover in the faded petals Rousseau’s favourite <a +name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 27</span>flower, the +periwinkle. Like a true Frenchman, like Rousseau himself in +his younger days, M. de Latour had not recognised the periwinkle +when he saw it. That night, so excited was M. de Latour, he +never closed an eye! What puzzled him was that he could not +remember, in all Rousseau’s works, a single allusion to the +“Imitatio Christi.” Time went on, the old book +was not rebound, but kept piously in a case of Russia +leather. M. de Latour did not suppose that “dans ce +bas monde it fût permis aux joies du bibliophile +d’aller encore plus loin.” He imagined that the +delights of the amateur could only go further, in heaven. +It chanced, however, one day that he was turning over the +“Oeuvres Inédites” of Rousseau, when he found +a letter, in which Jean Jacques, writing in 1763, asked +Motiers-Travers to send him the “Imitatio +Christi.” Now the date 1764 is memorable, in +Rousseau’s “Confessions,” for a burst of +sentiment over a periwinkle, the first he had noticed +particularly since his residence at <i>Les Charmettes</i>, where +the flower had been remarked by Madame de Warens. Thus M. +Tenant de Latour had recovered the very identical periwinkle, +which caused the tear of sensibility to moisten the fine eyes of +Jean Jacques Rousseau.</p> +<p>We cannot all be adorers of Rousseau. But M. de Latour +was an enthusiast, and this little <a name="page28"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 28</span>anecdote of his explains the +sentimental side of the bibliophile’s pursuit. Yes, +it is <i>sentiment</i> that makes us feel a lively affection for +the books that seem to connect us with great poets and students +long ago dead. Their hands grasp ours across the +ages. I never see the first edition of Homer, that monument +of typography and of enthusiasm for letters, printed at Florence +(1488) at the expense of young Bernardo and Nerio Nerli, and of +their friend Giovanni Acciajuoli, but I feel moved to cry with +Heyne, “salvete juvenes, nobiles et generosi; +<i>χαίρετέ +μοι καὶ ἐιν +Άΐδαο +δόμοισι</i>.”</p> +<p>Such is our apology for book-collecting. But the best +defence of the taste would be a list of the names of great +collectors, a “vision of mighty book-hunters.” +Let us say nothing of Seth and Noah, for their reputation as +amateurs is only based on the authority of the tract <i>De +Bibliothecis Antediluvianis</i>. The library of +Assurbanipal I pass over, for its volumes were made, as Pliny +says, of <i>coctiles laterculi</i>, of baked tiles, which have +been deciphered by the late Mr. George Smith. Philosophers +as well as immemorial kings, Pharaohs and Ptolemys, are on our +side. It was objected to Plato, by persons answering to the +cheap scribblers of to-day, that he, though a sage, gave a +hundred minae (£360) for three treatises of <a +name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 29</span>Philolaus, +while Aristotle paid nearly thrice the sum for a few books that +had been in the library of Speusippus. Did not a Latin +philosopher go great lengths in a laudable anxiety to purchase an +Odyssey “as old as Homer,” and what would not Cicero, +that great collector, have given for the Ascraean <i>editio +princeps</i> of Hesiod, scratched on mouldy old plates of +lead? Perhaps Dr. Schliemann may find an original edition +of the “Iliad” at Orchomenos; but of all early copies +none seems so attractive as that engraved on the leaden plates +which Pausanias saw at Ascra. Then, in modern times, what +“great allies” has the collector, what brethren in +book-hunting? The names are like the catalogue with which +Villon fills his “Ballade des Seigneurs du Temps +Jadis.” A collector was “le preux +Charlemaigne” and our English Alfred. The Kings of +Hungary, as Mathias Corvinus; the Kings of France, and their +queens, and their mistresses, and their lords, were all +amateurs. So was our Henry VIII., and James I., who +“wished he could be chained to a shelf in the +Bodleian.” The middle age gives us Richard de Bury, +among ecclesiastics, and the Renaissance boasts Sir Thomas More, +with that “pretty fardle of books, in the small type of +Aldus,” which he carried for a freight to the people of +Utopia. Men of the world, like Bussy Rabutin, queens like +<a name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>our +Elizabeth; popes like Innocent X.; financiers like Colbert (who +made the Grand Turk send him Levant morocco for bindings); men of +letters like Scott and Southey, Janin and Nodier, and Paul +Lacroix; warriors like Junot and Prince Eugène; these are +only leaders of companies in the great army of lovers of books, +in which it is honourable enough to be a private soldier.</p> +<h2><a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +31</span>CHAPTER II.<br /> +THE LIBRARY</h2> +<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Library which is to be spoken +of in these pages, is all unlike the halls which a Spencer or a +Huth fills with treasure beyond price. The age of great +libraries has gone by, and where a collector of the old school +survives, he is usually a man of enormous wealth, who might, if +he pleased, be distinguished in parliament, in society, on the +turf itself, or in any of the pursuits where unlimited supplies +of money are strictly necessary. The old amateurs, whom La +Bruyère was wont to sneer at, were not satisfied unless +they possessed many thousands of books. For a collector +like Cardinal Mazarin, Naudé bought up the whole stock of +many a bookseller, and left great towns as bare of printed paper +as if a tornado had passed, and blown the leaves away. <a +name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>In our modern +times, as the industrious Bibliophile Jacob, says, the fashion of +book-collecting has changed; “from the vast hall that it +was, the library of the amateur has shrunk to a closet, to a mere +book-case. Nothing but a neat article of furniture is +needed now, where a great gallery or a long suite of rooms was +once required. The book has become, as it were, a jewel, +and is kept in a kind of jewel-case.” It is not +quantity of pages, nor lofty piles of ordinary binding, nor +theological folios and classic quartos, that the modern amateur +desires. He is content with but a few books of distinction +and elegance, masterpieces of printing and binding, or relics of +famous old collectors, of statesmen, philosophers, beautiful dead +ladies; or, again, he buys illustrated books, or first editions +of the modern classics. No one, not the Duc d’Aumale, +or M. James Rothschild himself, with his 100 books worth +£40,000, can possess very many copies of books which are +inevitably rare. Thus the adviser who would offer +suggestions to the amateur, need scarcely write, like +Naudé and the old authorities, about the size and due +position of the library. He need hardly warn the builder to +make the <i>salle</i> face the east, “because the eastern +winds, being warm and dry of their nature, greatly temper the +air, fortify the senses, make subtle the humours, purify the +spirits, preserve a healthy <a name="page33"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 33</span>disposition of the whole body, and, +to say all in one word, are most wholesome and +salubrious.” The east wind, like the fashion of +book-collecting, has altered in character a good deal since the +days when Naudé was librarian to Cardinal Mazarin. +One might as well repeat the learned Isidorus his counsels about +the panels of green marble (that refreshes the eye), and Boethius +his censures on library walls of ivory and glass, as fall back on +the ancient ideas of librarians dead and gone.</p> +<p>The amateur, then, is the person we have in our eye, and +especially the bibliophile who has but lately been bitten with +this pleasant mania of collecting. We would teach him how +to arrange and keep his books orderly and in good case, and would +tell him what to buy and what to avoid. By the +<i>library</i> we do not understand a study where no one goes, +and where the master of the house keeps his boots, an assortment +of walking-sticks, the “Waverley Novels,” +“Pearson on the Creed,” “Hume’s +Essays,” and a collection of sermons. In, alas! too +many English homes, the Library is no more than this, and each +generation passes without adding a book, except now and then a +Bradshaw or a railway novel, to the collection on the +shelves. The success, perhaps, of circulating libraries, +or, it may be, the Aryan tendencies of our race, “which +does not read, and lives <a name="page34"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 34</span>in the open air,” have made +books the rarest of possessions in many houses. There are +relics of the age before circulating libraries, there are +fragments of the lettered store of some scholarly +great-grandfather, and these, with a few odd numbers of +magazines, a few primers and manuals, some sermons and novels, +make up the ordinary library of an English household. But +the amateur, whom we have in our thoughts, can never be satisfied +with these commonplace supplies. He has a taste for books +more or less rare, and for books neatly bound; in short, for +books, in the fabrication of which <i>art</i> has not been +absent. He loves to have his study, like Montaigne’s, +remote from the interruption of servants, wife, and children; a +kind of shrine, where he may be at home with himself, with the +illustrious dead, and with the genius of literature. The +room may look east, west, or south, provided that it be dry, +warm, light, and airy. Among the many enemies of books the +first great foe is <i>damp</i>, and we must describe the +necessary precautions to be taken against this peril. We +will suppose that the amateur keeps his ordinary working books, +modern tomes, and all that serve him as literary tools, on open +shelves. These may reach the roof, if he has books to fill +them, and it is only necessary to see that the back of the +bookcases <a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +35</span>are slightly removed from contact with the walls. +The more precious and beautifully bound treasures will naturally +be stored in a case with closely-fitting glass-doors. <a +name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2" +class="citation">[2]</a> The shelves should be lined with +velvet or chamois leather, that the delicate edges of the books +may not suffer from contact with the wood. A leather +lining, fitted to the back of the case, will also help to keep +out humidity. Most writers recommend that the bookcases +should be made of wood close in the grain, such as well-seasoned +oak; or, for smaller tabernacles of literature, of mahogany, +satin-wood lined with cedar, ebony, and so forth. These +close-grained woods are less easily penetrated by insects, and it +is fancied that book-worms dislike the aromatic scents of cedar, +sandal wood, and Russia leather. There was once a +bibliophile who said that a man could only love one book at a +time, and the darling of the moment he used to carry about in a +charming leather case. Others, men of few books, preserve +them in long boxes with glass fronts, which may be removed <a +name="page36"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 36</span>from place to +place as readily as the household gods of Laban. But the +amateur who not only worships but reads books, needs larger +receptacles; and in the open oak cases for modern authors, and +for books with common modern papers and bindings, in the closed +<i>armoire</i> for books of rarity and price, he will find, we +think, the most useful mode of arranging his treasures. His +shelves will decline in height from the lowest, where huge folios +stand at case, to the top ranges, while Elzevirs repose on a +level with the eye. It is well that each upper shelf should +have a leather fringe to keep the dust away.</p> +<p>As to the shape of the bookcases, and the furniture, and +ornaments of the library, every amateur will please +himself. Perhaps the satin-wood or mahogany tabernacles of +rare books are best made after the model of what +furniture-dealers indifferently call the “Queen Anne” +or the “Chippendale” style. There is a pleasant +quaintness in the carved architectural ornaments of the top, and +the inlaid flowers of marquetry go well with the pretty florid +editions of the last century, the books that were illustrated by +Stothard and Gravelot. Ebony suits theological tomes very +well, especially when they are bound in white vellum. As to +furniture, people who can afford it will imitate the arrangements +of Lucullus, in Mr. Hill Burton’s <a +name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 37</span>charming +volume “The Book-hunter” (Blackwood, Edinburgh, +1862).—“Everything is of perfect finish,—the +mahogany-railed gallery, the tiny ladders, the broad winged +lecterns, with leathern cushions on the edges to keep the wood +from grazing the rich bindings, the books themselves, each shelf +uniform with its facings, or rather backings, like well-dressed +lines at a review.” The late Sir William +Stirling-Maxwell, a famous bibliophile, invented a very nice +library chair. It is most comfortable to sit on; and, as +the top of the back is broad and flat, it can be used as a ladder +of two high steps, when one wants to reach a book on a lofty +shelf. A kind of square revolving bookcase, an American +invention, manufactured by Messrs. Trübner, is useful to the +working man of letters. Made in oak, stained green, it is +not unsightly. As to ornaments, every man to his +taste. You may have a “pallid bust of Pallas” +above your classical collection, or fill the niches in a shrine +of old French light literature, pastoral and comedy, with +delicate shepherdesses in Chelsea china. On such matters a +modest writer, like Mr. Jingle when Mr. Pickwick ordered dinner, +“will not presume to dictate.”</p> +<p>Next to damp, dust and dirt are the chief enemies of +books. At short intervals, books and shelves ought to be +dusted by the amateur himself. <a name="page38"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 38</span>Even Dr. Johnson, who was careless of +his person, and of volumes lent to him, was careful about the +cleanliness of his own books. Boswell found him one day +with big gloves on his hands beating the dust out of his library, +as was his custom. There is nothing so hideous as a dirty +thumb-mark on a white page. These marks are commonly made, +not because the reader has unwashed hands, but because the dust +which settles on the top edge of books falls in, and is smudged +when they are opened. Gilt-top edges should be smoothed +with a handkerchief, and a small brush should be kept for +brushing the tops of books with rough edges, before they are +opened. But it were well that all books had the top edge +gilt. There is no better preservative against dust. +Dust not only dirties books, it seems to supply what Mr. Spencer +would call a fitting environment for book-worms. The works +of book-worms speak for themselves, and are manifest to +all. How many a rare and valuable volume is spoiled by neat +round holes drilled through cover and leaves! But as to the +nature of your worm, authorities differ greatly. The +ancients knew this plague, of which Lucian speaks. Mr. +Blades mentions a white book-worm, slain by the librarian of the +Bodleian. In Byzantium the black sort prevailed. +Evenus, the grammarian, <a name="page39"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 39</span>wrote an epigram against the black +book-worm (“Anthol. Pal.,” ix. 251):—</p> +<blockquote><p>Pest of the Muses, devourer of pages, in crannies +that lurkest,<br /> +Fruits of the Muses to taint, labour of learning to spoil;<br /> +Wherefore, oh black-fleshed worm! wert thou born for the evil +thou workest?<br /> +Wherefore thine own foul form shap’st thou with envious +toil?</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The learned Mentzelius says he hath heard the book-worm crow +like a cock unto his mate, and “I knew not,” says he, +“whether some local fowl was clamouring or whether there +was but a beating in mine ears. Even at that moment, all +uncertain as I was, I perceived, in the paper whereon I was +writing, a little insect that ceased not to carol like very +chanticleer, until, taking a magnifying glass, I assiduously +observed him. He is about the bigness of a mite, and +carries a grey crest, and the head low, bowed over the bosom; as +to his crowing noise, it comes of his clashing his wings against +each other with an incessant din.” Thus far +Mentzelius, and more to the same purpose, as may be read in the +“Memoirs of famous Foreign Academies” (Dijon, +1755–59, 13 vol. in quarto). But, in our times, the +learned Mr. Blades having a desire to exhibit book-worms in the +body to the Caxtonians at the Caxton <a name="page40"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 40</span>celebration, could find few men that +had so much as seen a book-worm, much less heard him utter his +native wood-notes wild. Yet, in his “Enemies of +Books,” he describes some rare encounters with the +worm. Dirty books, damp books, dusty books, and books that +the owner never opens, are most exposed to the enemy; and +“the worm, the proud worm, is the conqueror still,” +as a didactic poet sings, in an ode on man’s +mortality. As we have quoted Mentzelius, it may not be +amiss to give D’Alembert’s theory of book-worms: +“I believe,” he says, “that a little beetle +lays her eggs in books in August, thence is hatched a mite, like +the cheese-mite, which devours books merely because it is +compelled to gnaw its way out into the air.” +Book-worms like the paste which binders employ, but +D’Alembert adds that they cannot endure absinthe. Mr. +Blades finds too that they disdain to devour our adulterate +modern paper.</p> +<p>“Say, shall I sing of rats,” asked Grainger, when +reading to Johnson his epic, the “Sugar-cane.” +“No,” said the Doctor; and though rats are the foe of +the bibliophile, at least as much as of the sugar-planter, we do +not propose to sing of them. M. Fertiault has done so +already in “Les Sonnets d’un Bibliophile,” +where the reader must be pleased with the beautiful etchings of +rats devouring an illuminated MS., and battening on <a +name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>morocco +bindings stamped with the bees of De Thou. It is +unnecessary and it would be undignified, to give hints on +rat-catching, but the amateur must not forget that these animals +have a passion for bindings.</p> +<p>The book-collector must avoid gas, which deposits a filthy +coat of oil that catches dust. Mr. Blades found that three +jets of gas in a small room soon reduced the leather on his +book-shelves to a powder of the consistency of snuff, and made +the backs of books come away in his hand. Shaded lamps give +the best and most suitable light for the library. As to the +risks which books run at the hands of the owner himself, we +surely need not repeat the advice of Richard de Bury. +Living in an age when tubs (if not unknown as M. Michelet +declares) were far from being common, the old collector inveighed +against the dirty hands of readers, and against their habit of +marking their place in a book with filthy straws, or setting down +a beer pot in the middle of the volume to keep the pages +open. But the amateur, however refined himself, must beware +of men who love not fly leaves neither regard margins, but write +notes over the latter, and light their pipes with the +former. After seeing the wreck of a book which these +persons have been busy with, one appreciates the fine Greek +hyperbole. The Greeks did not <a name="page42"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 42</span>speak of “thumbing” but +of “walking up and down” on a volume +(<i>πατεῖν</i>). To such +fellows it matters not that they make a book dirty and greasy, +cutting the pages with their fingers, and holding the boards over +the fire till they crack. All these slatternly practices, +though they destroy a book as surely as the flames of +Cæsar’s soldiers at Alexandria, seem fine manly acts +to the grobians who use them. What says Jules Janin, who +has written “Contre l’indifference des +Philistins,” “il faut à l’homme sage et +studieux un tome honorable et digne de sa louange.” +The amateur, and all decent men, will beware of lending books to +such rude workers; and this consideration brings us to these +great foes of books, the borrowers and robbers. The lending +of books, and of other property, has been defended by some great +authorities; thus Panurge himself says, “it would prove +much more easy in nature to have fish entertained in the air, and +bullocks fed in the bottom of the ocean, than to support or +tolerate a rascally rabble of people that will not +lend.” Pirckheimer, too, for whom Albert Durer +designed a book-plate, was a lender, and took for his device +<i>Sibi et Amicis</i>; and <i>Jo. Grolierii et amicorum</i>, was +the motto of the renowned Grolier, whom mistaken writers vainly +but frequently report to have been a bookbinder. But as Mr. +Leicester Warren <a name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +43</span>says, in his “Study of Book-plates” +(Pearson, 1880), “Christian Charles de Savigny leaves all +the rest behind, exclaiming <i>non mihi sed +aliis</i>.” But the majority of amateurs have chosen +wiser, though more churlish devices, as “the ungodly +borroweth and payeth not again,” or “go to them that +sell, and buy for yourselves.” David Garrick engraved +on his book-plate, beside a bust of Shakspeare, these words of +Ménage, “La première chose qu’on doit +faire, quand on a emprunte’ un livre, c’est de le +lire, afin de pouvoir le rendre plûtôt.” +But the borrower is so minded that the last thing he thinks of is +to read a borrowed book, and the penultimate subject of his +reflections is its restoration. Ménage (Menagiana, +Paris, 1729, vol. i. p. 265), mentions, as if it were a notable +misdeed, this of Angelo Politian’s, “he borrowed a +‘Lucretius’ from Pomponius Laetus, and kept it for +four years.” Four years! in the sight of the borrower +it is but a moment. Ménage reports that a friend +kept his “Pausanias” for three years, whereas four +months was long enough.</p> +<blockquote><p>“At quarto saltem mense redire +decet.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There is no satisfaction in lending a book; for it is rarely +that borrowers, while they deface your volumes, gather honey for +new stores, as De Quincey did, and Coleridge, and even Dr. +Johnson, <a name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +44</span>who “greased and dogs-eared such volumes as were +confided to his tender mercies, with the same indifference +wherewith he singed his own wigs.” But there is a +race of mortals more annoying to a conscientious man than +borrowers. These are the spontaneous lenders, who insist +that you shall borrow their tomes. For my own part, when I +am oppressed with the charity of such, I lock their books up in a +drawer, and behold them not again till the day of their +return. There is no security against borrowers, unless a +man like Guibert de Pixérécourt steadfastly refuses +to lend. The device of Pixérécourt was <i>un +livre est un ami qui ne change jamais</i>. But he knew that +our books change when they have been borrowed, like our friends +when they have been married; when “a lady borrows +them,” as the fairy queen says in the ballad of +“Tamlane.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“But had I kenn’d, Tamlane,” she +says,<br /> +“A lady wad borrowed thee,<br /> +I wad ta’en out thy twa gray een,<br /> +Put in twa een o’ tree!</p> +<p>“Had I but kenn’d, Tamlane,” she says,<br /> +“Before ye came frae hame,<br /> +I wad ta’en out your heart o’ flesh,<br /> +Put in a heart o’ stane!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Above the lintel of his library door, +Pixérécourt had this couplet carved—</p> +<blockquote><p><a name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +45</span>“Tel est le triste sort de tout livre +prêté,<br /> +Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est +gâté.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>M. Paul Lacroix says he would not have lent a book to his own +daughter. Once Lacroix asked for the loan of a work of +little value. Pixérécourt frowned, and led +his friend beneath the doorway, pointing to the motto. +“Yes,” said M. Lacroix, “but I thought that +verse applied to every one but me.” So +Pixérécourt made him a present of the volume.</p> +<p>We cannot all imitate this “immense” but unamiable +amateur. Therefore, bibliophiles have consoled themselves +with the inventions of book-plates, quaint representations, +perhaps heraldic, perhaps fanciful, of their claims to the +possession of their own dear volumes. Mr. Leicester Warren +and M. Poulet Malassis have written the history of these slender +works of art, and each bibliophile may have his own engraved, and +may formulate his own anathemas on people who borrow and restore +not again. The process is futile, but may comfort the +heart, like the curses against thieves which the Greeks were wont +to scratch on leaden tablets, and deposit in the temple of +Demeter. Each amateur can exercise his own taste in the +design of a book-plate; and for such as love and collect rare +editions of “Homer,” I venture to suggest this motto, +which may move the heart of <a name="page46"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 46</span>the borrower to send back an Aldine +copy of the epic—</p> +<blockquote><p><i>πέμψον +ἐπισταμένως</i>, +<i>δύνασαι +γάρ</i><br /> +<i>ὥς κε γάλ’ +ἀσκηθὴς ἣν +πατρίδα +γαῖαν +ἵκηται</i>. <a +name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3" +class="citation">[3]</a></p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. William Blades, in his pleasant volume, “The Enemies +of Books” (Trübner), makes no account of the +book-thief or biblioklept. “If they injure the +owners,” says Mr. Blades, with real tolerance, “they +do no harm to the books themselves, by merely transferring them +from one set of book-shelves to another.” This +sentence has naturally caused us to reflect on the ethical +character of the biblioklept. He is not always a bad +man. In old times, when language had its delicacies, and +moralists were not devoid of sensibility, the French did not say +“un voleur de livres,” but “un chipeur de +livres;” as the papers call lady shoplifters +“kleptomaniacs.” There are distinctions. +M. Jules Janin mentions a great Parisian bookseller who had an +amiable weakness. He was a bibliokleptomaniac. His +first motion when he saw a book within reach was to put it in his +pocket. Every one knew his habit, and when a volume was +lost at a sale the auctioneer duly announced it, and knocked it +down to the enthusiast, who regularly paid the price. When +<a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>he went to +a private view of books about to be sold, the officials at the +door would ask him, as he was going out, if he did not happen to +have an Elzevir Horace or an Aldine Ovid in his pocket. +Then he would search those receptacles and exclaim, “Yes, +yes, here it is; so much obliged to you; I am so +absent.” M. Janin mentions an English noble, a +“Sir Fitzgerald,” who had the same tastes, but who +unluckily fell into the hands of the police. Yet M. Janin +has a tenderness for the book-stealer, who, after all, is a lover +of books. The moral position of the malefactor is so +delicate and difficult that we shall attempt to treat of it in +the severe, though <i>rococo</i>, manner of Aristotle’s +“Ethics.” Here follows an extract from the lost +Aristotelian treatise “Concerning Books”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Among the contemplative virtues we reckon +the love of books. Now this virtue, like courage or +liberality, has its mean, its excess, and its defect. The +defect is indifference, and the man who is defective as to the +love of books has no name in common parlance. Therefore, we +may call him the Robustious Philistine. This man will cut +the leaves of his own or his friend’s volumes with the +butter-knife at breakfast. Also he is just the person +wilfully to mistake the double sense of the term +‘fly-leaves,’ and to stick the <a +name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +48</span>‘fly-leaves’ of his volumes full of +fly-hooks. He also loves dogs’-ears, and marks his +place with his pipe when he shuts a book in a hurry; or he will +set the leg of his chair on a page to keep it open. He +praises those who tear off margins for pipe-lights, and he makes +cigarettes with the tissue-paper that covers engravings. +When his books are bound, he sees that the margin is cut to the +quick. He tells you too, that ‘<i>he</i> buys books +to read them.’ But he does not say why he thinks it needful +to spoil them. Also he will drag off bindings—or +should we perhaps call this crime +<i>θηριοτης</i>, or +brutality, rather than mere vice? for vice is essentially human, +but to tear off bindings is bestial. Thus they still speak +of a certain monster who lived during the French Revolution, and +who, having purchased volumes attired in morocco, and stamped +with the devices of the oligarchs, would rip off the leather or +vellum, and throw them into the fire or out of the window, saying +that ‘now he could read with unwashed hands at his +ease.’ Such a person, then, is the man indifferent to +books, and he sins by way of defect, being deficient in the +contemplative virtue of book-loving. As to the man who is +exactly in the right mean, we call him the book-lover. His +happiness consists not in reading, which is an <a +name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 49</span>active +virtue, but in the contemplation of bindings, and illustrations, +and title-pages. Thus his felicity partakes of the nature +of the bliss we attribute to the gods, for that also is +contemplative, and we call the book-lover ‘happy,’ +and even ‘blessed,’ but within the limits of mortal +happiness. But, just as in the matter of absence of fear +there is a mean which we call courage, and a defect which we call +cowardice, and an excess which is known as foolhardiness; so it +is in the case of the love of books. As to the mean, we +have seen that it is the virtue of the true book-lover, while the +defect constitutes the sin of the Robustious Philistine. +But the extreme is found in covetousness, and the covetous man +who is in the extreme state of book-loving, is the biblioklept, +or book-stealer. Now his vice shows itself, not in +contemplation (for of contemplation there can be no excess), but +in action. For books are procured, as we say, by purchase, +or by barter, and these are voluntary exchanges, both the seller +and the buyer being willing to deal. But books are, again, +procured in another way, by involuntary contract—that is, +when the owner of the book is unwilling to part with it, but he +whose own the book is not is determined to take it. The +book-stealer is such a man as this, and he possesses himself of +books with which the owner does not intend to <a +name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 50</span>part, by +virtue of a series of involuntary contracts. Again, the +question may be raised, whether is the Robustious Philistine who +despises books, or the biblioklept who adores them out of measure +and excessively, the worse citizen? Now, if we are to look +to the consequences of actions only (as the followers of Bentham +advise), clearly the Robustious Philistine is the worse citizen, +for he mangles, and dirties, and destroys books which it is the +interest of the State to preserve. But the biblioklept +treasures and adorns the books he has acquired; and when he dies, +or goes to prison, the State receives the benefit at his +sale. Thus Libri, who was the greatest of biblioklepts, +rescued many of the books he stole from dirt and misuse, and had +them bound royally in purple and gold. Also, it may be +argued that books naturally belong to him who can appreciate +them; and if good books are in a dull or indifferent man’s +keeping, this is the sort of slavery which we call +“unnatural” in our <i>Politics</i>, and which is not +to be endured. Shall we say, then, that the Robustious +Philistine is the worse citizen, while the Biblioklept is the +worse man? But this is perhaps matter for a separate +disquisition.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This fragment of the lost Aristotelian treatise +“Concerning Books,” shows what a difficulty the +Stagirite had in determining the precise nature of <a +name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 51</span>the moral +offence of the biblioklept. Indeed, both as a collector and +as an intuitive moralist, Aristotle must have found it rather +difficult to condemn the book-thief. He, doubtless, went on +to draw distinctions between the man who steals books to sell +them again for mere pecuniary profit (which he would call +“chrematistic,” or “unnatural,” +book-stealing), and the man who steals them because he feels that +he is their proper and natural possessor. The same +distinction is taken by Jules Janin, who was a more constant +student of Horace than of Aristotle. In his imaginary +dialogue of bibliophiles, Janin introduces a character who +announces the death of M. Libri. The tolerant person who +brings the sad news proposes “to cast a few flowers on the +melancholy tomb. He was a bibliophile, after all. +What do you say to it? Many a good fellow has stolen books, +and died in grace at the last.” “Yes,” +replies the president of the club, “but the good fellows +did not sell the books they stole . . . Cest une grande honte, +une grande misère.” This Libri was an +Inspector-General of French Libraries under Louis Philippe. +When he was tried, in 1848, it was calculated that the sum of his +known thefts amounted to £20,000. Many of his +robberies escaped notice at the time. It is not long since +Lord Ashburnham, according to a <a name="page52"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 52</span>French journal, “Le +Livre,” found in his collection some fragments of a +Pentateuch. These relics had been in the possession of the +Lyons Library, whence Libri stole them in 1847. The late +Lord Ashburnham bought them, without the faintest idea of +Libri’s dishonesty; and when, after eleven years, the +present peer discovered the proper owners of his treasure, he +immediately restored the Pentateuch to the Lyons Library.</p> +<p>Many eminent characters have been biblioklepts. When +Innocent X. was still Monsignor Pamphilio, he stole a +book—so says Tallemant des Réaux—from Du +Monstier, the painter. The amusing thing is that Du +Monstier himself was a book-thief. He used to tell how he +had lifted a book, of which he had long been in search, from a +stall on the Pont-Neuf; “but,” says Tallemant (whom +Janin does not seem to have consulted), “there are many +people who don’t think it thieving to steal a book unless +you sell it afterwards.” But Du Monstier took a less +liberal view where his own books were concerned. The +Cardinal Barberini came to Paris as legate, and brought in his +suite Monsignor Pamphilio, who afterwards became Innocent +X. The Cardinal paid a visit to Du Monstier in his studio, +where Monsignor Pamphilio spied, on a table, +“L’Histoire du Concile de Trent”—the good +edition, the London one. <a name="page53"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 53</span>“What a pity,” thought +the young ecclesiastic, “that such a man should be, by some +accident, the possessor of so valuable a book.” With +these sentiments Monsignor Pamphilio slipped the work under his +<i>soutane</i>. But little Du Monstier observed him, and +said furiously to the Cardinal, that a holy man should not bring +thieves and robbers in his company. With these words, and +with others of a violent and libellous character, he recovered +the “History of the Council of Trent,” and kicked out +the future Pope. Amelot de la Houssaie traces to this +incident the hatred borne by Innocent X. to the Crown and the +people of France. Another Pope, while only a cardinal, +stole a book from Ménage—so M. Janin +reports—but we have not been able to discover +Ménage’s own account of the larceny. The +anecdotist is not so truthful that cardinals need flush a deeper +scarlet, like the roses in Bion’s “Lament for +Adonis,” on account of a scandal resting on the authority +of Ménage. Among Royal persons, Catherine de Medici, +according to Brantôme, was a biblioklept. “The +Marshal Strozzi had a very fine library, and after his death the +Queen-Mother seized it, promising some day to pay the value to +his son, who never got a farthing of the money.” The +Ptolemies, too, were thieves on a large scale. A department +of the Alexandrian Library was <a name="page54"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 54</span>called “The Books from the +Ships,” and was filled with rare volumes stolen from +passengers in vessels that touched at the port. True, the +owners were given copies of their ancient MSS., but the exchange, +as Aristotle says, was an “involuntary” one, and not +distinct from robbery.</p> +<p>The great pattern of biblioklepts, a man who carried his +passion to the most regrettable excesses, was a Spanish priest, +Don Vincente, of the convent of Pobla, in Aragon. When the +Spanish revolution despoiled the convent libraries, Don Vincente +established himself at Barcelona, under the pillars of Los +Encantes, where are the stalls of the merchants of +<i>bric-à-brac</i> and the seats of them that sell +books. In a gloomy den the Don stored up treasures which he +hated to sell. Once he was present at an auction where he +was out-bid in the competition for a rare, perhaps a unique, +volume. Three nights after that, the people of Barcelona +were awakened by cries of “Fire!” The house and +shop of the man who had bought “Ordinacions per los +gloriosos reys de Arago” were blazing. When the fire +was extinguished, the body of the owner of the house was found, +with a pipe in his blackened hand, and some money beside +him. Every one said, “He must have set the house on +fire with a spark from his pipe.” Time went on, and +week by <a name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +55</span>week the police found the bodies of slain men, now in +the street, now in a ditch, now in the river. There were +young men and old, all had been harmless and inoffensive in their +lives, and—all had been <i>bibliophiles</i>. A dagger +in an invisible hand had reached their hearts but the assassin +had spared their purses, money, and rings. An organised +search was made in the city, and the shop of Don Vincente was +examined. There, in a hidden recess, the police discovered +the copy of “Ordinacions per los gloriosis reys de +Arago,” which ought by rights to have been burned with the +house of its purchaser. Don Vincente was asked how he got +the book. He replied in a quiet voice, demanded that his +collection should be made over to the Barcelona Library, and then +confessed a long array of crimes. He had strangled his +rival, stolen the “Ordinacions,” and burned the +house. The slain men were people who had bought from him +books which he really could not bear to part with. At his +trial his counsel tried to prove that his confession was false, +and that he might have got his books by honest means. It +was objected that there was in the world only one book printed by +Lambert Palmart in 1482, and that the prisoner must have stolen +this, the only copy, from the library where it was +treasured. The defendant’s counsel proved <a +name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>that there +was another copy in the Louvre; that, therefore, there might be +more, and that the defendant’s might have been honestly +procured. Here Don Vincente, previously callous, uttered an +hysterical cry. Said the Alcalde:—“At last, +Vincente, you begin to understand the enormity of your +offence?” “Ah, Señor Alcalde, my error +was clumsy indeed. If you only knew how miserable I +am!” “If human justice prove inflexible, there +is another justice whose pity is inexhaustible. Repentance +is never too late.” “Ah, Señor Alcalde, +but my copy was not unique!” With the story of this +impenitent thief we may close the roll of biblioklepts, though +Dibdin pretends that Garrick was of the company, and stole +Alleyne’s books at Dulwich.</p> +<p>There is a thievish nature more hateful than even the +biblioklept. The Book-Ghoul is he who combines the larceny +of the biblioklept with the abominable wickedness of breaking up +and mutilating the volumes from which he steals. He is a +collector of title-pages, frontispieces, illustrations, and +book-plates. He prowls furtively among public and private +libraries, inserting wetted threads, which slowly eat away the +illustrations he covets; and he broods, like the obscene demon of +Arabian superstitions, over the fragments of the mighty +dead. His disgusting tastes vary. He <a +name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 57</span>prepares +books for the American market. Christmas books are sold in +the States stuffed with pictures cut out of honest volumes. +Here is a quotation from an American paper:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Another style of Christmas book which +deserves to be mentioned, though it is out of the reach of any +but the very rich, is the historical or literary work enriched +with inserted plates. There has never, to our knowledge, +been anything offered in America so supremely excellent as the +$5000 book on Washington, we think—exhibited by Boston last +year, but not a few fine specimens of books of this class are at +present offered to purchasers. Scribner has a beautiful +copy of Forster’s ‘Life of Dickens,’ enlarged +from three volumes octavo to nine volumes quarto, by taking to +pieces, remounting, and inlaying. It contains some eight +hundred engravings, portraits, views, playbills, title-pages, +catalogues, proof illustrations from Dickens’s works, a set +of the Onwhyn plates, rare engravings by Cruikshank and +‘Phiz,’ and autograph letters. Though this +volume does not compare with Harvey’s Dickens, offered for +$1750 two years ago, it is an excellent specimen of books of this +sort, and the veriest tyro in bibliographical affairs knows how +scarce are becoming the early editions of Dickens’s works +and the <a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +58</span>plates illustrating them. <a name="citation4"></a><a +href="#footnote4" class="citation">[4]</a> Anything about +Dickens in the beginning of his career is a sound investment from +a business point of view. Another work of the same sort, +valued at $240, is Lady Trevelyan’s edition of Macaulay, +illustrated with portraits, many of them very rare. Even +cheaper, all things considered, is an extra-illustrated copy of +the ‘Histoire de la Gravure,’ which, besides its +seventy-three reproductions of old engravings, is enriched with +two hundred fine specimens of the early engravers, many of the +impressions being in first and second states. At $155 such +a book is really a bargain, especially for any one who is forming +a collection of engravings. Another delightful work is the +library edition of Bray’s ‘Evelyn,’ illustrated +with some two hundred and fifty portraits and views, and valued +at $175; and still another is Boydell’s +‘Milton,’ with plates after Westall, and further +illustrations in the shape of twenty-eight portraits of the +painter and one hundred and eighty-one plates, and many of them +before letter. The price of this book is $325.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But few book-ghouls are worse than the moral ghoul. He +defaces, with a pen, the passages, in some precious volume, which +do not meet his idea of moral propriety. I have a +Pine’s “Horace,” <a name="page59"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 59</span>with the engravings from gems, which +has fallen into the hands of a moral ghoul. Not only has he +obliterated the verses which hurt his delicate sense, but he has +actually scraped away portions of the classical figures, and +“the breasts of the nymphs in the brake.” The +soul of Tartuffe had entered into the body of a sinner of the +last century. The antiquarian ghoul steals title-pages and +colophons. The aesthetic ghoul cuts illuminated initials +out of manuscripts. The petty, trivial, and almost idiotic +ghoul of our own days, sponges the fly-leaves and boards of books +for the purpose of cribbing the book-plates. An old +“Complaint of a Book-plate,” in dread of the wet +sponge of the enemy, has been discovered by Mr. Austin +Dobson:—<a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5" +class="citation">[5]</a></p> +<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">THE BOOK-PLATE’S +PETITION.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"><i>By a Gentleman of the +Temple</i>.</p> +<p>While cynic <span class="smcap">Charles</span> still +trimm’d the vane<br /> +’Twixt Querouaille and Castlemaine,<br /> +In days that shocked <span class="smcap">John Evelyn</span>,<br +/> +My First Possessor fix’d me in.<br /> +In days of Dutchmen and of frost,<br /> +The narrow sea with <span class="smcap">James</span> I +cross’d,<br /> +Returning when once more began<br /> +The Age of Saturn and of <span class="smcap">Anne</span>.<br /> +I am a part of all the past;<br /> +I knew the <span class="smcap">Georges</span>, first and last;<br +/> +<a name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 60</span>I have +been oft where else was none<br /> +Save the great wig of <span class="smcap">Addison</span>;<br /> +And seen on shelves beneath me grope<br /> +The little eager form of <span class="smcap">Pope</span>.<br /> +I lost the Third that own’d me when<br /> +French <span class="smcap">Noailles</span> fled at Dettingen;<br +/> +The year <span class="smcap">James Wolfe</span> surpris’d +Quebec,<br /> +The Fourth in hunting broke his neck;<br /> +The day that <span class="smcap">William Hogarth</span> +dy’d,<br /> +The Fifth one found me in Cheapside.<br /> +This was a Scholar, one of those<br /> +Whose Greek is sounder than their hose;<br /> +He lov’d old Books and nappy ale,<br /> +So liv’d at Streatham, next to <span +class="smcap">Thrale</span>.<br /> +’Twas there this stain of grease I boast<br /> +Was made by Dr. <span class="smcap">Johnson’s</span> +toast.<br /> +(He did it, as I think, for Spite;<br /> +My Master call’d him Jacobite!)<br /> +And now that I so long to-day<br /> +Have rested post discrimina,<br /> +Safe in the brass-wir’d book-case where<br /> +I watch’d the Vicar’s whit’ning hair,<br /> +Must I these travell’d bones inter<br /> +In some Collector’s sepulchre!<br /> +Must I be torn from hence and thrown<br /> +With frontispiece and colophon!<br /> +With vagrant E’s, and I’s, and O’s,<br /> +The spoil of plunder’d Folios!<br /> +With scraps and snippets that to <span class="smcap">Me</span><br +/> +Are naught but kitchen company!<br /> +Nay, rather, <span class="smcap">Friend</span>, this favour grant +me:<br /> +Tear me at once; but don’t transplant me.</p> +<p><span class="smcap">Cheltenham</span>, +<i>Sept</i><sup><i>r</i></sup>. 31, 1792.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The conceited ghoul writes his notes across our <a +name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>fair white +margins, in pencil, or in more baneful ink. Or he spills +his ink bottle at large over the pages, as André +Chénier’s friend served his copy of Malherbe. +It is scarcely necessary to warn the amateur against the society +of book-ghouls, who are generally snuffy and foul in appearance, +and by no means so insinuating as that fair lady-ghoul, Amina, of +the Arabian Nights.</p> +<p>Another enemy of books must be mentioned with the delicacy +that befits the topic. Almost all women are the inveterate +foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes +of history, but of books worthy of the name. It is true +that Isabelle d’Este, and Madame de Pompadour, and Madame +de Maintenon, were collectors; and, doubtless, there are other +brilliant exceptions to a general rule. But, broadly +speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and +admires. First, they don’t understand them; second, +they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost +money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money +expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper +scored with crabbed characters. Thus ladies wage a +skirmishing war against booksellers’ catalogues, and +history speaks of husbands who have had to practise the guile of +smugglers when they conveyed a new purchase across their own +frontier. <a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +62</span>Thus many married men are reduced to collecting +Elzevirs, which go readily into the pocket, for you cannot +smuggle a folio volume easily. This inveterate dislike of +books often produces a very deplorable result when an old +collector dies. His “womankind,” as the +Antiquary called them, sell all his treasures for the price of +waste-paper, to the nearest country bookseller. It is a +melancholy duty which forces one to introduce such topics into a +volume on “Art at Home.” But this little work +will not have been written in vain if it persuades ladies who +inherit books not to sell them hastily, without taking good and +disinterested opinion as to their value. They often dispose +of treasures worth thousands, for a ten pound note, and take +pride in the bargain. Here, let history mention with due +honour the paragon of her sex and the pattern to all wives of +book-collecting men—Madame Fertiault. It is thus that +she addresses her lord in a charming triolet (“Les Amoureux +du Livre,” p. xxxv):—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Le livre a ton esprit . . . tant mieux!<br +/> +Moi, j’ai ton coeur, et sans partage.<br /> +Puis-je désirer davantage?<br /> +Le livre a ton esprit . . . tant mieux!<br /> +Heureuse de te voir joyeux,<br /> +Je t’en voudrais . . . tout un étage.<br /> +Le livre a ton esprit . . . tant mieux!<br /> +Moi, j’ai ton coeur, et sans partage.”</p> +<p><a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 63</span>Books +rule thy mind, so let it be!<br /> +Thy heart is mine, and mine alone.<br /> +What more can I require of thee?<br /> +Books rule thy mind, so let it be!<br /> +Contented when thy bliss I see,<br /> +I wish a world of books thine own.<br /> +Books rule thy mind, so let it be!<br /> +Thy heart is mine, and mine alone.</p> +</blockquote> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p62b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"M. Annei Lucani de Bello Civili Libri X. Apud Seb. Gryphium +Lugduni. 1551" +title= +"M. Annei Lucani de Bello Civili Libri X. Apud Seb. Gryphium +Lugduni. 1551" + src="images/p62s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>There is one method of preserving books, which, alas, only +tempts the borrower, the stealer, the rat, and the book-worm; but +which is absolutely necessary as a defence against dust and +neglect. This is binding. The bookbinder’s art +too often destroys books when the artist is careless, but it is +the only mode of preventing our volumes from falling to pieces, +and from being some day disregarded as waste-paper. A +well-bound book, especially a book from a famous collection, has +its price, even if its literary contents be of trifling +value. A leather coat fashioned by Derome, or Le Gascon, or +Duseuil, will win respect and careful handling for one specimen +of an edition whereof all the others have perished. Nothing +is so slatternly as the aspect of a book merely stitched, in the +French fashion, when the threads begin to stretch, and the paper +covers to curl and be torn. Worse consequences follow, +whole sheets are lost, the volume becomes worthless, and the +owner must often be at the expense of purchasing another copy, <a +name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 64</span>if he can, +for the edition may now be out of print. Thus binding of +some sort not only adds a grace to the library, presenting to the +eye the cheerful gilded rows of our volumes, but is a positive +economy. In the case of our cloth-covered English works, +the need of binding is not so immediately obvious. But our +publishers have a taste for clothing their editions in tender +tones of colour, stamped, often, with landscapes printed in gold, +in white, or what not. Covers like this, may or may not +please the eye while they are new and clean, but they soon become +dirty and hideous. When a book is covered in cloth of a +good dark tint it may be allowed to remain unbound, but the +primrose and lilac hues soon call out for the aid of the +binder.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p64b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Pub. Virgilii Maronis Opera Parisiis. Apud Hieronymum de +Marnef, sub Pelicano, Monte D’Hilurii. 1558" +title= +"Pub. Virgilii Maronis Opera Parisiis. Apud Hieronymum de +Marnef, sub Pelicano, Monte D’Hilurii. 1558" + src="images/p64s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Much has been written of late about book-binding. In a +later part of this manual we shall have something to say about +historical examples of the art, and the performances of the great +masters. At present one must begin by giving the practical +rule, that a book should be bound in harmony with its character +and its value. The bibliophile, if he could give the rein +to his passions, would bind every book he cares to possess in a +full coat of morocco, or (if it did not age so fast) of Russia +leather. But to do this is beyond the power of most of +us. Only <a name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +65</span>works of great rarity or value should be full bound in +morocco. If we have the luck to light on a Shakespeare +quarto, on some masterpiece of Aldus Manutius, by all means let +us entrust it to the most competent binder, and instruct him to +do justice to the volume. Let old English books, as +More’s “Utopia,” have a cover of stamped and +blazoned calf. Let the binder clothe an early Rabelais or +Marot in the style favoured by Grolier, in leather tooled with +geometrical patterns. Let a Molière or Corneille be +bound in the graceful contemporary style of Le Gascon, where the +lace-like pattern of the gilding resembles the Venetian +point-lace, for which La Fontaine liked to ruin himself. +Let a binding, <i>à la fanfare</i>, in the style of +Thouvenin, denote a novelist of the last century, let panelled +Russia leather array a folio of Shakespeare, and let English +works of a hundred years ago be clothed in the sturdy fashion of +Roger Payne. Again, the bibliophile may prefer to have the +leather stamped with his arms and crest, like de Thou, Henri +III., D’Hoym, Madame du Barry, and most of the collectors +of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet there are +books of great price which one would hesitate to bind in new +covers. An Aldine or an Elzevir, in its old vellum or paper +wrapper, with uncut leaves, should be left just as it came from +the <a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +66</span>presses of the great printers. In this condition +it is a far more interesting relic. But a morocco case may +be made for the book, and lettered properly on the back, so that +the volume, though really unbound, may take its place with the +bound books on the shelves. A copy of any of +Shelley’s poems, in the original wrappers, should I venture +to think be treated thus, and so should the original editions of +Keats’s and of Mr. Tennyson’s works. A +collector, who is also an author, will perhaps like to have +copies of his own works in morocco, for their coats will give +them a chance of surviving the storms of time. But most +other books, not of the highest rarity and interest, will be +sufficiently clothed in half-bindings, that is, with leather +backs and corners, while the rest of the cover is of cloth or +paper, or whatever other substance seems most appropriate. +An Oxford tutor used to give half-binding as an example of what +Aristotle calls +<i>Μικροπρέπεια</i>, +or “shabbiness,” and when we recommend such coverings +for books it is as a counsel of expediency, not of +perfection. But we cannot all be millionaires; and, let it +be remembered, the really wise amateur will never be extravagant, +nor let his taste lead him into “the ignoble melancholy of +pecuniary embarrassment.” Let the example of Charles +Nodier be our warning; nay, let us <a name="page67"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 67</span>remember that while Nodier could get +out of debt by selling his collection, <i>ours</i> will probably +not fetch anything like what we gave for it. In +half-bindings there is a good deal of room for the exercise of +the collector’s taste. M. Octave Uzanne, in a tract +called “Les Caprices d’un Bibliophile,” gives +some hints on this topic, which may be taken or let alone. +M. Uzanne has noticed the monotony, and the want of meaning and +suggestion in ordinary half-bindings. The paper or cloth +which covers the greater part of the surface of half-bound books +is usually inartistic and even ugly. He proposes to use old +scraps of brocade, embroidery, Venice velvet, or what not; and +doubtless a covering made of some dead fair lady’s train +goes well with a romance by Crébillon, and engravings by +Marillier. “Voici un cartonnage Pompadour de notre +invention,” says M. Uzanne, with pride; but he observes +that it needs a strong will to make a bookbinder execute such +orders. For another class of books, which our honest +English shelves reject with disgust, M. Uzanne proposes a binding +of the skin of the boa constrictor; undoubtedly appropriate and +“admonishing.” The leathers of China and Japan, +with their strange tints and gilded devices may be used for books +of fantasy, like “Gaspard de la Nuit,” or the +“Opium Eater,” or Poe’s poems, <a +name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 68</span>or the verses +of Gérard de Nerval. Here, in short, is an almost +unexplored field for the taste of the bibliophile, who, with some +expenditure of time, and not much of money, may make half-binding +an art, and give modern books a peculiar and appropriate +raiment.</p> +<p>M. Ambrose Firmin Didot has left some notes on a more serious +topic,—the colours to be chosen when books are full-bound +in morocco. Thus he would have the “Iliad” +clothed in red, the “Odyssey” in blue, because the +old Greek rhapsodists wore a scarlet cloak when they recited the +Wrath of Achilles, a blue one when they chanted of the Return of +Odysseus. The writings of the great dignitaries of the +Church, M. Didot would array in violet; scarlet goes well with +the productions of cardinals; philosophers have their sober suit +of black morocco, poets like Panard may be dressed in rose +colour. A collector of this sort would like, were it +possible, to attire Goldsmith’s poems in a “coat of +Tyrian bloom, satin grain.” As an antithesis to these +extravagant fancies, we may add that for ordinary books no +binding is cheaper, neater, and more durable, than a coat of +buckram.</p> +<p>The conditions of a well bound book may be tersely +enumerated. The binding should unite solidity and +elegance. The book should open <a name="page69"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 69</span>easily, and remain open at any page +you please. It should never be necessary, in reading, to +squeeze back the covers; and no book, however expensively bound, +has been properly treated, if it does not open with ease. +It is a mistake to send recently printed books to the binder, +especially books which contain engravings. The printing ink +dries slowly, and, in the process called “beating,” +the text is often transferred to the opposite page. M. +Rouveyre recommends that one or two years should pass before the +binding of a newly printed book. The owner will, of course, +implore the binder to, spare the margins; and, almost equally of +course, the binder, <i>durus arator</i>, will cut them down with +his abominable plough. One is almost tempted to say that +margins should always be left untouched, for if once the binder +begins to clip he is unable to resist the seductive joy, and cuts +the paper to the quick, even into the printed matter. Mr. +Blades tells a very sad story of a nobleman who handed over some +Caxtons to a provincial binder, and received them back +<i>minus</i> £500 worth of margin. Margins make a +book worth perhaps £400, while their absence reduces the +same volume to the box marked “all these at +fourpence.” <i>Intonsis capillis</i>, with locks +unshorn, as Motteley the old dealer used to say, an Elzevir in +its paper wrapper may be worth more than the <a +name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>same tome in +morocco, stamped with Longepierre’s fleece of gold. +But these things are indifferent to bookbinders, new and +old. There lies on the table, as I write, “Les +Provinciales, ou Les Lettres Ecrites par Louis de Montalte +à un Provincial de ses amis, & aux R.R. P.P. +Jesuites. A Cologne, Ches <span class="smcap">Pierre</span> +de la <span class="smcap">Vallée</span>, <span +class="GutSmall">M.DC.LVIII</span>.” It is the +Elzevir edition, or what passes for such; but the binder has cut +down the margin so that the words “Les Provinciales” +almost touch the top of the page. Often the wretch—he +lived, judging by his style, in Derome’s time, before the +Revolution—has sliced into the head-titles of the +pages. Thus the book, with its old red morocco cover and +gilded flowers on the back, is no proper companion for “Les +Pensées de M. <span class="smcap">Pascal</span> +(Wolfganck, 1672),” which some sober Dutchman has left with +a fair allowance of margin, an inch “taller” in its +vellum coat than its neighbour in morocco. Here once more, +is “<span class="smcap">Les Fascheux</span>, Comedie de I. +B. P. <span class="smcap">Molière</span>, Representee sur +Le <i>Theatre du Palais Royal</i>. A Paris, Chez <span +class="smcap">Gabriel Quinet</span>, au Palais, dans la Galerie +des Prisonniers, à l’Ange Gabriel, <span +class="GutSmall">M.DCLXIII</span>. Avec privilege du +Roy.” What a crowd of pleasant memories the +bibliophile, and he only, finds in these dry words of the +title. Quinet, the bookseller, lived “au +Palais,” in that pretty old arcade where Corneille cast the +scene <a name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 71</span>of +his comedy, “La Galerie du Palais.” In the +Geneva edition of Corneille, 1774, you can see Gravelot’s +engraving of the place; it is a print full of exquisite charm +(engraved by Le Mure in 1762). Here is the long arcade, in +shape exactly like the galleries of the Bodleian Library at +Oxford. The bookseller’s booth is arched over, and is +open at front and side. Dorimant and Cléante are +looking out; one leans on the books on the window-sill, the other +lounges at the door, and they watch the pretty Hippolyte who is +chaffering with the lace-seller at the opposite shop. +“Ce visage vaut mieux que toutes vos chansons,” says +Dorimant to the bookseller. So they loitered, and bought +books, and flirted in their lace ruffles, and ribbons, and +flowing locks, and wide <i>canons</i>, when Molière was +young, and when this little old book was new, and lying on the +shelves of honest Quinet in the Palace Gallery. The very +title-page, and pagination, not of this second edition, but of +the first of “Les Fascheux,” had their own fortunes, +for the dedication to Fouquet was perforce withdrawn. That +favourite entertained La Vallière and the King with the +comedy at his house of Vaux, and then instantly fell from power +and favour, and, losing his place and his freedom, naturally lost +the flattery of a dedication. But <i>retombons à nos +</i><a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +72</span><i>coches</i>, as Montaigne says. This pleasant +little copy of the play, which is a kind of relic of +Molière and his old world, has been ruthlessly bound up +with a treatise, “Des Pierres Précieuses,” +published by Didot in 1776. Now the play is naturally a +larger book than the treatise on precious stones, so the binder +has cut down the margins to the size of those of the work on +amethysts and rubies. As the Italian tyrant chained the +dead and the living together, as Procrustes maimed his victims on +his cruel bed, so a hard-hearted French binder has tied up, and +mutilated, and spoiled the old play, which otherwise would have +had considerable value as well as interest.</p> +<p>We have tried to teach the beginner how to keep his books neat +and clean; what men and monsters he should avoid; how he should +guard himself against borrowers, book-worms, damp, and +dirt. But we are sometimes compelled to buy books already +dirty and dingy, foxed, or spotted with red, worn by greasy +hands, stained with ink spots, or covered with MS. notes. +The art of man has found a remedy for these defects. I have +never myself tried to wash a book, and this care is best left to +professional hands. But the French and English writers give +various recipes for cleaning old books, which the amateur may <a +name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>try on any +old rubbish out of the fourpenny box of a bookstall, till he +finds that he can trust his own manipulations. There are +“fat stains” on books, as thumb marks, traces of oil +(the midnight oil), flakes of old pasty crust left in old +Shakespeares, and candle drippings. There are “thin +stains,” as of mud, scaling-wax, ink, dust, and damp. +To clean a book you first carefully unbind it, take off the old +covers, cut the old stitching, and separate sheet from +sheet. Then take a page with “fat stains” of +any kind of grease (except finger-marks), pass a hot flat iron +over it, and press on it a clean piece of blotting paper till the +paper sucks up the grease. Then charge a camel-hair brush +with heated turpentine, and pass it over the places that were +stained. If the paper loses its colour press softly over it +a delicate handkerchief, soaked in heated spirits of wine. +Finger-marks you will cover with clean soap, leave this on for +some hours, and then rub with a sponge filled with hot +water. Afterwards dip in weak acid and water, and then soak +the page in a bath of clean water. Ink-stained pages you +will first dip in a strong solution of oxalic acid and then in +hydrochloric acid mixed in six times its quantity of water. +Then bathe in clean water and allow to dry slowly.</p> +<p>Some English recipes may also be given. <a +name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>“Grease +or wax spots,” says Hannett, in “Bibliopegia,” +“may be removed by washing the part with ether, chloroform, +or benzine, and placing it between pieces of white blotting +paper, then pass a hot iron over it.” “Chlorine +water,” says the same writer, removes ink stains, and +bleaches the paper at the same time. Of chloride of lime, +“a piece the size of a nut” (a cocoa nut or a hazel +nut?) in a pint of water, may be applied with a camel’s +hair pencil, and plenty of patience. To polish old +bindings, “take the yolk of an egg, beat it up with a fork, +apply it with a sponge, having first cleaned the leather with a +dry flannel.” The following, says a writer in +“Notes and Queries,” with perfect truth, is “an +easier if not a better method; purchase some bookbinder’s +varnish,” and use it as you did the rudimentary omelette of +the former recipe. Vellum covers may be cleaned with soap +and water, or in bad cases by a weak solution of salts of +lemon.</p> +<p>Lastly, the collector should acquire such books as +Lowndes’s “Bibliography,” Brunet’s +“Manuel,” and as many priced catalogues as he can +secure. The catalogues of Mr. Quaritch, Mr. Bohn, M. +Fontaine, M.M. Morgand et Fatout, are excellent guides to a +knowledge of the market value of books. Other special +works, as Renouard’s for Aldines, Willems’s for +Elzevirs, and Cohen’s for French <a name="page75"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 75</span>engravings, will be mentioned in +their proper place. Dibdin’s books are inaccurate and +long-winded, but may occasionally be dipped into with +pleasure.</p> +<h2><a name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +76</span>CHAPTER III.<br /> +THE BOOKS OF THE COLLECTOR.</h2> +<p><span class="smcap">The</span> easiest way to bring order into +the chaos of desirable books, is, doubtless, to begin +historically with manuscripts. Almost every age that has +left any literary remains, has bequeathed to us relics which are +cherished by collectors. We may leave the clay books of the +Chaldeans out of the account. These tomes resemble nothing +so much as sticks of chocolate, and, however useful they may be +to the student, the clay MSS. of Assurbanipal are not coveted by +the collector. He finds his earliest objects of desire in +illuminated manuscripts. The art of decorating manuscripts +is as old as Egypt; but we need not linger over the beautiful +papyri, which are silent books to all but a few +Egyptologists. Greece, out of all her tomes, has left us +but a few ill-written <a name="page77"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 77</span>papyri. Roman and early +Byzantine art are represented by a “Virgil,” and +fragments of an “Iliad”; the drawings in the latter +have been reproduced in a splendid volume (Milan 1819), and shew +Greek art passing into barbarism. The illumination of MSS. +was a favourite art in the later empire, and is said to have been +practised by Boethius. The iconoclasts of the Eastern +empire destroyed the books which contained representations of +saints and of the persons of the Trinity, and the monk Lazarus, a +famous artist, was cruelly tortured for his skill in illuminating +sacred works. The art was decaying in Western Europe when +Charlemagne sought for painters of MSS. in England and Ireland, +where the monks, in their monasteries, had developed a style with +original qualities. The library of Corpus Christi at +Cambridge, contains some of the earliest and most beautiful of +extant English MSS. These parchments, stained purple or +violet, and inscribed with characters of gold; are too often +beyond the reach of the amateur for whom we write. The MSS. +which he can hope to acquire are neither very early nor very +sumptuous, and, as a rule, MSS. of secular books are apt to be +out of his reach.</p> +<p>Yet a collection of MSS. has this great advantage over a +collection of printed books, that every item in it is absolutely +unique, no two MSS. being <a name="page78"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 78</span>ever really the same. This +circumstance alone would entitle a good collection of MSS. to +very high consideration on the part of book-collectors. +But, in addition to the great expense of such a collection, there +is another and even more serious drawback. It is sometimes +impossible, and is often extremely difficult, to tell whether a +MS. is perfect or not.</p> +<p>This difficulty can only be got over by an amount of learning +on the part of the collector to which, unfortunately, he is too +often a stranger. On the other hand, the advantages of +collecting MSS. are sometimes very great.</p> +<p>In addition to the pleasure—a pleasure at once literary +and artistic—which the study of illuminated MSS. affords, +there is the certainty that, as years go on, the value of such a +collection increases in a proportion altogether marvellous.</p> +<p>I will take two examples to prove this point. Some years +ago an eminent collector gave the price of £30 for a small +French book of Hours, painted in <i>grisaille</i>. It was +in a country town that he met with this treasure, for a treasure +he considered the book, in spite of its being of the very latest +school of illumination. When his collection was dispersed a +few years ago this one book fetched £260.</p> +<p>In the celebrated Perkins sale, in 1873, a magnificent <a +name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 79</span>early MS., +part of which was written in gold on a purple ground, and which +was dated in the catalogue “ninth or tenth century,” +but was in reality of the end of the tenth or beginning of the +eleventh, was sold for £565 to a dealer. It found its +way into Mr. Bragge’s collection, at what price I do not +know, and was resold, three years later, for £780.</p> +<p>Any person desirous of making a collection of illuminated +MSS., should study seriously for some time at the British Museum, +or some such place, until he is thoroughly acquainted (1) with +the styles of writing in use in the Middle Ages, so that he can +at a glance make a fairly accurate estimate of the age of the +book submitted to him; and (2) with the proper means of collating +the several kinds of service-books, which, in nine cases out of +ten, were those chosen for illumination.</p> +<p>A knowledge of the styles of writing can be acquired at second +hand in a book lately published by Mr. Charles Trice Martin, +F.S.A., being a new edition of “Astle’s Progress of +Writing.” Still better, of course, is the actual +inspection and comparison of books to which a date can be with +some degree of certainty assigned.</p> +<p>It is very common for the age of a book to be misstated in the +catalogues of sales, for the simple reason that the older the +writing, the plainer, in <a name="page80"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 80</span>all probability, it is. Let the +student compare writing of the twelfth century with that of the +sixteenth, and he will be able to judge at once of the truth of +this assertion. I had once the good fortune to “pick +up” a small Testament of the early part of the twelfth +century, if not older, which was catalogued as belonging to the +fifteenth, a date which would have made it of very moderate +value.</p> +<p>With regard to the second point, the collation of MSS., I fear +there is no royal road to knowing whether a book is perfect or +imperfect. In some cases the catchwords remain at the foot +of the pages. It is then of course easy to see if a page is +lost, but where no such clue is given the student’s only +chance is to be fully acquainted with what a book <i>ought</i> to +contain. He can only do this when he has a knowledge of the +different kinds of service-books which were in use, and of their +most usual contents.</p> +<p>I am indebted to a paper, read by the late Sir William Tite at +a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, for the collation of +“Books of Hours,” but there are many kinds of MSS. +besides these, and it is well to know something of them. +The Horae, or Books of Hours, were the latest development of the +service-books used at an earlier period. They cannot, in +fact, be strictly called service-books, being intended only for +private devotion. <a name="page81"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 81</span>But in the thirteenth century and +before it, Psalters were in use for this purpose, and the +collation of a Psalter is in truth more important than that of a +Book of Hours. It will be well for a student, therefore, to +begin with Psalters, as he can then get up the Hours in their +elementary form. I subjoin a bibliographical account of +both kinds of MSS. In the famous Exhibition at the +Burlington Club in 1874, a number of volumes was arranged to show +how persistent one type of the age could be. The form of +the decorations, and the arrangement of the figures in borders, +once invented, was fixed for generations. In a Psalter of +the thirteenth century there was, under the month of January in +the calendar, a picture of a grotesque little figure warming +himself at a stove. The hearth below, the chimney-pot +above, on which a stork was feeding her brood, with the +intermediate chimney shaft used as a border, looked like a +scientific preparation from the interior anatomy of a house of +the period. In one of the latest of the MSS. exhibited on +that occasion was the self-same design again. The little +man was no longer a grotesque, and the picture had all the high +finish and completeness in drawing that we might expect in the +workmanship of a contemporary of Van Eyck. There was a full +series of intermediate books, showing the gradual growth of the +picture.</p> +<p><a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 82</span>With +regard to chronology, it may be roughly asserted that the +earliest books which occur are Psalters of the thirteenth +century. Next to them come Bibles, of which an enormous +issue took place before the middle of the fourteenth +century. These are followed by an endless series of books +of Hours, which, as the sixteenth century is reached, appear in +several vernacular languages. Those in English, being both +very rare and of great importance in liturgical history, are of a +value altogether out of proportion to the beauty of their +illuminations. Side by side with this succession are the +Evangelistina, which, like the example mentioned above, are of +the highest merit, beauty, and value; followed by sermons and +homilies, and the Breviary, which itself shows signs of growth as +the years go on. The real Missal, with which all +illuminated books used to be confounded, is of rare occurrence, +but I have given a collation of it also. Besides these +devotional or religious books, I must mention chronicles and +romances, and the semi-religious and moral allegories, such as +the “Pélérinage de l’Ame,” which +is said to have given Bunyan the machinery of the +“Pilgrim’s Progress.” Chaucer’s and +Gower’s poetry exists in many MSS., as does the +“Polychronicon” of Higden; but, as a rule, the +mediæval chronicles are of single origin, and were not +copied. To collate MSS. of these kinds is <a +name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 83</span>quite +impossible, unless by carefully reading them, and seeing that the +pages run on without break.</p> +<p>I should advise the young collector who wishes to make sure of +success not to be too catholic in his tastes at first, but to +confine his attention to a single period and a single +school. I should also advise him to make from time to time +a careful catalogue of what he buys, and to preserve it even +after he has weeded out certain items. He will then be able +to make a clear comparative estimate of the importance and value +of his collection, and by studying one species at a time, to +become thoroughly conversant with what it can teach him. +When he has, so to speak, burnt his fingers once or twice, he +will find himself able to distinguish at sight what no amount of +teaching by word of mouth or by writing could ever possibly +impart to any advantage.</p> +<p>One thing I should like if possible to impress very strongly +upon the reader. That is the fact that a MS. which is not +absolutely perfect, if it is in a genuine state, is of much more +value than one which has been made perfect by the skill of a +modern restorer. The more skilful he is, that is to say the +better he can forge the style of the original, the more worthless +he renders the volume.</p> +<p>Printing seems to have superseded the art of <a +name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 84</span>the +illuminator more promptly and completely in England than on the +Continent. The <i>dames galantes</i> of +Brantôme’s memoirs took pleasure in illuminated Books +of Hours, suited to the nature of their devotions. As late +as the time of Louis XIV., Bussy Rabutin had a volume of the same +kind, illuminated with portraits of “saints,” of his +own canonisation. The most famous of these modern examples +of costly MSS. was “La Guirlande de Julie,” a +collection of madrigals by various courtly hands, presented to +the illustrious Julie, daughter of the Marquise de Rambouillet, +most distinguished of the <i>Précieuses</i>, and wife of +the Duc de Montausier, the supposed original of +Molière’s Alceste. The MS. was copied on +vellum by Nicholas Jarry, the great calligraph of his time. +The flowers on the margin were painted by Robert. Not long +ago a French amateur was so lucky as to discover the MS. book of +prayers of Julie’s noble mother, the Marquise de +Rambouillet. The Marquise wrote these prayers for her own +devotions, and Jarry, the illuminator, declared that he found +them most edifying, and delightful to study. The manuscript +is written on vellum by the famous Jarry, contains a portrait of +the fair Julie herself, and is bound in morocco by Le +Gascon. The happy collector who possesses the volume now, +heard vaguely that a manuscript <a name="page85"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 85</span>of some interest was being exposed +for sale at a trifling price in the shop of a country +bookseller. The description of the book, casual as it was, +made mention of the monogram on the cover. This was enough +for the amateur. He rushed to a railway station, travelled +some three hundred miles, reached the country town, hastened to +the bookseller’s shop, and found that the book had been +withdrawn by its owner. Happily the possessor, unconscious +of his bliss, was at home. The amateur sought him out, paid +the small sum demanded, and returned to Paris in triumph. +Thus, even in the region of manuscript-collecting, there are +extraordinary prizes for the intelligent collector.</p> +<h3>TO KNOW IF A MANUSCRIPT IS PERFECT.</h3> +<p>If the manuscript is of English or French writing of the +twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth centuries, it is +probably either—(1) a Bible, (2) a Psalter, (3) a book of +Hours, or (4), but rarely, a Missal. It is not worth while +to give the collation of a gradual, or a hymnal, or a +processional, or a breviary, or any of the fifty different kinds +of service-books which are occasionally met with, but which are +never twice the same.</p> +<p>To collate one of them, the reader must go <a +name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 86</span>carefully +through the book, seeing that the catch-words, if there are any, +answer to the head lines; and if there are +“signatures,” that is, if the foot of the leaves of a +sheet of parchment has any mark for enabling the binder to +“gather” them correctly, going through them, and +seeing that each signed leaf has its corresponding +“blank.”</p> +<p>1. To collate a Bible, it will be necessary first to go +through the catch-words, if any, and signatures, as above; then +to notice the contents. The first page should contain the +Epistle of St. Jerome to the reader. It will be observed +that there is nothing of the nature of a title-page, but I have +often seen title-pages supplied by some ignorant imitator in the +last century, with the idea that the book was imperfect without +one. The books of the Bible follow in order—but the +order not only differs from ours, but differs in different +copies. The Apocryphal books are always included. The +New Testament usually follows on the Old without any break; and +the book concludes with an index of the Hebrew names and their +signification in Latin, intended to help preachers to the +figurative meaning of the biblical types and parables. The +last line of the Bible itself usually contains a colophon, in +which sometimes the name of the writer is given, sometimes the +length of time it has taken him to write, and <a +name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 87</span>sometimes +merely the “Explicit. Laus Deo,” which has found its +way into many modern books. This colophon, which comes as a +rule immediately before the index, often contains curious notes, +hexameters giving the names of all the books, biographical or +local memoranda, and should always be looked for by the +collector. One such line occurs to me. It is in a +Bible written in Italy in the thirteenth century—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Qui scripsit scribat. Vergilius spe +domini vivat.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Vergilius was, no doubt, in this case the scribe. The +Latin and the writing are often equally crabbed. In the +Bodleian there is a Bible with this colophon—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Finito libro referemus gratias Christo +m.cc.lxv. indict. viij.<br /> +Ego Lafräcus de Päcis de Cmoa scriptor +scripsi.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This was also written in Italy. English colophons are +often very quaint—“Qui scripsit hunc librum fiat +collocatus in Paradisum,” is an example. The +following gives us the name of one Master Gerard, who, in the +fourteenth century, thus poetically described his +ownership:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Si Ge ponatur—et <i>rar</i> simul +associatur—<br /> +Et <i>dus</i> reddatur—cui pertinet ita vocatur.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>In a Bible written in England, in the British <a +name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 88</span>Museum, there +is a long colophon, in which, after the name of the +writer—“hunc librum scripsit Wills de +Hales,”—there is a prayer for Ralph of Nebham, who +had called Hales to the writing of the book, followed by a +date—“Fes. fuit liber anno M.cc.i. quarto ab +incarnatione domini.” In this Bible the books of the +New Testament were in the following order:—the Evangelists, +the Acts, the Epistles of S. Peter, S. James, and S. John, the +Epistles of S. Paul, and the Apocalypse. In a Bible at +Brussels I found the colophon after the index:—“Hic +expliciunt interpretationes Hebrayorum nominum Do gris qui potens +est p. süp. omia.” Some of these Bibles are of +marvellously small dimensions. The smallest I ever saw was +at Ghent, but it was very imperfect. I have one in which +there are thirteen lines of writing in an inch of the +column. The order of the books of the New Testament in +Bibles of the thirteenth century is usually according to one or +other of the three following arrangements:—</p> +<p class="gutsumm">(1.) The Evangelists, Romans to Hebrews, +Acts, Epistles of S. Peter, S. James, and S. John, +Apocalypse.</p> +<p class="gutsumm">(2.) The Evangelists, Acts, Epistles of +S. Peter, S. James, and S. John, Epistles of S. Paul, +Apocalypse. This is the most common.</p> +<p class="gutsumm"><a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +89</span>(3.) The Evangelists, Acts, Epistles of S. Peter, +S. James, and S. John, Apocalypse, and Epistles of S. Paul.</p> +<p>On the fly leaves of these old Bibles there are often very +curious inscriptions. In one I have +this:—“Hæc biblia emi Haquinas prior monasterii +Hatharbiensis de dono domini regis Norwegie.” Who was +this King of Norway who, in 1310, gave the Prior of Hatherby +money to buy a Bible, which was probably written at +Canterbury? And who was Haquinas? His name has a +Norwegian sound, and reminds us of St. Thomas of that +surname. In another manuscript I have seen:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Articula Fidei:—<br /> +Nascitur, abluitur, patitur, descendit at ima<br /> +Surgit et ascendit, veniens discernere cuncta.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>In another this:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Sacramenta ecclesiæ:—<br /> +Abluo, fumo, cibo, piget, ordinat, uxor et ungit.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I will conclude these notes on MS. Bibles with the following +colophon from a copy written in Italy in the fifteenth +century:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Finito libro vivamus semper in +Christo—<br /> +Si semper in Christo carebimus ultimo leto.<br /> +Explicit Deo gratias; Amen. Stephanus de<br /> +Tantaldis scripsit in pergamo.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>2. The “Psalter” of the thirteenth century +is usually to be considered a forerunner of the “Book <a +name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 90</span>of +Hours.” It always contains, and usually commences +with, a Calendar, in which are written against certain days the +“obits” of benefactors and others, so that a +well-filled Psalter often becomes a historical document of high +value and importance. The first page of the psalms is +ornamented with a huge B, which often fills the whole page, and +contains a representation of David and Goliath ingeniously fitted +to the shape of the letter. At the end are usually to be +found the hymns of the Three Children, and others from the Bible +together with the Te Deum; and sometimes, in late examples, a +litany. In some psalters the calendar is at the end. +These Psalters, and the Bibles described above, are very +frequently of English work; more frequently, that is, than the +books of Hours and Missals. The study of the Scriptures was +evidently more popular in England than in the other countries of +Europe during the Middle Ages; and the early success of the +Reformers here, must in part, no doubt, be attributed to the wide +circulation of the Bible even before it had been translated from +the Latin. I need hardly, perhaps, observe that even +fragments of a Psalter, a Testament, or a Bible in English, are +so precious as to be practically invaluable.</p> +<p>3. We are indebted to Sir W. Tite for the following +collation of a Flemish “Book of Hours”:—</p> +<p class="gutindent"><a name="page91"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 91</span>1. The Calendar.</p> +<p class="gutindent">2. Gospels of the Nativity and the +Resurrection.</p> +<p class="gutindent">3. Preliminary Prayers (inserted +occasionally).</p> +<p class="gutindent">4. Horæ—(Nocturns and +Matins).</p> +<p class="gutindent">5. ,, (Lauds).</p> +<p class="gutindent">6. ,, (Prime).</p> +<p class="gutindent">7. ,, (Tierce).</p> +<p class="gutindent">8. ,, (Sexte).</p> +<p class="gutindent">9. ,, (None).</p> +<p class="gutindent">10. ,, (Vespers).</p> +<p class="gutindent">11. ,, (Compline).</p> +<p class="gutindent">12. The seven penitential Psalms</p> +<p class="gutindent">13. The Litany.</p> +<p class="gutindent">14. Hours of the Cross.</p> +<p class="gutindent">15. Hours of the Holy Spirit.</p> +<p class="gutindent">16. Office of the Dead.</p> +<p class="gutindent">17. The Fifteen Joys of B. V. M.</p> +<p class="gutindent">18. The seven requests to our +Lord.</p> +<p class="gutindent">19. Prayers and Suffrages to various +Saints.</p> +<p class="gutindent">20. Several prayers, petitions, and +devotions.</p> +<p>This is an unusually full example, but the calendar, the +hours, the seven psalms, and the litany, are in almost all the +MSS. The buyer must look carefully to see that no +miniatures have been cut out; but it is only by counting the +leaves in their gatherings that he can make sure. This is +often impossible without breaking the binding.</p> +<p>The most valuable “Horæ” are those written +in England. Some are of the English use (Sarum or York, or +whatever it may happen to be), but <a name="page92"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 92</span>were written abroad, especially in +Normandy, for the English market. These are also valuable, +even when imperfect. Look for the page before the +commencement of the Hours (No. 4 in the list above), and at the +end will be found a line in red,—“Incipit Horæ +secundum usum Sarum,” or otherwise, as the case may be.</p> +<p>4. Missals do not often occur, and are not only very +valuable but very difficult to collate, unless furnished with +catch-words or signatures. But no Missal is complete +without the Canon of the Mass, usually in the middle of the book, +and if there are any illuminations throughout the volume, there +will be a full page Crucifixion, facing the Canon. Missals +of large size and completeness contain—(1) a Calendar; (2) +“the proper of the Season;” (3) the ordinary and +Canon of the Mass; (4) the Communal of Saints; (5) the proper of +Saints and special occasions; (6) the lessons, epistles, and +gospels; with (7) some hymns, “proses,” and +canticles. This is Sir W. Tite’s list; but, as he +remarks, MS. Missals seldom contain so much. The collector +will look for the Canon, which is invariable.</p> +<p>Breviaries run to an immense length, and are seldom +illuminated. It would be impossible to give them any kind +of collation, and the same may be said of many other kinds of old +service-<a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +93</span>books, and of the chronicles, poems, romances, and +herbals, in which mediæval literature abounded, and which +the collector must judge as best he can.</p> +<p>The name of “missal” is commonly and falsely given +to all old service-books by the booksellers, but the collector +will easily distinguish one when he sees it, from the notes I +have given. In a Sarum Missal, at Alnwick, there is a +colophon quoted by my lamented friend Dr. Rock in his +“Textile Fabrics.” It is appropriate both to +the labours of the old scribes and also to those of their modern +readers:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Librum Scribendo—Jon Whas Monachus +laborabat—<br /> +Et mane Surgendo—multum corpus macerabat.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It is one of the charms of manuscripts that they illustrate, +in their minute way, all the art, and even the social condition, +of the period in which they were produced. Apostles, +saints, and prophets wear the contemporary costume, and Jonah, +when thrown to the hungry whale, wears doublet and trunk +hose. The ornaments illustrate the architectural taste of +the day. The backgrounds change from diapered patterns to +landscapes, as the modern way of looking at nature penetrates the +monasteries and reaches the <i>scriptorium</i> where the +illuminator sits and refreshes his eyes with <a +name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 94</span>the sight of +the slender trees and blue distant hills. Printed books +have not such resources. They can only show varieties of +type, quaint frontispieces, printers’ devices, and +<i>fleurons</i> at the heads of chapters. These +attractions, and even the engravings of a later day, seem meagre +enough compared with the allurements of manuscripts. Yet +printed books must almost always make the greater part of a +collection, and it may be well to give some rules as to the +features that distinguish the productions of the early +press. But no amount of “rules” is worth six +months’ practical experience in bibliography. That +experience the amateur, if he is wise, will obtain in a public +library, like the British Museum or the Bodleian. Nowhere +else is he likely to see much of the earliest of printed books, +which very seldom come into the market.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p94b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Title-page of “Le Rommant de la Rose,” Paris, 1539" +title= +"Title-page of “Le Rommant de la Rose,” Paris, 1539" + src="images/p94s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Those of the first German press are so rare that practically +they never reach the hands of the ordinary collector. Among +them are the famous Psalters printed by Fust and Schoffer, the +earliest of which is dated 1457; and the bible known as the +Mazarine Bible. Two copies of this last were in the Perkins +sale. I well remember the excitement on that +occasion. The first copy put up was the best, being printed +upon vellum. The bidding commenced at £1000, and very +speedily <a name="page95"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +95</span>rose to £2200, at which point there was a long +pause; it then rose in hundreds with very little delay to +£3400, at which it was knocked down to a bookseller. +The second copy was on paper, and there were those present who +said it was better than the other, which had a suspicion +attaching to it of having been “restored” with a +facsimile leaf. The first bid was again £1000, which +the buyer of the previous copy made guineas, and the bidding +speedily went up to £2660, at which price the first bidder +paused. A third bidder had stepped in at £1960, and +now, amid breathless excitement, bid £10 more. This +he had to do twice before the book was knocked down to him at +£2690.</p> +<p>A scene like this has really very little to do with +book-collecting. The beginner must labour hard to +distinguish different kinds of printing; he must be able to +recognise at a glance even fragments from the press of +Caxton. His eye must be accustomed to all the tricks of the +trade and others, so that he may tell a facsimile in a moment, or +detect a forgery.</p> +<p>But now let us return to the distinctive marks of early +printed books. The first is, says M. Rouveyre,—</p> +<p>1. <i>The absence of a separate title-page</i>. It +was not till 1476–1480 that the titles of books were <a +name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 96</span>printed on +separate pages. The next mark is—</p> +<p>2. <i>The absence of capital letters at the beginnings +of divisions</i>. For example, in an Aldine Iliad, the +fifth book begins thus—</p> + +<blockquote><p> Νθ +αυ τὖδέιδῃ +Διυμήδεῑ<br /> +ἔ +παλλὰς +ἀθήνη<br /> + + +δῶκε μένος +καὶ +θάρσος +ἵν’<br /> + + +ἔκδηλος +μετὰ πᾶσιν<br +/> +ἀργείοισι +γένοιτο, +ἰδέ κλέος +ἐσθλὸν +ἄροιτο.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It was intended that the open space, occupied by the small +epsilon (ἔ), should be filled up with a coloured and gilded +initial letter by the illuminator. Copies thus decorated +are not very common, but the Aldine “Homer” of +Francis I., rescued by M. Didot from a rubbish heap in an English +cellar, had its due illuminations. In the earliest books +the guide to the illuminator, the small printed letter, does not +appear, and he often puts in the wrong initial.</p> +<p>3. <i>Irregularity and rudeness of type</i> is a +“note” of the primitive printing press, which very +early disappeared. Nothing in the history of printing is so +remarkable as the beauty of almost its first efforts. Other +notes are—</p> +<p>4. <i>The absence of figures at the top of the +pages</i>, <i>and of signatures at the foot</i>. The +thickness and solidity of the paper, the absence of the +printer’s <a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +97</span>name, of the date, and of the name of the town where the +press stood, and the abundance of crabbed abbreviations, are all +marks, more or less trustworthy, of the antiquity of books. +It must not be supposed that all books published, let us say +before 1500, are rare, or deserve the notice of the +collector. More than 18,000 works, it has been calculated, +left the press before the end of the fifteenth century. All +of these cannot possibly be of interest, and many of them that +are “rare,” are rare precisely because they are +uninteresting. They have not been preserved because they +were thought not worth preserving. This is a great cause of +rarity; but we must not hastily conclude that because a book +found no favour in its own age, therefore it has no claim on our +attention. A London bookseller tells me that he bought the +“remainder” of Keats’s “Endymion” +for fourpence a copy! The first edition of +“Endymion” is now rare and valued. In trying to +mend the binding of an old “Odyssey” lately, I +extracted from the vellum covers parts of two copies of a very +scarce and curious French dictionary of slang, “Le Jargon, +ou Langage de l’Argot Reformé.” This +treatise may have been valueless, almost, when it appeared, but +now it is serviceable to the philologist, and to all who care to +try to interpret the slang <i>ballades</i> <a +name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 98</span>of the poet +Villon. An old pamphlet, an old satire, may hold the key to +some historical problem, or throw light on the past of manners +and customs. Still, of the earliest printed books, +collectors prefer such rare and beautiful ones as the oldest +printed Bibles: German, English,—as Taverner’s and +the Bishop’s,—or Hebrew and Greek, or the first +editions of the ancient classics, which may contain the readings +of MSS. now lost or destroyed. Talking of early Bibles, let +us admire the luck and prudence of a certain Mr. Sandford. +He always longed for the first Hebrew Bible, but would offer no +fancy price, being convinced that the book would one day fall in +his way. His foreboding was fulfilled, and he picked up his +treasure for ten shillings in a shop in the Strand. The +taste for <i>incunabula</i>, or very early printed books, +slumbered in the latter half of the sixteenth, and all the +seventeenth century. It revived with the third jubilee of +printing in 1740, and since then has refined itself, and only +craves books very early, very important, or works from the press +of Caxton, the St. Albans Schoolmaster, or other famous old +artists. Enough has been said to show the beginner, always +enthusiastic, that all old books are not precious. For +further information, the “Biography and Typography of +William Caxton,” by Mr. Blades (Trübner, London, +1877), may be consulted with profit.</p> +<p><a name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +99</span>Following the categories into which M. Brunet classifies +desirable books in his invaluable manual, we now come to books +printed on vellum, and on peculiar papers. At the origin of +printing, examples of many books, probably presentation copies, +were printed on vellum. There is a vellum copy of the +celebrated Florentine first edition of Homer; but it is truly sad +to think that the twin volumes, Iliad and Odyssey, have been +separated, and pine in distant libraries. Early printed +books on vellum often have beautifully illuminated +capitals. Dibdin mentions in “Bibliomania” +(London, 1811), p. 90, that a M. Van Praet was compiling a +catalogue of works printed on vellum, and had collected more than +2000 articles. When hard things are said about Henry VIII., +let us remember that this monarch had a few copies of his book +against Luther printed on vellum. The Duke of +Marlborough’s library possessed twenty-five books on +vellum, all printed before 1496. The chapter-house at Padua +has a “Catullus” of 1472 on vellum; let Mr. Robinson +Ellis think wistfully of that treasure. The notable Count +M’Carthy of Toulouse had a wonderful library of books in +<i>membranis</i>, including a book much coveted for its rarity, +oddity, and the beauty of its illustrations, the +“Hypnerotomachia” of Poliphilus (Venice, <a +name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +100</span>1499). Vellum was the favourite +“vanity” of Junot, Napoleon’s general. +For reasons connected with its manufacture, and best not inquired +into, the Italian vellum enjoyed the greatest reputation for +smooth and silky whiteness. Dibdin calls “our modern +books on vellum little short of downright wretched.” +But the editor of this series could, I think, show examples that +would have made Dibdin change his opinion.</p> +<p>Many comparatively expensive papers, large in <i>format</i>, +are used in choice editions of books. Whatman papers, Dutch +papers, Chinese papers, and even <i>papier vergé</i>, have +all their admirers. The amateur will soon learn to +distinguish these materials. As to books printed on +coloured paper—green, blue, yellow, rhubarb-coloured, and +the like, they are an offence to the eyes and to the taste. +Yet even these have their admirers and collectors, and the great +Aldus himself occasionally used azure paper. Under the head +of “large paper,” perhaps “uncut copies” +should be mentioned. Most owners of books have had the +edges of the volumes gilded or marbled by the binders. Thus +part of the margin is lost, an offence to the eye of the +bibliomaniac, while copies untouched by the binder’s shears +are rare, and therefore prized. The inconvenience of uncut +copies is, that one cannot easily turn over the <a +name="page101"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +101</span>leaves. But, in the present state of the fashion, +a really rare uncut Elzevir may be worth hundreds of pounds, +while a cropped example scarcely fetches as many shillings. +A set of Shakespeare’s quartoes, uncut, would be worth more +than a respectable landed estate in Connemara. For these +reasons the amateur will do well to have new books of price bound +“uncut.” It is always easy to have the leaves +pared away; but not even the fabled fountain at Argos, in which +Hera yearly renewed her maidenhood, could restore margins once +clipped away. So much for books which are chiefly precious +for the quantity and quality of the material on which they are +printed. Even this rather foolish weakness of the amateur +would not be useless if it made our publishers more careful to +employ a sound clean hand-made paper, instead of drugged trash, +for their more valuable new productions. Indeed, a taste +for hand-made paper is coming in, and is part of the revolt +against the passion for everything machine-made, which ruined art +and handiwork in the years between 1840 and 1870.</p> +<p>The third of M. Brunet’s categories of books of prose, +includes <i>livres de luxe</i>, and illustrated literature. +Every Christmas brings us <i>livres de luxe</i> in plenty, books +which are no books, but have gilt and magenta covers, and great +staring illustrations. These are regarded as drawing-<a +name="page102"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 102</span>room +ornaments by people who never read. It is scarcely +necessary to warn the collector against these gaudy baits of +unregulated Christmas generosity. All ages have not +produced quite such garish <i>livres de luxe</i> as ours. +But, on the whole, a book brought out merely for the sake of +display, is generally a book ill “got up,” and not +worth reading. Moreover, it is generally a folio, or +quarto, so large that he who tries to read it must support it on +a kind of scaffolding. In the class of illustrated books +two sorts are at present most in demand. The ancient +woodcuts and engravings, often the work of artists like Holbein +and Dürer, can never lose their interest. Among old +illustrated books, the most famous, and one of the rarest, is the +“Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” “wherein all human +matters are proved to be no more than a dream.” This +is an allegorical romance, published in 1499, for Francesco +Colonna, by Aldus Manucius. <i>Poliam Frater Franciscus +Columna peramavit</i>. “Brother Francesco Colonna +dearly loved Polia,” is the inscription and device of this +romance. Poor Francesco, of the order of preachers, +disguised in this strange work his passion for a lady of +uncertain name. Here is a translation of the passage in +which the lady describes the beginning of his affection. +“I was standing, as is the manner of women young and fair, +at the <a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +103</span>window, or rather on the balcony, of my palace. +My yellow hair, the charm of maidens, was floating round my +shining shoulders. My locks were steeped in unguents that +made them glitter like threads of gold, and they were slowly +drying in the rays of the burning sun. A handmaid, happy in +her task, was drawing a comb through my tresses, and surely these +of Andromeda seemed not more lovely to Perseus, nor to Lucius the +locks of Photis. <a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6" +class="citation">[6]</a> On a sudden, Poliphilus beheld me, +and could not withdraw from me his glances of fire, and even in +that moment a ray of the sun of love was kindled in his +heart.”</p> +<p>The fragment is itself a picture from the world of the +Renaissance. We watch the blonde, learned lady, dreaming of +Perseus, and Lucius, Greek lovers of old time, while the sun +gilds her yellow hair, and the young monk, passing below, sees +and loves, and “falls into the deep waters of +desire.” The lover is no less learned than the lady, +and there is a great deal of amorous archæology in his +account of his voyage to Cythera. As to the designs in +wood, quaint in their vigorous effort to be classical, they have +been attributed to Mantegna, to Bellini, and other artists. +Jean Cousin is said to have executed the imitations, in the Paris +editions of 1546, 1556, and 1561.</p> +<p><a name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 104</span>The +“Hypnerotomachia” seems to deserve notice, because it +is the very type of the books that are dear to collectors, as +distinct from the books that, in any shape, are for ever valuable +to the world. A cheap Tauchnitz copy of the Iliad and +Odyssey, or a Globe Shakespeare, are, from the point of view of +literature, worth a wilderness of +“Hypnerotomachiæ.” But a clean copy of +the “Hypnerotomachia,” especially on <span +class="GutSmall">VELLUM</span>, is one of the jewels of +bibliography. It has all the right qualities; it is very +rare, it is very beautiful as a work of art, it is curious and +even <i>bizarre</i>, it is the record of a strange time, and a +strange passion; it is a relic, lastly, of its printer, the great +and good Aldus Manutius.</p> +<p>Next to the old woodcuts and engravings, executed in times +when artists were versatile and did not disdain even to draw a +book-plate (as Dürer did for Pirckheimer), the designs of +the French “little masters,” are at present in most +demand. The book illustrations of the seventeenth century +are curious enough, and invaluable as authorities on manners and +costume. But the attitudes of the figures are too often +stiff and ungainly; while the composition is frequently left to +chance. England could show nothing much better than +Ogilby’s translations of Homer, illustrated with big florid +engravings in sham antique <a name="page105"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 105</span>style. The years between 1730 +and 1820, saw the French “little masters” in their +perfection. The dress of the middle of the eighteenth +century, of the age of Watteau, was precisely suited to the gay +and graceful pencils of Gravelot, Moreau, Eisen, Boucher, Cochin, +Marillier, and Choffard. To understand their merits, and +the limits of their art, it is enough to glance through a series +of the designs for Voltaire, Corneille, or Molière. +The drawings of society are almost invariably dainty and +pleasing, the serious scenes of tragedy leave the spectator quite +unmoved. Thus it is but natural that these artists should +have shone most in the illustration of airy trifles like +Dorat’s “Baisers,” or tales like Manon Lescaut, +or in designing tailpieces for translations of the Greek idyllic +poets, such as Moschus and Bion. In some of his +illustrations of books, especially, perhaps, in the designs for +“La Physiologie de Gout” (Jouaust, Paris, 1879), M. +Lalauze has shown himself the worthy rival of Eisen and +Cochin. Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that the beauty +and value of all such engravings depends almost entirely on their +“state.” The earlier proofs are much more +brilliant than those drawn later, and etchings on fine papers are +justly preferred. For example, M. Lalauze’s +engravings on “Whatman paper,” have a beauty which +could scarcely be guessed by people who have only seen <a +name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>specimens +on “papier vergé.” Every collector of +the old French <i>vignettes</i>, should possess himself of the +“Guide de l’amateur,” by M. Henry Cohen +(Rouquette, Paris, 1880). Among English illustrated books, +various tastes prefer the imaginative works of William Blake, the +etchings of Cruikshank, and the woodcuts of Bewick. The +whole of the last chapter of this sketch is devoted, by Mr. +Austin Dobson, to the topic of English illustrated books. +Here it may be said, in passing, that an early copy of William +Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” written, +illustrated, printed, coloured, and boarded by the author’s +own hand, is one of the most charming objects that a bibliophile +can hope to possess. The verses of Blake, in a framework of +birds, and flowers, and plumes, all softly and magically tinted, +seem like some book out of King Oberon’s library in +fairyland, rather than the productions of a mortal press. +The pictures in Blake’s “prophetic books,” and +even his illustrations to “Job,” show an imagination +more heavily weighted by the technical difficulties of +drawing.</p> +<p>The next class of rare books is composed of works from the +famous presses of the Aldi and the Elzevirs. Other presses +have, perhaps, done work as good, but Estienne, the Giunta, and +Plantin, are comparatively neglected, while the taste for the +performances of Baskerville and Foulis is not <a +name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 107</span>very +eager. A safe judgment about Aldines and Elzevirs is the +gift of years and of long experience. In this place it is +only possible to say a few words on a wide subject. The +founder of the Aldine press, Aldus Pius Manutius, was born about +1450, and died at Venice in 1514. He was a man of careful +and profound learning, and was deeply interested in Greek +studies, then encouraged by the arrival in Italy of many educated +Greeks and Cretans. Only four Greek authors had as yet been +printed in Italy, when (1495) Aldus established his press at +Venice. Theocritus, Homer, Æsop, and Isocrates, +probably in very limited editions, were in the hands of +students. The purpose of Aldus was to put Greek and Latin +works, beautifully printed in a convenient shape, within the +reach of all the world. His reform was the introduction of +books at once cheap, studiously correct, and convenient in actual +use. It was in 1498 that he first adopted the small octavo +size, and in his “Virgil” of 1501, he introduced the +type called <i>Aldine</i> or <i>Italic</i>. The letters +were united as in writing, and the type is said to have been cut +by Francesco da Bologna, better known as Francia, in imitation of +the hand of Petrarch. For full information about Aldus and +his descendants and successors, the work of M. Firmin Didot, +(“Alde <a name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +108</span>Manuce et l’Hellénisme à Venise: +Paris 1875),” and the Aldine annals of Renouard, must be +consulted. These two works are necessary to the collector, +who will otherwise be deceived by the misleading assertions of +the booksellers. As a rule, the volumes published in the +lifetime of Aldus Manutius are the most esteemed, and of these +the Aristotle, the first Homer, the Virgil, and the Ovid, are +perhaps most in demand. The earlier Aldines are consulted +almost as studiously as MSS. by modern editors of the +classics.</p> +<p>Just as the house of Aldus waned and expired, that of the +great Dutch printers, the Elzevirs, began obscurely enough at +Leyden in 1583. The Elzevirs were not, like Aldus, ripe +scholars and men of devotion to learning. Aldus laboured +for the love of noble studies; the Elzevirs were acute, and too +often “smart” men of business. The founder of +the family was Louis (born at Louvain, 1540, died 1617). +But it was in the second and third generations that Bonaventura +and Abraham Elzevir began to publish at Leyden, their editions in +small duodecimo. Like Aldus, these Elzevirs aimed at +producing books at once handy, cheap, correct, and beautiful in +execution. Their adventure was a complete success. +The Elzevirs did not, like Aldus, surround themselves with the +most learned scholars of their time. <a +name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 109</span>Their +famous literary adviser, Heinsius, was full of literary +jealousies, and kept students of his own calibre at a +distance. The classical editions of the Elzevirs, +beautiful, but too small in type for modern eyes, are anything +but exquisitely correct. Their editions of the +contemporary. French authors, now classics themselves, are +lovely examples of skill in practical enterprise. The +Elzevirs treated the French authors much as American publishers +treat Englishmen. They stole right and left, but no one +complained much in these times of slack copyright; and, at all +events, the piratic larcenous publications of the Dutch printers +were pretty, and so far satisfactory. They themselves, in +turn, were the victims of fraudulent and untradesmanlike +imitations. It is for this, among other reasons, that the +collector of Elzevirs must make M. Willems’s book +(“Les Elzevier,” Brussels and Paris, 1880) his +constant study. Differences so minute that they escape the +unpractised eye, denote editions of most various value. In +Elzevirs a line’s breadth of margin is often worth a +hundred pounds, and a misprint is quoted at no less a sum. +The fantastic caprice of bibliophiles has revelled in the +bibliography of these Dutch editions. They are at present +very scarce in England, where a change in fashion some years ago +had made them common enough. No Elzevir <a +name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 110</span>is valuable +unless it be clean and large in the margins. When these +conditions are satisfied the question of rarity comes in, and +Remy Belleau’s Macaronic poem, or “Le Pastissier +Français,” may rise to the price of four or five +hundred pounds. A Rabelais, Molière, or Corneille, +of a “good” edition, is now more in request than the +once adored “Imitatio Christi” (dateless), or the +“Virgil”’ of 1646, which is full of gross +errors of the press, but is esteemed for red characters in the +letter to Augustus, and another passage at page 92. The +ordinary marks of the Elzevirs were the sphere, the old hermit, +the Athena, the eagle, and the burning faggot. But all +little old books marked with spheres are not Elzevirs, as many +booksellers suppose. Other printers also stole the designs +for the tops of chapters, the Aegipan, the Siren, the head of +Medusa, the crossed sceptres, and the rest. In some cases +the Elzevirs published their books, especially when they were +piracies, anonymously. When they published for the +Jansenists, they allowed their clients to put fantastic +pseudonyms on the title pages. But, except in four cases, +they had only two pseudonyms used on the titles of books +published by and for themselves. These disguises are +“Jean Sambix” for Jean and Daniel Elzevir, at Leyden, +and for the Elzevirs of Amsterdam, <a name="page111"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 111</span>“Jacques le +Jeune.” The last of the great representatives of the +house, Daniel, died at Amsterdam, 1680. Abraham, an +unworthy scion, struggled on at Leyden till 1712. The +family still prospers, but no longer prints, in Holland. It +is common to add duodecimos of Foppens, Wolfgang, and other +printers, to the collections of the Elzevirs. The books of +Wolfgang have the sign of the fox robbing a wild bee’s +nest, with the motto <i>Quaerendo</i>.</p> +<p><i>Curious and singular books</i> are the next in our +classification. The category is too large. The books +that be “curious” (not in the booksellers’ +sense of “prurient” and “disgusting,”) +are innumerable. All suppressed and condemned books, from +“Les Fleurs du Mal” to Vanini’s +“Amphitheatrum,” or the English translation of +Bruno’s “Spaccia della Bestia Trionfante,” are +more or less rare, and more or less curious. Wild books, +like William Postel’s “Three Marvellous Triumphs of +Women,” are “curious.” Freakish books, +like macaronic poetry, written in a medley of languages, are +curious. Books from private presses are singular. The +old English poets and satirists turned out many a book curious to +the last degree, and priced at a fantastic value. Such are +“Jordan’s Jewels of Ingenuity,” +“Micro-cynicon, six Snarling Satyres” (1599), and the +“Treatize made of a <a name="page112"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 112</span>Galaunt,” printed by Wynkyn de +Worde, and found pasted into the fly-leaf, on the oak-board +binding of an imperfect volume of Pynson’s +“Statutes.” All our early English poems and +miscellanies are curious; and, as relics of delightful singers, +are most charming possessions. Such are the “Songes +and Sonnettes of Surrey” (1557), the “Paradyce of +daynty Deuices” (1576), the “Small Handful of +Fragrant Flowers,” and “The Handful of Dainty +Delights, gathered out of the lovely Garden of Sacred Scripture, +fit for any worshipful Gentlewoman to smell unto,” +(1584). “The Teares of Ireland” (1642), are +said, though one would not expect it, to be “extremely +rare,” and, therefore, precious. But there is no end +to the list of such desirable rarities. If we add to them +all books coveted as early editions, and, therefore, as relics of +great writers, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Milton, Sterne, Walton, and +the rest, we might easily fill a book with remarks on this topic +alone. The collection of such editions is the most +respectable, the most useful, and, alas, the most expensive of +the amateur’s pursuits. It is curious enough that the +early editions of Swift, Scott, and Byron, are little sought for, +if not wholly neglected; while early copies of Shelley, Tennyson, +and Keats, have a great price set on their heads. The +quartoes of Shakespeare, like first editions of <a +name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 113</span>Racine, are +out of the reach of any but very opulent purchasers, or unusually +lucky, fortunate book-hunters. Before leaving the topic of +books which derive their value from the taste and fantasy of +collectors, it must be remarked that, in this matter, the fashion +of the world changes. Dr. Dibdin lamented, seventy years +ago, the waning respect paid to certain editions of the +classics. He would find that things have become worse now, +and modern German editions, on execrable paper, have supplanted +his old favourites. Fifty years ago, M. Brunet expressed +his contempt for the designs of Boucher; now they are at the top +of the fashion. The study of old booksellers’ +catalogues is full of instruction as to the changes of +caprice. The collection of Dr. Rawlinson was sold in +1756. “The Vision of Pierce Plowman” (1561), +and the “Creede of Pierce Plowman” (1553), brought +between them no more than three shillings and sixpence. +Eleven shillings were paid for the “Boke of +Chivalrie” by Caxton. The “Boke of St. +Albans,” by Wynkyn de Worde, cost £ 1: 1s., and this +was the highest sum paid for any one of two hundred rare pieces +of early English literature. In 1764, a copy of the +“Hypnerotomachia” was sold for two shillings, +“A Pettie Pallace of Pettie his Pleasures,” (ah, what +a thought for the amateur!) went for three <a +name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 114</span>shillings, +while “Palmerin of England” (1602), attained no more +than the paltry sum of fourteen shillings. When Osborne +sold the Harley collection, the scarcest old English books +fetched but three or four shillings. If the wandering Jew +had been a collector in the last century he might have turned a +pretty profit by selling his old English books in this age of +ours. In old French, too, Ahasuerus would have done a good +stroke of business, for the prices brought by old Villons, +Romances of the Rose, “Les Marguerites de +Marguerite,” and so forth, at the M’Carthy sale, were +truly pitiable. A hundred years hence the original editions +of Thackeray, or of Miss Greenaway’s Christmas books, or +“Modern Painters,” may be the ruling passion, and +Aldines and Elzevirs, black letter and French vignettes may all +be despised. A book which is commonplace in our century is +curious in the next, and disregarded in that which follows. +Old books of a heretical character were treasures once, rare +unholy possessions. Now we have seen so many heretics that +the world is indifferent to the audacities of Bruno, and the +veiled impieties of Vanini.</p> +<p>The last of our categories of books much sought by the +collector includes all volumes valued for their ancient bindings, +for the mark and stamp of famous amateurs. The French, who +have <a name="page115"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +115</span>supplied the world with so many eminent +binders,—as Eve, Padeloup, Duseuil, Le Gascon, Derome, +Simier, Bozérian, Thouvenin, Trautz-Bauzonnet, and +Lortic—are the chief patrons of books in historical +bindings. In England an historical binding, a book of +Laud’s, or James’s, or Garrick’s, or even of +Queen Elizabeth’s, does not seem to derive much added charm +from its associations. But, in France, peculiar bindings +are now the objects most in demand among collectors. The +series of books thus rendered precious begins with those of +Maioli and of Grolier (1479–1565), remarkable for their +mottoes and the geometrical patterns on the covers. Then +comes De Thou (who had three sets of arms), with his blazon, the +bees stamped on the morocco. The volumes of Marguerite of +Angoulême are sprinkled with golden daisies. Diane de +Poictiers had her crescents and her bow, and the initial of her +royal lover was intertwined with her own. The three +daughters of Louis XV. had each their favourite colour, and their +books wear liveries of citron, red, and olive morocco. The +Abbé Cotin, the original of Molière’s +Trissotin, stamped his books with intertwined C’s. +Henri III. preferred religious emblems, and sepulchral +mottoes—skulls, crossbones, tears, and the insignia of the +Passion. <i>Mort m’est vie</i> is a favourite device +of the effeminate <a name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +116</span>and voluptuous prince. Molière himself was +a collector, <i>il n’es pas de bouquin qui +s’échappe de ses mains</i>,—“never an +old book escapes him,” says the author of “La Guerre +Comique,” the last of the pamphlets which flew from side to +side in the great literary squabble about +“L’École des Femmes.” M. +Soulié has found a rough catalogue of +Molière’s library, but the books, except a little +Elzevir, have disappeared. <a name="citation7"></a><a +href="#footnote7" class="citation">[7]</a> Madame de +Maintenon was fond of bindings. Mr. Toovey possesses a copy +of a devotional work in red morocco, tooled and gilt, which she +presented to a friendly abbess. The books at Saint-Cyr were +stamped with a crowned cross, besprent with +<i>fleurs-de-lys</i>. The books of the later +collectors—Longepierre, the translator of Bion and Moschus; +D’Hoym the diplomatist; McCarthy, and La Vallière, +are all valued at a rate which seems fair game for satire.</p> +<p>Among the most interesting bibliophiles of the eighteenth +century is Madame Du Barry. In 1771, this notorious beauty +could scarcely read or write. She had rooms, however, in +the Château de Versailles, thanks to the kindness of a +monarch who admired those native qualities which education may +polish, but which it can never confer. <a +name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 117</span>At +Versailles, Madame Du Barry heard of the literary genius of +Madame de Pompadour. The Pompadour was a person of +taste. Her large library of some four thousand works of the +lightest sort of light literature was bound by Biziaux. Mr. +Toovey possesses the Brantôme of this <i>dame +galante</i>. Madame herself had published etchings by her +own fair hands; and to hear of these things excited the emulation +of Madame Du Barry. She might not be <i>clever</i>, but she +could have a library like another, if libraries were in +fashion. One day Madame Du Barry astonished the Court by +announcing that her collection of books would presently arrive at +Versailles. Meantime she took counsel with a bookseller, +who bought up examples of all the cheap “remainders,” +as they are called in the trade, that he could lay his hands +upon. The whole assortment, about one thousand volumes in +all, was hastily bound in rose morocco, elegantly gilt, and +stamped with the arms of the noble house of Du Barry. The +bill which Madame Du Barry owed her enterprising agent is still +in existence. The thousand volumes cost about three francs +each; the binding (extremely cheap) came to nearly as much. +The amusing thing is that the bookseller, in the catalogue which +he sent with the improvised library, marked the books which +Madame Du Barry possessed <i>before</i> <a +name="page118"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 118</span>her large +order was so punctually executed. There were two +“Mémoires de Du Barry,” an old newspaper, two +or three plays, and “L’Historie Amoureuse de Pierre +le Long.” Louis XV. observed with pride that, though +Madame Pompadour had possessed a larger library, that of Madame +Du Barry was the better selected. Thanks to her new +collection, the lady learned to read with fluency, but she never +overcame the difficulties of spelling.</p> +<p>A lady collector who loved books not very well perhaps, but +certainly not wisely, was the unhappy Marie Antoinette. The +controversy in France about the private character of the Queen +has been as acrimonious as the Scotch discussion about Mary +Stuart. Evidence, good and bad, letters as apocryphal as +the letters of the famous “casket,” have been +produced on both sides. A few years ago, under the empire, +M. Louis Lacour found a manuscript catalogue of the books in the +Queen’s <i>boudoir</i>. They were all novels of the +flimsiest sort,—“L’Amitié +Dangereuse,” “Les Suites d’un Moment +d’Erreur,” and even the stories of Louvet and of +Rétif de la Bretonne. These volumes all bore the +letters “C. T.” (Château de Trianon), and +during the Revolution they were scattered among the various +public libraries of Paris. The Queen’s more important +<a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 119</span>library +was at the Tuileries, but at Versailles she had only three books, +as the commissioners of the Convention found, when they made an +inventory of the property of <i>la femme Capet</i>. Among +the three was the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” printed, +with eighty exquisite designs by Cochin, at the expense of +“Monsieur,” afterwards Louis XVIII. Books with +the arms of Marie Antoinette are very rare in private +collections; in sales they are as much sought after as those of +Madame Du Barry.</p> +<p>With these illustrations of the kind of interest that belongs +to books of old collectors, we may close this chapter. The +reader has before him a list, with examples, of the kinds of +books at present most in vogue among amateurs. He must +judge for himself whether he will follow the fashion, by aid +either of a long purse or of patient research, or whether he will +find out new paths for himself. A scholar is rarely a rich +man. He cannot compete with plutocrats who buy by +deputy. But, if he pursues the works he really needs, he +may make a valuable collection. He cannot go far wrong +while he brings together the books that he finds most congenial +to his own taste and most useful to his own studies. Here, +then, in the words of the old “sentiment,” I bid him +farewell, and wish “success to his inclinations, <a +name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 120</span>provided +they are virtuous.” There is a set of collectors, +alas! whose inclinations are not virtuous. The most famous +of them, a Frenchman, observed that his own collection of bad +books was unique. That of an English rival, he admitted, +was respectable,—“<i>mais milord se livre à +des autres préoccupations</i>!” He thought a +collector’s whole heart should be with his treasures.</p> + +<div class="gapshortline"> </div> +<p class="poetry"><a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +121</span>En bouquinant se trouve grand soulas.<br /> +Soubent m’en vay musant, à petis pas,<br /> +Au long des quais, pour flairer maint bieux livre.<br /> +Des Elzevier la Sphere me rend yure,<br /> +Et la Sirène aussi m’esmeut. Grand cas<br /> +Fais-je d’Estienne, Aide, ou Dolet. Mais Ias!<br /> +Le vieux Caxton ne se rencontre pas,<br /> +Plus qu’ agneau d’or parmi jetons de cuivre,<br /> +En bouquinant!</p> +<p class="poetry">Pour tout plaisir que l’on goute +icy-bas<br /> +La Grace a Dieu. Mieux vaut, sans altercas,<br /> +Chasser bouquin: Nul mal n’en peult s’ensuivre.<br /> +Dr sus au livre: il est le grand appas.<br /> +Clair est le ciel. Amis, qui veut me suivre<br /> +En bouquinant?</p> +<p style="text-align: right">A. L.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page122"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 122</span> +<a href="images/p122b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Group of Children. Drawn by Kate Greenaway; engraved by O. +Lacour" +title= +"Group of Children. Drawn by Kate Greenaway; engraved by O. +Lacour" + src="images/p122s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<h2><a name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +123</span>CHAPTER IV.<br /> +ILLUSTRATED BOOKS <a name="citation123"></a><a +href="#footnote123" class="citation">[123]</a></h2> +<p> +<a href="images/p123b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Highly decorative letter M, first letter of Modern" +title= +"Highly decorative letter M, first letter of Modern" + src="images/p123s.jpg" /> +</a><span class="GutSmall">ODERN</span> English +book-illustration—to which the present chapter is +restricted—has no long or doubtful history, since to find +its first beginnings, it is needless to go farther back than the +last quarter of the eighteenth century. Not that +“illustrated” books of a certain class were by any +means unknown before that period. On the contrary, for many +years previously, literature <a name="page124"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 124</span>had boasted its +“sculptures” of be-wigged and be-laurelled +“worthies,” its “prospects” and +“land-skips,” its phenomenal monsters and its +“curious antiques.” But, despite the couplet in +the “Dunciad” respecting books where</p> +<blockquote><p>“ . . . the pictures for the page +atone,<br /> +And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own;”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>illustrations, in which the designer attempted the actual +delineation of scenes or occurrences in the text, were certainly +not common when Pope wrote, nor were they for some time +afterwards either very numerous or very noteworthy. There +are Hogarth’s engravings to “Hudibras” and +“Don Quixote;” there are the designs of his crony +Frank Hayman to Theobald’s “Shakespeare,” to +Milton, to Pope, to Cervantes; there are Pine’s +“Horace” and Sturt’s “Prayer-Book” +(in both of which text and ornament were alike engraved); there +are the historical and topographical drawings of Sandby, Wale, +and others; and yet—notwithstanding all these—it is +with Bewick’s cuts to Gay’s “Fables” in +1779, and Stothard’s plates to Harrison’s +“Novelist’s Magazine” in 1780, that +book-illustration by imaginative compositions really begins to +flourish in England. Those little masterpieces of the +Newcastle artist brought about a revival of wood-engraving which +continues to this day; but engraving <a name="page125"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 125</span>upon metal, as a means of decorating +books, practically came to an end with the “Annuals” +of thirty years ago. It will therefore be well to speak +first of illustrations upon copper and steel.</p> + +<div class="gapspace"> </div> +<p>Stothard, Blake, and Flaxman are the names that come freshest +to memory in this connection. For a period of fifty years +Stothard stands pre-eminent in illustrated literature. +Measuring time by poets, he may be said to have lent something of +his fancy and amenity to most of the writers from Cowper to +Rogers. As a draughtsman he is undoubtedly weak: his +figures are often limp and invertebrate, and his type of beauty +insipid. Still, regarded as groups, the majority of his +designs are exquisite, and he possessed one all-pervading and +un-English quality—the quality of grace. This is his +dominant note. Nothing can be more seductive than the suave +flow of his line, his feeling for costume, his gentle and +chastened humour. Many of his women and children are models +of purity and innocence. But he works at ease only within +the limits of his special powers; he is happier in the pastoral +and domestic than the heroic and supernatural, and his style is +better fitted to the formal salutations of “Clarissa” +and “Sir <a name="page126"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +126</span>Charles Grandison,” than the rough horse-play of +“Peregrine Pickle.” Where Rowlandson would have +revelled, Stothard would be awkward and constrained; where Blake +would give us a new sensation, Stothard would be poor and +mechanical. Nevertheless the gifts he possessed were +thoroughly recognised in his own day, and brought him, if not +riches, at least competence and honour. It is said that +more than three thousand of his drawings have been engraved, and +they are scattered through a hundred publications. Those to +the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the poems of +Rogers are commonly spoken of as his best, though he never +excelled some of the old-fashioned plates (with their pretty +borders in the style of Gravelot and the Frenchmen) to +Richardson’s novels, and such forgotten +“classics” as “Joe Thompson”, +“Jessamy,” “Betsy Thoughtless,” and one +or two others in Harrison’s very miscellaneous +collection.</p> +<p>Stothard was fortunate in his engravers. Besides James +Heath, his best interpreter, Schiavonetti, Sharp, Finden, the +Cookes, Bartolozzi, most of the fashionable translators into +copper were busily employed upon his inventions. Among the +rest was an artist of powers far greater than his own, although +scarcely so happy in turning them to profitable account. +The genius of William <a name="page127"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 127</span>Blake was not a marketable commodity +in the same way as Stothard’s talent. The one caught +the trick of the time with his facile elegance; the other scorned +to make any concessions, either in conception or execution, to +the mere popularity of prettiness.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Give pensions to the learned pig,<br /> +Or the hare playing on a tabor;<br /> +Anglus can never see perfection<br /> +But in the journeyman’s labour,”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>he wrote in one of those rough-hewn and bitter epigrams of +his. Yet the work that was then so lukewarmly +received—if, indeed, it can be said to have been received +at all—is at present far more sought after than +Stothard’s, and the prices now given for the “Songs +of Innocence and Experience,” the “Inventions to the +Book of Job,” and even “The Grave,” would have +brought affluence to the struggling artist, who (as Cromek +taunted him) was frequently “reduced so low as to be +obliged to live on half a guinea a week.” Not that +this was entirely the fault of his contemporaries. Blake +was a visionary, and an untuneable man; and, like others who work +for the select public of all ages, he could not always escape the +consequence that the select public of his own, however willing, +were scarcely numerous enough <a name="page128"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 128</span>to support him. His most +individual works are the “Songs of Innocence,” 1789, +and the “Songs of Experience,” 1794. These, +afterwards united in one volume, were unique in their method of +production; indeed, they do not perhaps strictly come within the +category of what is generally understood to be copperplate +engraving. The drawings were outlined and the songs written +upon the metal with some liquid that resisted the action of acid, +and the remainder of the surface of the plate was eaten away with +<i>aqua-fortis</i>, leaving the design in bold relief, like a +rude stereotype. This was then printed off in the +predominant tone—blue, brown, or yellow, as the case might +be—and delicately tinted by the artist in a prismatic and +ethereal fashion peculiarly his own. Stitched and bound in +boards by Mrs. Blake, a certain number of these +leaflets—twenty-seven in the case of the first +issue—made up a tiny <i>octavo</i> of a wholly exceptional +kind. Words indeed fail to exactly describe the flower-like +beauty—the fascination of these “fairy +missals,” in which, it has been finely said, “the +thrilling music of the verse, and the gentle bedazzlement of the +lines and colours so intermingle, that the mind hangs in a +pleasant uncertainty as to whether it is a picture that is +singing, or a song which has newly budded and blossomed into +colour and <a name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +129</span>form.” The accompanying woodcut, after one +of the illustrations to the “Songs of Innocence,” +gives some indication of the general composition, but it can +convey no hint of the gorgeous purple, and crimson, and orange of +the original.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p129b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“Infant Joy.” From Blake’s “Songs of +Innocence,” 1789. Engraved by J. F. Jungling" +title= +"“Infant Joy.” From Blake’s “Songs of +Innocence,” 1789. Engraved by J. F. Jungling" + src="images/p129s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Of the “Illustrations to the Book of Job,” 1826, +there are excellent reduced facsimiles by <a +name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 130</span>the +recently-discovered photo-intaglio process, in the new edition of +Gilchrist’s “Life.” The originals were +engraved by Blake himself in his strong decisive fashion, and +they are his best work. A kind of +<i>deisidaimonia</i>—a sacred awe—falls upon one in +turning over these wonderful productions of the artist’s +declining years and failing hand.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Leaving the old, both worlds at once they +view,<br /> +That stand upon the threshold of the new,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>sings Waller; and it is almost possible to believe for a +moment that their creator was (as he said) “under the +direction of messengers from Heaven.” But his designs +for Blair’s “Grave,” 1808, popularised by the +burin of Schiavonetti, attracted greater attention at the time of +publication; and, being less rare, they are even now perhaps +better known than the others. The facsimile here given is +from the latter book. The worn old man, the trustful woman, +and the guileless child are sleeping peacefully; but the king +with his sceptre, and the warrior with his hand on his +sword-hilt, lie open-eyed, waiting the summons of the +trumpet. One cannot help fancying that the artist’s +long vigils among the Abbey tombs, during his apprenticeship to +James Basire, must have been present to his mind when he selected +this impressive monumental subject.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page131"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 131</span> +<a href="images/p131b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother and Child, in the +Tomb.” From Blair’s “Grave,” 1808. +Designed by William Blake; facsimiled on wood from the engraving +by Louis Schiavonetti" +title= +"“Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother and Child, in the +Tomb.” From Blair’s “Grave,” 1808. +Designed by William Blake; facsimiled on wood from the engraving +by Louis Schiavonetti" + src="images/p131s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p><a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 132</span>To +one of Blake’s few friends—to the “dear +Sculptor of Eternity,” as he wrote to Flaxman from +Felpham—the world is indebted for some notable book +illustrations. Whether the greatest writers—the +Homers, the Shakespeares, the Dantes—can ever be +“illustrated” without loss may fairly be +questioned. At all events, the showy dexterities of the +Dorés and Gilberts prove nothing to the contrary. +But now and then there comes to the graphic interpretation of a +great author an artist either so reverential, or so strongly +sympathetic at some given point, that, in default of any relation +more narrowly intimate, we at once accept his conceptions as the +best attainable. In this class are Flaxman’s outlines +to Homer and Æschylus. Flaxman was not a Hellenist as +men are Hellenists to-day. Nevertheless, his Roman studies +had saturated him with the spirit of antique beauty, and by his +grand knowledge of the nude, his calm, his restraint, he is such +an illustrator of Homer as is not likely to arise again. +For who—with all our added knowledge of classical +antiquity—who, of our modern artists, could hope to rival +such thoroughly Greek compositions as the ball-play of Nausicaa +in the “Odyssey,” or that lovely group from +Æschylus of the tender-hearted, womanly Oceanides, cowering +like flowers beaten by the storm under the <a +name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 133</span>terrible +anger of Zeus? In our day Flaxman’s drawings would +have been reproduced by some of the modern facsimile processes, +and the gain would have been great. As it is, something is +lost by their transference to copper, even though the translators +be Piroli and Blake. Blake, in fact, did more than he is +usually credited with, for (beside the acknowledged and later +“Hesiod,” 1817) he really engraved the whole of the +“Odyssey,” Piroli’s plates having been lost on +the voyage to England. The name of the Roman artist, +nevertheless, appears on the title-page (1793). But Blake +was too original to be a successful copyist of other men’s +work, and to appreciate the full value of Flaxman’s +drawings, they should be studied in the collections at University +College, the Royal Academy, and elsewhere. <a +name="citation9"></a><a href="#footnote9" +class="citation">[9]</a></p> +<p>Flaxman and Blake had few imitators. But a host of +clever designers, such as Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Westall, +Uwins, Smirke, Burney, Corbould, Dodd, and others, vied with the +popular Stothard in “embellishing” the endless +“Poets,” “novelists,” and +“essayists” of our forefathers. Some of these, +and most of the recognised artists of the period, lent their aid +to that <a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +134</span>boldly-planned but unhappily-executed +“Shakespeare” of Boydell,—“black and +ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling +Fuselis,” as Thackeray calls it. They are certainly +not enlivening—those cumbrous “atlas” +<i>folios</i> of 1803–5, and they helped to ruin the worthy +alderman. Even courtly Sir Joshua is clearly ill at ease +among the pushing Hamiltons and Mortimers; and, were it not for +the whimsical discovery that Westall’s “Ghost of +Cæsar” strangely resembles Mr. Gladstone, there would +be no resting-place for the modern student of these dismal +masterpieces. The truth is, Reynolds excepted, there were +no contemporary painters strong enough for the task, and the +honours of the enterprise belong almost exclusively to +Smirke’s “Seven Ages” and one or two plates +from the lighter comedies. The great “Bible” of +Macklin, a rival and even more incongruous publication, upon +which some of the same designers were employed, has fallen into +completer oblivion. A rather better fate attended another +book of this class, which, although belonging to a later period, +may be briefly referred to here. The “Milton” +of John Martin has distinct individuality, and some of the +needful qualities of imagination. Nevertheless, posterity +has practically decided that scenic grandeur and sombre effects +alone are not a sufficient pictorial equipment for the varied +story of “Paradise Lost.”</p> +<p><a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 135</span>It is +to Boydell of the Shakespeare gallery that we owe the +“Liber Veritatis” of Claude, engraved by Richard +Earlom; and indirectly, since rivalry of Claude prompted the +attempt, the famous “Liber Studiorum” of +Turner. Neither of these, however—which, like the +“Rivers of France” and the “Picturesque Views +in England and Wales” of the latter artist, are collections +of engravings rather than illustrated books—belongs to the +present purpose. But Turner’s name may fitly serve to +introduce those once familiar “Annuals” and +“Keepsakes,” that, beginning in 1823 with +Ackermann’s “Forget-me-Not,” enjoyed a +popularity of more than thirty years. Their general +characteristics have been pleasantly satirised in +Thackeray’s account of the elegant miscellany of Bacon the +publisher, to which Mr. Arthur Pendennis contributed his pretty +poem of “The Church Porch.” His editress, it +will be remembered, was the Lady Violet Lebas, and his colleagues +the Honourable Percy Popjoy, Lord Dodo, and the gifted Bedwin +Sands, whose “Eastern Ghazuls” lent so special a +distinction to the volume in watered-silk binding. The +talented authors, it is true, were in most cases under the +disadvantage of having to write to the plates of the talented +artists, a practice which even now is not extinct, though it is +scarcely considered favourable to <a name="page136"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 136</span>literary merit. And the real +“Annuals” were no exception to the rule. As a +matter of fact, their general literary merit was not obtrusive, +although, of course, they sometimes contained work which +afterwards became famous. They are now so completely +forgotten and out of date, that one scarcely expects to find that +Wordsworth, Coleridge, Macaulay, and Southey, were among the +occasional contributors. Lamb’s beautiful +“Album verses” appeared in the “Bijou,” +Scott’s “Bonnie Dundee” in the “Christmas +Box,” and Tennyson’s “St. Agnes’ +Eve” in the “Keepsake.” But the plates +were, after all, the leading attraction. These, prepared +for the most part under the superintendence of the younger Heath, +and executed on the steel which by this time had supplanted the +old “coppers,” were supplied by, or were +“after,” almost every contemporary artist of +note. Stothard, now growing old and past his prime, Turner, +Etty, Stanfield, Leslie, Roberts, Danby, Maclise, Lawrence, +Cattermole, and numbers of others, found profitable labour in +this fashionable field until 1856, when the last of the +“Annuals” disappeared, driven from the market by the +rapid development of wood engraving. About a million, it is +roughly estimated, was squandered in producing them.</p> +<p>In connection with the “Annuals” must be mentioned +two illustrated books which were in <a name="page137"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 137</span>all probability suggested by +them—the “Poems” and “Italy” of +Rogers. The designs to these are chiefly by Turner and +Stothard, although there are a few by Prout and others. +Stothard’s have been already referred to; Turner’s +are almost universally held to be the most successful of his many +vignettes. It has been truly said—in a recent +excellent life of this artist <a name="citation10"></a><a +href="#footnote10" class="citation">[10]</a>—that it would +be difficult to find in the whole of his works two really greater +than the “Alps at Daybreak,” and the “Datur +Hora Quieti,” in the former of these volumes. Almost +equally beautiful are the “Valombré Falls” and +“Tornaro’s misty brow.” Of the +“Italy” set Mr. Ruskin writes:—“They are +entirely exquisite; poetical in the highest and purest sense, +exemplary and delightful beyond all praise.” To such +words it is not possible to add much. But it is pretty +clear that the poetical vitality of Rogers was secured by these +well-timed illustrations, over which he is admitted by his nephew +Mr. Sharpe to have spent about £7000, and far larger sums +have been named by good authorities. The artist received +from fifteen to twenty guineas for each of the drawings; the +engravers (Goodall, Miller, Wallis, Smith, and others), sixty +guineas a plate. The “Poems” and the +“Italy,” in the original issues of 1830 and <a +name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 138</span>1834, are +still precious to collectors, and are likely to remain so. +Turner also illustrated Scott, Milton, Campbell, and Byron; but +this series of designs has not received equal commendation from +his greatest eulogist, who declares them to be “much more +laboured, and more or less artificial and unequal.” +Among the numerous imitations directly induced by the Rogers +books was the “Lyrics of the Heart,” by Alaric Attila +Watts, a forgotten versifier and sometime editor of +“Annuals,” but it did not meet with similar +success.</p> +<p>Many illustrated works, originating in the perfection and +opportunities of engraving on metal, are necessarily unnoticed in +this rapid summary. As far, however, as book-illustration +is concerned, copper and steel plate engraving may be held to +have gone out of fashion with the “Annuals.” It +is still, indeed, to be found lingering in that mine of modern +art-books—the “Art Journal;” and, not so very +long ago, it made a sumptuous and fugitive reappearance in +Doré’s “Idylls of the King,” Birket +Foster’s “Hood,” and one or two other imposing +volumes. But it was badly injured by modern wood-engraving; +it has since been crippled for life by photography; and it is +more than probable that the present rapid rise of modern etching +will give it the <i>coup de grace</i>. <a +name="citation11"></a><a href="#footnote11" +class="citation">[11]</a></p> +<p><a name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 139</span>By +the end of the seventeenth century the art of engraving on wood +had fallen into disuse. Writing <i>circa</i> 1770, Horace +Walpole goes so far as to say that it “never was executed +in any perfection in England;” and, speaking afterwards of +Papillon’s “Traité de la Gravure,” 1766, +he takes occasion to doubt if that author would ever +“persuade the world to return to wooden cuts.” +Nevertheless, with Bewick, a few years later, wood-engraving took +a fresh departure so conspicuous that it amounts to a +revival. In what this consisted it is clearly impossible to +show here with any sufficiency of detail; but between the method +of the old wood-cutters who reproduced the drawings of +Dürer, and the method of the Newcastle artist, there are two +marked and well-defined differences. One of these is a +difference in the preparation of the wood and the tool +employed. The old wood-cutters carved their designs with +knives and chisels on strips of wood sawn lengthwise—that +is to say, upon the <i>plank</i>; Bewick used a graver, and +worked upon slices of box or pear cut across the +grain,—that is to say upon the <i>end</i> of the +wood. The other difference, of which Bewick is said to have +been the inventor, <a name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +140</span>is less easy to describe. It consisted in the +employment of what is technically known as “white +line.” In all antecedent wood-cutting the cutter had +simply cleared away those portions of the block left bare by the +design, so that the design remained in relief to be printed from +like type. Using the smooth box block as a uniform surface +from which, if covered with printing ink, a uniformly black +impression might be obtained, Bewick, by cutting white lines +across it at greater or lesser intervals, produced gradations of +shade, from the absolute black of the block to the lightest +tints. The general result of this method was to give a +greater depth of colouring and variety to the engraving, but its +advantages may perhaps be best understood by a glance at the +background of the “Woodcock” on the following +page.</p> +<p>Bewick’s first work of any importance was the +Gay’s “Fables” of 1779. In 1784 he did +another series of “Select Fables.” Neither of +these books, however, can be compared with the “General +History of Quadrupeds,” 1790, and the “British Land +and Water Birds,” 1797 and 1804. The illustrations to +the “Quadrupeds” are in many instances excellent, and +large additions were made to them in subsequent issues. But +in this collection Bewick laboured to a great extent under the +disadvantage of representing <a name="page141"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 141</span>animals with which he was familiar +only through the medium of stuffed specimens or incorrect +drawings. In the “British Birds,” on the +contrary, his facilities for study from the life were greater, +and his success was consequently more complete. Indeed, it +may be safely affirmed that of all the engravers of the present +century, none have excelled Bewick for beauty of black and white, +for skilful rendering of plumage and foliage, and for fidelity of +detail and accessory. The “Woodcock” (here +given), the “Partridge,” the “Owl,” the +“Yellow-Hammer,” the “Yellow-Bunting,” +the “Willow-Wren,” are popular examples <a +name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 142</span>of these +qualities. But there are a hundred others nearly as +good.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p141b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“The Woodcock.” From Jackson & Chatto’s +“History of Wood-Engraving,” 1839. Engraved, after +T. Bewick, by John Jackson" +title= +"“The Woodcock.” From Jackson & Chatto’s +“History of Wood-Engraving,” 1839. Engraved, after +T. Bewick, by John Jackson" + src="images/p141s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Among sundry conventional decorations after the old German +fashion in the first edition of the “Quadrupeds,” +there are a fair number of those famous tail-pieces which, to a +good many people, constitute Bewick’s chief claim to +immortality. That it is not easy to imitate them is plain +from the failure of Branston’s attempts, and from the +inferior character of those by John Thompson in Yarrell’s +“Fishes.” The genius of Bewick was, in fact, +entirely individual and particular. He had the humour of a +Hogarth in little, as well as some of his special +characteristics,—notably his faculty of telling a story by +suggestive detail. An instance may be taken at random from +vol. I. of the “Birds.” A man, whose wig and +hat have fallen off, lies asleep with open mouth under some +bushes. He is manifestly drunk, and the date “4 +June,” on a neighbouring stone, gives us the reason and +occasion of his catastrophe. He has been too loyally +celebrating the birthday of his majesty King George III. +Another of Bewick’s gifts is his wonderful skill in +foreshadowing a tragedy. Take as an example, this truly +appalling incident from the “Quadrupeds.” The +tottering child, whose nurse is seen in the background, has +strayed into the meadow, and is pulling at the <a +name="page143"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 143</span>tail of a +vicious-looking colt, with back-turned eye and lifted heel. +Down the garden-steps the mother hurries headlong; but she can +hardly be in time. And of all this—sufficient, one +would say, for a fairly-sized canvas—the artist has managed +to give a vivid impression in a block of three inches by +two! Then, again, like Hogarth once more, he rejoices in +multiplications of dilemma. What, for instance, can be more +comically pathetic than the head-piece to the +“Contents” in vol. I. of the +“Birds”? The old horse has been seized with an +invincible fit of stubbornness. The day is both windy and +rainy. The rider has broken his stick and lost his hat; but +he is too much encumbered with his cackling and excited stock to +dare to dismount. Nothing can help him but a <i>Deus ex +machinâ</i>,—of whom there is no sign.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p143b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Tailpiece. From the same. Engraved, after T. Bewick, by John +Jackson" +title= +"Tailpiece. From the same. Engraved, after T. Bewick, by John +Jackson" + src="images/p143s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p><a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +144</span>Besides his humour, Bewick has a delightfully rustic +side, of which Hogarth gives but little indication. From +the starved ewe in the snow nibbling forlornly at a worn-out +broom, to the cow which has broken through the rail to reach the +running water, there are numberless designs which reveal that +faithful lover of the field and hillside, who, as he said, +“would rather be herding sheep on Mickle bank top” +than remain in London to be made premier of England. He +loved the country and the country-life; and he drew them as one +who loved them. It is this rural quality which helps to +give such a lasting freshness to his quaint and picturesque +fancies; and it is this which will continue to preserve their +popularity, even if they should cease to be valued for their +wealth of whimsical invention.</p> +<p>In referring to these masterpieces of Bewick’s, it must +not be forgotten that he had the aid of some clever +assistants. His younger brother John was not without +talent, as is clear from his work for Somervile’s +“Chace,” 1796, and that highly edifying book, the +“Blossoms of Morality.” Many of the tail-pieces +to the “Water Birds” were designed by Robert Johnson, +who also did most of the illustrations to Bewick’s +“Fables” of 1818, which were engraved by Temple and +Harvey, two other pupils. Another <a +name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 145</span>pupil was +Charlton Nesbit, an excellent engraver, who was employed upon the +“Birds,” and did good work in Ackermann’s +“Religious Emblems” of 1808, and the second series of +Northcote’s “Fables.” But by far the +largest portion of the tail-pieces in the second volume of the +“Birds” was engraved by Luke Clennell, a very skilful +but unfortunate artist, who ultimately became insane. To +him we owe the woodcuts, after Stothard’s charming +sketches, to the Rogers volume of 1810, an edition preceding +those already mentioned as illustrated with steel-plates, and +containing some of the artist’s happiest pictures of +children and <i>amorini</i>. Many of these little groups +would make admirable designs for gems, if indeed they are not +already derived from them, since one at least is an obvious copy +of a well-known sardonyx—(“The Marriage of Cupid and +Psyche.”) This volume, generally known by the name of +the “Firebrand” edition, is highly prized by +collectors; and, as intelligent renderings of pen and ink, there +is little better than these <a name="page146"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 146</span>engravings of Clennell’s. <a +name="citation12"></a><a href="#footnote12" +class="citation">[12]</a> Finally, among others of +Bewick’s pupils, must be mentioned William Harvey, who +survived to 1866. It has been already stated that he +engraved part of the illustrations to Bewick’s +“Fables,” but his best known block is the large one +of Haydon’s “Death of Dentatus.” Soon +after this he relinquished wood-engraving in favour of design, +and for a long period was one of the most fertile and popular of +book-illustrators. His style, however, is unpleasantly +mannered; and it is sufficient to make mention of his +masterpiece, the “Arabian Nights” of Lane, the +illustrations to which, produced under the supervision of the +translator, are said to be so accurate as to give the appropriate +turbans for every hour of the day. They show considerable +freedom of invention and a large fund of Orientalism.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p145b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Headpiece. From Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory, with +other Poems,” 1810. Drawn by T. Stothard; engraved, after +Luke Clennell, by O. Lacour" +title= +"Headpiece. From Rogers’s “Pleasures of Memory, with +other Poems,” 1810. Drawn by T. Stothard; engraved, after +Luke Clennell, by O. Lacour" + src="images/p145s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Harvey came to London in 1817; Clennell had preceded him by +some years; and Nesbit lived there for a considerable time. +What distinguishes these pupils of Bewick especially is, that +they were artists as well as engravers, capable of producing the +designs they engraved. The “London School” of +engravers, on the contrary, were mostly engravers, who depended +<a name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 147</span>upon +others for their designs. The foremost of these was Robert +Branston, a skilful renderer of human figures and indoor +scenes. He worked in rivalry with Bewick and Nesbit; but he +excelled neither, while he fell far behind the former. John +Thompson, one of the very best of modern English engravers on +wood, was Branston’s pupil. His range was of the +widest, and he succeeded as well in engraving fishes and birds +for Yarrell and Walton’s “Angler,” as in +illustrations to Molière and “Hudibras.” +He was, besides, a clever draughtsman, though he worked chiefly +from the designs of Thurston and others. One of the most +successful of his illustrated books is the “Vicar of +Wakefield,” after Mulready, whose simplicity and homely +feeling were well suited to Goldsmith’s style. +Another excellent engraver of this date is Samuel Williams. +There is an edition of Thomson’s “Seasons,” +with cuts both drawn and engraved by him, which is well worthy of +attention, and (like Thompson and Branston) he was very skilful +in reproducing the designs of Cruikshank. Some of his best +work in this way is to be found in Clarke’s “Three +Courses and a Dessert,” published by Vizetelly in 1830.</p> +<p>From this time forth, however, one hears less of the engraver +and more of the artist. The establishment of the +“Penny Magazine” in 1832, <a name="page148"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 148</span>and the multifarious publications of +Charles Knight, gave an extraordinary impetus to +wood-engraving. Ten years later came “Punch,” +and the “Illustrated London News,” which further +increased its popularity. Artists of eminence began to draw +on or for the block, as they had drawn, and were still drawing, +for the “Annuals.” In 1842–6 was issued +the great “Abbotsford” edition of the “Waverley +Novels,” which, besides 120 plates, contained nearly 2000 +wood-engravings; and with the “Book of British +Ballads,” 1843, edited by Mr. S. C. Hall, arose that long +series of illustrated Christmas books, which gradually supplanted +the “Annuals,” and made familiar the names of +Gilbert, Birket Foster, Harrison Weir, John Absolon, and a crowd +of others. The poems of Longfellow, Montgomery, Burns, +“Barry Cornwall,” Poe, Miss Ingelow, were all +successively “illustrated.” Besides these, +there were numerous selections, such as Willmott’s +“Poets of the Nineteenth Century,” Wills’s +“Poets’ Wit and Humour,” and so forth. +But the field here grows too wide to be dealt with in detail, and +it is impossible to do more than mention a few of the books most +prominent for merit or originality. Amongst these there is +the “Shakespeare” of Sir John Gilbert. Regarded +as an interpretative edition of the great dramatist, this is +little more than a <a name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +149</span>brilliant <i>tour de force</i>; but it is nevertheless +infinitely superior to the earlier efforts of Kenny Meadows in +1843, and also to the fancy designs of Harvey in Knight’s +“Pictorial Shakespeare.” The “Illustrated +Tennyson” of 1858 is also a remarkable production. +The Laureate, almost more than any other, requires a variety of +illustrators; and here, for his idylls, he had Mulready and +Millais, and for his romances Rossetti and Holman Hunt. His +“Princess” was afterwards illustrated by Maclise, and +his “Enoch Arden” by Arthur Hughes; but neither of +these can be said to be wholly adequate. The “Lalla +Rookh” of John Tenniel, 1860, albeit somewhat stiff and <a +name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 150</span>cold, after +this artist’s fashion, is a superb collection of carefully +studied oriental designs. With these may be classed the +illustrations to Aytoun’s “Lays of the Scottish +Cavaliers,” by Sir Noel Paton, which have the same finished +qualities of composition and the same academic hardness. +Several good editions of the “Pilgrim’s +Progress” have appeared,—notably those of C. H. +Bennett, J. D. Watson, and G. H. Thomas. Other books are +Millais’s “Parables of our Lord,” +Leighton’s “Romola,” Walker’s +“Philip” and “Denis Duval,” the +“Don Quixote,” “Dante,” “La +Fontaine” and other works of Doré, Dalziel’s +“Arabian Nights,” Leighton’s “Lyra +Germanica” and “Moral Emblems,” and the +“Spiritual Conceits” of W. Harry Rogers. These +are some only of the number, which does not include books like +Mrs. Hugh Blackburn’s “British Birds,” +Wolf’s “Wild Animals,” Wise’s “New +Forest,” Linton’s “Lake Country,” +Wood’s “Natural History,” and many more. +Nor does it take in the various illustrated periodicals which +have multiplied so freely since, in 1859, “Once a +Week” first began to attract and train such younger +draughtsmen as Sandys, Lawless, Pinwell, Houghton, Morten, and +Paul Grey, some of whose best work in this way has been revived +in the edition of Thornbury’s “Ballads and +Songs,” recently published by <a name="page151"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 151</span>Chatto and Windus. Ten years +later came the “Graphic,” offering still wider +opportunities to wood-cut art, and bringing with it a fresh +school of artists. Herkomer, Fildes, Small, Green, Barnard, +Barnes, Crane, Caldecott, Hopkins, and others,—<i>quos nunc +perscribere longum est</i>—have contributed good work to +this popular rival of the older, but still vigorous, +“Illustrated.” And now again, another promising +serial, the “Magazine of Art,” affords a +supplementary field to modern refinements and younger +energies.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p149b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“Golden head by golden head.” From Christina +Rossetti’s “Goblin Market and other Poems,” +1862. Drawn by D. G. Rossetti; engraved by W. J. Linton" +title= +"“Golden head by golden head.” From Christina +Rossetti’s “Goblin Market and other Poems,” +1862. Drawn by D. G. Rossetti; engraved by W. J. Linton" + src="images/p149s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Not a few of the artists named in the preceding paragraph have +also earned distinction in separate branches of the pictorial +art, and specially in that of humorous design,—a department +which has always been so richly recruited in this country that it +deserves more than a passing mention. From the days of +Hogarth onwards there has been an almost unbroken series of +humorous draughtsmen, who, both on wood and metal, play a +distinguished part in our illustrated literature. +Rowlandson, one of the earliest, was a caricaturist of +inexhaustible facility, and an artist who scarcely did justice to +his own powers. He illustrated several books, but he is +chiefly remembered in this way by his plates to Combe’s +“Three Tours of Dr. Syntax.” Gillray, his +contemporary, whose bias was political rather than social, is +said to <a name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +152</span>have illustrated “The Deserted Village” in +his youth; but he is not famous as a book-illustrator. +Another of the early men was Bunbury, whom +“quality”-loving Mr. Walpole calls “the second +Hogarth, and first imitator who ever fully equalled his original +(!);” but whose prints to “Tristram Shandy,” +are nevertheless completely forgotten, while, if he be remembered +at all, it is by the plate of “The Long Minuet,” and +the vulgar “Directions to Bad Horsemen.” With +the first years of the century, however, appears the great master +of modern humorists, whose long life ended only a few years +since, “the veteran George Cruikshank”—as his +admirers were wont to style him. He indeed may justly be +compared to Hogarth, since, in tragic power and intensity he +occasionally comes nearer to him than any artist of our +time. It is manifestly impossible to mention here all the +more important efforts of this indefatigable worker, from those +far-away days when he caricatured “Boney” and +championed Queen Caroline, to that final frontispiece for +“The Rose and the Lily”—“designed and +etched (according to the inscription) by George Cruikshank, age +83;” but the plates to the “Points of Humour,” +to Grimm’s “Goblins,” to “Oliver +Twist,” “Jack Sheppard,” Maxwell’s +“Irish Rebellion,” and the “Table Book,” +are sufficiently favourable and varied specimens of <a +name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 154</span>his skill +with the needle, while the woodcuts to “Three Courses and a +Dessert,” one of which is here given, are equally good +examples of his work on the block. The “Triumph of +Cupid,” which begins the “Table Book,” is an +excellent instance of his lavish wealth of fancy, and it contains +beside, one—nay more than one—of the many portraits +of the artist. He is shown <i>en robe de chambre</i>, +smoking (this was before his regenerate days!) in front of a +blazing fire, with a pet spaniel on his knee. In the cloud +which curls from his lips is a motley procession of sailors, +sweeps, jockeys, Greenwich pensioners, Jew clothesmen, flunkies, +and others more illustrious, chained to the chariot wheels of +Cupid, who, preceded by cherubic acolytes and banner-bearers, +winds round the top of the picture towards an altar of Hymen on +the table. When, by the aid of a pocket-glass, one has +mastered these swarming figures, as well as those in the +foreground, it gradually dawns upon one that all the furniture is +strangely vitalised. Masks laugh round the border of the +tablecloth, the markings of the mantelpiece resolve themselves +into rows of madly-racing figures, the tongs leers in a +<i>degagé</i> and cavalier way at the artist, the shovel +and poker grin in sympathy; there are faces in the smoke, in the +fire, in the fireplace,—the very <a +name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 155</span>fender +itself is a ring of fantastic creatures who jubilantly hem in the +ashes. And it is not only in the grotesque and fanciful +that Cruikshank excels; he is master of the strange, the +supernatural, and the terrible. In range of character (the +comparison is probably a hackneyed one), both by his gifts and +his limitations, he resembles Dickens; and had he illustrated +more of that writer’s works the resemblance would probably +have been more evident. In “Oliver Twist,” for +example, where Dickens is strong, Cruikshank is strong; where +Dickens is weak, he is weak too. His Fagin, his Bill Sikes, +his Bumble, and their following, are on a level with +Dickens’s conceptions; his Monk and Rose Maylie are as poor +as the originals. But as the defects of Dickens are +overbalanced by his merits, so Cruikshank’s strength is far +in excess of his weakness. It is not to his melodramatic +heroes or wasp-waisted heroines that we must look for his +triumphs; it is to his delineations, from the moralist’s +point of view, of vulgarity and vice,—of the “rank +life of towns,” with all its squalid tragedy and +comedy. Here he finds his strongest ground, and possibly, +notwithstanding his powers as a comic artist and caricaturist, +his loftiest claim to recollection.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="image153" href="images/p153b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“The Deaf Post-Boy.” From Clarke’s +“Three Courses and a Dessert,” 1830. Drawn by G. +Cruikshank; engraved by S. Williams [?]" +title= +"“The Deaf Post-Boy.” From Clarke’s +“Three Courses and a Dessert,” 1830. Drawn by G. +Cruikshank; engraved by S. Williams [?]" + src="images/p153s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>Cruikshank was employed on two only of Dickens’s +books—“Oliver Twist” and the <a +name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +156</span>“Sketches by Boz.” <a +name="citation13"></a><a href="#footnote13" +class="citation">[13]</a> The great majority of them were +illustrated by Hablot K. Browne, an artist who followed the +ill-fated Seymour on the “Pickwick Papers.” To +“Phiz,” as he is popularly called, we are indebted +for our pictorial ideas of Sam Weller, Mrs. Gamp, Captain Cuttle, +and most of the author’s characters, down to the +“Tale of Two Cities.” “Phiz” also +illustrated a great many of Lever’s novels, for which his +skill in hunting and other Lever-like scenes especially qualified +him.</p> +<p>With the name of Richard Doyle we come to the first of a group +of artists whose main work was, or is still, done for the +time-honoured miscellany of Mr. Punch. So familiar an +object is “Punch” upon our tables, that one is +sometimes apt to forget how unfailing, and how good on the whole, +is the work we take so complacently as a matter of course. +And of this good work, in the earlier days, a large proportion +was done by Mr. Doyle. He is still living, although he has +long ceased to gladden those sprightly pages. But it was to +“Punch” that he contributed his masterpiece, the +“Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe,” a series of +outlines illustrating social life in 1849, and cleverly commented +by a shadowy “Mr. <a name="page157"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 157</span>Pips,” a sort of fetch or +double of the bustling and garrulous old Caroline diarist. +In these captivating pictures the life of thirty years ago is +indeed, as the title-page has it, “drawn from ye +quick.” We see the Molesworths and Cantilupes of the +day parading the Park; we watch Brougham fretting at a hearing in +the Lords, or Peel holding forth to the Commons (where the Irish +members are already obstructive); we squeeze in at the Haymarket +to listen to Jenny Lind, or we run down the river to Greenwich +Fair, and visit “Mr. Richardson, his show.” +Many years after, in the “Bird’s Eye Views of +Society,” which appeared in the early numbers of the +“Cornhill Magazine,” Mr. Doyle returned to this +attractive theme. But the later designs were more +elaborate, and not equally fortunate. They bear the same +relationship to Mr. Pips’s pictorial chronicle, as the +laboured “Temperance Fairy Tales” of +Cruikshank’s old age bear to the little-worked +Grimm’s “Goblins” of his youth. So +hazardous is the attempt to repeat an old success! +Nevertheless, many of the initial letters to the +“Bird’s Eye Views” are in the artist’s +best and most frolicsome manner. “The Foreign Tour of +Brown, Jones, and Robinson” is another of his happy +thoughts for “Punch;” and some of his most popular +designs are to be found in Thackeray’s +“Newcomes,” <a name="page158"></a><span +class="pagenum">p. 158</span>where his satire and fancy seem +thoroughly suited to his text. He has also illustrated +Locker’s well-known “London Lyrics,” +Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River,” and +Hughes’s “Scouring of the White Horse,” from +which last the initial at the beginning of this chapter has been +borrowed. His latest important effort was the series of +drawings called “In Fairy Land,” to which Mr. William +Allingham contributed the verses.</p> +<p>In speaking of the “Newcomes,” one is reminded +that its illustrious author was himself a “Punch” +artist, and would probably have been a designer alone, had it not +been decreed “that he should paint in colours which will +never crack and never need restoration.” Everyone +knows the story of the rejected illustrator of +“Pickwick,” whom that and other rebuffs drove +permanently to letters. To his death, however, he clung +fondly to his pencil. In <i>technique</i> he never attained +to certainty or strength, and his genius was too quick and +creative—perhaps also too desultory—for finished +work, while he was always indifferent to costume and +accessory. But many of his sketches for “Vanity +Fair,” for “Pendennis,” for “The +Virginians,” for “The Rose and the Ring,” the +Christmas books, and the posthumously published “Orphan of +Pimlico,” <a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +159</span>have a vigour of impromptu, and a happy suggestiveness +which is better than correct drawing. Often the realisation +is almost photographic. Look, for example, at the portrait +in “Pendennis” of the dilapidated Major as he crawls +downstairs in the dawn after the ball at Gaunt House, and then +listen to the inimitable context: “That admirable and +devoted Major above all,—who had been for hours by Lady +Clavering’s side ministering to her and feeding her body +with everything that was nice, and her ear with everything that +was sweet and flattering—oh! what an object he was! +The rings round his eyes were of the colour of bistre; those orbs +themselves were like the plovers’ eggs whereof Lady +Clavering and Blanche had each tasted; the wrinkles in his old +face were furrowed in deep gashes; and a silver stubble, <i>like +an elderly morning dew</i>, was glittering on his chin, and +alongside the dyed whiskers, now limp and out of +curl.” A good deal of this—that fine touch in +italics especially—could not possibly be rendered in black +and white, and yet how much is indicated, and how thoroughly the +whole is felt! One turns to the woodcut from the words, and +back again to the words from the woodcut with ever-increasing +gratification. Then again, Thackeray’s little initial +letters are charmingly arch and playful. <a +name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 160</span>They seem +to throw a shy side-light upon the text, giving, as it were, an +additional and confidential hint of the working of the +author’s mind. To those who, with the present writer, +love every tiny scratch and quirk and flourish of the +Master’s hand, these small but priceless memorials are far +beyond the frigid appraising of academics and schools of art.</p> +<p>After Doyle and Thackeray come a couple of well-known +artists—John Leech and John Tenniel. The latter still +lives (may he long live!) to delight and instruct us. Of +the former, whose genial and manly “Pictures of Life and +Character” are in every home where good-humoured raillery +is prized and appreciated, it is scarcely necessary to +speak. Who does not remember the splendid languid swells, +the bright-eyed rosy girls (“with no nonsense about +them!”) in pork pie hats and crinolines, the superlative +“Jeames’s,” the hairy “Mossoos,” +the music-grinding Italian desperadoes whom their kind creator +hated so? And then the intrepidity of “Mr. +Briggs,” the Roman rule of “Paterfamilias,” the +vagaries of the “Rising Generation!” There are +things in this gallery over which the severest misanthrope must +chuckle—they are simply irresistible. Let any one +take, say that smallest sketch of the hapless mortal who has +turned on the hot water in the bath and <a +name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 161</span>cannot turn +it off again, and see if he is able to restrain his +laughter. In this one gift of producing instant mirth Leech +is almost alone. It would be easy to assail his manner and +his skill, but for sheer fun, for the invention of downright +humorous situation, he is unapproached, except by +Cruikshank. He did a few illustrations to Dickens’s +Christmas books; but his best-known book-illustrations properly +so called are to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the +“Comic Histories” of A’Beckett, the +“Little Tour in Ireland,” and certain sporting novels +by the late Mr. Surtees. Tenniel now confines himself +almost exclusively to the weekly cartoons with which his name is +popularly associated. But years ago he used to invent the +most daintily fanciful initial letters; and many of his admirers +prefer the serio-grotesque designs of “Punch’s +Pocket-Book,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and +“Through the Looking-Glass,” to the always +correctly-drawn but sometimes stiffly-conceived cartoons. +What, for example, could be more delightful than the picture, in +“Alice in Wonderland,” of the “Mad Tea +Party?” Observe the hopelessly distraught expression +of the March hare, and the eager incoherence of the hatter! +A little further on the pair are trying to squeeze the dormouse +into the teapot; and a few pages back the blue caterpillar is +discovered smoking <a name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +163</span>his hookah on the top of a mushroom. He was +exactly three inches long, says the veracious chronicle, but what +a dignity!—what an oriental flexibility of gesture! +Speaking of animals, it must not be forgotten that Tenniel is a +master in this line. His “British Lion,” in +particular, is a most imposing quadruped, and so often in request +that it is not necessary to go back to the famous cartoons on the +Indian mutiny to seek for examples of that magnificent +presence. As a specimen of the artist’s treatment of +the lesser <i>felidæ</i>, the reader’s attention is +invited to this charming little kitten from “Through the +Looking-Glass.”</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="image162" href="images/p162b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“The Mad Tea-Party.” From “Alice’s +Adventures in Wonderland,” 1865. Drawn by John Tenniel; +engraved by Dalziel Brothers" +title= +"“The Mad Tea-Party.” From “Alice’s +Adventures in Wonderland,” 1865. Drawn by John Tenniel; +engraved by Dalziel Brothers" + src="images/p162s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p><a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 164</span> +<a href="images/p163b.jpg"> +<img class='floatright' alt= +"Black Kitten. From “Through the Looking-Glass,” +1871. Drawn by John Tenniel; engraved by Dalziel Brothers" +title= +"Black Kitten. From “Through the Looking-Glass,” +1871. Drawn by John Tenniel; engraved by Dalziel Brothers" + src="images/p163s.jpg" /> +</a>Mr. Tenniel is a link between Leech and the younger school of +“Punch” artists, of whom Mr. George du Maurier, Mr. +Linley Sambourne, and Mr. Charles Keene are the most +illustrious. The first is nearly as popular as Leech, and +is certainly a greater favourite with cultivated audiences. +He is not so much a humorist as a satirist of the Thackeray +type,—unsparing in his denunciation of shams, affectations, +and flimsy pretences of all kinds. A master of composition +and accomplished draughtsman, he excels in the delineation of +“society”—its bishops, its “professional +beauties” and “æsthetes,” its <i>nouveaux +riches</i>, its distinguished foreigners,—while now and +then (but not too often) he lets us know that if he chose he +could be equally happy in depicting the lowest classes. +There was a bar-room scene not long ago in “Punch” +which gave the clearest evidence of this. Some of those for +whom no good thing is good enough complain, it is said, that he +lacks variety—that he is too constant to one type of +feminine beauty. But any one who will be at the pains to +study a group of conventional “society” faces from +any of his “At Homes” or “Musical +Parties” will speedily discover that they are really very +subtly diversified and contrasted. For a case in point, +take the decorously sympathetic group round the sensitive German +musician, who is <a name="page166"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +166</span>“veeping” over one of his own +compositions. Or follow the titter running round that +amused assembly to whom the tenor warbler is singing +“Me-e-e-et me once again,” with such passionate +emphasis that the domestic cat mistakes it for a well-known area +cry. As for his ladies, it may perhaps be conceded that his +type is a little persistent. Still it is a type so refined, +so graceful, so attractive altogether, that in the jarring of +less well-favoured realities it is an advantage to have it always +before our eyes as a standard to which we can appeal. Mr. +du Maurier is a fertile book-illustrator, whose hand is +frequently seen in the “Cornhill,” and +elsewhere. Some of his best work of this kind is in Douglas +Jerrold’s “Story of a Feather,” in +Thackeray’s “Ballads,” and the large edition of +the “Ingoldsby Legends,” to which Leech, Tenniel, and +Cruikshank also contributed. One of his prettiest +compositions is the group here reproduced from +“Punch’s Almanack” for 1877. The talent +of his colleague, Mr. Linley Sambourne, may fairly be styled +unique. It is difficult to compare it with anything in its +way, except some of the happier efforts of the late Mr. Charles +Bennett, to which, nevertheless, it is greatly superior in +execution. To this clever artist’s invention +everything seems to present itself with a train of fantastic +accessory so whimsically inexhaustible <a +name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 168</span>that it +almost overpowers one with its prodigality. Each fresh +examination of his designs discloses something overlooked or +unexpected. Let the reader study for a moment the famous +“Birds of a Feather” of 1875, or that ingenious skit +of 1877 upon the rival Grosvenor Gallery and Academy, in which +the late President of the latter is shown as the proudest of +peacocks, the eyes of whose tail are portraits of Royal +Academicians, and whose body-feathers are paint brushes and +shillings of admission. Mr. Sambourne is excellent, too, at +adaptations of popular pictures,—witness the more than +happy parodies of Herrman’s “À Bout +d’Arguments,” and “Une Bonne +Histoire.” His book-illustrations have been +comparatively few, those to Burnand’s laughable burlesque +of “Sandford and Merton” being among the best. +Rumour asserts that he is at present engaged upon +Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” a subject which +might almost be supposed to have been created for his +pencil. There are indications, it may be added, that Mr. +Sambourne’s talents are by no means limited to the domain +in which for the present he chooses to exercise them, and it is +not impossible that he may hereafter take high rank as a +cartoonist. Mr. Charles Keene, a selection from whose +sketches has recently been issued under the title of “Our +People,” is <a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +169</span>unrivalled in certain <i>bourgeois</i>, military, and +provincial types. No one can draw a volunteer, a monthly +nurse, a Scotchman, an “ancient mariner” of the +watering-place species, with such absolutely humorous +verisimilitude. Personages, too, in whose eyes—to use +Mr. Swiveller’s euphemism—“the sun has shone +too strongly,” find in Mr. Keene a merciless satirist of +their “pleasant vices.” Like Leech, he has also +a remarkable power of indicating a landscape background with the +fewest possible touches. His book-illustrations have been +mainly confined to magazines and novels. Those in +“Once a Week” to a “Good Fight,” the tale +subsequently elaborated by Charles Reade into the “Cloister +and the Hearth,” present some good specimens of his earlier +work. One of these, in which the dwarf of the story is seen +climbing up a wall with a lantern at his back, will probably be +remembered by many.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="image165" href="images/p165b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“The Music of the Past.” From “Punch’s +Almanack,” 1877. Drawn by George du Maurier; engraved by +Swain" +title= +"“The Music of the Past.” From “Punch’s +Almanack,” 1877. Drawn by George du Maurier; engraved by +Swain" + src="images/p165s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="image167" href="images/p167b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Lion and Tub. From “Punch’s Pocket-Book,” +1879. Drawn by Linley Sambourne; engraved by Swain" +title= +"Lion and Tub. From “Punch’s Pocket-Book,” +1879. Drawn by Linley Sambourne; engraved by Swain" + src="images/p167s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p>After the “Punch” school there are other lesser +luminaries. Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s drawings to his own +inimitable “Bab Ballads” have a perverse drollery +which is quite in keeping with that erratic text. Mr. F. +Barnard, whose exceptional talents have not been sufficiently +recognised, is a master of certain phases of strongly marked +character, and, like Mr. Charles Green, has contributed some +excellent sketches to the “Household <a +name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +170</span>Edition” of Dickens. Mr. Sullivan of +“Fun,” whose grotesque studies of the “British +Tradesman” and “Workman” have recently been +republished, has abounding <i>vis comica</i>, but he has hitherto +done little in the way of illustrating books. For minute +pictorial stocktaking and photographic retention of detail, Mr. +Sullivan’s artistic memory may almost be compared to the +wonderful literary memory of Mr. Sala. Mr. John Proctor, +who some years ago (in “Will o’ the Wisp”) +seemed likely to rival Tenniel as a cartoonist, has not been very +active in this way; while Mr. Matthew Morgan, the clever artist +of the “Tomahawk,” has transferred his services to +the United States. Of Mr. Bowcher of “Judy,” +and various other professedly humorous designers, space permits +no further mention.</p> + +<div class="gapspace"> </div> +<p>There remains, however, one popular branch of +book-illustration, which has attracted the talents of some of the +most skilful and original of modern draughtsmen, i.e. the +embellishment of children’s books. From the days when +Mulready drew the old “Butterfly’s Ball” and +“Peacock at Home” of our youth, to those of the +delightfully Blake-like fancies of E. V. B., whose +“Child’s Play” has recently been re-published +for the delectation of a new generation of admirers, this has +always been a <a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +171</span>popular and profitable employment; but of late years it +has been raised to the level of a fine art. Mr. H. S. +Marks, Mr. J. D. Watson, Mr. Walter Crane, have produced +specimens of nursery literature which, for refinement of +colouring and beauty of ornament, cannot easily be +surpassed. The equipments of the last named, especially, +are of a very high order. He began as a landscapist on +wood; he now chiefly devotes himself to the figure; and he seems +to have the decorative art at his fingers’ ends as a +natural gift. Such work as “King Luckieboy’s +Party” was a <a name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +172</span>revelation in the way of toy books, while the +“Baby’s Opera” and “Baby’s +Bouquet” are <i>petits chefs d’oeuvre</i>, of which +the sagacious collector will do well to secure copies, not for +his nursery, but his library. Nor can his “Mrs. Mundi +at Home” be neglected by the curious in quaint and graceful +invention. <a name="citation14"></a><a href="#footnote14" +class="citation">[14]</a> Another book—the +“Under the Window” of Miss Kate Greenaway—comes +within the same category. Since Stothard, no one has given +us such a clear-eyed, soft-faced, happy-hearted childhood; or so +poetically “apprehended” the coy reticences, the +simplicities, and the small solemnities of little people. +Added to this, the old-world costume in which she usually elects +to clothe her characters, lends an arch piquancy of contrast to +their innocent rites and ceremonies. Her taste in tinting, +too, is very sweet and spring-like; and there is a fresh, pure +fragrance about all her pictures as of new-gathered nosegays; or, +perhaps, looking to the fashions that she favours, it would be +better to say “bow-pots.” But the latest +“good genius” of this branch of book-illustrating is +Mr. Randolph Caldecott, a designer assuredly of the very first +order. There is a spontaneity of fun, an unforced invention +about everything he does, that is infinitely entertaining. +Other <a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +174</span>artists draw to amuse us; Mr. Caldecott seems to draw +to amuse himself,—and this is his charm. One feels +that he must have chuckled inwardly as he puffed the cheeks of +his “Jovial Huntsmen;” or sketched that inimitably +complacent dog in the “House that Jack Built;” or +exhibited the exploits of the immortal “train-band +captain” of “famous London town.” This +last is his masterpiece. Cowper himself must have rejoiced +at it,—and Lady Austen. There are two sketches in +this book—they occupy the concluding pages—which are +especially fascinating. On one, John Gilpin, in a forlorn +and flaccid condition, is helped into the house by the +sympathising (and very attractive) Betty; on the other he has +donned his slippers, refreshed his inner man with a cordial, and +over the heaving shoulder of his “spouse,” who lies +dissolved upon his martial bosom, he is taking the spectators +into his confidence with a wink worthy of the late Mr. +Buckstone. Nothing more genuine, more heartily laughable, +than this set of designs has appeared in our day. And Mr. +Caldecott has few limitations. Not only does he draw human +nature admirably, but he draws animals and landscapes equally +well, so one may praise him without reserve. Though not +children’s books, mention should here be made of his +“Bracebridge Hall,” and “Old Christmas,” +the <a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +175</span>illustrations to which are the nearest approach to that +<i>beau-ideal</i>, perfect sympathy between the artist and the +author, with which the writer is acquainted. The cut on +page 173 is from the former of these works.</p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a href="images/p171b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"Boy and Hippocampus. From Miss E. Keary’s “Magic +Valley,” 1877. Drawn by “E. V. B.” (Hon. Mrs. +Boyle); engraved by T. Quartley" +title= +"Boy and Hippocampus. From Miss E. Keary’s “Magic +Valley,” 1877. Drawn by “E. V. B.” (Hon. Mrs. +Boyle); engraved by T. Quartley" + src="images/p171s.jpg" /> +</a></p> +<p style="text-align: center"> +<a name="image173" href="images/p173b.jpg"> +<img alt= +"“Love Charms.” From Irving’s +“Bracebridge Hall,” 1876. Drawn by Randolph +Caldecott; engraved by J. D. Cooper" +title= +"“Love Charms.” From Irving’s +“Bracebridge Hall,” 1876. Drawn by Randolph +Caldecott; engraved by J. D. Cooper" + src="images/p173s.jpg" /> +</a></p> + +<div class="gapspace"> </div> +<p>Many of the books above mentioned are printed in colours by +various processes, and they are not always engraved on +wood. But—to close the account of modern +wood-engraving—some brief reference must be made to what is +styled the “new American School,” as exhibited for +the most part in “Scribner’s” and other +Transatlantic magazines. Authorities, it is reported, shake +their heads over these performances. “<i>C’est +magnifique</i>, <i>mais ce nest pas la gravure</i>,” they +whisper. Into the matter in dispute, it is perhaps +presumptuous for an “atechnic” to adventure +himself. But to the outsider it would certainly seem as if +the chief ground of complaint is that the new comers do not play +the game according to the old rules, and that this (alleged) +irregular mode of procedure tends to lessen the status of the +engraver as an artist. False or true, this, it may fairly +be advanced, has nothing whatever to do with the matter, as far, +at least, as the public are concerned. For them the +question is, simply and solely—What is the result <a +name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +176</span>obtained? The new school, availing themselves +largely of the assistance of photography, are able to dispense, +in a great measure, with the old tedious method of drawing on the +block, and to leave the artist to choose what medium he prefers +for his design—be it oil, water-colour, or black and +white—concerning themselves only to reproduce its +characteristics on the wood. This is, of course, a +deviation from the method of Bewick. But would Bewick have +adhered to his method in these days? Even in his last hours +he was seeking for new processes. What we want is to get +nearest to the artist himself with the least amount of +interpretation or intermediation on the part of the +engraver. Is engraving on copper to be reproduced, we want +a facsimile if possible, and not a rendering into something which +is supposed to be the orthodox utterance of wood-engraving. +Take, for example, the copy of Schiavonetti’s engraving of +Blake’s <i>Death’s Door</i> in +“Scribner’s Magazine” for June 1880, or the cut +from the same source at page 131 of this book. These are +faithful line for line transcriptions, as far as wood can give +them, of the original copper-plates; and, this being the case, it +is not to be wondered at that the public, who, for a few pence +can have practical facsimiles of Blake, of Cruikshank, or of +Whistler, are loud in their appreciation of the <a +name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 177</span>“new +American School.” Nor are its successes confined to +reproduction in facsimile. Those who look at the exquisite +illustrations, in the same periodical, to the “Tile Club at +Play,” to Roe’s “Success with Small +Fruits,” and Harris’s “Insects Injurious to +Vegetation,”—to say nothing of the selected specimens +in the recently issued “Portfolios”—will see +that the latest comers can hold their own on all fields with any +school that has gone before. <a name="citation15"></a><a +href="#footnote15" class="citation">[15]</a></p> +<p>Besides copperplate and wood, there are many processes which +have been and are still employed for book-illustrations, although +the brief limits of this chapter make any account of them +impossible. Lithography was at one time very popular, and, +in books like Roberts’s “Holy Land,” +exceedingly effective. The “Etching Club” +issued a number of books <i>circa</i> 1841–52; and most of +the work of “Phiz” and Cruikshank was done with the +needle. It is probable that, as we have already seen, the +impetus given to modern etching by Messrs. Hamerton, Seymour +Haden, and Whistler, will lead to a specific revival of etching +as a means of book-illustration. Already beautiful etchings +have for some time appeared in “L’Art,” <a +name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 178</span>the +“Portfolio,” and the “Etcher;” and at +least one book of poems has been entirely illustrated in this +way,—the poems of Mr. W. Bell Scott. For reproducing +old engravings, maps, drawings, and the like, it is not too much +to say that we shall never get anything much closer than the +facsimiles of M. Amand-Durand and the Typographic Etching and +Autotype Companies. But further improvements will probably +have to be made before these can compete commercially with +wood-engraving as practised by the “new American +School.”</p> +<blockquote><p><a name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">p. +179</span>“Of making many books,” ’twais +said,<br /> +“There is no end;” and who thereon<br /> +The ever-running ink doth shed<br /> +But probes the words of Solomon:<br /> +Wherefore we now, for colophon,<br /> +From London’s city drear and dark,<br /> +In the year Eighteen Eight-One,<br /> +Reprint them at the press of Clark.</p> +<p style="text-align: right">A. D.</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> +<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1" +class="footnote">[1]</a> This is the technical name for +people who “illustrate” books with engravings from +other works. The practice became popular when Granger +published his “Biographical History of England.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2" +class="footnote">[2]</a> Mr. William Blades, in his +“Enemies of Books” (Trübner, 1880), decries +glass-doors,—“the absence of ventilation will assist +the formation of mould.” But M. Rouveyre bids us open +the doors on sunny days, that the air may be renewed, and, close +them in the evening hours, lest moths should enter and lay their +eggs among the treasures. And, with all deference to Mr. +Blades, glass-doors do seem to be useful in excluding dust.</p> +<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3" +class="footnote">[3]</a> “Send him back carefully, +for you can if you like, that all unharmed he may return to his +own place.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4" +class="footnote">[4]</a> No wonder the books are scarce, if +they are being hacked to pieces by Grangerites.</p> +<p><a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5" +class="footnote">[5]</a> These lines appeared in +“Notes and Queries,” Jan. 8, 1881.</p> +<p><a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6" +class="footnote">[6]</a> In the Golden Ass of Apuleius, +which Polia should not have read.</p> +<p><a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7" +class="footnote">[7]</a> M. Arsène Houssaye seems to +think he has found them; marked on the fly-leaves with an +impression, in wax, of a seal engraved with the head of +Epicurus.</p> +<p><a name="footnote123"></a><a href="#citation123" +class="footnote">[123]</a> This chapter was written by +Austin Dobson.—DP</p> +<p><a name="footnote9"></a><a href="#citation9" +class="footnote">[9]</a> The recent Winter Exhibition of +the Old Masters (1881) contained a fine display of +Flaxman’s drawings, a large number of which belonged to Mr. +F. T. Palgrave.</p> +<p><a name="footnote10"></a><a href="#citation10" +class="footnote">[10]</a> By Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse.</p> +<p><a name="footnote11"></a><a href="#citation11" +class="footnote">[11]</a> These words were written before +the “Art Journal” had published its programme for +1881. From this it appears that the present editor fully +recognises the necessity for calling in the assistance of the +needle.</p> +<p><a name="footnote12"></a><a href="#citation12" +class="footnote">[12]</a> The example, here copied on the +wood by M. Lacour, is a very successful reproduction of +Clennell’s style.</p> +<p><a name="footnote13"></a><a href="#citation13" +class="footnote">[13]</a> He also illustrated the +“Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi.” But this was +simply “edited” by “Boz.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote14"></a><a href="#citation14" +class="footnote">[14]</a> The reader will observe that this +volume is indebted to Mr. Crane for its beautiful +frontispiece.</p> +<p><a name="footnote15"></a><a href="#citation15" +class="footnote">[15]</a> Since this paragraph was first +written an interesting paper on the illustrations in +“Scribner,” from the pen of Mr. J. Comyns Carr, has +appeared in “L’Art.”</p> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIBRARY***</p> +<pre> + + +***** This file should be named 2018-h.htm or 2018-h.zip****** + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/1/2018 + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will +be renamed. + +Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright +law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, +so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United +States without permission and without paying copyright +royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part +of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm +concept and trademark. 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