The Book-Collector Part 7

# A judicious one-volume selection preferable.

Th.o.r.eau's _Walden_, 1854.

Thorne's _Environs of London_.

Tottell's _Miscellany_.

Virgil, _Bucolics_ and _Georgics_, by Keightley.

Voltaire's _Candide_, in French.

Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary_.

Walton's _Angler_.

Warton's _English Poetry_, 1871.

Walpole's _Letters_.

Wise's _New Forest_.

# Best edition for engravings.

White's _Selborne_, 1st edition.

Wodroephe's _Spare Hours of a Soldier_, 1623.

Yarrell's _British Birds_.

How pa.s.sing rich one would be with all these, and no more--rich beyond the greatest bibliomaniacs, and beyond the possessors of the rarest and costliest treasures in book-form! Turn over the pages of the most splendid catalogues, and how few one would find to add! Nor would all the before-recited productions appeal to all book-lovers. There are many who would excuse themselves from admitting Rabelais. Some might not particularly care for the works of foreign origin. Some might be courageous enough to avow an indifference to Milton and Spenser, and even a dislike to Bunyan. Still the rule holds good, we think, that all our chosen authors or books have more or less powerful credentials. There remain to be added Books of Reference, as we have pointed out, curiosities, and this or that person's specialisms.

From a strictly practical point of view, the language and sense of any great writer, ancient or modern, may be as well, nay, better, appreciated in a volume bought for a trifle than in a rare and luxurious edition, where the place and time of origin, the type, the paper, and the binding are advent.i.tious accessories--almost _impedimenta_--and the book itself a work of art like a picture or a coin. But with either of the latter it is different, for there the canvas or the metal is an integral portion of the object. For instance, take the better parts of Tennyson. Is it not sufficient to read them in a modest foolscap octavo? Do we require external aids?

The poet is his own best ill.u.s.trator, and if we purchase a pictorial edition, we are apt to find that the author and the artist are at variance in their interpretations.

Translations are always to be carefully avoided by all who can more or less confidently read the author in the original language. We have yet to meet with a version, whether of an ancient or of a modern cla.s.sic, which is thoroughly appreciative and satisfactory. The majority are utterly disappointing and deceptive. It is in the transfer of the idiom and costume that the difficulty and consequent failure lie. No one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for _Gil Blas_), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupa.s.sant, Balzac, can have had an opportunity of forming an adequate and just estimate of those authors. You might nearly as soon expect a Frenchman to relish Butler or d.i.c.kens in their Parisian habiliments.

Such a fact--for a fact it undoubtedly is--opens to our consideration a very large and a very grave problem, since the very limited extent to which the English public is conversant with Greek and Latin, and with even the Latin family of modern languages, makes the admission that so many works of the highest importance and interest are only properly and truly readable in their own tongues tantamount to one that they are not properly and truly readable at all.

Of all forms of translation, the paraphrase is perhaps the worst, so far as an interpretation of the original sense goes, but not the most dangerous if we know it to be what it is, and do not look for more than a general idea of the meaning and plan of the author. To be practically serviceable, an English version of any cla.s.sical or foreign work should be literal, and with the literalness as idiomatic as may be; and if the text to be rendered is in verse, the English equivalent should preferably be in verse without rhyme or in prose.

The object to be attained in these cases is a transfer of the conceptions, notions, or theories of writers from languages which we do not understand to one which we do; and therefore the best translator is he who has absolutely no higher aim than this, and does not aspire to make his task a stalking-horse for his own literary ambition.

There is scarcely an end of the various schemes adopted to convey to us intelligibly and successfully the sentiments and conceits of ancient authors as well as of those of other countries, and, all things considered, a _literal_ version in prose appears to present the fewest disadvantages, for it disarms the translator of the temptation to poetical flights and metrical ingenuity, and brings us nearer to the man and the age to be immediately and primarily studied.

At best, a translation is an indifferent subst.i.tute for the book itself, as it was delivered to the world by some renowned hand, or even by some personage whose individuality is stamped, as in the case of the _Imitatio Christi_ or the _Essays_ of Montaigne, on every sentence indelibly and untransferably, and seems part of the very Latin or French type. An amusing instance occurred in which a gentleman, having heard of the fine style of A Kempis, bought as a present to a friend a copy of the latest English translation! And it is equally futile to look for the essence and spirit of the great Gascon writer in the pages of Florio or Cotton, both of whom, though in unequal measure, to the exigencies of diction or an imperfect conversance with the dialect in which Montaigne wrote sacrificed precious personal idiosyncrasies.

The majority of the popular and current versions of the cla.s.sics are unsatisfying and treacherous, because they have been executed either by under-paid scholars, like Bohn's Series, or by persons who have had a tendency to put themselves in the place of their author.

We may not be very willing to part with our old favourites, such as Chapman's _Homer_, Florio's _Montaigne_, North's _Plutarch_, Shelton's _Don Quixote_, Urquhart's _Rabelais_, and Smollett's _Gil Blas_; but it is to be feared that they must be prized as curiosities and rarities rather than as interpreters and guides. If a thoroughly reliable library of cla.s.sical translations, on as literal a plan as possible, could be formed, it would be a real boon to the public--it would be what Bohn's Series ought to have been. Of course, in the department of translation there are two leading divisions--the ancient and the modern cla.s.sics; and for much the same reason that a story or a _jeu d'esprit_ seldom bears transplanting from one soil to another, both these branches of literature are apt to suffer when they change their garb. Almost every man who writes is influenced by dominant environments, whether he be Greek or Roman, or Oriental, or modern European of whatever nationality; and his mere expressions or sense rendered into a foreign tongue are usually like a painting without a background or an atmosphere. We may range over the whole field from the most ancient times to the most modern, and the same thing manifests itself. Open before me is an ill.u.s.tration which will answer the purpose as well as any other, in the shape of Muirhead's version of the _Vaux de Vire_ of Jean le Houx. At page 105 we have the following stanza:--

"Lorsque me presse l'heure, Je retourne au logis; Ma femme est la qui pleure, Ainsi qu'il m'est aduis, Et me dict en cholere: 'Que fay ie seule au lict?

Est il seant de boire Ainsi jusqu'a minuict?'"

Mr. Muirhead translates thus--

"When late the hour appears, Returning to my home, My wife is there in tears, As I hear when I come.

She greets me testily: 'I lie a-bed alone: Do you thus shamelessly Carouse till midnight's gone?'"

The same kind of paraphrastic dilution runs through the volume; nor is Mr. Muirhead wholly to blame. The original is idiomatic and terse, and he could not find exact equivalents in numerous cases. _Ab uno disce omnes._ But what a privilege it becomes to be able to dispense with interpreters! My admiration of these festive _chansons_ arises from my appreciation of them in their native costume and diction. The Knight of La Mancha was of my opinion herein, for he likened a translation to a piece of Flemish tapestry seen on the wrong side.

A corollary which naturally suggests itself to my mind is that if a familiarity--say, even with Latin and French alone--is expedient on no other account, it is eminently so on this one; and the mastery of the inner sense of a great and famous writer const.i.tutes an ample reward for any expenditure of labour and time in acquiring the language in which he wrote, in making yourself as nearly his countryman as you can. I remember a saying, which may have been a wicked epigram, that the only book in Bohn's Cla.s.sical Library worthy of purchase or perusal was a version of one of Aristotle's works which a gentleman had executed _con amore_ and presented to the publisher.

A voluminous and not very well known body of literary material consists of foreign translations of contemporary English pamphlets of a historical or religious character, from the time of Henry VIII. to the Revolution of 1688, covering the entire Stuart period. They cannot be said to be of primary consequence beyond the proof which they furnish of the interest felt abroad in pa.s.sing transactions in this country, even in such incidents of minor moment as the trial of Elizabeth Cellier in 1680 for an obscure political libel, and the occasional value which they have acquired through the apparent loss of the English originals. We have, for example, a French account of a London ferryman, who, under pretence of conveying pa.s.sengers across the river, strangled them (1586); a second, of the misdoings of a minister at Malden in Ess.e.x (1588); and a third, of the execution of two priests and two laymen at Oxford in 1590, the last existing also in Italian, but none of them known in English.

CHAPTER VII

Transmission of ancient remains--The unique fragment and unique book--Importance of the former--The St. Alban's Grammar-School find--A more recent one or two--Mr. Neal's volume--A tantalising entry in a country catalogue--_The Hundred Merry Tales_--Large volumes only known from small fragments--Blind Harry's _Wallace_--Aberdeen and other Breviaries--The Oxenden Collection of Old English Plays--The idyll of _Adam Bell_, 1536--John Bagford: his unsuspected services to us--Ought we to destroy the old theology?--Other causes of the disappearance of books--Unique books which still preserve their reputation--Rare books which are not rare--Books which are rare and not valuable--Ratcliff, the waste-paper dealer, who had a collection of Caxtons--The bystander's manifold experiences--Narrowness of the circle of first-cla.s.s buyers--The old collector and the new one--Speculative investors.

LOOKING at the imperfect and unconsecutive condition in which much of our most precious early literature has been received by us, we are apt to reflect to how narrow and close an accident we owe two cla.s.ses of existing remains: the unique book and the unique fragment. Of course to term a volume or production unique is a perilous business; the bookseller and the auctioneer may do so _ex officio_; an inexperienced amateur may resort to the term as a pleasant and harmless self-deception; but no responsible writer or critic dares to p.r.o.nounce anything whatever unique without an emphatic _caveat_. We have personally known cases where a publication by one of the early printers was first introduced to notice, and created a sort of sensation, as a mutilated fragment rescued from the binding of another work; this revelation brought to light, after an interval, a second of a different issue; anon at some auction occurred a perfect copy; and now the poor damaged worm-eaten leaves, once so reverently and so tenderly regarded, awake no further interest; the mystery and romance have vanished; and when we examine the book as a whole, we do not find its merits so striking as when we strained our eyes to decipher the old binder's pasteboard.

The FRAGMENT is really an unusually and more than at first credibly important feature in the elder literature. It may be taken, after all deductions for occasional discoveries of the entire work, to be the sole existing voucher for a terribly large section of the more popular books of our forefathers, just as the Stationers' Register is for another. But it is far more than one degree trustworthier and more palpable; for it is, like the _torso_ of an ancient statue, a veritable part of the printed _integer_ and a certificate of its publication and former existence. Many years ago there was a great stir in consequence of the detachment from the binding of another book--Caxton's _Boethius_--in the St. Alban's Grammar-School of a parcel of fragments belonging to books by Caxton; these are now in the British Museum. In the Huth Catalogue are noticed several relics of a similar kind; and indeed scarcely any great library, public or private, is without them. They may be accepted as provisional evidences. A rather curious circ.u.mstance seems to be a.s.sociated with one of the Huth fragments--three leaves of Thomas Howell's _New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets_. The relic once belonged to Thomas Martin of Palgrave, and includes two leaves of signature D, which are deficient in the Capell copy of this work at Cambridge. The latter is described as a quarto; but it would be interesting to discover that from the fragment the text could be completed. The inconvenience attending the examination of rare books in provincial libraries is very great and serious.

A copy of Statham's _Abridgement of the Statutes_, printed at Rouen about 1491, and bound in England, had as flyleaves two sheets of Caxton's _Chronicles of England_, possibly some of the waste found in Caxton's warehouse after his death.

There is a weird fascination about a newly found fragment of some lost literary composition. Only a few months since, in a copy of Cicero's _Rhetorica_, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1546, in the possession of Mr. Neal, quite a number of pieces of wastrel were disclosed on the removal of the covers, and among them portions of English metrical effusions of the period (for the volume must have been bound here). We view this _treasure trove_ wistfully and indulgently; there it is; no mortal eye had fallen on it in the course of three and a half centuries; and how can we be expected to judge its value or quality by the ordinary standard--on an ordinary critical principle? It has come to us like an unlooked-for testamentary windfall. We are not to look at it in the mouth too curiously or fastidiously, or we deserve to have lost it; and it is the very same thing with scores of remains of the kind, brought to light in various directions and ways from season to season, and (to the utmost extent of my power and opportunity) chronicled by me on my accustomed principle.

When I was younger by some thirty years, I received the catalogue of a provincial bookseller, and was sanguine enough to suppose that I should become the happy master at the marked price (7s. 6d.) of No.

2084, which ran as follows:--

"Pynson and others--Specimens of Early Printing, comprising _Twenty Leaves of the Ballad of Robin Hood, &c. &c._, taken from the cover of an old Missal."

No time was lost in giving the order; _but the lot was sold, and the proprietors did not even know who had bought it_. I comforted myself as the fox did. Yet such is the frailty of one's nature, that one cannot refrain, after long, long years, from sentimentalising over it.

There is something so taking in the notion of a tattered, semi-illegible, unappropriated fractional relic, not a trunk even; it fascinates us like a coin of which the legend is almost beyond identification; there is mystery behind it; we may be on the track of a discovery which will help to make us famous.

We have all heard of the _Hundred Merry Tales_, rescued by Mr.

Conybeare in the early years of the century from another book, of which the fragments a.s.sisted to form the covers, and how the treasure was prized till a complete copy occurred in a Continental library and dispelled the charm. It was pointed out many years ago by the present writer (_Old English Jest-Books_, 1864, i., Additional Notes) that Scot, in his _Discovery of Witchcraft_, 1584, quotes the story from this miscellany of the miller's eels, and enabled us, before the Gottingen copy was brought under notice, to complete the text, which is almost undecipherable in the Conybeare (now Huth) one.

The fragmentary state by no means restricts itself to literary items of insignificant bulk. For, as we see, a potential factor in the creation of rare books has been a vast temporary popularity, succeeded by a prolonged period of neglect. The result is before us in the almost total evanescence of thousands of books extending to hundreds of pages. Look at Blind Harry's _Wallace_, a large volume, first printed in folio about 1520; a few leaves are all that remain of the _editio princeps_; and others have totally vanished. Many of us are familiar with the tolerably ample dimensions of the service-books of various uses in the English Church; and yet those of Aberdeen, Hereford, and York survive only in fragments or _torsi_; and the modern reprint of the first was formed from a combination of several imperfect originals. A similar fate has all but overtaken such excessively popular works as Coverdale's Bible, 1535, and Fox's _Martyrs_, 1563, an absolutely perfect copy of either of which I have never beheld.

Henry Oxinden, of Barham in Kent, was the earliest recorded collector of old English plays, and bound up his 122 dramatic possessions in six volumes before 1647. He has left a list of them in his ma.n.u.script common-place book. Tears almost steal into our eyes as we read the t.i.tles: the _Hamlet_ of 1603, the _Taming of the Shrew_, 1594, _Ralph Roister Doister_. Of the first we know well enough the history to date: two copies, both imperfect. The second exists in the unique Inglis, Heber, and Devons.h.i.+re example; it is mentioned in Longman's Catalogue for 1817, from which it was purchased by Rodd, and sold to Mr. Inglis; it is reputed to have once belonged to Pope. The remaining item survives in the t.i.tleless copy at present in the library of Eton College, to which Mr. Briggs presented it in 1818, not on account of the a.s.sociation of Udall the author with that seminary of learning, but, curiously enough, by mere accident.

Among Bagford's collections there is a single leaf of an otherwise unknown impression of Clement Robinson's _Handful of Pleasant Delights_, a 1565 book only hitherto extant in a 1584 reprint. This precious little _morceau_ altogether differs, so far as it goes, from the corresponding portion of the volume now preserved in the National Library.

Let me insist a little on the instructive progress of knowledge in one or two cases. A fragment of a small tract in verse by Lydgate, from the prolific press of Wynkyn de Worde, was proclaimed as an extraordinary and unique accession to our literary stores some eighty years since; it was called _The Treatise of a Gallant_, and had been taken from the covers of a volume of statutes in the library at Nash Court. Some time after, a complete copy of another impression turned up, and ultimately a third, quite distinct from either of the previous two, was discovered in a volume of marvellously rare pieces sold by a Bristol bookseller to the late Mr. Maskell for 300, and by him to the British Museum. Take another case connected with the same press. A piece ent.i.tled _The Remorse of Conscience_, by William Lichfield, parson of All Hallows, Thames Street, who died in 1447, leaving a larger number of MSS. behind him than Lamb once humorously made Coleridge do, long enjoyed the reputation of being a solitary survivor; but at present the world holds four, two recovered from bindings, and a third t.i.tleless, and all, in fact, more or less dilapidated by unappreciative or over-appreciative handlers. Last, not least, the delightful idyll of _Adam Bell_, of which we were so glad on a time to follow the Garrick exemplar, is now proved to have been in type in the reign of Henry VIII.; and a piece of a pre-Reformation issue luckily preserves enough to show how, even in a production probably sold at a penny, it was thought worth while to alter a pa.s.sage where the Pope was originally alluded to.

There are instances where we are deprived of the gratification of beholding so much as a morsel of a book sufficient to establish its former existence in hundreds, if not thousands, of copies. Of the _Four Sons of Aymon_, from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, 1504, not a vestige has so far accrued; yet it once existed, as it is expressly cited in a later issue. So it is, again, with Skelton's _Nigramansir_, printed by De Worde in 1504, which was actually seen by Weston the historian in the hands of Collins the poet, and with _Peter Fabyl's Ghost_ (the Merry Devil of Edmonton) from the same press.

We are accustomed to a.s.sociate with the black-letter fragment the name of JOHN BAGFORD, who, in the closing years of the seventeenth and beginning of the next century, distinguished himself by the zeal with which he collected typographical specimens and memorials. In Bagford's day, the relative value of old books was scarcely at all understood; there was no adequate discrimination between the productions of Caxton and his immediate successors and those of living or recent printers; and, again, which was more excusable, volumes by early divines or by writers of established repute were more generally sought than those by schools of poetry and fiction, which at present command chief attention and respect. If we turn over the pages of an auctioneer's catalogue belonging to that era, we perceive, side by side, items estimated at about the same figure, of which many have become worth perhaps even less, while a few have left their former companions immeasurably behind, and one or two rank among the _livres introuvables_. Those were the days when the cla.s.sics were preserved with the most jealous care, and acquired at extravagant prices, and when our vernacular literature, from the introduction of typography down to the Restoration, was an object of attention to an extremely limited const.i.tuency, and could be obtained for a song.

The Bagford collection of t.i.tle-pages and fragments formerly const.i.tuted part of the Harleian ma.n.u.scripts in the British Museum, but has been chiefly transferred to the printed book department of recent years. It resembles a Typographical Cemetery, a charnel-house of books crowded together without respect to their subject-matter or their literary rank: the leaf of a Caxton, another of a valueless legal treatise, the t.i.tle-page of _Romeus and Julietta_, on which Shakespeare founded, as the phrase goes, his own play, and a broadsheet preserved entire, there being no more of it. But Bagford, who helped Dr. Moore, Bishop of Ely, and perchance Lord Oxford, to some of their rarities, does not stand alone. He had many followers; but the scale of operations diminished as the orthodox collector multiplied and prices rose. Sir John Fenn, editor of the _Paston Letters_, whom we have named above, was a disciple, however, and Martin of Palgrave was another. Many years since, for a proposed new _Biographia Britannica_ by Murray of Albemarle Street, the present writer collected all the known particulars of Bagford himself, who spent his last days in the Charterhouse. His episcopal client or patron died in 1714.

Before we condemn these biblioclasts, let us recollect one thing. It is not so much that they have rendered books imperfect by the abstraction of leaves or t.i.tle-pages, as that they have actually preserved the sole testimony for the existence of hundreds of books, tracts, and broadsheets of which we should have otherwise known nothing, amid the wholesale destruction of early literature, which was not arrested till the close of the last century, and still proceeds in a modified form and degree. Not many years since the _Troy-Book_ printed by Caxton was discovered hanging up in a water-closet at Harrogate; a portion had disappeared, but the remainder was secured, and was sold to a dealer in Manchester for thirty guineas. It must be, and is, Bagford's apology that he sacrificed to his typographical scheme material which was almost universally neglected, and for which there might seem, two hundred years ago, scarcely any prospect of a future call. Yet, oddly enough, this very person was one of the pioneers, by his labours and example, in bringing back a taste for the older English school; he appeared at a juncture when sufficient time had elapsed for the destruction by various agencies of a vast proportion of the products of the press; but until the fas.h.i.+on, which he and others set, had begun to spread, it remained unknown how much was reduced from its original volume, and how much had perished. We have the less pretence for censuring the biblioclasts of the past, who could only use the eyes and experience of their own epoch, when instances are reported from time to time of the same ruthless practices even by those who might have been expected to know better; and there is more than one way of viewing the present notorious tendency to exterminate the old theology on the plea that it is worthless, since a generation may arise which will upbraid us for having converted to pulp this part of our inheritance, till it comes at last to survive in a stray leaf here or a mangled fragment there.

An altogether different quarter from which a result conducive to the shrinkage or disappearance of copies of early works has arisen is the print-collecting movement, involving the devastation of the innumerable volumes which contain portraits, frontispieces, and other engravings, and the more than incidental risk of the consignment of the unvalued residue to the waste-basket; and it may be mentioned that within our personal knowledge hundreds upon hundreds of scarce old books have been destroyed by editors, lexicographers, and other literary workers, to save the trouble of transcribing extracts. It might be impossible to exhaust the variety of ways in which an extraordinarily large body of publications of former days has been reduced or raised to the position of rarities of graduated rank.

After all these ages, all the indefatigable researches which have been undertaken for profit or for pleasure, all the libraries which have been formed and dispersed, true it is that the Unique volume, which of course enjoys its designation only till a second copy is producible, still survives in such abundance, that one, if it were otherwise feasible, might form a library composed of nothing else. Does it not become curious to consider to what lottery, as it were, we owe them--owe their arrest just at the dividing line between living and lost literature? Whatever may be the cause, we have hitherto failed to trace duplicates of the metrical _s.h.i.+p of Fools_, 1509, _Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-Book_, 1569, Watson's _Teares of Fancie_, 1593, _Venus and Adonis_, 1593, 1599, and 1617, and of _Lucrece_, 1598.

Copies of these later productions must have found their way to Shakespeare's country at the time. Malone met with the _Venus and Adonis_ of 1593 at Manchester in 1805, and another collector with that of 1594 in the same s.h.i.+re; and the Florio's _Montaigne_ of 1603, the only volume with the poet's autograph yet seen, was long preserved at Smethwick, near Birmingham. It was at Manchester, too, that the copy of the _Tragedy of Richard III._, 1594, came to light as recently as 1881. Several of the works of Nicholas Breton and Samuel Rowlands survive in isolated copies. Upwards of a century has elapsed since a medical man picked up in Ayrs.h.i.+re in 1788 an a.s.semblage of quarto tracts belonging to the ancient vernacular literature of Scotland and to the parent press of Edinburgh; and not a whisper has been raised to suggest the existence of a second copy of any of them, which is to be regretted so far, as some are imperfect. During years on years, the authorities at the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, kept this inestimable relic in a cupboard under the stairs. In the find at Lamport Hall, Northamptons.h.i.+re, thirty or forty years since, there were items upon items utterly unknown. It was the same at the Wolfreston sale in 1856. It goes without saying that among the Heber stores the uniques were barely numerable; and many yet preserve their reputation as such. Mr. Caldecott, Mr. Jolley, and Mr. Corser were lucky in falling in with scores of tracts of the first order of rarity. No one has beheld the double of the _Jests of the Widow Edith_, purchased by Lord Fitzwilliam for 3 10s. at West's sale in 1773, and formerly Lord Oxford's; and the citation of the last name prompts the remark that many a book in the Harleian Library still awaits recovery, a.s.suming the description in the catalogue to be correct. On the contrary, there are serious warnings to enthusiasts not to rely too implicitly on the reputation of a volume for uniqueness or high rarity in view of such phenomena as the occurrence within a short period of each other at the same mart in 1896 of two copies of the first edition of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, printed by Caxton. Here was a case where the publicity afforded to these matters brought out a second example, which the owner found to be worth a small estate.

The writer's publication, _Fugitive Tracts_, 1493-1700, 2 vols., 1875, very aptly and powerfully ill.u.s.trates the present bearings of our subject. Of the sixty pieces there reproduced, two-thirds appear to be unique, and only four are traceable in the Heber Catalogue. Yet many of the items are of historical or biographical importance, and were, in fact, selected from a much larger number with that view; which seems to be tantamount to a recognition of the truth, that, enormous as is the total surviving body of early English and Scotish Literature, it represents in some sections or cla.s.ses only a salvage of what was once in type, or, to speak more by the card, of what we have so far been able to recover.

There are rare books which, paradoxical as it may seem, are not rare.