Amenities of Literature Part 57

[4] These are his words in reply to his adversary Foster, the only work which he published in English, in consequence of the attack being in the vernacular idiom. The term here introduced into the language is, perhaps, our most ancient authority for the modern term _Encyclopaedia_, which Chambers curtailed to _Cyclopaedia_.

[5] The collected writings of ROBERT FLUDD, under the latinised name "De Fluctibus," should form six volumes folio. His "Philosophia Mosaica" has been translated, 1659, fo. He makes Moses a great Rosacrusian. The secret brotherhood must be still willing to give costly prices for their treasure. At the recent sale of Mr. Hibbert, the "Opera" of Fludd obtained twenty pounds! The copy was doubtless "very fine," but the price was surely cabalistical. Nor are these tomes slightly valued on the Continent.

[6] "Lord Bacon's Natural History," Cent. x. 998.--"In this experiment, upon the relation of men of credit, though myself as _yet_ am not fully inclined to believe it," his lords.h.i.+p gives ten notes or points as extraordinary as "the ointment" itself.

[7] This list appeared in some Commentaries on Genesis, but was suppressed in most of the copies; the whole has, however, been recovered by Chauffepie in his Dictionary.

BACON.

In the age of Elizabeth, the English mind took its first bent; a new-born impulse in the nation everywhere was working out its religion, its legislation, and its literature. In every cla.s.s of genius there existed nothing to copy; everything that was to be great was to find a beginning. Those maritime adventurers in this reign who sailed to discover new regions, and those heroes whose chivalric spirit was errant in the marshes of Holland, were not more enterprising than the creators of our peaceful literature.

Among these first INVENTORS--our epical SPENSER, our dramatic SHAKESPEARE and JONSON, our HOOKER, who sounded the depths of the origin of law, and our RAWLEIGH, who first opened the history of mankind--at length appeared the philosopher who proclaimed a new philosophy, emanc.i.p.ating the human mind by breaking the chains of scholastic antiquity. He was a singular being who is recognised without his name.

Aristotle, in taking possession of all the regions of knowledge, from the first had a.s.sumed a universal monarchy, more real than that of his regal pupil, for he had subjugated the minds of generation after generation. Through a long succession of ages, and amid both extinct and new religions, the writings of the mighty Stagyrite, however long known by mutilated and unfaithful versions, were equally studied by the Mahometan Arabian and the Rabbinical Hebrew, and, during the scholastic ages, were even placed by the side, and sometimes above, the Gospel; and the ten categories, which pretended to cla.s.sify every object of human apprehension, were held as another revelation. Centuries succeeded to centuries, and the learned went on translating, commenting, and interpreting, the sacred obscurity of the autocratical edict of a genius whose lofty omniscience seemed to partake in some degree of divinity itself.

But from this pa.s.sive obedience to a single encyclopaedic mind, a fatal consequence ensued for mankind. The schoolmen had formed, as Lord Bacon has n.o.bly expressed himself, "an unhallowed conjunction of divine with human matters;" theology itself was turned into a system, drawn out of the artificial arrangements of Aristotle; they made their orthodoxy dependent on "the scholastic gibberish;"[1] and to doubt any doctrine of "the philosopher," as Aristotle was paramountly called, might be to sin by a syllogism--heretical, if not atheistical. In reality it was to contend, without any possibility of escape, with the ecclesiastical establishment, whose integrity was based on the immoveable conformity of all human opinions. Every university in Europe, whose honours and emoluments arose from their Aristotelian chairs, stood as the sentinels of each intellectual fortress. Speculative philosophy could therefore no further advance; it could not pa.s.s that inviolable circle which had circ.u.mscribed the universal knowledge of the human race. No one dared to think his own thoughts, to observe his own observations, lest by some fortuitous discovery, in differing from the Aristotelian dialectic, he might lapse from his Christianity. The scholastical sects were still agitating the same topics; for the same barbarous terms supplied, on all occasions, verbal disputations, which even b.l.o.o.d.y frays could never terminate.

If we imagine that this awful fabric of the Aristotelian or scholastic philosophy was first shaken by the Verulamian, we should be conferring on a single individual a sudden influence which was far more progressive. In a great revolution, whence we date a new era, we are apt to lose sight of those devious paths and those marking incidents which in all human affairs are the prognostics and the preparations; the history of the human mind would be imperfectly revealed, should we not trace the great inventors in their precursors.

Early in the sixteenth century appeared simultaneously a number of extraordinary geniuses. An age of philosophical inventors seemed to arise; a new generation, who, each in his own way, were emanc.i.p.ating themselves from the dogmas of the ancient dictator. This revolt against the old scholastics broke forth in Italy, in Spain, in France, in Germany, and even reached our sh.o.r.es. These philosophers were the contemporaries of Luther: they had not engaged in his theological reformation, but it is more than probable that they had caught the inspiration of his hardy spirit. We are indeed told that the famous Cornelius Agrippa, though he could not desert the Rome of his patrons, yet saw with satisfaction its great pontiff attacked by Luther; as Erasmus and others equally delighted to satirize all the scholastic monkery.[2] Luther, too, made common cause with them, in the demolition of that ancient edifice of scholastic superst.i.tion which, under the supremacy of Aristotle, barred out every free inquiry.

Of these eminent men, an elegant scholar, Ludovicus Vives, by birth a Spaniard, had been invited to the English court by our Henry the Eighth, to be the preceptor of the Princess Mary. Vives too was the friend of Erasmus; but while that facetious sage only expended his raillery on the scholastic madness, Vives formally attacked the chief, whose final authority he declared had hitherto solely rested on the indolence of the human mind. Ramus, in France, advanced with more impetuous fury; he held a public disputation against the paramount authority of the Stagyrite in philosophy; and in his "Aristotelian Animadversions" he profanely s.h.i.+vered into atoms of absurdity the syllogistic method, and subst.i.tuted for the logic of Aristotle one of his own, which was long received in all the schools of the reformed, for Ramus was a Huguenot. This innovator was denounced to the magistrate; for, by opposing Aristotle, he had committed open hostility against religion and learning! The erudite Abate Andres, probably an Aristotelian at heart, observes, in noticing the continued persecutions of this bold spirit, that, "to tell the truth, Ramus injured himself far more than the Aristotelian doctrine which he had impugned"[3]--and true enough, if it were a rival Aristotelian who cast Ramus out of the window, to be ma.s.sacred by the mob on St. Bartholomew's day. Two eminent scholars of Italy contested more successfully the doctrines of Aristotle: Patricius collected everything he could to degrade and depreciate that philosopher, and to elevate the more seductive and imaginative Plato. He a.s.serted that Aristotle was the plagiarist of other writers, whose writings he invariably affected to contemn; and he went so far as to suggest to the Pope to prohibit the teaching of the Aristotelian doctrines in the schools; for the doctrines of Plato more harmoniously accorded with the Christian faith. Less learned, but more original than Patricius, the Neapolitan Telesius struck out a new mode of philosophizing. The study of mathematics had indicated to Telesius a severe process in his investigations of nature, and had taught him to reject those conjectural solutions of the phenomena of the material world--subtleties and fictions which had led Aristotle into many errors, and whose universal authority had swayed opinions through successive ages. "Telesius," says Lord Bacon, "hath renewed the tenet of Parmenides, and is the best of our novelists."[4] Lord Bacon considered the Telesian system worthy of his development and his refutation. But, by his physical system, Telesius had broken the spell, and sent forth the naturalist to scrutinize more closely into nature; and possibly this Neapolitan sage may have kindled the first spark in the experimental philosophy of Bacon.

All these were eminent philosophers who had indignantly rejected the eternal babble of the scholastics, and the vain dicta of the peripatetics; and in the same cycle were others more erratic and fantastic. These bold artificers of novel systems of philosophy had not unsuccessfully attacked the dogmas of Aristotle, but to little purpose, while they were subst.i.tuting their own. The prevalent agitation of the philosophical spirit, now impetuous and disturbed, shot forth mighty impulses in imaginary directions, and created chimeras. Agrippa and Paracelsus, Jordano Bruno, Cardan and Campanella, played their "fantastic tricks," till the patient genius of the new philosophy arose simultaneously in the Italian Galileo and the founder of the Verulamian method.

Amid the ruins of these systems of philosophies, it was not with their fallen columns that Lord Bacon designed to construct a new philosophy of his own--a system in opposition to other systems. He would hold no controversies: for refutations were useless if the method he invented was a right one. He would not even be the founder of a sect, for he presumed not to establish a philosophy, but to show how we should philosophize. The father of experimental philosophy delivered no "opinions," but "a work;" patient observation, practical results, or new and enlarged sciences, "not to be found in the s.p.a.ce of a single age, but through a succession of generations." D'Alembert observed, "The Baconian philosophy was too wise to astonish." His early sagacity had detected the fatal error of all system-makers; each, to give coherence to his hypothesis, had recourse to some occult operation, and sometimes had ventured to give it a name which was nothing more than an abstract notion, and not a reality ascertained to exist in nature. The Platonist had buried his lofty head amid the clouds of theology, beyond the aspirations of man: the Aristotelian, by the syllogistic method of reasoning, had invented a mere instrument of perpetual disputation, without the acquisition of knowledge; and in the law which governed the material world, when Democritus had conceived his atom, and endowed it with a desire or appetency to move with other atoms, or Telesius imagined with cold and heat to find the first beginnings of motion--what had they but contracted nature within the bars of their systems, while she was perpetually escaping from them? The greater philosopher sought to follow nature through her paths, to be "her servant and interpreter;"

or, as he has also expressed it, "to subdue nature by yielding to her."

Lord Bacon was conscious of the slow progress of truth; he has himself appealed to distant ages. So progressive is human reason, that a novel system, at its first announcement, has been resisted as the most dangerous innovation, or rejected as utterly false; yet at a subsequent period the first promulgator who had struck into the right road is censured, not for his temerity, but for his timidity, in not having advanced to its termination, and laying the burden on posterity to demonstrate that which he had only surmised or a.s.sumed. It is left to another generation to shoot their arrow forth a truer aim, far more distantly. Some of the most important results in philosophical inquiries by men who have advanced beyond their own age, have been subjected to this inconvenience; and we now are familiarized to axioms and principles, requiring no further demonstration, which in their original discovery were condemned as dangerous and erroneous; for the most novel principles must be disputed before they can be demonstrated, till time in silence seals its decree with authority.

Some discoveries have required almost a century to be received, while some truths remain still problematical, and, like the ether of Newton, but a mere hypothesis. What is the wisdom of the wise but a state of progression? and the inventor has to encounter even the hostility of his brothers in science; even Lord Bacon himself was the victim of his own idols of the den--those fallacies that originate from the peculiar character of the man; for by undervaluing the science of mathematics, he refused his a.s.sent to the Copernican system.

The celebrity of Lord Bacon was often distinct from the Baconian philosophy at home--a circ.u.mstance which concerns the history of our vernacular literature. The lofty pretensions of a new way to "The Advancement of Learning," and the "Novum Organum" of an art of invention, to invent arts, were long a veiled mystery to the English public, who were deterred from its study by the most offuscating translations of the Latin originals. English readers recognised in Lord Bacon, not the interpreter of Nature through all her works, but the interpreter of man to man, of their motives and their actions, in his "Sermones Fideles," those "Essaies" which "come home to our business and to our bosoms." Such readers were left to wonder how the historian of "The Winds," and of "Life and Death"--the gatherer of medical receipts and of ma.s.ses of natural history, amid all such minute processes of experiments and inductions, groping in tangible matter, as it seemed to ordinary eyes, could in the mere naturalist be the creator of a new philosophy of intellectual energy. The ethical sage who had unfolded the volume of the heart they delightfully comprehended, but how the mind itself stood connected with the outward phenomena of nature remained long an enigma for the men of the world. Lord Bacon, in his dread to trust the mutability of our language placed by the side of the universal language of the learned which fifteen centuries had fixed sacred from innovation, had concluded that the modern languages will "at one time or another play the bankrupt with books." The sage who, in his sanguine confidence in futurity, had predicted that "third period of time which will far surpa.s.s that of the Grecian and Roman learning," had not, however, contemplated on a national idiom; nor in that n.o.ble prospect of time had he antic.i.p.ated a race of the European learned whose vernacular prose would create words beyond the reach of the languages of antiquity.

No work in our native idiom had yet taken a station. The volume of Hooker we know not how he read; but the copiousness of the diction little accorded with the English of the learned Lord Chancellor, who had pressed the compactness of his aphoristic sentences into the brevity of Seneca, but with a weight of thought no Roman, if we except Tacitus, has attained. Rawleigh and Jonson were but contemporaries, unsanctioned by time; nor could he have looked even on them as modellers for him whose own genius was still more prodigally opulent, though not always with the most difficult taste.

Lord Bacon, therefore, decided to compose his "Instauratio Magna" in Latin. Dedicating the Latin version of the "Advancement of Learning" to the Prince, he observed--"It is a work I think will live, and be a _citizen of the world, as English books are not_." Lord Bacon saw "bankruptcy in our language," and houseless wanderers in our books. The commonwealth of letters had yet no existence. Haunted by this desolating notion that there was no perpetuity in English writings, he rested not till his own were translated by himself and his friends, Jonson, and Hobbes, and Herbert; and often enlarging these Latin versions, some of his English compositions remain, in some respect, imperfect, when compared with those subsequent revisions in the Latin translations.

By trusting his genius to a foreign tongue, Lord Bacon has dimmed its l.u.s.tre; the vitality of his thoughts in their original force, the spontaneity of his mind in all its raciness, all those fortuitous strokes which are the felicities of genius, were lost to him who had condemned himself to the Roman yoke. Professor Playfair always preferred quoting the original English of those pa.s.sages of the treatise "De Augmentis Scientiarum," which had first appeared in "The Advancement of Learning." The felicity of many of those fine or forcible conceptions is emasculated in a foreign and artificial idiom; and the invention of novel terms in an ancient language left it often in a clouded obscurity.

The hand of Lord Bacon had already moulded the language at pleasure, and he might have preceded his friend Hobbes in the lucidity of a philosophical style. The style of Lord Bacon is stamped with the originality of the age, and is as peculiar to him as was that of Shakspeare to the poet. He is not only the wittiest of writers in his remote allusions, but poetical in his fanciful conceptions. His style long served for a model to many succeeding writers. One of the most striking imitations is that curious folio of secret history, and brilliant sententiousness, and witty pedantry, the Life of Archbishop Williams by Bishop HACKET. It was with declining spirit Lord Bacon composed his "History of Henry the Seventh;" it was an oblation to majesty; the king himself was his critic; and the Solomon, as he terms Henry the Seventh, was that image of peaceful sovereignty which James affected.

He who thought that the language would have failed him, has himself failed to the language, and we have lost an English cla.s.sic. Since the experimental philosophy arose out of practical discoveries, it should not have been limited to recluse students, but open to the pract.i.tioners not yet philosophers, now condemned to study it by translations of a translation. It required two centuries before the writings of Bacon reached the many. Now, a single volume, in the most popular form, places them in the hands of artisans and artists, who are to learn from them to think, to observe, and to invent.

The first modern edition of the collected writings of Lord Bacon was that by Blackbourne, in 1730. It probably awoke the public attention; but English readers eager to possess themselves of the Baconian philosophy were still doomed to their old ignorance, for no one was yet to be found bold enough to risk versions, which in the mere translation often require to be elucidated. This first edition, however, hastened the arduous task of "methodising" the philosophy of Bacon in English, by Dr. PETER SHAW, in 1733, who then suggested that the n.o.ble Baconian scheme had not been "sufficiently understood and regarded." This Dr.

SHAW was one of the court physicians, attached to scientific pursuits, which he usefully displayed by popular lectures and writings, on subjects with which the public were then not familiar. Imbued with the genius of Bacon, this diligent student unfortunately had a genius of his own; he fancied that he could reconstruct the works of our great philosopher, by a more perfect arrangement. He separated, or he joined; he cla.s.sed, and he new-named; and not the least curious of his singularities is that of a.s.signing right principles for his wrong doings. He did not abridge his author; for justly he observes, great works admit of no abridgment; but to shorten their extent, he took the liberty of what he terms "dropping,"--that is, "leaving out." Of his translations of the Latin originals, of which he experienced all the difficulty, he observes, that "a direct translation would have left the works more obscure than they are," and therefore he adopted what he terms "an open version." A precise notion of this mode of free translation, it might be difficult to fix on; it would be too open if it admitted what was not in the original, or if it suffered what was essential to escape. His irremissible sin was that of "modernizing the English" of Lord Bacon. The most racy and picturesque expressions of our elder writers were then to be weakened down to a vapid colloquial style.

w.i.l.l.ymot had translated Lord Bacon's "Essays" from the Latin, and thus subst.i.tuted his own loose incondite sentences, which he deemed "more fas.h.i.+onable language," for the brilliancy or the energy of Lord Bacon's native vein. Dr. Shaw's three goodly quartos, however, long conveyed in some shape to the English public the Baconian philosophy. There is something still seductive in these fair volumes, with their copious index, and a glossary of the philosophical terms invented by Bacon; I loved them in the early days of my studies; and they have been deemed worthy to be revived in a late edition.

In my youth, the ill.u.s.trious name of Lord Bacon was more familiar to readers than his works, and they were more frequently reminded of the Lord Chancellor by the immortal verse of Pope, than by that Life of Bacon by Mallet, which may be read without discovering that the subject was the father of modern philosophy, excepting that in the last page, as if accidentally, there occurs a slight mention of the Great Instauration itself! The very choice of Mallet, in 1740, for an editor of Lord Bacon, is a striking evidence how imperfectly the genius of the Instaurator of sciences was comprehended.

The psychological history of Lord Bacon has all that oneness which is the perfection of mind. We see him in his boyhood, studious of the phenomena of nature, meditating on the multiplication of echoes at the brick-conduit, near his father's house; there he sought to discover the laws of sound; as in his latest days, when on the snowy road an experiment suddenly occurred, "touching the conservation and the induration of bodies," whether snow could not preserve flesh equally with salt. Alighting from his carriage, with his own hands he a.s.sisted the experiment, and was struck by that chilliness which, a few days after, closed in death; yet the dying naturalist, too weak to write the last letter he dictated, expressed his satisfaction that the experiment "answered excellently well."

But he who, by the cruelty of fortune and mortal infirmity, lived many lives in the span of one short life, ever wrestling with Nature to subdue her, could never subdue himself by himself. He idolized state and magnificence in his own person; the brilliancy of his robes and the blaze of his equipage his imagination seemed to feed on; he loved to be gazed on in the streets, and to be wondered at in the cabinet; but with this feminine weakness, this philosopher was still so philosophic as to scorn the least prudential care of his fortune. So that, while he was enamoured of wealth, he could not bring himself down to the love of money. Partic.i.p.ating in the corruptions of the age, he was himself incorruptible; the Lord Chancellor never gave a partial or unjust sentence, and Rushworth has told us, that not one of his decrees was ever reversed. Such a man was not made to crouch and to fawn, to breathe the infection of a corrupted court, to make himself the scape-goat in the mysterious darkness of court-intrigues; but he was this man of wretchedness! Truly he exclaimed one day, in grasping a volume, For this only am I fitted. The intellectual architect who had modelled his house of Solomon, and should have been for ever the ideal inhabitant of that palace of the mind, was the tenant of an abode of disorder, where every one was master but its owner, a maculated man seeking to shelter himself in dejection and in shade. Whisperers, surmisers, evil eyes and evil tongues, the domestic asp, whose bite sends poison into the veins of him on whom it hangs--those were his familiars, while his abstracted mind was dictating to his chaplain the laws and economy of nature.

Yet there were some better spirits in the mansion of Gorhambury, and even in the obscurity of Gray's Inn, who have left testimonies of their devotion to the great man long after his death. In the psychological history of Lord Bacon, we must not pa.s.s by the psychological monument which the affectionate Sir Thomas Meautys, who, by his desire, lies buried at his feet, raised to his master. The design is as original as it is grand, and is said to have been the invention of Sir Henry Wotton, who, in his long residence abroad, had formed a refined taste for the arts which were yet strangers in England. The simplicity of our ancestors had placed their sculptured figures rec.u.mbent on their tombs; the taste of Wotton raised the marble figure to imitate life itself, and to give the mind of the original to its image. The monument of Bacon exhibits the great philosopher seated in profound contemplation in his habitual att.i.tude, for the inscription records for posterity, _Sic sedebat_.[5]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Abate ANDRES, in his erudite "Origine &c. d'ogni Letteratura," gives this remarkable description--"_i_ GHIRIBIZZI _della Dialetica e Metafisica d'Aristotele_." As we are at a loss to discover the origin of the term _gibberish_, and as it is suitable to the present occasion, may we conjecture that we have here found it?--xii. 26.

[2] Enfield, ii. 448.

[3] Andres "Dell' Origine e Progressi d'ogni Letteratura," xv. 165.

[4] Montagu's Bacon, iv. 46.

[5] See "Curiosities of Literature," art. "Bacon at Home."

THE FIRST FOUNDER OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY.

The first marked advancement in the progress of the national understanding was made by a new race of public benefactors, who, in their munificence, no longer endowing obsolete superst.i.tions, and inefficient or misplaced charities, erected libraries and opened academies; founders of those habitations of knowledge whose doors open to the bidding of all comers.

To the privacy and the silent labours of some men of letters and some lovers of the arts, usually cla.s.sed under the general designation of COLLECTORS, literary Europe, for the great part, owes its public museums and its public libraries. It was their ripe knowledge only which could have created them, their opulence only which could render them worthy of a nation's purchase, or of its acceptance, when in their generous enthusiasm they consecrated the intellectual gift for their countrymen.

These collections could only have acquired their strength by their growth, for gradual were their acquisitions and innumerable were their details; they claimed the sleepless vigilance of a whole life, the devotion of a whole fortune, and often that moral intrepidity which wrestled with insurmountable difficulties. We may admire the generous enthusiasm whose opulence was solely directed to enrich what hereafter was to be consecrated as public property; but it has not always received the notice and the eulogy so largely its due. It is but bare justice to distinguish these men from their numerous brothers whose collections have terminated with themselves, known only to posterity by their posthumous catalogues--the sole record that these collectors were great buyers and more famous sellers. Of many of the FOUNDERS of public collections the names are not familiar to the reader, though some have sometimes been identified with their more celebrated collections, from the grat.i.tude of a succeeding age.

A collection formed by a single mind, skilled in its favourite pursuit, becomes the tangible depository of the thoughts of its owner; there is a unity in this labour of love, and a secret connexion through its dependent parts. Thus we are told that Cecil's library was the best for history; Walsingham's, for policy; Arundel's, for heraldry; Cotton's, for antiquity; and Usher's, for divinity. The completion of such a collection reflects the perfect image of the mind of the philosopher, the philologist, the antiquary, the naturalist, the scientific or the legal character, who into one locality has gathered together and arranged this furniture of the human intellect.

To disperse their collections would be, to these elect spirits, to resolve them back into their first elements--to scatter them in the air, or to mingle them with the dust.[1] Happily for mankind, these have been men to whom the perpetuity of their intellectual a.s.sociations was a future existence. Conscious that their hands had fastened links in the unbroken chain of human inquiry, they left the legacy to the world. The creators of these collections have often betrayed their anxiety to preserve them distinct and entire. Confident I am that such was the real feeling of a recent celebrated collector. The rich and peculiar collection of ma.n.u.scripts, and of rare and chosen volumes, of FRANCIS DOUCE, from his earliest days had been the objects of his incessant cares. With means extremely restricted, but with a mind which no obstructions could swerve from its direct course, through many years he accomplished a glorious design. Our modest antiquary startled the most curious, not only of his countrymen but of foreigners, by his knowledge, diversified as his own unrivalled collections, in the recondite literature of the middle ages, and whatever exhibited the manners, the customs, and the arts of every people and of every age. Late in life he accidentally became the possessor of a considerable fortune, and having decided that this work of his life should be a public inheritance, he seemed at a loss where it might at once rest in security, and lie patent for the world. The idea of its dispersion was very painful, for he was aware that the singleness of design which had a.s.sembled such various matters together could never be resumed by another. He often regretted that in the great national repository of literature the collection would merge into the universal ma.s.s. It was about this time that we visited together the great library of Oxford. Douce contemplated in the Bodleian that arch over which is placed the portrait of SELDEN, and the library of Selden preserved entire; the antiquary's closet which holds the great topographical collections of Gough; and the distinct shelves dedicated to the small Shakespearian library of MALONE. He observed that the collections of Rawlinson, of Tanner, and of others, had preserved their ident.i.ty by their separation. This was the subject of our conversation. At this moment Douce must have decided on the locality where his precious collection was to find a perpetual abode; for it was immediately on his return home that our literary antiquary bequeathed his collection to the Bodleian Library, where it now occupies more than one apartment.

To the anxious cares of such founders of public collections, England, as well as Italy and France, owes a national debt; nor can we pa.s.s over in silence the man to whom first occurred the happy idea of inst.i.tuting a library which should have for its owners his own fellow-citizens. A Florentine merchant, emanc.i.p.ated from the thraldom of traffic, vowed himself to the pursuits of literature, and, just before the art of printing was practised, to the preservation of ma.n.u.scripts, which he not only multiplied by his unwearied hand, but was the first of that race of critics who amended the texts of the early copyists. What he could not purchase, his pure zeal was not the less solicitous to preserve.

Boccaccio had bequeathed his own library to a convent in Florence, and its sight produced that effect on him which the library of Shakespeare, had it been preserved, might have had on an Englishman; and since he could not possess it, he built an apartment solely to preserve it distinct from any other collection.

At a period when the owners of ma.n.u.scripts were so avaricious of their possessions that they refused their loan, and were frugal even in allowing a sight of their leaves, the hardy generosity of this Florentine merchant conceived one of the most important designs for the interests of learning;--to invite readers, he bequeathed his own as A PUBLIC LIBRARY.[2] He who occupied but a private station, first offered Europe a model of patriotic greatness which princes and n.o.bles in their magnificence would emulate. It has been said that the founder of this public library at Florence had only revived the n.o.ble design of the ancients, who had displayed their affection for literature by even bestowing their own names on public libraries; but this must not detract from the true glory of the merchant of Florence; it was at least an idea which had wholly escaped the less liberal of his learned contemporaries.

Sir THOMAS BODLEY may be considered as the first founder of a public library in this country, raised by the hand of an individual. A picture of the obstructions, the anxieties, the hopes, and the disappointments of the founder of the Bodleian, exhibits a person of rank and opulence submitting even to minute drudgery, and to the most humiliating solicitations, and busily occupied by a foreign as well as a domestic correspondence, to accomplish what he long despaired of--a library adequate to the wants of every English student.

BODLEY, in the sketch of his own life, betrays that early book-love which subsequently broke out into that n.o.ble pa.s.sion for "his reverend mother, the University of Oxford." Sir Thomas Bodley had ably served in some of the highest state-employments; but, at length, discovered the secret pathway to escape from "court contentions;" and this he found when busying himself with a vast ideal library--the future Bodleian!

Long, indeed, it was but ideal; the labour of his day, the dream of his night, so slowly rose the reality of the fabric. It was difficult to determine on the cla.s.s or the worth of authors--often rejecting, always augmenting, still consulting, now advising, or being advised; sometimes irresolute, and at others decisive; now exulting, and now despondent.

However fervid was his n.o.ble enthusiasm for literature, and for his library, not less remarkable was that provident sagacity which he combined with it, and by which only he could carry on the vast design.