The Book-Collector Part 18

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Hazlitt's _Venice_, 1860, iv. 431.

[7] The library of James Chamberlain, sold at Stourbridge Fair in 1686.

[8] See _Catalogue of Early English Miscellanies formerly in the Harleian Library_, by W. C. Hazlitt, 1862.

[9] See besides, _Hazlitt's Memoirs_, 1896, chaps. vii, viii, ix; and Hazlitt's _Confessions of a Collector_, 1897, p. 150 _et seq._

ADDITIONAL NOTES

P. 5. Of the public collections in England, those of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, at Oxford, of which very little remains, and of Sir John Gyllarde, Prior of the Calendaries' Gild in Bristol (founded before 1451), appear to be the pioneers. For the latter the Bishop of Worcester is said to have provided, in 1464, a receptacle or building; but the collection was destroyed by fire in 1466.

P. 5. _Illuminated MSS._--A great store of information is capable of being collected on the subject of the embellis.h.i.+ng and finis.h.i.+ng processes which MSS. underwent when the scribe had done his part.

Among the Paston Letters occurs a bill from Thomas (the) Limner of Bury St. Edmunds to Sir John Howard, afterward Duke of Norfolk, in 1467, for illuminating several books, and we have also one of Antoine Verard of Paris, "Enlumineur du Roy," in 1493 for similar work executed for the Comte d'Angouleme by artists in the printer's employment.

P. 7. _Circulating Libraries._--There was a library of this cla.s.s at Dunfermline in 1711 and at Edinburgh in 1725. When Benjamin Franklin came to London, there was nothing of the kind. A bookseller named Wright established one about 1740, and it was kept up by his successors. Sion College was limited in its lending range to the London clergy.

P. 9. Add the Le Stranges of Hunstanton to the East Anglian collectors.

P. 9. _Kent as a Hunting-ground for Books in Old Days._--Flockton of Canterbury it was who once sold Marlowe's _Dido_, 1594, for 2s. He was a contemporary of William Hutton, the Birmingham bookseller. This may have been the very copy which formerly belonged to Henry Oxinden of Barham, near Canterbury, and pa.s.sed in succession into the hands of Isaac Reed, George Steevens, the Duke of Roxburghe, Sir Egerton Brydges, and Mr. Heber. The price charged by Flockton, however, was fairly extravagant in comparison with that given by John Henderson, the actor, for the copy which subsequently belonged to J. P. Kemble and the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re--fourpence--probably the original published price.

P. 10. _Bristol Houses._--Add _Strong_. Strong's catalogues for 1827-1828 are now before me, and describe 10,000 items. No such stock has been kept at Bristol since. Jefferies had in former days some very remarkable books on sale--Caxtons included; and Kerslake and George could shew you volumes worth your notice and money, whoever you might be. Now, alas! you have to leave the city as empty as you entered it.

P. 18. _Loss of Old Books._--The fate of a heavy percentage of our earlier books--of the earlier books of every people--is curiously and mournfully readable in the illiterate bucolic scrawls, doing duty for autographs and inscriptions, which tell, only too plainly, how such property slowly but surely pa.s.sed out of sight and existence.

P. 19. _Old Libraries._--Add Fraser of Lovat, Boswell of Auchinleck, and Fountaine of Narford.

P. 25. _Rolls of Book-Collectors._--Rather say 5000 names.

P. 29. _Spoliation of Libraries._--A precious volume of early English tracts was not very long since offered at an auction, which had been stolen from Peterborough Cathedral, and another, which const.i.tuted one of the chief treasures of Sion College.

P. 32. The bulk of the books of Mr. Samuel Sandars were left to the University Library, Cambridge, which has since acquired those of the late Lord Acton.

P. 33. _Lincoln Cathedral Library._--Besides the Honeywood books sold to Dibdin, the Dean and Chapter have suffered others to stray from their homes. A notice is before me of one, a large folio on vellum, containing tracts of a theological complexion, chiefly by an Oxford doctor, Robert of Leicester, which was presented, as a coeval inscription apprises us, by Thomas Driffield, formerly Chancellor of the Diocese, in 1422 to the new library of the cathedral.

P. 34. _Provincial Libraries._--Of the books at Bamborough Castle, a catalogue was printed at Durham in 1799. Some of the books at York Minster appear to have been gifts from Archbishop Mathews. At Colchester they are fortunate in possessing the library of Archbishop Harsnet.

P. 35. Marlowe's _Edward II._, 1594.--Possibly obtained by the Landgraf of Hesse during his visit to London in 1611. This is mentioned by me in my _Shakespear Monograph_, 1903.

P. 37. _Private Libraries._--In the case of private collections, we have to distinguish between those of an ancestral character, insensibly acc.u.mulated from generation to generation without any fixed or preconcerted plan, and such as have been formed by or for wealthy individuals in the course of a single life, if not of a few years, on some general principle, with or without an eye to cost. Under either of these conditions the motive is usually personal, and the ultimate transfer in some instances to a public inst.i.tution an accident or afterthought.

P. 38. _Harleian Library._--The taste of the Harley family for books dated from the time of Charles I. Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Castle, is credited with the possession of "an extraordinary library of ma.n.u.script and printed books, which had been collected from one descent to another." The house was besieged and burned in 1643, and these literary and bibliographical treasures probably perished with it. But his grandson, the first Earl of Oxford, restored the library; and we all know that the second earl, who survived till 1741, elevated it to the rank of the first private collection in England, while he unconsciously sacrificed it to the incidence of a languid and falling market.

P. 42. Mr. William Henry Miller of Craigentinny was originally a solicitor in Edinburgh.

P. 65. _Books of Emblems._--Besides those described is the translation executed by Thomas Combe, and licensed in 1593, of the _Theatre des Bons Engins_ of Guillaume de la Perriere, of which no perfect copy of any edition had been seen till the writer met with one of 1614 among the Burton-Constable books.

P. 103. _Books Appreciable on Special Grounds._--Among these are--Pennant's _Tour in Scotland_, 1769, and White's _Selborne_, 1785.

Everybody is aware that there are better works on Scotland than Pennant's, and better accounts of birds, those of Selborne included, than White's. But we desire the two heirlooms, as their authors left them, pure and simple. We prefer not to have to disentangle the two pieces of eighteenth century workmans.h.i.+p from the editorial and artistic improvements which have overlaid them. A much-edited writer becomes a partner in a limited company without a vote. His pages are converted by degrees into an arena where others commend him above his deserts, or what might have been his wishes, while here and there he finds a commentator, whose aim is to convince you how superior a job he would have made of it had it been left to him.

P. 109. _Translations._--It is remarkable that Aulus Gellius makes the same complaint as is embodied in the text, about the lame versions of Latin writers from the Greek.

P. 117. Howell's _New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets_.--The Huth fragment seems as if it would complete the unique, but imperfect, Capell copy.

P. 119. _A Hundred Merry Tales._--Besides the Huth mutilated copy and the Gottingen complete one (of 1526) there is a fragment at the Birthplace Museum, Stratford. I saw it there, but did not note to what impression it belonged.

P. 122. _Four Sons of Aymon_, 1504.--A fine copy is offered at 15s. in a catalogue about 1760. Of the _Famous history of the vertuous and G.o.dly woman Judith_, 1565, all that is so far discoverable is that it is a translation in English metre by Edward Jenynges. A t.i.tle-page, preserved among Ames's collections at the British Museum, is copied by me in _Bibl. Coll._, 1903, pp. 210-11.

P. 125. _Destruction of Books._--Untold numbers of volumes have also been sacrificed to the acc.u.mulation of material on special lines. Tons of the _Annual Register_, _Gentleman's Magazine_, _Notes and Queries_, and the like, have been lost, if it be a loss, in this way. A few pages, maybe, are all that survive of a book, and when the library of the specialist is sold, the rest shares the same fate at the hands of an unsympathetic purchaser.

P. 126. _Unique copies._--The play of _Orestes_, 1567, came to light at Plymouth about forty years ago with an equally unique issue of one of Drayton's pieces. Of such things the present writer has met in the course of a lengthened career with treasures which would make a small library, and has beheld no duplicates.

P. 128. _Fragments._--The Fragment has within the last twenty or thirty years come into surprising evidence, and in my latest instalment of _Bibliographical Notes_, 1903, I have been enabled to supply numerous deficiencies in existing records even of modern date from a variety of sources not ostensibly connected with Bagford, Fenn, or any other culprit of this type, shewing that the process of disappearance was in universal operation, and that mere chance arrested it here and there just in the nick of time.

P. 128. _Capital Books._--It is perhaps not unfair to add that although Milton's _Poems_, 1645, is not a rare book, it is eminently so in an irreproachable state, to say nothing of such a copy as the Bodleian one presented by the poet himself, which one of the earlier officials, a Dr. Hudson, thought might be thrown away without detriment to the library.

P. 171. _Early Prices of Binding._--The books or pamphlets issued at one penny, that is, a silver penny of the day, were usually st.i.tched or sewn.

The edition of the _Book of Common Prayer_, 1552, was sold, bound in parchment, at 3s. 4d., and in leather, paper boards, or clasps, at 4s.

But in the next impression, it being in contemplation to suppress certain matter, the price was to be reduced in proportion.

P. 183. There has been recently added to Cohen's work a companion one on the French ill.u.s.trated literature of the nineteenth century.

Books like Bewick's _Birds and Quadrupeds_, and indeed all works of the modern side in request, are best liked in the original boards with labels inviolate.

P. 191. _Cloister Life of Charles V._--The Keir ill.u.s.trated copy was long at Leighton's in Brewer Street, while the late Sir W.

Stirling-Maxwell was known as Mr. Stirling.

P. 198. _Henry VIII., Prayers_, 1544.--This exists in later impressions in English, and of the date 1544 in Latin.

P. 200. _Special Copies._--To the list given may be added the extraordinary volume of tracts formerly in the possession of Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, a MS. note in which throws an entirely new light on the earlier life of Spenser, as first pointed out by me after my purchase of the book at an auction, where its importance was overlooked.

P. 205. _Shakespear's Copy of Florio's Montaigne_, 1603.--In my _Monograph on Shakespear_, 1903, I have adduced new evidence in support of the authenticity of this and other signatures of the poet.

P. 206. _Books with MSS. Notes._--There is yet another category of remains among the older literature of all countries, and it is that, in which an acknowledged judge or master of a subject, though himself perhaps a person of no peculiar celebrity, has rendered a copy of some book the medium for preserving for future use matter overlooked by the author or editor or correcting serious errors, and the lapse of time exercises its influence in the appreciation of such _adversaria_. A living scholar may be capable of going far beyond his predecessors in enriching margins and flyleaves; but there is the caveat that he is our contemporary. The privilege of the grave appertains to the man who laid down his pen ever so long ago. We may know much more than Langbaine or Oldys about the drama, and than Johnson or Malone about Shakespear; yet, depend upon it, their notes are more wanted than ours.

P. 208. _Autographs in Books._--In his copy of Slatyer's _Palaealbion_, 1621, the poet Earl of Westmorland wrote on a flyleaf: "Solus Deus Protector Meus. W. Ex dono Danielis Beswitch servi mei fidelis, 1654."

Among his books Robespierre possessed a MS. Account of the Glorious Achievements of Louis XIV. with ill.u.s.trative drawings, and did it the honour of attaching his autograph--an operation seldom so harmless.

P. 218. _Books on Vellum._--The _Horae_ of the Virgin in the ancient impressions on vellum are commoner than those on paper, though, as the late Mr. Huth quietly observed to me, the vellum copies may be more desirable.

The material, on which the Gwynn and Methuen copy of _Helyas_, 1512, was printed, was unusually coa.r.s.e, and this criticism applies to other early English books taken off on that substance. They are a powerful contrast to the Italian productions of the same cla.s.s.