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 Books and bookmen / 
 
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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924031 034931 
 
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 # 
 
 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 9 
 
VENETIIS, ALDUS, 1559. 
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF BINDING FRoM THE LIBRARY OF GROLTER. 
 
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 
 
 By ANDREW LANG 
 
 Author of " The Library" etc. 
 
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 GEORGE J. COOMBES 
 
 
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 Copyright, 1886, 
 By GEORGE J. COOMBES. 
 
 CamlititiBe : l^rinttb at tl&e Uiljet^Sitie ^te0^. 
 
 H II 5j 
 U -.-i \' \ H U 
 /, JllH.l " 
 
To 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 You took my vagrom essays in, 
 You found them shelter over sea; 
 
 Beyond the /Itlantic's foam and din 
 
 You took my vagrom essays in! 
 
 If any reader there they win 
 
 To you he owes them, not to me.. 
 
 You took my vagrom essays in, 
 You found them shelter over sea! 
 
pttfatot^ 0ott 
 
 AM asked to say a few words of 
 introduction to this little volume 
 of collected pieces, the swan-song 
 of a book-hunter. , The author 
 does not book-hunt any more ; he 
 leaves the sport to others, and 
 with catalogues he lights a hum- 
 ble cigarette. The game has grown too scarce ; 
 the preserves are for the rich ; the cheap book-stalls 
 hold little but ' The Death of Abel ' and ' Sermons ' 
 by the Rev. Josiah Gowles, or ' Charles XII.' by 
 M. de Voltaire. I have ceased to hope for better 
 luck ; let younger or more sanguine men pursue the 
 fugitive tract and the rare quarto. I can pass the 
 very dirtiest stall and never turn over a page ; I am 
 too wise to be lured by cheap Elzevirs, those snares 
 of inexperience. As the old cricketer hangs his bat 
 in the hall, and, for the future, looks on at "the 
 game he has not strength to play ; " as the veteran 
 angler, afraid of rheumatism, keeps his feet far from 
 the water-side, so I am taught to avoid sales by auc- 
 
vi Prefatory Note 
 
 tion, and Sotheby's knows me no more. Adieu, 
 paniers, the vintaging is over ; we go no more a-rov- 
 ing, by alley, and court, and lane. Others may wan- 
 der, and linger, loiter, and hope, and buy. For my 
 part, the first editions of Tate and Brady's singular 
 psalter is my only purchase this twelvemonth. It 
 sings of simple pieties, and is very curiously bound 
 in black morocco, with heads of angels, sunbeams, 
 and other appropriate emblems. My books are all 
 German treatises on Mythology, stoutly half bound 
 in rude leather. From these I learn to know (like 
 Cornelius Agrippa) "the vanity of science ; " in these 
 I study the vagaries of the learned, the follies of the 
 wise. No more morocco for me, or tooling, nor first 
 editions ; all these are vanity and (as a rule) bad 
 bargains. Be not in a hurry to buy, ye young men 
 and maidens, or your shelves, like mine, will be over- 
 crowded with the melancholy harvest of inexperience 
 and young desire. In prefaces, and places where 
 they sing, here foUoweth the Ballade : — 
 
 S&aHa&e of tlje iSeal anb %inm\ 
 
 (double refrain.) 
 
 O visions of salmon tremendous, 
 Of trout of unusual weight, 
 Of waters that wander as Ken does. 
 Ye come through the horji Gate ! 
 But the skies that hring never a ' spate,' 
 But the flies that catch up<in a thorn, 
 But the creel that is barren affreight, 
 Through the portals of horn! 
 
Prefatory Note vii 
 
 O dreams of the Fates that attend us 
 
 IVith prints in the earliest state, 
 
 O bargains in books that they send us. 
 
 Ye come through the Ivory Gate! 
 
 But the tome of a dubious date. 
 
 But the quarto that's tattered and torn, 
 
 And bereft of a title and date. 
 
 Through the portals of horn ! 
 
 O dreams of the tongues that commend us, 
 Of crowns for the laureate pate, 
 Of a Public to buy and befriend us, 
 Ye come through the Ivory Gate! 
 But the critics that slash us and slate. 
 But the people that hold us in scorn, 
 But the sorrow, the scathe, and the hate. 
 Through the portals of horn ! 
 
 Fair dreams of things golden and great. 
 Ye come through the Ivory Gate; 
 But the facts that are bleak and forlorn. 
 Through the portals of horn ! 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prefatory Note— with a Ballade of the Real 
 
 and Ideal v 
 
 I. Literary Forgeries 13 
 
 II. Parish Registers . . . . . _J7 
 
 ///. Bookmen at Rome ^y 
 
 ly. Bibliomania in France . ... 69 
 
 V. Bookbindings g^ 
 
 VI. El:{evirs log 
 
 VII. Some Japanese Bogie-Books . . . iji 
 
 VIII. A Bookman's Purgatory . . . 1^9 
 
 Eni^OY — a Ballade of the Unattainable . . ij^ 
 
 Index 775 
 
The Initial letters, Head, and Tail-pieces, were designed and 
 drawn especially for this volume, hy Geo. R. Halm. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 yenetiis, Aldus, 1339. — Fac-Simile of Binding 
 from the Library of Grolier . . . Frontispiece 
 
 Binding, with the Arms of Madame de Pompa- 
 dour 89 
 
 The true and false El:{evirian Spheres . . ii^ 
 
 Fac-Simile of Title-Page to Thomce a Kempis de Im- 
 itatione Christi 116 
 
 The Elzevir Device of the " Sage" . . .120 
 
 Fac-Simile of engraved Title-Page to " Le Pastissier 
 Frangois," 165^ 121 
 
 Fac-Simile of full Title to the same work . . 12^ 
 
 Illustrations to Japanese Bogie-Books : 
 
 1. Japanese Children 135 
 
 2. A Storm-Fiend 139 
 
 3. A Snow Bogie ..... 143 
 
 4. The Simulacrum Vulgare . . . 145 
 
 5. A Well and Water Bogie . . . 149 
 
 6. Raising the Wind .... 1^3 
 
 7. A Chink and Creroice Bogie . . . /jfj 
 
Utzmtv forgeries 
 
Uttvatv jforgeriejs 
 
 N the whole amusing history of im- 
 postures, there is no more divert- 
 ing chapter than that which deals 
 with literary frauds. None con- 
 tains a more grotesque revelation 
 of the smallness and the com- 
 plexity of human nature, and none 
 — not even the records of the 
 Tichborne trial, and its results — displag ;s more 
 pleasantly the depths of mortal credulity. The lit- 
 erary forger is usually a clever man, and it is neces- 
 sary for him to be at least on a level with the liter- 
 ary knowledge and critical science of his time. But 
 how low that level commonly appears to be ! Think 
 of the success of Ireland, a boy of eighteen ; think 
 of Chatterton ; think of Surtees of Mainsforth, who 
 took in the great Magician himself, the father of all 
 them that are skilled in ballad lore. How simple 
 were the artifices of these ingenious impostors, their 
 resources how scanty ; how hand-to-mouth and im- 
 provised was their whole procedure ! Times have 
 altered a little. Jo Smith's revelation and famed 
 " Golden Bible" only carried captive the polygamous 
 populus qui vult decipi, reasoners a little lower than 
 
1 6 Books and Bookmen 
 
 even the believers in Anglo-Israel. The Moabite 
 Ireland, who lately gave Mr. Shapira the famous 
 MS. of Deuteronomy, but did not delude M. Cler- 
 mont Ganneau, was doubtless a smart man ; he was, 
 however, a little too indolent, a little too easily satis- 
 fied. He might have procured better and less rec- 
 ognizable materials than his old " synagogue rolls ; " 
 in short, he took rather too little trouble, and came 
 to the wrong market. A literary forgery ought 
 first, perhaps, to appeal to the credulous, and only 
 slowly should it come, with the prestige of having al- 
 ready won many believers, before the learned world. 
 The inscriber of the Phoenician inscriptions in Bra- 
 zil (of all places) was a clever man. His account of 
 the voyage of Hiram to South America probably 
 gained some credence in Brazil, while in England it 
 only carried captive Mr. Day, author of ' The Pre- 
 historic Use of Iron and Steel.' But the Brazilians, 
 from lack of energy, have dropped the subject, and 
 the Phoenician inscriptions of Brazil are less suc- 
 cessful, after all, than the Moabite stone,- about 
 which one begins to entertain disagreeable doubts. 
 
 The motives of the literary forger are curiously 
 mixed ; but they may, perhaps, be analyzed roughly 
 into piety, greed, " push," and love of fun. Many 
 literary forgeries have been pious frauds, perpe- 
 trated in the interests of a church, a priesthood, or 
 a dogma. Then we have frauds of greed, as if, for 
 example, a forger should offer his wares for a mil- 
 lion of money to the British Museum ; or when he 
 tries to palm off his Samaritan Gospel on the "Bad 
 Samaritan " of the Bodleian. Next we come to 
 playful frauds, or^ frauds in their origin playful,, like 
 (perhaps) the Shakespearian forgeries of Ireland, the 
 
Literary Forgeries ly 
 
 supercheries of Prosper M^rim6e, the sham antique 
 ballads (very spirited poems in their way) of Sur- 
 tees, and many other examples. Occasionally it has 
 happened that forgeries, begun for the mere sake 
 of exerting the imitative faculty, and of raising a 
 laugh against the learned, have been persevered 
 with_in earnest. The humorous deceits are, of 
 course, the most pardonable, though it is difficult to 
 forgive the young archaeologist who took in his own 
 father with false Greek inscriptions. But this story 
 may be a mere fable amongst archaeologists, who 
 are constantly accusing each other of all manner 
 of crimes. Then there are forgeries by "pushing" 
 men, who hope to get a reading for poems which, if 
 put forth as new, would be neglected. There remain 
 forgeries of which the motive is so complex as to 
 remain forever obscure. We may generally ascribe 
 them to love of notoriety in the forger ; such noto- 
 riety as Macpherson won by his dubious pinchbeck 
 Ossian. More difficult still to understand are the 
 forgeries which real scholars have committed or con- 
 nived at for the purpose of supporting some opinion 
 which they held with earnestness. There is a vein 
 of madness and self-deceit in the character of the 
 man who half-persuades himself that his own false 
 facts are true. The Payne Collier case is thus one 
 of the most difficult in the world to explain, for it is 
 equally hard to suppose that Mr. Payne Collier was 
 taken in by the notes on the folio he gave the world, 
 and to hold that he was himself guilty of forgery to 
 support his own opinions. 
 
 The further we go back in the history of literary 
 forgeries, the more (as is natural) do we find them 
 to be of a pious or priestly character. When the 
 
1 8 Books and Bookmen 
 
 clergy alone can write, only the clergy can forge. 
 In such ages people are interested chiefly in proph- 
 ecies and warnings, or, if they are careful about 
 literature, it is only when literature contains some 
 kind of title-deeds. Thus Solon is said to have 
 forged a line in the Homeric catalogue of the ships 
 for the purpose of proving that Salamis belonged to 
 Athens. But the great antique forger, the " Ionian 
 father of the rest," is, doubtless, Onomacritus. 
 There exists, to be sure, an Egyptian inscription 
 professing to be of the fourth, but probably of the 
 twenty-sixth, dynasty. The Germans hold the lat- 
 ter view ; the French, from patriotic motives, main- 
 tain the opposite opinion. But this forgery is 
 scarcely "literary." I never can think of Onomac- 
 ritus without a certain respect : he began the forg- 
 ing business so very early, and was (apart from this 
 failing) such an imposing and magnificently respect- 
 able character. The scene of the error and the de- 
 tection of Onomacritus presents itself always to me 
 in a kind of pictorial vision. It is night, the clear, 
 windless night of Athens ; not of the Athens whose 
 ruins remain, but of the ancient city that sank in 
 ashes during the invasion of Xerxes. The time 
 is the time of Pisistratus the successful tyrant; the 
 scene is the ancient temple, the stately house of 
 Athen^, the fane where the sacred serpent was fed 
 on cakes, and the primeval olive-tree grew beside 
 the well of Posidon. The darkness of the temple's 
 inmost shrine is lit by the ray of one earthen lamp. 
 You dimly discern the majestic form of a venerable 
 man stooping above a coffer of cedar and ivory, 
 carved with the exploits of the goddess, and with 
 boustrophedon inscriptions. In his hair this archaic 
 
Literary Forgeries 19 
 
 Athenian wears the badge of the golden grasshop- 
 per. You never saw a finer man. He is Onomac- 
 ritus, the famous poet, and the trusted guardian of 
 the ancient oracles of Musaeus and Bacis. What is 
 he doing .' Why, he takes from the fragrant cedar 
 coffer certain thin stained sheets of lead, whereon 
 are scratched the words of doom, the prophecies of 
 the Greek Thomas the Rhymer. From his bosom 
 he draws another thin sheet of lead, also stained 
 and corroded. On this he scratches, in imitation 
 of the old "Cadmeian letters," a prophecy that "the 
 isles near Lemnos shall disappear under the sea." 
 So busy is he in this task, that he does not hear 
 the rustle of a chiton behind, and suddenly a man's 
 hand is on his shoulder ! Onomacritus turns in hor- 
 ror. Has the goddess punished him for tampering 
 with the oracles .' No ; it is Lasus, the son of Her- 
 miones, a rival poet, who has caught the keeper of 
 the oracles in the very act of a pious forgery. (He- 
 rodotus, vii. 6.) Pisistratus expelled the learned 
 Onomacritus from Athens, but his conduct proved, 
 in the long run, highly profitable to the reputations 
 of Musaeus and Bacis. Whenever their oracles were 
 not fulfilled, people said, " Oh, i/iat is merely one of 
 the interpolations of Onomacritus ! " and the mat- 
 ter was passed over. This Onomacritus is said to 
 have been one of the original editors of Homer un- 
 der Pisistratus. He lived long, never repented, and, 
 many years later, deceived Xerxes into attempting 
 his disastrous expedition. This he did by " keeping 
 back the oracles unfavorable to the barbarians," and 
 putting forward any that seemed favorable. The 
 children of Pisistratus believed in him, as spiritual- 
 ists go on giving credit to exposed and exploded 
 " mediums." 
 
20 Books and Bookmen 
 
 Having once practised deceit, it is to be feared 
 that Onomacritus acquired a liking for the practice 
 of literary forgery, which, as will be seen in the case 
 of Ireland, grows on a man like dram-drinking. 
 Onomacritus is generally charged with the author- 
 ship of the poems which the ancients usually attrib- 
 uted to Orpheus, the companion of Jason. Perhaps 
 the most interesting of the poems of Orpheus to us 
 would have been his ' Inferno,' or Kara/Jao-is h SZov, 
 in which the poet gave his own account of his de- 
 scent to Hades in search of Eurydice. But only 
 a dubious reference to one adventure in the journey 
 is quoted by Plutarch. Whatever the exact truth 
 about the Orphic poems may be (the reader may 
 pursue the hard and fruitless quest in Lobeck's 
 ' Aglaopha^us '), it seems certain that the period 
 between ' Pisistratus and Pericles, like the Alexan- 
 drian time, was a great age for literary forgeries. 
 But of all these frauds the greatest (according to 
 the most " advanced " theory on the subject) is the 
 " Forgery of the Iliad and Odyssey ! " The opin- 
 ions of the scholars who hold that the Iliad and 
 Odyssey, which we know and which Plato knew, are 
 not the epics known to Herodotus, but later com- 
 positions, are not very clear nor consistent. But it 
 seems to be vaguely held that about the time of 
 Pericles there arose a kind of Greek Macpherson. 
 This ingenious impostor worked on old epic mate- 
 rials, but added many new ideas of his own about 
 the gods, converting the Iliad (the poem which we 
 now possess) into a kind of mocking romance, a 
 Greek Don Quixote. He also forged a number of 
 pseudo-archaic words, tenses, and expressions, and 
 added the numerous references to iron, a metal prac- 
 
Literary Forgeries 21 
 
 tically unknown, it is asserted, to Greece before the 
 sixth century. If we are to believe, with Professor 
 Paley, that the chief incidents of the Iliad and Odys- 
 sey were unknown to Sopliocles, iEschylus, and the 
 contemporary vase-painters, we must also suppose 
 that the Greek Macpherson invented most of the 
 situations in the Odyssey and Iliad. According to 
 this theory the "cooker" of the extant epics was 
 far the greatest and most successful of all literary 
 impostors, for he deceived the whole world, from 
 Plato downwards, till he was exposed by Mr. Paley. 
 There are times when one is inclined to believe that 
 Plato must have been the fofger himself, as Bacon 
 (according to the other hypothesis) was the author 
 of Shakespeare's plays. Thus " Plato the wise, and 
 large-browed Verulara," would be " the first of those 
 who " forge ! Next to this prodigious imposture, 
 no doubt, the false ' Letters of Phalaris ' are the 
 most important of classical forgeries. And these 
 illustrate, like most literary forgeries, the extreme 
 worthlessness of literary taste as a criterion of the 
 authenticity of writings. For what man ever was 
 more a man of taste than Sir William Temple, "the 
 most accompUshed writer of the age," whom Mr. 
 Boyle never thought of without calling to mind 
 those happy lines of Lucretius, — 
 
 " Quern tu, dea, tempore in omni 
 Omnibus ornatum voluisti excellere rebus." 
 
 Well, the ornate and excellent Temple held that 
 "the Epistles of Phalaris have more race, more 
 spirit, more force of wit and genius, than any others 
 he had ever seen, either ancient or modern." So 
 much for what Bentley calls Temple's "Nicety of 
 
22 Books and Bookmen 
 
 Tast." The greatest of English scholars readily 
 proved that Phalaris used (in the spirit of prophecy) 
 an idiom which did not exist to write about mat- 
 ters in his time not invented, but " many centuries 
 younger than he." So let the Nicety of Temple's 
 Tast and its absolute failure be a warning to us 
 when we read (if read we must) German critics 
 who deny Homer's claim to this or that passage, 
 and Plato's right to half his accepted dialogues, on 
 grounds of literary taste. And farewell, as Herodo- 
 tus would have said, to the Letters of Phalaris, of 
 Socrates, of Plato ; to the Lives of Pythagoras and 
 of Homer, and to all the other uncounted literary 
 forgeries of the classical world, from the Sibylline 
 prophecies to the battle of the frogs and mice. 
 
 Early Christian forgeries were, naturally, pious. 
 We have the apocryphal Gospels, and the works of 
 Dionysius the Areopagite, which were not exposed 
 till Erasmus's time. Perhaps the most important of 
 pious forgeries (if forgery be exactly the right word 
 in this case) was that of 'The False Decretals.' 
 " Of a sudden," says Milman, speaking of the pon- 
 tificate of Nicholas I. {ob. 867 A. d.), " Of a sudden 
 was promulgated, unannounced, without preparation, 
 not absolutely unquestioned, but apparently over- 
 awing at once all doubt, a new Code, which to the 
 former authentic documents added fifty-nine letters 
 and decrees of the twenty oldest Popes from Clem- 
 ent to Melchiades, and the donation of Constantine, 
 and in the third part, among the decrees of the 
 Popes and of the Councils from Sylvester to Greg- 
 ory n., thirty-nine false decrees, and the acts of 
 several unauthentic Councils." "The whole is com- 
 posed," Milman adds, "with an air of profound piety 
 
Literary Forgeries 2^ 
 
 and reverence." The False Decretals naturally as- 
 sert the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. " They 
 are full and minute on Church Property " (they were 
 sure to be that) ; in fact, they remind one of an- 
 other forgery, pious and Aryan, ' The Institutes of 
 Vishnu.' " Let him not levy any tax upon Brah- 
 mans," says the Brahman forger of the Institutes, 
 which "came from the mouths of Vishnu," as he 
 sat " clad in a yellow robe, imperturbable, decorated 
 with all kinds of gems, while Lakshmi was stroking 
 his feet with her soft palms." The Institutes took 
 excellent care of Brahmans and cows, as the Decre- 
 tals did of the Pope and the clergy, and the earliest 
 Popes had about as much hand in the Decretals as 
 Vishnu had in his Institutes. Hommenay, in ' Pan- 
 tagruel,' did well to have the praise of the Decre- 
 tals sung by Jilles belles, blondelettes, doulcettes, et de 
 bonne grace. And then Hommenay drank to the 
 Decretals and their very good health. "O dives 
 D^cretales, tant par vous est le vin bon bon trouv6" 
 — " O divine Decretals, how good you make good 
 wine taste ! " " The miracle would be greater," said 
 Pantagruel, "if they made bad wine taste good." 
 The most that can now be done by the devout for 
 the Decretals is "to palliate the guilt of their for- 
 ger," whose name, like that of the Greek Macpher- 
 son, is unknown. 
 
 If the early Christian centuries, and the Middle 
 Ages, were chiefly occupied with pious frauds, with 
 forgeries of gospels, epistles, and Decretals,- the im- 
 postors of the Renaissance were busy with classical 
 imitations. After the Turks took Constantinople, 
 when the learned Greeks were scattered all over 
 Southern Europe, when many genuine classical 
 
24 Books and Bookmen 
 
 manuscripts were recovered by the zeal of scholars, 
 when the plays of Menander were seen once, and 
 then lost forever, it was natural that literary forgery 
 should thrive. As yet scholars were eager rather 
 than critical ; they were collecting and unearthing, 
 rather than minutely examining the remains of clas- 
 sic literature. They had found so much, and every 
 year were finding so much more, that no discovery 
 seemed impossible. The lost books of Livy and 
 Cicero, the songs of Sappho, the perished plays of 
 Sophocles and ^schylus might any day be brought 
 to light. This was the very moment for the literary 
 forger ; but it is improbable that any forgery of the 
 period has escaped detection. Three or four years 
 ago some one published a book to show that the 
 ' Annals of Tacitus ' were written by Poggio Brac- 
 ciolini. This paradox gained no more converts than 
 the bolder hypothesis of Hardouin. The theory of 
 Hardouin was that all the ancient classics were pro- 
 ductions of a learned company which worked, in the 
 thirteenth century, under Severus Archontius. Har- 
 douin made some exceptions to his sweeping gen- 
 eral theory. Cicero's writings were genuine, he ad- 
 mitted, so were Pliny's, of Virgil the Georgics ; the 
 satires and epistles of Horace, Herodotus, and Ho- 
 mer. All the rest of the classics were a magnificent 
 forgery of the illiterate thirteenth century, which 
 had scarce any Greek, and whose Latin, abundant 
 in quantity, in quality left much to be desired. 
 
 Among literary forgers, or passers of false liter- 
 ary coin, at the time of the Renaissance, Annius is 
 the most notorious. Annius (his real vernacular 
 name was Nanni), was born at Viterbo, in 1432. 
 He became a Dominican, and (after publishing his 
 
Literary Forgeries 25 
 
 f orged classics) rose to the position of Mattre du ' 
 Palais to the Pope, Alexander Borgia. With Cssar 
 Borgia, it is said that Annius was never on good 
 terms. He persisted in preaching "the sacred 
 truth" to his highness, and this (according to the 
 detractors of Annius) was the only use he had for 
 the sacred truth. There is a legend that Cassar 
 Borgia poisoned the preacher (1502), but people 
 usually brought that charge against Caesar when 
 any one in any way connected with him happened 
 to die. Annius wrote on the History and Empire of 
 the Turks, who took Constantinople in his time ; 
 but he is better remembered by his ' Antiquitatum 
 Variarum Volumina XVH. cum comment. Fr. Jo. 
 Annii.' These fragments of antiquity included, 
 among many other desirable things, the historical 
 writings of Fabius Pictor, the predecessor of Livy. 
 One is surprised that Annius, when he had his hand 
 in, did not publish choice extracts from the ' Libri 
 Lintei,' the ancient Roman annals, written on linen, 
 and preserved in the temple of Juno Moneta. Among 
 the other discoveries of Annius were treatises by 
 Berosus, Manetho, Cato, an d poems by Archilochus. c/cxxC^i, 
 Opinion has been divided as to whether Annius was 
 wholly a knave, or whether he was himself imposed "T 
 upon. Or, again, whether he had some genuine ^■■'■^' 
 fragments, and eked them out with his own inven- 
 tions. It is observed that he did not dovetail the 
 really genuine relics of Berosus and Manetho into 
 the works attributed to them. This may be ex- 
 plained as the result of ignorance or of cunning ; 6{' /^ 
 there can be no certain inference. " Even the DO' 
 
 
 minicans," as Bayle says, admit that Annius's dis- ^_ [ 
 coveries are falseTtEough they excuse them by aver- .'iS^fiJ!^- 
 
26 Books and Bookmen 
 
 ring that the pious man was the dupe of others. 
 But a learned Lutheran has been found to defend 
 the ' Antiquitates ' of the Dominican. 
 
 It is amusing to remember that the great and eru- 
 dite Rabelais was taken in by some pseudo-classi- 
 cal fragments. The joker of jokes was hoaxed. He 
 published, says Mr. Besant, " a couple of Latin for- 
 geries, which he proudly called ' Ex reliquiis vene- 
 randae antiquitatis,' consisting of a pretended will 
 and a contract." The name of the book is ' Ex re- 
 liquiis venerandse antiquitatis. Lucci Cuspidii Tes- 
 tamentum. Item contractus venditionis antiquis 
 Romanorum temporibus initus. Lugduni apud Gry- 
 phium (pet. in 8°).' Pomponius Lsetus and Jovianus 
 Pontanus were apparently authors of the hoax. 
 
 Socrates said that he " would never lift up his 
 hand against his father Parmenides." The fathers 
 of the Church have not been so respectfully treated 
 by literary forgers during the Renaissance. The 
 ' Flowers of Theology ' of St. Bernard, which were 
 to be a primrose path ad gaudia Paradisi (Stras- 
 burg, 1478), were really, it seems, the production of 
 Jean de Garlande. Athanasius, his ' Eleven Books 
 concerning the Trinity,' are attributed to Vigilius, a 
 colonial Bishop in Northern Africa. Among false 
 classics were two comic Latin fragments with which 
 Muretus beguiled Scaliger. Meursius has suffered, 
 posthumously, from the attribution to him of a very 
 disreputable volume indeed. In 1583, a book on 
 ' Consolations,' by Cicero, was published at Venice, 
 containing the reflections with which Cicero con- 
 soled himself for the death of Tullia. It might as 
 well have been attributed to Mrs. Blimber, and de- 
 scribed as replete with the thoughts with which that 
 
Literary Forgeries 2y 
 
 lady supported herself under the affliction of never 
 having seen Cicero or his Tusculan villa. The real 
 author was Charles Sigonius, of Modena. Sigonius 
 really did discover some Ciceronian fragments, and, 
 if he was not the builder, at least he was the restorer 
 of Tully's lofty theme. In 1693, Frangois Nodot, 
 conceiving the world had not already enough of 
 Petronius Arbiter, published an edition, in which he 
 added to the works of that lax though accomplished 
 author. Nodot's story was that he had found a 
 whole MS. of Petrarch, at Belgrade, and he pub- 
 lished it with a translation of his own Latin into 
 French. Still dissatisfied with the existing supply 
 of Petronius' humor was Marchena, a writer of 
 Spanish books, who printed at Bale a translation 
 and edition of a new fragment. This fragment was 
 very cleverly inserted in a presumed lacuna. In 
 spite of the ironical style of the preface many schol- 
 ars were taken in by this fragment, and their cre- 
 dulity led Marchena to find a new fragment (of Ca- 
 tullus this time) at Herculaneum. Eichstadt, a Jena 
 professor, gravely announced that the same frag- 
 ment existed in a MS. in the University library, 
 and, under pretence of giving various readings, cor- 
 rected Marchena's faults in prosody. Another sham 
 Catullus, by Corradino, a Venetian, was published 
 in 1738. 
 
 Themost famous forgeries of .the eighteenth cen- 
 tury_were those of Macpherson, Chatterton, and Ire- 
 land. Space (fortunately) does not permit a discus- 
 sion of the Ossianic question. That fragments of 
 Ossianic legend (if not of Ossianic poetry) survive 
 in oral Gaelic traditions, seems certain. How much 
 Macpherson knew of these, and how little he used 
 
28 Books and Bookmen 
 
 them in the bombastic prose which Napoleon loved 
 (and spelled " Ocean "), it is next to impossible to 
 discover. The case of Chatterton is too well known 
 to need much more than mention. The most ex- 
 traordinary poet for his years who ever lived began 
 with the forgery of a sham feudal pedigree for Mr. 
 Bergum, a pewterer. Ireland started on his career 
 in much the same way, unless Ireland's * Confes- 
 sions ' be themselves a fraud, based on what he 
 knew about Chatterton. Once launched in his ca- 
 reer, Chatterton drew endless stores of poetry from 
 " Rowley's MS." and the muniment chest in St. 
 Mary Redcliffe's. Jacob Bryant believed in them 
 and wrote an ' Apology ' for the credulous. Bryant, 
 who believed in his own system of mythology, might 
 have believed in anything. When Chatterton sent 
 his "discoveries" to Walpole (himself somewhat of 
 a mediaeval imitator). Gray and Mason detected the 
 imposture, and Walpole, his feelings as an antiquary 
 injured, took no more notice of the boy. Chatter- 
 ton's death was due to his precocity. Had his gen- 
 ius come to him later, it would have found him 
 wiser, and better able to command the fatal demon 
 of intellect, for which he had to find work, like Mi- 
 chael Scott in the legend. 
 
 The end of the eighteenth century, which had 
 been puzzled or diverted by the Chatterton and 
 Macpherson frauds, witnessed also the great and fa- 
 mous Shakespearian forgeries. We shall never know 
 the exact truth about the fabrication of the Shake- 
 spearian documents, and 'Vortigern' and the other 
 plays. We have, indeed, the confession of the cul- 
 prit : habemus confitentem reum, but Mr. W. H. Ire- 
 land was a liar and a solicitor's clerk, so versatile 
 
Literary Forgeries 29 
 
 and accomplished that we cannot always believe 
 him, even when he is narratTng the tale of his own 
 iniquities. The temporary but wide and turbulent 
 success of the Ireland forgeries suggests the disa- 
 greeable reflection that criticism and learning are 
 (or a hundred years ago were)' worth very little as 
 literary touchstones. A polished and learned so- 
 ciety, a society devoted to Shakespeare and to the 
 stage, was taken in by a boy of eighteen. Young 
 Ireland not only palmed off his sham documents, 
 most makeshift imitations of the antique, but even 
 his ridiculous verse on the experts. James Boswell 
 went down on his knees and' thanked Heaven for 
 the sight of them, and feeling thirsty after these de- 
 votions, drank hot brandy and water. Dr. Parr was 
 as readily gulled, and probably the experts, like Ma- 
 lone, who held aloof, were as much influenced by 
 jealousy as by science. The whole story of young 
 Ireland's forgeries is not only too long to be told 
 here, but forms the topic of a novel (' The Talk of 
 the Town ') by Mr. James Payn. The frauds in his 
 hands lose neither their humcr nor their compli- 
 cated interest of plot. To be brief, then, Mr. Sam- 
 uel Ireland was a gentleman extremely fond of old 
 literature and old books. If we may trust the ' Con- 
 fessions ' (1805) of his candid son, Mr. W. H. Ireland, 
 a more harmless and confiding old person than Sam- 
 uel never collected early English tracts. Living in 
 his learned society, his son, Mr. W. H. Ireland, ac- 
 quired not only a passion for black letters, but a de- 
 sire to emulate Chatterton. His first step in guilt 
 was the forgery of an autograph on an old pamphlet, 
 with which he gratified Samuel Ireland. He also 
 wxQte a sham inscription on a modern bust of Crom- 
 
)0 Books and Bookmen 
 
 well, which he represented as an authentic antique. 
 Finding that the critics were taken in, and attrib- 
 uted this new bust to the old sculptor Simon, Ire- 
 land conceived a very low and not unjustifiable opin- 
 ion of critical tact. Cntics would find merit in 
 anything which seemed old enough. Ireland's next 
 achievement was the forgery of some legal docu- 
 ments concerning Shakespeare. Just as the bad man 
 who deceived the guileless Mr. Shapira forged his 
 'Deuteronomy' on the blank spaces of old syna- 
 gogue rolls, so young Ireland used the cut-off ends 
 of old rent rolls. He next bought up quantities_^ 
 old fly-leaves of books, and on this ancient paper he 
 indicted a sham confession of faith, which he attrib- 
 uted to Shakespeare. Being a strong " evangelical," 
 young Mr. Ireland gave a very Protestant complex- 
 ion to this edifying document. And still the critics 
 gaped and wondered and believed. Ireland's method 
 was to write in an ink made by blending various 
 liquids used in the marbling of paper for bookbind- 
 ing. This stuff was supplied to him by a bookbind- 
 er's apprentice. When people asked questions as 
 to whence all the new Shakespeare manuscripts 
 came, he said they were presented to him by a gen- 
 tleman who wished to remain anonymous. Finally, 
 the impossibility of producing this gentleman was 
 one of The causes of the detection of the fraud. Ac- 
 cording to himself, Ireland performed prodigies of 
 acuteness. Once he had forged, at random, the 
 name of a contemporary of Shakespeare. He was 
 confronted with a genuine signature, which, of 
 course, was quite different. He obtained leave to 
 consult his "anonymous gentleman," rushed home, 
 forged the name on the model of what had been 
 
Literary Forgeries ' ^i 
 
 shown to him, and returned with this signature as a 
 new gift from his benefactor. That nameless friend 
 had informed him that there were two persons of 
 the same name, and that both signatures were genu- 
 ine. I reland 's impudence went the length of intro- 
 ducing an ancestor of his own, with the same name 
 asTiimself, among the companions of Shakespeare. 
 j[f_'3'^oj:ti&ern ' had succeeded (and it was actually 
 put on the stage with all possible pomp), Ireland 
 meant to have produced a series of pseudo-Shake- 
 spearian plays from William the Conqueror to Queen 
 Elizabeth. When busy with 'Vortigern,' he was 
 detected by a friend of his own age, who pounced 
 on him while-^he was at work, as Lasus pounced on 
 - Gnomacritus. The discoverer, however, consented 
 to " stand in " with Ireland, and did not divulge his 
 secret. At last, after the fiasco of ' Vortigern,' sus- 
 picion waxed so strong, and disagreeable inquiries 
 for the anonymous benefactor were so numerous, 
 that Ireland fled from his father's house. He con- 
 fessed all, and, according to his own account, fell 
 under the undying wrath of Samuel Ireland. Any 
 reader of Ireland's confessions will be likely to sym- 
 pathize with old Samuel as the dupe of his son. 
 The whole story is told with a curious mixture of 
 impudence and humor, and with great plausibility. 
 Young Ireland admits that his " desire for laughter " 
 was almost irresistible, when people — ■ learned, pom- 
 pous, sagacious people — listened attentively to the 
 papers. One feels half inclined to forgive the rogue 
 for the sake of his youth, his cleverness, his humor. 
 But the ' Confessions ' are, not improbably, almost as 
 apocryphal as the original documents. They were 
 written for the sake of money, and it is impossible 
 
i2 Books and Bookmen 
 
 to say how far the same mercenary motive actuated 
 Ireland in his forgeries. Dr. Ingleby, in his ' Shake- 
 ' speare Fabrications,' takes a very rigid view of the 
 conduct, not only of William, but of old Samuel Ire- 
 land. Sam, according to Dr. Ingleby, was a part- 
 ner in the whole imposture, and the confession was 
 only one element in the scheme of fraud. Old Sam- 
 uel was the Fagin of a band of young literary Dodg- 
 ers. He "positively trained his whole family to 
 trade in forgery," and as for Mr. W. H. Ireland, he 
 was "the most accomplished Har that ever lived," 
 which is certainly a distinction in its way. The 
 point of the joke is that, afitojhe whole conspiracy 
 exploded, people were anxious to buy examples of 
 the forgeries. Mr. W. H. Ireland was equal to the 
 occasion. He actually forged his own, or (accord- 
 ing to Dr. Ingleby) his father's forgeries, and, by 
 thus increasing the supply, he deluged the market 
 with sham shams, with imitations of imitations. If 
 this accusation be correct, it is impossible not to ad- 
 mire the colossal impudence of Mr. W. H. Ireland, 
 Dr. Ingleby, in the ardor of his honest indignation, 
 pursues William into his private life, which, it ap- 
 pears, was far from exemplary. But literary criti- 
 cism should be content with a man's works; his do- 
 mestic life is matter, as Aristotle often says, "for a 
 separate kind of investigation." Old Ritson used to 
 say that " every literary impostor deserved hanging 
 as much as a common thief." W. H. Ireland's mer- 
 its were never recognized by the law. 
 
 How old Ritson would have punished "the old 
 corrector," it is " better only guessing," as the 
 wicked say, according to Clough, in regard to their 
 own possible chastisement. The difficulty is to as- 
 
Literary Forgeries jj_j 
 
 certain who the apocryphal old corrector really was. 
 The story of his misdeeds was recently brought 
 back to mind by the death, at an advanced age, of 
 the learned Shakespearian, Mr. J. Payne Collier. 
 Mr. Collier was, to put it mildly, the Shapira of the 
 old corrector. He brought that artist's works be- 
 fore the public ; but why f how deceived, or how 
 influenced, it is once more " better only guessing." 
 Mr. Collier first brought to the public notice his 
 singular copy of a folio Shakespeare (second edition), 
 loaded with ancient manuscript emendations, in 
 1849. Mr. Collier's account of this book was sim- 
 ple and plausible. He chanced, one day, to be in 
 the shop of Mr. Rudd, the bookseller, in Great 
 Newport Street, when a parcel of second-hand vol- 
 umes arrived from the country. When the parcel 
 was opened, the heart of the BibHophile began to 
 sing, for the packet contained two old folios, one 
 of them an old folio Shakespeare of the second edi- 
 tion (1632). The volume (mark this) was " much 
 cropped," greasy, and imperfect. Now the student 
 of Mr. Hamilton's ' Inquiry ' into the whole affair 
 is already puzzled. In later days, Mr. Collier said 
 that his folio had previously been in the posses- 
 sion of a Mr. Parry. On the other hand, Mr. Parry 
 (then a very aged man) failed to recognize his folio 
 in Mr. Collier's, for kis copy was " cropped," whereas 
 the leaves of Mr. CoUier's example were not muti- 
 lated. Here, then (* Inquiry,' pp. 12, 61), we have 
 two descriptions of the outward aspect of Mr. Col- 
 lier's dubious treasure. In one account it is " much 
 cropped " by the bookbinder's cruel shears ; in the 
 other, its unmutilated condition is contrasted with 
 that of a copy which has been "cropped." In any 
 
34 Books and Bookmen 
 
 case, Mr. Collier hoped, he says, to complete an im- 
 perfect folio he possessed, with leaves taken from 
 the folio newly acquired for thirty shillings. But 
 the volumes happened to have the same defects, 
 and the healing process was impossible. Mr. Col- 
 lier chanced to be going into the country, when in 
 packing the folio he had bought of Rudd he saw it 
 was covered with manuscript corrections in an old 
 hand. These he was inclined to attribute to one 
 Thomas Perkins, whose name was written on the 
 fly-leaf, and who might have been a connection of 
 Richard Perkins, the actor (Jlor. 1633). The notes 
 contained many various readings, and very numerous 
 changes in punctuation. Some of these Mr. Collier 
 published in his ' Notes and Emendations ' (1852), 
 and in an edition of the 'Plays.' There was much 
 discussion, much doubt, and the previous folio of 
 the old corrector (who was presumed to have marked 
 the book in the theatre during early performances) 
 was exhibited to the Society of Antiquaries. Then 
 Mr. Collier presented the treasure to the Duke of 
 Devonshire, who again lent it for examination to the 
 British Museum. Mr. Hamilton published in the 
 Times (July, 1859) the results of his examination 
 of the old corrector. It turned out that the old cor- 
 rector was a modern myth. He had first made his 
 corrections in pencil, and in a modern hand, and 
 then he had copied them over in ink, and in a forged 
 ancient hand. The same word sometimes recurred 
 in both handwritings. The ink, which looked old, 
 was really no English ink at all, not even Ireland's 
 mixture. It seemed to be sepia, sometimes mixed 
 with a little Indian ink. Mr. Hamilton made many 
 other sad discoveries. He pointed out that Mr. 
 
Literary Forgeries ^5 
 
 Collier had published, from a Dulwich MS., a letter 
 of Mrs. Alleyne's (the actor's wife), referring to 
 Shakespeare as "Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe." 
 Now the Dulwich MS. was mutilated and blank in 
 the very place where this interesting reference 
 should have occurred. Such is a skeleton history 
 of the old corrector, his works and ways. It is 
 probable that — thanks to his assiduities — new 
 Shakespearian documents will in future be received 
 with extreme scepticism ; and this is all the fruit, 
 except acres of newspaper correspondence, which 
 the world has derived from Mr. Collier's greasy and 
 imperfect but unique "corrected folio." 
 
 The recency and (to a Shakespearian critic) the 
 importance of these forgeries obscures the humble 
 merit of Surtees, with his ballads of the ' Slaying 
 of Antony Featherstonhaugh,' and of ' Bartram's 
 Dirge.' Surtees left clever iacunce in these songs, 
 " collected from oral traditions," and furnished notes 
 so learned that they took in Sir Walter Scott. There 
 are moments when I half suspect " the Shirra him- 
 sel " (who forged so many extracts from " Old 
 Plays ") of having composed ' Kinmont Willie.' To 
 compare old Scott of Satchell's account of Kin- 
 mont Willie with the ballad is to feel uncomfortable 
 doubts. But this is a rank impiety. The last bal- 
 lad forgery of much note was the set of sham Mace- 
 donian epics and popular songs (all about Alexander 
 the Great, and other heroes) which a schoolmaster 
 in the Rhodope imposed on M. Verkovitch. The 
 trick was not badly done, and the imitation of "bal- 
 lad slang" was excellent. The "Oera Linda book," 
 too, was successful enough to be translated into 
 English. With this latest effort of the tenth muse. 
 
36 
 
 Books and Bookmen 
 
 the crafty muse of Literary Forgery, we may leave 
 a topic which could not be exhausted in a ponderous 
 volume. We have not room even for the forged let- 
 ters of Shelley, to which Mr. Browning, being taken 
 in thereby, wrote a preface, nor for the forged let- 
 ters of Mr. Ruskin, which hoaxed all the newspapers 
 not long ago. 
 
Curiosities of paxi^}) ISesisterjs 
 
Cunogiitiegs of paxi^\) JRegigtergi 
 
 HERE are three classes of per- 
 sons who are deeply concerned 
 with parish registers — namely, 
 villains, antiquaries, and the sed- 
 ulous readers, " parish clerks and 
 others," of the second or "agony" 
 column of the Times. Villains 
 are probably the most numer- 
 ous of these three classes. The villain of fiction 
 dearly loves a parish register : he cuts out pages, 
 inserts others, intercalates remarks in a different 
 colored ink, and generally manipulates the register 
 as a Greek manages his hand at ^carti, or as a He- 
 brew dealer in Moabite bric-a-brac treats a syna- 
 gogue roll. We well remember one villain who had 
 locked himself into the vestry (he was disguised as 
 an archaeologist), and who was enjoying his wicked 
 pleasure with the register, when the vestry some- 
 how caught fire, the rusty key would not turn in 
 the door, and the villain was roasted alive, in spite 
 of the disinterested efforts to save him made by 
 all the virtuous characters in the story. Let the 
 fate of this bold, bad man be a warning to wicked 
 earls, baronets, and all others who attempt to de- 
 
40 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 stroy the record of the marriage of a hero's parents. 
 Fate will be too strong for them in the long run, 
 though they bribe the parish clerk, or carry off in 
 white wax an impression of the keys of the vestry 
 and of the iron chest in which a register should 
 repose. 
 
 There is another and more prosaic danger in the 
 way of villains, if the new bill, entitled " The Parish 
 Register Preservation Act," ever becomes law. The 
 bill provides that every register earlier than 1837 
 shall be committed to the care of the Master of the 
 Rolls, and removed to the Record Office. Now the 
 common villain ai fiction would feel sadly out of 
 place in the Register Office, where a more watchful 
 eye than that of a comic parish clerk would be kept 
 on his proceedings. Villains and local antiquaries 
 will, therefore, use all their parliamentary influence 
 to oppose and delay this bill, which is certainly hard 
 on the parish archaeologist. The men who grub in 
 their local registers, and slowly compile parish or 
 county history, deserve to be encouraged rather than 
 depressed. Mr. Chester Waters^- therefore, suggests 
 that copies of registers should be made, and the 
 comparatively legible copy left in the parish, while 
 the crabbed original is conveyed to the Record Of- 
 fice in London. Thus the local antiquary would 
 really have his work made more easy for him (though 
 it may be doubted whether he would quite enjoy 
 that condescension), while the villain of romance 
 would be foiled ; for it is useless (as a novel of Mr. 
 Christie Murray's proves) to alter the register in the 
 keeping of the parish when the original document is 
 safe in the Record Office. But previous examples 
 of enforced transcription (as in 1603) do not en- 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 41 
 
 courage us to suppose that the copies would be very 
 scrupulously made. Thus, after the Reformation, 
 the prayers for the dead in the old registers were 
 omitted by the copyist, who seemed to think (as the 
 contractor for " sandwich men " said to the poor 
 fellows who carried the letter H), " I don't want 
 you, and the public don't want you, and you 're no 
 use to nobody." Again, when Laurence Fletcher 
 was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark, in 1608, the 
 old register described him as " a player, the King's 
 servant." But the clerk, keeping a note -book, 
 simply called Laurence Fletcher "a man," and (in 
 1625) he also styled Mr. John Fletcher "a man." 
 Now, the old register calls Mr. John Fletcher "a 
 poet." To copy all the parish registers in England 
 would be a very serious task, and would probably 
 be but slovenly performed. If they were repro- 
 duced again, by any process of photography, the old 
 difficult court hand would remain as hard as ever. 
 But this is a minor objection, for the local antiquary 
 revels in the old court hand. 
 
 From the little volume by Mr. Chester Waters, 
 already referred to (' Parish Registers in England ; ' 
 printed for the author by F. J. Roberts, Little Brit- 
 ain, E. C), we proceed to appropriate such matters 
 of curiosity as may interest minds neither parochial 
 nor doggedly antiquarian. Parish registers among 
 the civilized peoples of antiquity do not greatly con- 
 cern us. It seems certain that many Polynesian 
 races have managed to record (in verse, or by some 
 rude marks) the genealogies of their chiefs through 
 many hundreds of years. These oral registers are 
 accepted as fairly truthful by some students, yet 
 we must remember that Pindar supposed himself to 
 
42 Books and Bookmen 
 
 possess knowledge of at least twenty-five genera- 
 tions before his own time, and that only brought 
 him up to the birth of Jason. Nobody believes in 
 Jason and Medea, and possibly the genealogical 
 records of Maoris and Fijians are as little trust- 
 worthy as those of Homeric Greece. However, to 
 consider thus is to consider too curiously. We only 
 know for certain that genealogy very soon becomes 
 important, and, therefore, that records are early 
 kept, in a growing civilization. " After Nehemiah's 
 return from the captivity in Babylon, the priests at 
 Jerusalem, whose register was not found, were as 
 polluted put from the priesthood." Rome had her 
 parish registers, which were kept in the temple of 
 Saturn. But modern parish registers were " discov- 
 ered " (like America) in 1497, when Cardinal Xime- 
 nes found it desirable to put on record the names 
 of the godfathers and godmothers of baptized chil- 
 dren. When these relations of " gossip," or god's 
 kin (as the word literally means), were not cer- 
 tainly known, married persons could easily obtain 
 divorces, by pretending previous spiritual relation- 
 ship. 
 
 But it was only during the reign of Mary (called 
 the Bloody) that this rule of registering godfathers 
 and godmothers prevailed in England. Henry 
 Vin. introduced the custom of parish registers 
 when in a Protestant humor. By the way, how 
 curiously has Madame de Flamareil {la femme de 
 quarante ans, in Charles de Bernard's novel) anti- 
 cipated the verdict of Mr. Froude on Henry VHI. ! 
 " ' On accuse Henri VHI.,' dit Madame de Flama- 
 reil, ' moi je le comprends, et je I'absous ; c'^tait un 
 cceur gdndreux, lorsqu'il ne les aimait plus, il les 
 
Curiostttes of Parish Registers 4^ 
 
 tuait' " The public of England mistrusted, in the 
 matter of parish registers, the generous heart of 
 Henry VIII. It is the fixed conviction of the pub- 
 lic that all novelties in administration mean new 
 taxes. Thus the Croatian peasantry have lately 
 been on the point of revolting because they imag- 
 ined that they were to be taxed in proportion to the 
 length of their mustaches. The English believed, 
 and the insurgents of the famous Pilgrimage of 
 Grace declared, that baptism was to be refused to 
 all children who did not pay a " trybette " (tribute) 
 to the king. But Henry, or rather his minister, 
 Cromwell, stuck to his plan, and (September 29, 
 1538) issued an injunction that a weekly register of 
 weddings, christenings, and burials should be kept 
 by the curate of every parish. The cost of the book 
 (twopence in the case of St. Margaret's, Westmin- 
 ster) was defrayed by the parishioners. The oldest 
 extant register books are those thus acquired in 
 1597 or 1603. These volumes were of parchment, 
 and entries were copied into them out of the old 
 books on paper. The copyists, as we have seen, 
 were indolent, and omitted characteristic points in 
 the more ancient records. 
 
 In the civil war parish registers fell into some 
 confusion, and when the clergy did make entries they 
 commonly expressed their political feelings in a 
 mixture of Latin and English. Latin, by the way, 
 went out as Protestantism came in, but the curate 
 of Rotherby, in Leicestershire, writes, " Bellum, 
 Bellum, Bellum, interruption ! persecution ! " At 
 St. Bridget's, in Chester, is the quaint entry, " 1643. 
 Here the register is defective till 1653. The tymes 
 were suck ! " At Hilton, in Dorset, William Snoke, 
 
44 Books and Bookmen 
 
 minister, entered his opinion that persons whose 
 baptism and marriage were not registered " will be 
 made uncapable of any earthly inheritance if they 
 live. This I note for the satisfaction of any that do : " 
 though we may doubt whether these parishioners 
 found the information thus conveyed highly satis- 
 factory. 
 
 The register of Maid's Moreton, Bucks, tells how 
 the reading-desk (a spread eagle, gilt) was " doomed 
 to perish as an abominable idoll ; " and how the 
 cross on the steeple nearly (but not quite) knocked 
 out the brains of the Puritan who removed it. The 
 Puritans had their way with the registers as well 
 as with the eagle (" the vowl," as the old country 
 people call it), and laymen took the place of par- 
 sons as registrars in 1653. The books from 1653 
 to 1660, while this regime lasted, "were kept excep- 
 tionally well," new brooms sweeping clean. The 
 books of the period contain fewer of the old Puri- 
 tan Christian names than we might have expected. 
 We find " Repente Kytchens," so styled before the 
 poor little thing had anything but original sin to 
 repent of. " Faint not Kennard " is also registered, 
 and " Freegift Mabbe." 
 
 A novelty was introduced into registers in 1678. 
 The law required (for purposes of protecting trade) 
 that all the dead should be buried in woollen wind- 
 ing sheets. The price of the wool was the obolus 
 paid to the Charon of the Revenue. After March 
 25, 1667, no person was to be "buried in any shirt, 
 shift, or sheet other than should be made of woole 
 only." Thus when the children in a little Oxford- 
 shire village lately beheld a ghost, "dressed in a 
 long narrow gown of woollen, with bandages round 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 45 
 
 the head and chin," it is clear that the ghost was 
 much more than a hundred years old, for the act 
 " had fallen into disuse long before it was repealed 
 in 1 8 14." But this has little to do with parish reg- 
 isters. The addition made to the duties of the 
 keeper of the register in 1678 was this — he had 
 to take and record the affidavit of a kinsman of the 
 dead, to the effect that the corpse was actually bur- 
 ied in woollen fabric. The upper classes, however, 
 preferred to bury in linen, and to pay the fine of 5/. 
 When Mistress Oldfield, the famous actress, was 
 interred in 1 730, her body was arrayed " in a very . 
 fine Brussels lace headdress, a holland shift with a 
 tucker and double ruffles of the same lace, and a 
 pair of new kid gloves." 
 
 In 1694 an empty exchequer was replenished by 
 a tax on marriages, births, and burials, the very ex- 
 tortion which had been feared by the insurgents in 
 the Pilgrimage of Grace. The tax collectors had ac- 
 cess without payment of fee to the registers. The 
 registration of births was discontinued when the 
 Taxation Acts expired. An attempt to introduce 
 the registration of births was made in 1753, but un- 
 successfully. The public had the old superstitious 
 dread of anything like a census. Moreover, the 
 custom was denounced as " French," and therefore 
 abominable. In the same way it was thought saga- 
 cious to call the cldture " the French gag " during 
 some recent discussions of parliamentary rules. In 
 1783 the parish register was again made the instru- 
 ment of taxation, and threepence was charged on 
 every entry. Thus " the clergyman was placed in 
 the invidious light of a tax collector, and as the 
 poor were often unable or unwilling to pay the tax. 
 
46 Books and Bookmen 
 
 the clergy had a direct inducement to retain their 
 good-will by keeping the registers defective." 
 
 It is easy to imagine the indignation in Scotland, 
 when " bang went saxpence " every time a poor 
 man had twins ! Of course the Scotch rose up 
 against this unparalleled extortion. At last, in 181 2, 
 "Rose's Act" was passed. It is styled "an Act 
 for the better regulating and preserving registers of 
 births," but the registration of births is altogether 
 omitted from its provisions. By a stroke of the 
 wildest wit the penalty of transportation for four- 
 teen years, for making a false entry, is "to be di- 
 vided equally between the informer and the poor 
 of the parish." A more casual Act has rarely been 
 drafted. 
 
 Without entering into the modern history of par- 
 ish registers, we may examine a few of the ancient 
 curiosities to be found therein, the blunders and the 
 waggeries of forgotten priests, and curates, and 
 parish clerks. In quite recent times (1832) it was 
 thought worth while to record that Charity Morrell 
 at her wedding had signed her name in the register 
 with her right foot, and that the ring had been placed 
 on the fourth toe of her left foot ; for poor Charity 
 was born without arms. Sometimes the time of a 
 birth was recorded with much minuteness, that the 
 astrologers might draw a more accurate horoscope. 
 Unlucky children, with no acknowledged fathers, 
 were entered in a variety of odd ways. In Lambeth 
 (1685), George Speedwell is put down as "a merry 
 begot ; " Anne Twine is "fil miiuscujusque." At 
 Croydon, a certain William is "terraefilius " (1582), 
 an autochthonous infant. Among the queer names 
 of foundlings are "Nameless," "Godsend," "Sub- 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 47 
 
 poena," and " Moyses and Aaron, two children 
 found," not m the bulrushes, but " in the street." 
 
 The rule was to give the foundling for surname 
 the name of the parish, and from the Temple 
 Church came no fewer than one hundred and four 
 foundlings named "Temple," between 1728 and 1755. 
 These Temples are the plebeian gens of the patri- 
 cian house which claims descent from Godiva. The 
 use of surnames as Christian names is later than the 
 Reformation, and is the result of a reaction against 
 the exclusive use of saints' names from the calendar. 
 Another example of the same reaction is the use of 
 Old Testament names, and " Ananias and Sapphira 
 were favorite names with the Presbyterians." It is 
 only fair to add that these names are no longer 
 popular with Presbyterians, at any rate in the Kirk 
 of Scotland. The old Puritan argument was that 
 you would hardly select the name of too notorious 
 a scriptural sinner, "as bearing testimony to the 
 triumph of grace over original sin." But in Amer- 
 ica a clergyman has been known to decline to chris- 
 ten a child " Pontius Pilate," and no wonder. 
 
 Entries of burials in ancient times often contained 
 some biographical information about the deceased. 
 But nothing could possibly be vaguer than this : 
 " 161 5, February 28, St. Martin's, Ludgate, was bur- 
 ied an anatomy from the College of Physicians." 
 Man, woman, or child, sinner or saint, we know not, 
 only that " an anatomy " found Christian burial in 
 St. Martin's, Ludgate. How much more full and 
 characteristic is this, from St. Peter's-in-the-East, 
 Oxford (1568): "There was buried Alyce, the wiff 
 of a naughty fellow whose name is Matthew Manne." 
 There is immortality for Matthew Manne, and there 
 
48 Books and Bookmen 
 
 is, in short-hand, the tragedy of " Alyce his wiff." 
 The reader of this record knows more of Matthew 
 than in two hundred years any one is likely to know 
 of us who moralize over Matthew ! At Kyloe, in 
 Northumberland, the intellectual defects of Henry 
 Watson have, like the naughtiness of Manne, se- 
 cured him a measure of fame. (1696.) " Henry 
 was so great a fooU, that he never could put on his 
 own close, nor never went a quarter of a mile off 
 the house " in all his life of thirty-six years. 
 
 What had Mary Woodfield done to deserve the 
 alias which the Croydon register gives her of 
 " Queen of Hell " ? (1788.) Distinguished people 
 were buried in efifigy, in all the different churches 
 with which they were connected, and each sham 
 burial service was entered in the parish registers, 
 a snare and stumbling-block to the historian. This 
 curious custom is very ancient. Thus we read in 
 the Odyssey that when Menelaus heard in Egypt of 
 the death of Agamemnon he reared for him a ceno- 
 taph, and piled an empty barrow " that the fame of 
 the dead man might never be quenched." Probably 
 this old usage gave rise to the claims of several 
 Greek cities to possess the tomb of this or that an- 
 cient hero. A heroic tomb, as of Cassandra for 
 example, several towns had to show, but which was 
 the true grave, which were the cenotaphs .' Queen 
 Elizabeth was buried in all the London churches, 
 and poor Cassandra had her barrow in Argos, My- 
 cenae, and Amyclse. 
 
 "A drynkyng for the soul" of the dead, a Ta<;(>os or 
 funeral feast, was as common in England before the 
 Reformation as in ancient Greece. James Cooke, of 
 Sporle, in Norfolk (1528), left six shillings and eight- 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 49 
 
 pence to pay for this " drynkyng for his soul ; " and 
 the funeral feast, which long survived in the distri- 
 bution of wine, wafers, and rosemary, still endures 
 as a slight collation of wine and cake in Scotland. 
 What a funeral could be, as late as 1731, Mr. Ches- 
 ter Waters proves by the bill for the burial of An- 
 drew Card, senior bencher of Gray's-inn. The de- 
 ceased was brave in a " superfine pinked shroud " 
 (cheap at i/. 5^. 6d), and there were eight large 
 plate candlesticks on stands round the dais, and 
 ninety-six buckram escutcheons. The pall-bearers 
 wore Alamode hatbands covered with frizances, and 
 so did the divines who were present at the melan- 
 choly but gorgeous function. A hundred men in 
 mourning carried a hundred white wax branch 
 lights, and the gloves of the porters in Gray's-inn 
 were ash-colored with black points. Yet the wine 
 cost no more than i/. igj. 6d. ; a "deal of sack," by 
 no means "intolerable." 
 
 Leaving the funerals, we find that the parish reg- 
 ister sometimes records ancient and obsolete modes 
 of death. Thus, martyrs are scarce now, but the 
 register of All Saints', Derby, 1556, mentions "a 
 poor blinde woman called Joan Waste, of this par- 
 ish, a martyr, burned in Windmill pit." She was 
 condemned by Ralph Baynes, Bishop of Coventry 
 and Lichfield. In 1558, at Richmond in Yorkshire, 
 we find "Richard Snell, b'rnt, bur. 9 Sept." At 
 Croydon, in 1585, Roger Shepherd probably never 
 expected to be eaten by a lioness. Roger was not, 
 like Wyllyam Barker, "a common drunkard and 
 blasphemer," and we cannot regard the Croydon 
 lioness, like the Nemean lion, as a miraculous mon- 
 ster sent against the county of Surrey for the sins 
 
50 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 of the people. The lioness " was brought into the 
 town to be seen of such as would give money to 
 see her. He" (Roger) " was sore wounded in sun- 
 dry places, and was buried the 26th Aug." 
 
 In 1590, the register of St. Oswald's, Durham, in- 
 forms us that " Duke, Hyll, Hogge, and Holiday " 
 were hanged and burned for "there horrible of- 
 fences." The arm of one of these horrible offend- 
 ers was preserved at St. Omer as the relic of a 
 martyr, "a most precious treasure," in 1686. But 
 no one knew whether the arm belonged originally 
 to Holiday, Hyll, Duke, or Hogge. The coals, 
 when these unfortunate men were burned, cost six- 
 pence ; the other items in the account of the abom- 
 inable execution are, perhaps, too repulsive to be 
 quoted. 
 
 According to some critics of the British govern- 
 ment, we do not treat the Egyptians well. But our 
 conduct towards the Fellahs has certainly improved 
 since this entry was made in the register of St. 
 Nicholas, Durham (1592, August 8th): " Simson, 
 Arington, Featherston, Fenwick, and Lancaster, were 
 hanged for being Egyptians." They were, in fact, 
 gypsies, or had been consorting with gypsies, and 
 they suffered under 5 Eliz. c. 20. In 1783 this stat- 
 ute was abolished, and was even considered " a law 
 of excessive severity." For even a hundred years 
 ago " the puling cant of sickly humanitarianism " 
 was making itself heard to the injury of our sturdy 
 old English legislation. To be killed by a poet is 
 now an unusual fate, but the St. Leonard's, Shore- 
 ditch, register (1S98) mentions how "Gabriel Spen- 
 cer, being slayne, was buried." Gabriel was " slayne" 
 by Rare Ben Jonson, in Hoxton Fields. 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 5/ 
 
 The burning of witches is, naturally, not an un- 
 common item in parish registers, and is set forth in 
 a bold, business-like manner. On August 21 (1650) 
 fifteen women and one man were executed for the 
 imaginary crime of witchcraft. " A grave, for a 
 witch, sixpence," is an item in the municipal ac- 
 counts. And the grave was a cheap haven for the 
 poor woman who had been committed to the tender 
 mercies of a Scotch witch-trier. Cetewayo's medi- 
 cine-men, who " smell out '.' witches, are only some 
 two centuries in the rear of our civilization. Three 
 hundred years ago Bishop Jewell, preaching before 
 Elizabeth, was quite of the mind of Cetewayo and 
 Saul, as to the wickedness of suffering a witch to 
 live. As late as 1691, the register of Holy Island, 
 Northumberland, mentions " William Cleugh, be- 
 witched to death," and the superstition is almost as 
 powerful as ever among the rural people. Between 
 July 13 and July 24 (1699) the widow Comon, in Es- 
 sex, was thrice swum for a witch. She was not 
 drowned, but survived her immersion for only five 
 months. A singular homicide is recorded at New- 
 ington Butts, 1689. "John Arris and Berwick Far- 
 lin in one grave, being both Dutch soldiers ; one 
 killed the other drinking brandy." But who slew 
 the slayer .' The register is silent ; but " often eat- 
 ing a shoulder of mutton or a peck of hasty pudding 
 at a time caused the death of James Parsons," at 
 Teddington, in Middlesex, 1743. Parsons had re- 
 sisted the effects of shoulders of mutton and hasty 
 pudding till the age of thirty-six. 
 
 And so the registers run on. Sometimes they 
 tell of the death of a glutton, sometimes of a Grace 
 wyfe (grosse femme). Now the bell tolls for the de- 
 
52 Books and Bookmen 
 
 cease of a duke, now of a " dog-whipper." " Luten- 
 ists " and " Saltpetremen " — the skeleton of the old 
 German allegory whispers to each and twitches him 
 by the sleeve. " Ellis Thompson, insipiens," leaves 
 Chester-le-Street, where he had gabbled and scrab- 
 bled on the doors, and follows " William, foole to my 
 Lady Jerningham," and " Edward Errington, the 
 Towne's Fooll " (Newcastle-on-Tyne) down the way 
 to dusty death. Edward Errington died "of the 
 pest," and another idiot took his place and office, for 
 Newcastle had her regular town fools before she ac- 
 quired her singularly independent modern represen- 
 tative. The " aquavity man " dies (in Cripplegate), 
 and the " dumb-man who was a fortune-teller " (Step- 
 ney, 1628), and the " King's Falkner," and Mr. Greg- 
 ory Isham, who combined the professions, not fre- 
 quently united, of " attorney and husbandman," in 
 Barwell, Leicestershire (1655). "The lame chim- 
 ney-sweeper," and the " King of the gypsies," and 
 Alexander Willis, "qui calographiam docuit," the 
 linguist, and the Tom 0' Bedlam, the comfit-maker, 
 and the panyer-man, and the tack-maker, and the sui- 
 cide, they all found death ; or, if they sought him, 
 the churchyard where they were "hurled into a 
 grave" was interdicted, and purified, after a fort- 
 night, with "frankincense and sweet perfumes, and 
 herbs." 
 
 Sometimes people died wholesale of pestilence, 
 and the Longborough register mentions a fresh way 
 of death, "the swat called New Acquaintance, alias 
 Stoupe Knave, and know thy master." Another mal- 
 ady was " the posting swet, that posted from towne 
 to towne through England." The plague of 1591 
 was imported in bales of cloth from the Levant, just 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 5^ 
 
 as British commerce still patriotically tries to intro- 
 duce cholera in cargoes of Egyptian rags. The reg- 
 ister of Malpas, in Cheshire (Aug. 24, 1625), has this 
 strange story of the plague : — 
 
 " Richard Dawson being sicke of the plague, and 
 perceiving he must die at yt time, arose out of his 
 bed, and made his grave, and caused his nefew, John 
 Dawson, to cast strawe into the grave which was 
 not farre from the house, and went and lay'd him 
 down in the say'd grave, and caused clothes to be 
 lay'd uppon, and so dep'ted out of this world ; this 
 he did because he was a strong man, and heavier 
 than his said nefew and another wench were able to 
 bury." . 
 
 And John Dawson died, and Rose Smyth, the 
 " wench " already spoken of, died, the last of the 
 household. 
 
 Old customs survive in the parish registers. 
 Scolding wives were ducked, and in Kingston-on- 
 Thames, 1572, the register tells how the sexton's 
 wife "was sett on a new cukking-stoole, and brought 
 to Temes brydge, and there had three duckings over 
 head and eres, because she was a common scold and 
 fighter." The cucking-stool, a very elaborate engine 
 of the law, cost i/. 3J. ^d. Men were ducked for 
 beating their wives, and if that custom were revived 
 the profession of cucking-stool maker would become 
 busy and lucrative. Penances of a graver sort are 
 on record in the registers. Margaret Sherioux, in 
 Croydon (1597), was ordered to stand three market 
 days in the town, and three Sundays in the church, 
 in a white sheet. The sin imputed to her was a 
 dreadful one. "She stood one Saturday, and one 
 Sunday, and died the next." Innocent or guilty, 
 
54 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 this world was no longer a fit abiding-place for 
 Margaret Sherioux. Occasionally the keeper of the 
 register entered any event which seemed out of the 
 common. Thus the register of St. Nicholas, Dur- 
 ham (1568), has this contribution to natural his- 
 tory : — 
 
 " A certaine Italian brought into the cittie of Dur- 
 ham a very greate strange and monstrous serpent, 
 in length sixteen feet, in quantitie and dimentions 
 greater than a greate horse, which was taken and 
 killed by special policie, Ethiopia within the Turkas 
 dominions. But before it was killed, it had devoured 
 (as is credibly thought) more than 1,000 persons, 
 and destroyed a great country." 
 
 This must have been a descendant of the monster 
 that would have eaten Andromeda, and was slain by 
 Perseus in the country of the blameless Ethiopians. 
 Collections of money are recorded occasionally, as 
 in 1680, when no less than one pound eight shil- 
 lings was contributed " for redemption of Christians 
 (taken by ye Turkish pyrates) out of Turkish slav- 
 ery." Two hundred years ago the Turk was pretty 
 "unspeakable" still. Of all blundering Dogberries, 
 the most confused kept (in 1670) the parish register 
 at Melton Mowbray : — 
 
 " Here [he writes] is a bill of Burton Lazareth's 
 people, which was buried, and which was and maried 
 above 10 years old, for because the clarke was dead, 
 and therefore they was not set down according as 
 they was, but they all set down sure enough one 
 among another here in this place." 
 
 " They all set down sure enough," nor does it mat- 
 ter much now to know whom they married, and how 
 long they lived in Melton Mowbray. The following 
 
Curiosities of Parish Registers 
 
 35 
 
 entry sufficed for the great Villiers that expired " in 
 the worst inn's worst room," — "Kirkby Moorside, 
 Yorkshire, 1687. Georges vilaris Lord dooke of 
 Bookingham, bur. 17. April." 
 " So much for Buckingham ! " 
 
Cl^e 05006111011 at 35ome 
 
%^z 'Boofimett at JSome 
 
 LMOST every city, it has been 
 said, possesses its own distinctive 
 color, and it may be added that 
 every historical centre of human 
 life has its own sentiment, its pe- 
 culiar way of affecting us as a 
 whole. Thus there are living 
 cities, and dead cities, and cities 
 which may be called half alive, when their present 
 quiet is compared with the excitement of their past 
 existence. The interest of these is naturally a some- 
 what melancholy one ; but it varies in various places, 
 and a man carries away very different impressions 
 from Venice and from Athens. But the city which 
 has the most singular charm, and the charm that 
 has been most widely felt, is of course Rome. The 
 spectacle of the city which was once, in a sense, 
 commensurate with the world appeals to the imagi- 
 nation in the same way as the spectacle of the world 
 itself appeals to it, and in Rome we read the lesson 
 of life writ small and close. It was not without a 
 meaning that the old sculptors represented Rome 
 with the chaplet of towers which was worn also by 
 Cybele, the mother of the gods, so that it is not 
 
6o Books and Bookmen 
 
 always easy to distinguish their statues. Rome was 
 indeed, as Spenser translates Du Bellay : — 
 
 " Such as the Berecynthian Goddess bright, 
 
 In her swift chariot, with high turrets crowned, 
 Proud that so many Gods she brought to light ; 
 Such was this city in her good days found." 
 
 She protected the gods of all the nations, if she did 
 not bring them to light, and the awe caused by the 
 expectation of her dateless period of power inspired 
 the ^neid, and procured for her the worship of 
 many cities of Asia, and for her seat on the seven 
 hills the name of " the earthly Olympus." 
 
 No doubt the most striking and the earliest im- 
 pression which the mind receives from Rome is that 
 of the perished greatness of her past, and of the 
 vast labors the ruins of which cumber her soil. 
 Thus Rome has proved a trial to the pilgrims of 
 sentiment, at whatever period of modern times 
 they have visited her. They have said, with the 
 learned Poggius, as quoted or paraphrased by Gib- 
 bon, that " the temple is overthrown, the gold has 
 been pillaged, the wheel of fortune has accomplished 
 her revolution." They have felt, like Clough, " that 
 all the incongruous things of past incompatible ages 
 seem to be treasured up here to make fools of pres- 
 ent and future." But these are the mistakes of sen- 
 timentalists ; and the real charm of Rome lies in 
 the fact that, among the dust of her ruins, she is 
 still, and has always been, the unexhausted mother 
 of new forces. From her deep foundations — "pro- 
 fondes jusques aux antipodes," says Montaigne, 
 though Mr. Parker has not pushed his excavations 
 so far — to the guard-rooms of the national soldiery 
 of Italy, she has been, among all her changes, the 
 
The Bookmen at Rome 6i 
 
 mistress rather than the sport of change. We can 
 never say with truth that the wheel of fortune has 
 accomplished her revolution in the city which Maz- 
 zini called " the guide of nations and of humanity." 
 Thus the sight of Rome is a kind of test of the 
 spirit and courage that are in men. If they are 
 mere sentimentalists they will be struck, as senti- 
 mentalists are struck in view of mountains and of 
 the sea, by a sense of human impotence and fragil- 
 ity. If they are of stouter hearts, they will feel 
 encouraged by the thought of man's endurance 
 and persistent conflict with destiny. And even 
 when they are saddened, on the whole, by the in- 
 fluence of Rome, they will recognize in it a curious 
 and inexplicable sort of attraction. 
 
 No one shows worse, when tried by the test of 
 Rome, than Chateaubriand. One of the earliest 
 of the sentimental travelers of the century, he was 
 also perhaps the most dismal. In reading his lam- 
 entations over the Eternal City, one can hardly help 
 sympathizing with Heine when he compares Cha- 
 teaubriand to Angeli, the funereal court jester of 
 Louis XIII. At Rome Chateaubriand wags his 
 black bonnet most mournfully, and produces the 
 most lugubrious music from its bells. He crosses 
 the Campagna, " these inania regna, empty domains 
 that once were crowded with the homes of men. In 
 the distance Rome appears," he says, " as if it rose to 
 meet you from the grave where it is laid." " Rome's 
 ghost since her decease," says Mr. Browning, by a 
 curious coincidence, — and the figure is found in an 
 earlier poet, in Joachim du Bellay, thus translated 
 by Spenser : — 
 
^2 Books and Bookmen 
 
 " If the shade of Rome 
 May of the body yield a seeming sight, 
 
 'T is like a corse drawn forth out of the tomb 
 By magicke skill out of eternal night." 
 
 "Imagine," Chateaubriand goes on with his fune- 
 real pomp of style, — " imagine something of the 
 desolation of Tyre and Sidon, of which the Scrip- 
 ture speaks ; a silence and a solitude as vast as 
 were the noise and turmoil of the men who once 
 crowded, so many and so eager, upon this soil. 
 Here and there you see some traces of Roman 
 roads, in places where no one goes any more, and 
 here and there some dry beds of the winter torrents. 
 These watercourses look from a distance like great 
 frequented ways, and they are but the empty bed of 
 a stormy stream, which has vanished like the Ro- 
 man people. Nothing but ruin seems to flourish in 
 a soil composed of the dust of the dead, and of the 
 ashes of empire." This is Chateaubriand's favorite 
 and monotonous moral. The task of welding na- 
 tions together, of establishing the Roman power, 
 of giving laws to the world, and of making smooth 
 the way for Christianity was no more to him than 
 the counterpart in human history of the raging of a 
 winter torrent. Rome, in his view, was utterly 
 dead ; and he would have been delighted with Mr. 
 Ruskin's figure, which sets forth how " the shattered 
 aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness 
 like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourn- 
 ers, passing from a nation's grave." In Chateau- 
 briand's eyes, as in Byron's, " History, with all her 
 volumes vast, hath but one page," and on that is 
 written sic transit gloria. " Rome is a fair place," 
 he says, "wherein to forget all, to despise all, and 
 
The Bookmen at Rome 6^ 
 
 to die," as if tliere were a single spot in the world 
 where it was less possible to forget, and more nec- 
 essary to remember, the past of our race. 
 
 When Chateaubriand enjoyed these "merry days 
 of desolation," to use Costard's phrase, at Rome, he 
 was apparently in a pagan and hopeless mood. We 
 find him in Rome once more, a quarter of a century 
 later ; but now he is Christian and hopeful. The 
 change did not, however, make him a whit less fu- 
 nereal and sentimental ; his fancy still ran on 
 death's-heads and pompes fimibres. " If a man be 
 a Christian," he wrote, " how can he tear himself 
 from this soil which has become his fatherland ; 
 this earth that has beheld the birth of a new em- 
 pire, more holy in its cradle, more noble in its do- 
 minion, than the power that went before it ; this 
 soil where the friends whom we have lost share the 
 sleep of the martyrs in the catacombs .' " and so on. 
 
 There is happily an abundance of antidotes to 
 this poetical piety and elegant regret ; and none is 
 better than that which Montaigne gives us in his 
 musings over Rome. To Montaigne the city seemed 
 to whisper the maxims of her own imperial philos- 
 opher, and such sayings of Marcus Aurelius as this : 
 " Consider the life led by others in olden time, and 
 the life of those who shall come after thee, and be 
 of good cheer." In a spirit of good cheer, Montaigne 
 let the spectacle of Rome awaken and intensify his 
 curious interest in human fortunes. The sight of 
 the scene of change did not subdue, but rather for- 
 tified him. " Tant de remuements d'estats et change- 
 ments de fortune publique nous instruisent a ne pas 
 faire grand miracle de la nostre." He pleases him- 
 self with the thought that he himself is civis Roma- 
 
^4 Books and Bookmen 
 
 nus, not only because Rome is the city metropolitan 
 of all Christian nations, but because he has actually 
 been presented with a diploma of burghership. 
 "Among the empty favors of Fortune," he writes, 
 " there is none that I prize more than this." He 
 feels that he now owes a double affection to his 
 dead fellow-citizens, Scipio and Metellus, TuUus and 
 Ancus. " Reverence for the dead passes for a duty, 
 and I have been nourished from my childhood in 
 the memory of the dead men who lie here. I have 
 the conditions and fortune of Metellus and Scipio 
 more often in my mind than those of any men of 
 our own time ; they are dead and gone, and so is 
 my father, even as they, and hath been sundered as 
 far from me and life in these eighteen years as they 
 in sixteen centuries, whose memory, whose love, for 
 all that, I cease not to embrace in dear and constant 
 union. Finding myself of no avail in this present 
 time, I betake myself to that past date, and am so 
 captivated therewith that the condition of old Rome, 
 free and flourishing, — I love not much her birth or 
 her old age, — fills me with passionate affection, 
 and I can never see so often the site of those houses 
 and streets, and of these ruins, with foundations 
 deep as the antipodes, but that I take new delight 
 in them." 
 
 This sense of strength and comfort in the pres- 
 ence of the remains of strength and courage gone 
 by was felt by Goethe not less than by Montaigne. 
 It was fortunate, perhaps, that Goethe did not visit 
 Rome too early in life. He had written the 'Sor- 
 rows of Young Werther,' and had in other ways got 
 rid of the more perilous stuff of sentiment, before 
 he was exposed to the trial of seeing "the monu- 
 
The Bookmen at Rome 6^ 
 
 ment and sepulchre of the world." More than any 
 other of the pilgrims who have left a record of their 
 emotions, Goethe seems to have felt at Rome a 
 sense of the richness, the happiness, of existence. 
 " Here," he wrote, " I am at my ease, and shall be, 
 it seems, at rest for all my days." Again : " I have 
 scarcely any new thoughts, I have found nothing 
 unfamiliar, but my old ideas have become so defi- 
 nite, so living, that they might pass for new." In 
 Rome he entered into the fullness of the labors of 
 the past, and into the fullness of his own life. It 
 was characteristic of him that, among all the fallen 
 fanes, he found one still unshaken : — 
 
 " Ein einziger Tempel, 
 Amor's Tempel." 
 
 In his old age remembrance was not regret. " Only 
 in Rome," he told Eckermann, "have I felt what it 
 really is to be a man. . . . Compared with my situ- 
 ation at Rome, I have never since felt real glad- 
 ness." 
 
 Goethe, after all, as Mr. Arnold says, " pursued a 
 lonely road." It is impossible for every one to reach 
 his imperial philosophy of joy, as well as of calm 
 and resignation. To those who visit Rome, and who 
 do not merely remark, with Clough's young lady, 
 that " Rome is a wonderful place, not very gay, how- 
 ever ; the English are mostly at Naples," there must 
 come moments of oppression and of disappointment. 
 They will find no more sympathetic companion than 
 ' Les Regrets ' and other Roman sonnets of the old 
 French poet, Joachim du Bellay. He compressed 
 into the space of some thirty poems all the various 
 feelings of sadness, of homesickness, of weariness, 
 and ^Iso the strange love and involuntary attach- 
 
66 Books and Bookmen 
 
 ment that Rome can inspire in the heart of the ex- 
 ile. His four years of residence in Rome, whither 
 he had accompanied his relative the Cardinal du 
 Bellay, were at first as dreary as Ovid's banishment 
 at Tomi. He sighed for la douceur Angevine, the 
 soft air of Anjou, and did not find consolation, like 
 Goethe, in Amor's Temple. It is chiefly in ' Les 
 Antiquit6s,' the " Ruynes of Rome," as Spenser has 
 it, that he gives expression to the sentiment of the 
 place. At first this string of cameos in sonnets, as 
 he calls them, only shows pictures of depression. 
 Like Chateaubriand, Du Bellay compares the an- 
 cient impetus of the Roman people to the rage of 
 blind natural powers : — 
 
 " As waves, as winds, as fire spread over all. 
 Till it by fatal doom adown did fall." 
 
 Nothing of her old estate remains save " Tyber has- 
 tening to his fall." The Seven Hills are no longer 
 the " Olympus on earth," but the weights with which 
 heaven crushes down the vanquished Titan. The 
 cycle of the destinies of Rome is compared to the 
 cycle of the world. She has spoiled the nations, and 
 the nations have spoiled her in turn. It is all a les- 
 son to us to make no great marvel of our own con- 
 dition : — 
 
 " For if that Time make end of things so sure, 
 He als will end the paine that I endure." 
 
 But at last even Du Bellay perceives that the force 
 of the city has not perished, that " the Demon of 
 Rome doth himself renew." This Demon is spoken 
 of again as the spirit which binds him to Rome " by 
 a chain of sweet regret." 
 
 And this, perhaps, is the experience of most peo- 
 ple. They are saddened, chilled, wearied at first, 
 
The Bookmen at Rome 
 
 67 
 
 and bewildered ; like Hawthorne, perhaps, they can 
 " never say how they dislike the place." And then 
 the Dcemon du lieu of Du Bellay — that is to say, 
 the attraction of the human life and effort that 
 made and still haunt Rome — becomes stronger 
 than weariness and depression. Like Clough, peo- 
 ple will ask themselves : — 
 
 " Does there a spirit we know not tliough seek, though we find com- 
 prehend not, 
 Here to entice and confuse, tempt and evade us, abide ? " 
 
 To a few, perhaps, as to the strange child Ha^wthorne 
 speaks of in his ' Note-Books,' " the rest of life is to 
 be a dream of this city of the soul, and an unsatis- 
 fied longing to come back to it." It is more pleas- 
 ant to believe in the magical virtue of the waters of 
 the Fountain of Trevi. 
 
'Bfljliomania in -france 
 
"Btbliomama (n france 
 
 HE love of books for their own 
 sake, for their paper, print, bind- 
 ing, and for their associations, as 
 distinct from the love of. litera- 
 ture, is a stronger and more uni- 
 versal passion in France than 
 elsewhere ' in Europe. In Eng- 
 land publishers are men of busi- 
 ness ; in France they aspire to be artists. In Eng- 
 land people borrow what they read from the libraries, 
 and take what gaudy cloth-binding chance chooses 
 to send them. In France people buy books, and 
 bind them to their heart's desire with quaint and 
 dainty devices on the morocco covers. Books are 
 life-long friends in that country ; in England they 
 are the guests of a week or of a fortnight. The 
 greatest French writers have been collectors of cu- 
 rious editions ; they have devoted whole treatises to 
 the love of books. The literature and history of 
 France are full of anecdotes of the good and bad 
 fortunes of bibliophiles, of their bargains, discover- 
 ies, disappointments. There lies before us at this 
 moment a small library of books about books, — the 
 ' Bibliophile Frangais,' in seven large volumes, ' Les 
 
7^ Books and Bookmen 
 
 Sonnets d'un Bibliophile,' ' La Bibliomanie en 1878/ 
 ' Un Bouquiniste Parisien,' and a dozen other works 
 of Janin, Nodier, Bennet, Pieters, Didot, great col- 
 lectors who have written for the instruction of be- 
 ginners and the pleasure of every one who takes 
 delight in printed paper. 
 
 The passion for books, like other forms of desire, 
 has its changes of fashion. It is not always easy to 
 justify the caprices of taste. The presence or ab- 
 sence of half an inch of paper in the "uncut" margin 
 of a book makes a difference of value that ranges 
 from five shillings to a hundred pounds. Some 
 books are run after because they are beautifully 
 bound ; some are competed for with equal eager- 
 ness because they never have been bound at all. 
 The uninitiated often make absurd mistakes about 
 these distinctions. Some time ago the Daily Tele- 
 graph reproached a collector because his books were 
 "uncut," whence, argued the journalist, it was clear 
 that he had never read them. " Uncut," of course, 
 only means that the margins have not been curtailed 
 by the binders' tools.' It is a point of sentiment to 
 like books just as they left the hands of the old 
 printers, — of Estienne, Aldus, or Louis Elzevir. 
 
 It is because the passion for books is a senti- 
 mental passion that people who have not felt it al- 
 ways fail to understand it. Sentiment is not an 
 easy thing to explain. Englishmen especially find 
 it impossible to understand tastes and emotions that 
 are not their own, — the wrongs of Ireland, the as- 
 pirations of Eastern Roumelia, the infatuated pas- 
 sion for a white flag of the late Comte de Chambord. 
 If we are to understand the book-hunter, we must 
 never forget that to him books are, in the first place, 
 
Bibliomania in France 7^ 
 
 relics. He likes to think that the great writers 
 whom he admires handled just such pages and saw 
 such an arrangement of type as he now beholds. 
 Moli^re, for example, corrected the proofs for this 
 edition of the ' Precieuses Ridicules,' when he first 
 discovered " what a labor it is to publish a book, and 
 how green (neuf) an author is the first time they 
 print him." Or it may be that Campanella turned 
 over, with hands unstrung, and still broken by the 
 torture, these leaves that contain his passionate son- 
 nets. Here again is the copy of Theocritus from 
 which some page may have been read aloud to 
 charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X. 
 This Gargantua is the counterpart of that which the 
 martyred Dolet printed for (or pirated from, alas !) 
 Maitre Francois Rabelais. This woful ballade, with 
 the wood-cut of three thieves hanging from one gal- 
 lows, came near being the " Last Dying Speech and 
 Confession of Fran9ois Villon." This shabby copy 
 of ' The Eve of St. Agnes ' is precisely like that 
 which Shelley doubled up and thrust into his pocket 
 when the prow of the piratical felucca crushed into 
 the timbers of the Don J-uan. Some rare books 
 have these associations, and they bring you nearer 
 to the authors than do the modern reprints. Biblio- 
 philes will tell you that it is the early readings they 
 care for, — the author's first fancies, and those more 
 hurried expressions which he afterwards corrected. 
 These readings have their literary value, especially 
 in the masterpieces of the great ; but the sentiment 
 after all is the main thing. 
 
 Other books come to be relics in another way. 
 They are the copies which belonged to illustrious 
 people, — to the famous collectors who make a kind 
 
74 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 of catena (a golden chain of bibliophiles) through the 
 centuries since printing was invented. There are 
 Grolier (1479-1565), — not a bookbinder, as the Eng- 
 lish Daily Telegraph supposed (probably when Mr. 
 Sala was on his travels), — De Thou (1553-1617), 
 the great Colbert, the Due de la Valli^re (1708- 
 1 780), Charles Nodier a man of yesterday, M. Didot, 
 and the rest, too numerous to name. Again, there 
 are the books of kings, like Francis I., Henri III., 
 and Louis XIV. These princes had their favorite 
 devices. Nicolas, Eve, Padeloup, Derome, and other 
 artists arrayed their books in morocco, — tooled with 
 skulls, cross-bones, and crucifixions for the voluptu- 
 ous pietist Henri III., with the salamander for Fran- 
 cis I., and powdered with fleurs de lys for the mon- 
 arch who "was the State." There are relics also of 
 noble beauties. The volumes of Marguerite d'An- 
 gouleme are covered with golden daisies. Diane de 
 Poictiers has her crescents and her bow, and the 
 fanciful and gracious contrivances that link her ini- 
 tial with that of her royal lover. The cipher of 
 Marie Antoinette adorns too many books that Ma- 
 dame du Barry might have welcomed to her hastily 
 improvised library. The three daughters of Louis 
 XV. had their favorite colors of morocco, citron, red, 
 and olive, and their books are valued as much as if 
 they bore the bees of De Thou, or the intertwined 
 C's of the illustrious and ridiculous Abb6 Cotin, the 
 Trissotin of the comedy. Surely in all these things 
 there is a human interest, and our fingers are faintly 
 thrilled, as we touch these books, with the far-off 
 contact of the hands of kings and cardinals, schol- 
 ars and coquettes, pedants, poets, and prkieuses, the 
 people who are unforgotten in the mob that inhab- 
 ited dead centuries. 
 
Bibliomania in France y^ 
 
 So universal and ardent has the love of magnifi- 
 cent books been in France, that it would be possible 
 to write a kind of .bibliomaniac history of that coun- 
 try. All her rulers, kings, cardinals, and women 
 have had time to spare for collecting. Without go- 
 ing too far back, to the time when Bertha span and 
 Charlemagne was an amateur, we may give a few 
 specimens of an anecdotical history of French bibli- 
 olatry, beginning, as is courteous, with a lady. " Can 
 a woman be a bibliophile .-' " is a question which was 
 once discussed at the weekly breakfast party of 
 Guilbert de Pix6r6court, the famous book-lover and 
 playwright, the "Corneille of the Boulevards." The 
 controversy glided into a discussion as to " how 
 many books a man can love at a time ; " but histor- 
 ical examples prove that French women (and Ital- 
 ian, witness the Princess d'Este) may be bibliophiles 
 of the true strain. Diane de Poictiers was their il- 
 lustrious patroness. The mistress of Henri II. pos- 
 sessed, in the Chiteau d'Anet, a library of the first 
 triumphs of typography. Her taste was wide in 
 range, including songs, plays, romances, divinity ; 
 her copies of the Fathers were bound in citron mo- 
 rocco, stamped with her arms and devices, and 
 closed with clasps of silver. In the love of books, as 
 in everything else, Diane and Henri II. were insep- 
 arable. The interlaced H and D are scattered over 
 the covers of their volumes ; the lily of France is 
 twined round the crescents of Diane, or round the 
 quiver, the arrows, and the bow which she adopted 
 as her cognizance, in honor of the maiden goddess. 
 The books of Henri and of Diane remained in the 
 Chateau d'Anet till the death of the Princesse Cond6 
 in 1723, when they were dispersed. The son of the 
 
7(5 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 famous Madame de Guyon bought the greater part 
 of the library, which has since been scattered again 
 and again. M. Leopold Double, a well-known bibli- 
 ophile, possessed several examples. 
 
 Henri III. scarcely deserves, perhaps, the name of 
 a book-lover, for he probably never read the works 
 which were bound for him in the most elaborate 
 way. But that great historian, Alexandre Dumas, 
 takes a far more friendly view of the king's studies, 
 and, in ' La Dame de Monsoreau ' introduces us to 
 a learned monarch. Whether he cared for the con- 
 tents of his books or not, his books are among the 
 most singular relics of a character which excites 
 even morbid curiosity. No more debauched and 
 worthless wretch ever filled a throne ; but, like the 
 bad man in Aristotle, Henri HI. was "full of repent- 
 ance." When he was not dancing in an unseemly 
 revel, he was on his knees in his chapel. The board 
 of one of his books, of which an engraving lies be- 
 fore me, bears his cipher and crown in the corners ; 
 but the centre is occupied in front with a picture of 
 the Annunciation, while on the back is the crucifix- 
 ion and the bleeding heart through which the swords 
 have pierced. His favorite device was the death's- 
 head, with the motto Memento Mori, or Spes mea 
 Deus. While he was still only Due d'Anjou, Henri 
 loved Marie de Cloves, Princesse de Cond6. On 
 her sudden death he expressed his grief, as he had 
 done his piety, by aid of the petits fers of the book- 
 binder. Marie's initials were stamped on his book- 
 covers in a chaplet of laurels. In one corner a skull 
 and cross-bones were figured ; in the other the 
 motto Mori nCest vie; while two large objects, which 
 did duty for tears, filled up the lower corners. The 
 
Bihliomania in France yy 
 
 books of Henri III., even when they are absolutely- 
 worthless as literature, sell for high prices ; and an 
 inane treatise on theology, decorated with his sa- 
 cred emblems, lately brought about ^120 in a Lon- 
 don sale. 
 
 Francis I., as a patron of all the arts, was natu- 
 rally an amateur of bindings. The fates of books 
 were curiously illustrated by the story of the copy 
 of Homer, on large paper, which Aldus, the great 
 Venetian printer, presented to Francis I. After the 
 death of the late Marquis of Hastings, better known 
 as an owner of horsps than of books, his possessions 
 were brought to the hammer. With the instinct, 
 the flair, as the French say, of the bibliophile, M. 
 Ambroise Firmin Didot, the biographer of Aldus, 
 guessed that the marquis might have owned some- 
 thing in his line. He sent his agent over to Eng- 
 land, to the country town where the sale was to be 
 held. M. Didot had his reward. Among the books 
 which were dragged out of some mouldy store-room 
 was the very Aldine Homer of Francis I., with part 
 of the original binding still clinging to the leaves. 
 M. Didot purchased the precious relic, and sent it 
 to what M. Fertiault (who has written a century of 
 sonnets on bibliomania) calls the hospital for books. 
 
 " Le dos humide, je I'eponge ; 
 Oii manque un coin, vite une allonge, 
 Pour tous j'ai maison de sante." 
 
 M. Didot, of course, did not practise this amateur 
 surgery himself, but had the arms and devices of 
 Francis I. restored by one of those famous binders 
 who only work for dukes, millionnaires, and Roth- 
 schilds. 
 
 During the religious wars and the troubles of the 
 
7^ Books and Bookmen 
 
 Fronde, it is probable that few people gave much 
 time to the collection of books. The illustrious ex- 
 ceptions are Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin, who 
 possessed a " snuffy Davy " of his own, an inde- 
 fatigable prowler among book-stalls and dingy pur- 
 lieus, in Gabriel Naud6. In 1664 Naud6, who was 
 a learned and ingenious writer, the apologist for 
 " great men accused of magic," pubhshed the sec- 
 ond edition of his 'Avis pour dresser une Biblio- 
 th^que,' and proved himself to be a true lover of the 
 chase, a mighty hunter (of books) before the Lord. 
 Naud6's advice to the collector is rather amusing. 
 He pretends not to care much for bindings, and 
 quotes Seneca's rebuke of the Roman bibliomaniacs, 
 Quos voluminum suorum frontes maxime placent titti- 
 lique, — who chiefly care for the backs and letter- 
 ing of their volumes. The fact is that Naud6 had 
 the wealth of Mazarin at his back, and we know 
 very well, from the remains of the Cardinal's library 
 which exist, that he liked as well as any man to 
 see his cardinal's hat glittering on red or olive mo- 
 rocco in the midst of the beautiful tooling of the 
 early seventeenth century. When once he got a 
 book, he would not spare to give it a Vorthy jacket. 
 Naud^'s ideas about buying were peculiar. Perhaps 
 he sailed rather nearer the wind than even Monk- 
 barns would have cared to do. His favorite plan 
 was to buy up whole libraries in the gross, " specu- 
 lative lots " as the dealers call them. In the second 
 place, he advised the book-lover to haunt the re- 
 treats of Libraires fripiers, et les vieuxfonds et mag- 
 asins. Here he truly observes that you may find 
 rare books, broches, — that is, unbound and uncut, 
 — just as Mr. Symonds bought two uncut copies of 
 
Bibliomania in France yg 
 
 ' Laon and Cythna ' in a Bristol stall for a crown. 
 " You may get things for four or five crowns that 
 would cost you forty or fifty elsewhere," says Naudd. 
 Thus a few years ago M. Paul Lacroix bought for 
 two francs, in a Paris shop, the very copy of ' Tar- 
 tuffe ' which had belonged to Louis XIV. The ex- 
 ample may now be worth perhaps ;^200. But we are 
 digressing into the pleasures of the modern sports- 
 man. 
 
 It was not only in second-hand bookshops that 
 Naud6 hunted, but among the dealers in waste pa- 
 per. " Thus did Poggio find Quintilian on the coun- 
 ter of a wood-merchant, and Masson picked up 
 ' Agobardus ' at the shop of a binder, who was go- 
 ing to use the MS. to patch his books withal." 
 Rossi, who may have seen Naude at work, tells us 
 how he would enter a shop with a yard-measure in 
 his hand, buying books, we are sorry to say, by the 
 ell. " The stalls where he had passed were like the 
 towns through which Attila or the Tartars had 
 swept, with ruin in their train, — u( non hominis 
 unius sedulitas, sed calamitas quaedam per omnes 
 bibliopolarum tabernas pervasissevideatur !" Naude 
 had sorrows of his own. In 1652 the Parliament 
 decreed the confiscation of the splendid library of 
 Mazarin, which was perhaps the first free library in 
 Europe, — the first that was open to all who were 
 worthy of right of entrance. There is a painful 
 description of the sale, from which the book-lover 
 will avert his eyes. On Mazarin's return to power 
 he managed to collect again and enrich his stores, 
 which form the germ of the existing BibliotMque 
 Mazarine. 
 
 Naud6 is thought not to have been more scrupu- 
 
^o Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 lous than other collectors, but it is not on record 
 that he ever stole a book. A contemporary of his 
 — a Pope, melancholy to relate — is accused of hav- 
 ing "conveyed" a book on the Council of Trent. 
 The witness for the prosecution is only Tallemant 
 des R^aux, who had a bad word for every one ; and 
 it is fair to say that when he annexed the volume 
 Innocent X. was still plain Monseigneur Pamphilio 
 in the suite of the Legate. The victim was Du 
 Monstier, the painter, who himself frankly avowed 
 that he had stolen a book from a stall on the Pont 
 Neuf. He was the more likely to be suspicious of 
 others. Innocent X. (then Pamphilio) once attended 
 the Legate Cardinal Barberini on a visit to the 
 studio of Du Monstier. On the table lay ' L'His- 
 toire du Concile de Trente,' — " the London edi- 
 tion, the good one." " What a shame that such a 
 man should have such a book ! " said Pamphilio to 
 himself, and proceeded to make his frontier more 
 scientific by slipping the history under his soutane. 
 Du Monstier observed him, seized the spoil, and 
 drove Monseigneur Pamphilio out of the studio. 
 According to Amelot de la Houssare, the priest, 
 when he became pope, bore resentment, and during 
 the ten years of his pontificate was the inveterate 
 enemy of France. He did not, however, as some 
 expected he would, excommunicate Du Monstier. 
 
 Among princes and popes it is pleasant to meet 
 one man of letters, and he the greatest of the great 
 age, who was a bibliophile. The enemies and rivals 
 of Moli^re — De Vise, De Villiers, and the rest — 
 are always reproaching him with his love of bou- 
 quins. There is some difference of opinion among 
 philologists about the derivation of bouquin, but all 
 
Bibliomania in France 8i 
 
 book-hunters know the meaning of the word. The 
 bouquin is the " small, rare volume, dark with tar- 
 nished gold," which lies among the wares of the 
 stall-keeper, patient in rain and dust, till the hunter 
 comes who can appreciate the quarry. We like to 
 think of MoUere lounging through the narrow streets 
 in the evening, returning, perhaps, from some no- 
 ble house where he has been reading the proscribed 
 ' Tartuffe,' or giving an imitation of the rival actors 
 at the H6tel Bourgogne. Absent as the contempla- 
 teur is, a dingy book-stall wakens him from his rev- 
 erie. His lace ruffles are soiled in a moment, with 
 the learned dust of ancient volumes. Perhaps he 
 picks up the only work out of all his library that is 
 known to exist, — un ravissani petit Elzevir, 'De 
 Imperio Magni Mogolis' (Lugd. Bat. 1651). On the 
 title-page of this tiny volume, one of the minute 
 series of ' Republics ' which the Elzevirs published, 
 the poet has written his rare signature, " J. B. P. 
 Molifere," with the price the book cost him, " i livre, 
 10 sols." " II n'est pas de bouquin qui s'^chappe 
 de ses mains," says the author of ' La Guerre Co- 
 mique,' the last of the pamphlets which flew about 
 during the great literary quarrel about " L'ficole 
 des Femmes." Thanks to M. Souli6 the catalogue 
 of Moli^re's library has been found, though the 
 books themselves have passed out of view. There 
 are about three hundred and fifty volumes in the 
 inventory, but Moli^re's widow may have omitted 
 as valueless (it is the foible of her sex) many rusty 
 bouquins, now worth far more than their weight 
 in gold. Moli^re owned no fewer than two hundred 
 and forty volumes of French and Italian comedies. 
 From these he took what suited him wherever he 
 
^2 Books and Bookmen 
 
 found it. He had plenty of classics, histories, philo- 
 sophic treatises, ■ the essays of Montaigne, a Plu- 
 tarch, and a Bible. 
 
 We know nothing, to the regret of bibliophiles, 
 of Moli^re's taste in bindings. Did he have a comic 
 mask stamped on the leather (that device was chased 
 on his plate), or did he display his cognizance and 
 arms, the two apes that support a shield charged with 
 three mirrors of Truth ? It is certain — La Bruy^re 
 tells us as much — that the sillier sort of book-lover 
 in the seventeenth century was much the same sort 
 of person as his successor in our own time. " A man 
 tells me he has a library," says La Bruyfere {De la 
 Mode) ; " I ask permission to see it. I go to visit 
 my friend, and he receives me in a house where, 
 even on the stairs, the smell of the black morocco 
 with which his books are covered is so strong that 
 I nearly faint. He does his best to revive me ; 
 shouts in my ear that the volumes ' have gilt edges,' 
 that they are 'elegantly tooled,' that they are 'of 
 the good edition,' ... . and informs me that 'he 
 never reads,' that ' he never sets foot in this part 
 of his house,' that he 'will come to oblige me !' I 
 thank him for all his kindness, and have no more 
 desire than himself to see the tanner's shop that he 
 calls his library." 
 
 Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV., was a 
 bibliophile at whom perhaps La Bruy^re would have 
 sneered. He was a collector who did not read, but 
 who amassed beautiful books, and looked forward, 
 as business men do, to the day when he would have 
 time to study them. After Grolier, De Thou, and 
 Mazarin, Colbert possessed probably the richest pri- 
 vate library in Europe. Th Ambassadors of France 
 
Bibliomania in France 8j 
 
 were charged to procure him rare books and manu- 
 scripts, and it is said that in a commercial treaty 
 with the Porte he inserted a clause demanding a 
 certain quantity of Levant morocco for the use of 
 the royal bookbinders. England, in those days, had 
 no literature with which France deigned to be ac- 
 quainted. Even into England, however, valuable 
 books had been imported ; and we find Colbert 
 pressing the French ambassador at St. James's to 
 bid for him at a certain sale of rare heretical writ- 
 ings. People who wanted to gain his favor ap- 
 proached him with presents of books, and the city 
 of Metz gave him two real curiosities, — the famous 
 "Metz Bible" and the Missal of Charles the Bald. 
 The Elzevirs sent him their best examples, and 
 though Colbert probably saw more of the gilt cov- 
 ers of his books than of their contents, at least he 
 preserved and handed down many valuable works. 
 As much may be said for the reprobate Cardinal 
 Dubois, who, with all his faults, was a collector. 
 Bossuet, on the other hand, left little or nothing of 
 interest except a copy of the 1682 edition of Mo- 
 li^re, whom he detested and condemned to "the 
 punishment of those who laugh." Even this book, 
 which has a curious interest, has slipped out of 
 sight, and may have ceased to exist. 
 
 If Colbert and Dubois preserved books from de- 
 struction, there are collectors enough whom books 
 have rescued from oblivion. The diplomacy of 
 D'Hoym is forgotten ; the plays of Longepierre, 
 and his quarrels with J. B. Rousseau are known 
 only to the literary historian. These great ama- 
 teurs have secured an eternity of gilt edges, an 
 immortality of morocco. Absurd prices are given 
 
^4 Books and Bookmen 
 
 for any trash that belonged to them, and the writer 
 of this notice has bought for four shillings an El- 
 zevir classic, which, when it bears the golden fleece 
 of Longepierre, is worth about ;£ioo. Longepierre, 
 D'Hoym, McCarthy, and the Due de la VaUidre, 
 with all their treasures, are less interesting to us 
 than Graille, Coche, and Loque, the neglected daugh- 
 ters of Louis XV. They found some pale consola- 
 tion in their little cabinets of books, in their various 
 liveries of olive, citron, and red morocco. 
 
 During the Revolution, to like well-bound books 
 was as much as to proclaim one an aristocrat. Con- 
 dorcet might have escaped the scaffold if he had 
 only thrown away the neat little Horace from the 
 royal press, which betrayed him for no true Repub- 
 lican, but an educated man. The great libraries 
 from the chateaux of the nobles were scattered 
 among all the book-stalls. True sons of freedom 
 tore off the bindings, with their gilded crests and 
 scutcheons. One revolutionary writer declared, and 
 perhaps he was not far wrong, that the art of bind- 
 ing was the worst enemy of reading. He always 
 began his studies by breaking the backs of the vol- 
 umes he was about to attack. The art of bookbind- 
 ing in these sad years took flight to England, and 
 was kept alive by artists robust rather than refined, 
 like Thompson and Roger Payne. 
 
 When Napoleon became Emperor, he strove in 
 vain to make the troubled and feverish years of his 
 power produce a literature. He himself was one of 
 the most voracious readers of novels that ever lived. 
 He was always asking for the newest of the new, 
 and unfortunately even the new romances of his 
 period were hopelessly bad. Barbier, his librarian, 
 
Bibliomania in France 8^ 
 
 had orders to send parcels of fresh fiction to his 
 majesty wherever he might happen to be, and great 
 loads of novels followed Napoleon to Germany, 
 Spain, Italy, Russia. The conqueror was very hard 
 to please. He read in his travelling carriage, and 
 after skimming a few pages would throw a volume 
 that bored him out of the window into the highway. 
 He might have been tracked by his trail of romances, 
 as was Hop-o'-My-Thumb, in the fairy tale, by the 
 white stones he dropped behind him. Poor Bar- 
 bier, who ministered to a passion for novels that de- 
 manded twenty volumes a day, was at his wit's end. 
 He tried to foist on the Emperor the romances of 
 the year before last ; but these Napoleon had gen- 
 erally read, and he refused, with imperial scorn, to 
 look at them again. He ordered a travelling library 
 of three thousand volumes to be made for him, but 
 it was proved that the task could not be accom- 
 plished in less than six years. The expense, if only 
 fifty copies of each example had been printed, would 
 have amounted to more than six million francs. A 
 Roman emperor would not have allowed these con- 
 siderations to stand in his way ; but Napoleon, after 
 all, was a modern. He contented himself with a 
 selection of books conveniently small in shape, and 
 packed in sumptuous cases. The classical writers 
 of France could never content Napoleon, and even 
 from Moscow, in 1 8 1 2, he wrote to Barbier clamor- 
 ous for new books, and good ones. Long before 
 they could have reached Moscow, Napoleon was fly- 
 ing homeward before Kotousoff and Benningsen. 
 
 Napoleon was the last of the book-lovers who gov- 
 erned France. The Due d'Aumale, a famous biblio- 
 phile, has never " come to his own," and of M. Gam- 
 
^^ Books and Bookmen 
 
 betta it is only known that his devotional library, at 
 least, has found its way into the market. The writer 
 of this essay was fortunate enough to purchase ' La 
 Journde Chretienne,' with Lhn Gambetta on the 
 fly-leaf, at a London book-stall. We have reached 
 the era of private book fanciers : of Nodier, who 
 had three libraries in his time, but never a Virgil ; 
 and of Pix^rdcourt, the dramatist, who founded the 
 Society des Bibliophiles Fran^ais. The Romantic 
 movement in French literature brought in some 
 new fashions in book-hunting. The original editions 
 of Ronsard, Des Fortes, Belleau, and Du Bellay be- 
 came invaluable ; while the writings of Gautier, 
 Petrus Borel, and others excited the passion of col- 
 lectors. Pix^r^court was a believer in the works of 
 the Elzevirs. On one occasion, when he was outbid 
 by a friend at an auction, he cried passionately, " I 
 shall have that book at your sale ! " and, the other 
 poor bibliophile soon falling into a decline and dying, 
 Pixer6court got the volume which he so much de- 
 sired. The superstitious might have been excused 
 for crediting him with the gift of jettatura, — of the 
 evil eye. On Pix6r6court himself the evil eye fell 
 at last ; his theatre, the Gaiet6, was burned down in 
 1835, and his creditors intended to impound his be- 
 loved books. The bibliophile hastily packed them 
 in boxes, and conveyed them in two cabs and under 
 cover of night to the house of M. Paul Lacroix. 
 There they languished in exile till the affairs of the 
 manager were settled. 
 
 Pixdr^court and Nodier, the most reckless of men, 
 were the leaders of the older school of bibliomani- 
 acs. The former was not a rich man ; the second 
 was poor, but he never hesitated in face of a price 
 
Bibliomania in France 8y 
 
 that he could not afford. He would literally ruin 
 himself in the accumulation of a library, and then 
 would recover his fortunes by selling his books. 
 Nodier passed through life without a Virgil, because 
 he never succeeded in finding the ideal Virgil of his 
 dreams, — a clean, uncut copy of the old Elzevir 
 edition, with the misprint and the two pages in red 
 letters. Perhaps this failure was a judgment on him 
 for the trick by which he beguiled a certain collector 
 of Bibles. He invented an edition, and put the col- 
 lector on the scent, which he followed vainly, till he 
 died of the sickness of hope deferred. 
 
 One has more sympathy with the eccentricities of 
 Nodier than with the mere extravagance of the new 
 haute icole of bibliomaniacs, the school of million- 
 naires, royal dukes, and Rothschilds. These ama- 
 teurs are reckless of prices, and by their competition 
 have made it almost impossible for a poor man to 
 buy a precious book. The dukes, the Americans, 
 the public libraries, snap them all up in the auctions. 
 A glance at M. Gustave Brunet's little volume, ' La 
 Bibliomanie en 1878,' will prove the excesses which 
 these people commit. The funeral oration of Bos- 
 suet over Henriette Marie of France (1669), and 
 Henriette Anne of England (1670), quarto, in the 
 original binding, are sold for £,2.oq). It is true that 
 this copy had possibly belonged to Bossuet himself, 
 and certainly to his nephew. There is an example 
 of the 1682 edition of Moli^re, — of Molifere whom 
 Bossuet detested, — which may also have belonged 
 to the eagle of Meaux. The manuscript notes of 
 the divine on the work of the poor player must be 
 edifying, and in the interests of science it is to be 
 hoped that this book may soon come into the mar- 
 
88 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 ket. While pamphlets of Bossuet are sold so dear, 
 the first edition of Homer — the beautiful edition 
 of 1488, which the three young Florentine gentle- 
 men published — may be had for ;£ioo. Yet even 
 that seems expensive, when we remember that the 
 copy in the library of George III. cost only seven 
 shillings. This exquisite Homer, sacred to the mem- 
 ory of learned friendships, the chief offering of early 
 printing at the altar of ancient poetry, is really one 
 of the most interesting books in the world. Yet 
 this Homer is less valued than the tiny octavo which 
 contains the ballades and huitains of the scamp 
 Frangois Villon (1533). 'The History of the Holy 
 Grail' (L'Hystoire du Sainct Griaal: Paris, 1523), 
 in a binding stamped with the four crowns of Louis 
 XIV., is valued at about ;^S00. A chivalric ro- 
 mance of the old days, which was treasured even in 
 the time of the grand ntonarque, when old French 
 literature was so much despised, is certainly a curi- 
 osity. The 'Rabelais' of Madame de Pompadour 
 seems comparatively cheap at £,60. There is some- 
 thing piquant in the idea of inheriting from that 
 famous beauty the work of the colossal genius of 
 Rabelais.* 
 
 The natural sympathy of collectors "to middle 
 fortune born " is not with the rich men whose sport 
 in book-hunting resembles the battue. We side 
 with the poor hunters of the wild game, who hang 
 over the four-penny stalls on the quais, and dive 
 into the dusty boxes after literary pearls. These 
 devoted men rise betimes, and hurry to the stalls 
 before the common tide of passengers goes by. 
 
 * For a specimen of Madame Pompadour's binding see opposite 
 page. 
 
iNDil^G Will-I l>t ASMS OF MADAME DE POMPADOUR 
 
Bibliomania in France 91 
 
 Early morning is the best moment in this, as in 
 other sports. At half past seven, in summer, the 
 bouquiniste, the dealer in cheap volumes at second- 
 hand, arrays the books which he purchased over 
 night, the stray possessions of ruined families, the 
 outcasts of libraries. The old-fashioned bookseller 
 knew little of the value of his wares ; it was his 
 object to turn a small certain profit on his expen- 
 diture. Thus a charming old fellow in a London 
 street (long may he live !) actually sold a play of 
 Moli^re's, a presentation copy with the poet's auto- 
 graph, for half a crown ! The purchaser in this case 
 was generous, and sent the stall-keeper an adequate 
 cheque. It is generally held, however, that book- 
 sellers are fair game. The amateurs surround their 
 boxes on summer mornings, " as thick as bees on 
 the iiowers in spring," and watch each other as you 
 may have seen boys do, when they are angling three 
 or four in the same river-pool. Sometimes the best 
 fish escape them, and M. de Fontaine de Resbecq 
 (author of a charming little book, 'Voyage Litt6- 
 raire sur les Quais de Paris ') landed a first edition 
 of Rochefoucauld after two keen fishers had just 
 gone over the same water. It is reckoned that an 
 energetic, business-like old bookseller will turn over 
 150,000 volumes in a year. In this vast number 
 there must be pickings for the humble collector who 
 cannot afford to encounter the children of Israel at 
 Christie's, or at the H6tel Drouot. 
 
 Let the enthusiast, in conclusion, throw a hand- 
 ful of lilies on the grave of the martyr of the love 
 of books, — the poet Albert Glatigny. Poor Gla- 
 tigny was the son of a garde champitre ; his educa- 
 tion was accidental, and his poetic taste and skill ex- 
 
92 
 
 Books and Bookmen 
 
 traordinarily fine and delicate. In his life of literal 
 starvation (he had often to sleep in omnibuses and 
 railway stations), he frequently spent the price of a 
 dinner on a new book. He lived to read and to dream, 
 and if he bought books he had not the wherewithal 
 to live. Still, he bought them, — and he died ! His 
 own poems were beautifully printed by Lemerre, 
 and it may be a joy to him {si mentem mortalia tan- 
 gunt) that they are now so highly valued that the 
 price of a copy would have kept the author alive 
 and happy for a month. 
 
050061)11111111:50 
 
'Booftl3inDtng0 
 
 AKING one consideration with 
 another, the bookseller's hfe, in 
 summer, can scarcely be a happy 
 one. In summer there are so 
 many agreeable things to do that 
 one is little tempted to haunt 
 streets and lanes, and linger over 
 stalls, and imbrue one's self, so to 
 speak, with learned dust. Summer is the season for 
 finding "books in the running brooks;" and even 
 if a man be pent up in town, there are gardens, and 
 lawn-tennis courts, and Lord's, and the Oval which 
 appeal to him. He can find sport enough without 
 the sport of book-hunting, which is all very well in 
 winter, when the "ways are mire," and life has 
 comparatively few recreations. In spite of these 
 results of July weather, the Beckford sale went on 
 in 1883 without any sign of slackness, or of a droop- 
 ing and depressed market. Probably the mighty 
 book-hunters are not so easily diverted for the pur- 
 suit of the big game as humbler amateurs who 
 chevy the small and infrequent bargain in winter. 
 In the same summer Mr. Quaritch published a 
 ' Catalogue of Books in Historical and Remarkable 
 
9<5 Books and Bookmen 
 
 Bindings,' which is equipped with an historical in- 
 troduction, and enriched, if we may say so, with re- 
 markable remarks. With the aid of this and of the 
 Beckford catalogue (No. 3), we propose to discourse 
 for a while of books and of bookbindings. 
 
 " Books cannot live long without bindings," says 
 the author of Mr. Quaritch's catalogue. The life of 
 unbound German books in particular is a short and 
 (it is needless to add) by no means a merry one. 
 A man has a natural and proper objection to spend- 
 ing money on the binding of his German books; 
 they are so ugly, so didactic, so badly printed on 
 such execrable paper. But he who does not at least 
 half bind his German volumes soon finds his study 
 resemble the cave of the sibyl on a windy day, and 
 the pages 
 
 " Turbata volant rapidis ludibria ventis." 
 " It is therefore no unwise or contemptible mania," 
 says the same writer "(as mere scholars and journal- 
 istic journeymen have combined to assert), which 
 impels the lover of good books to deck his darlings 
 in appropriate costume, — a costume so appropriate 
 and so good in itself that even Ignorance will be 
 tempted to save the author for the sake of his 
 robes." 
 
 Very true, let the mere scholar and the contemp- 
 tible journalist make what he can of it. Mr. Quar- 
 itch's catalogue goes on to deplore the lack of a 
 truly worthy history of bookbinding. MM. Marius- 
 Michel have written, not unwisely, on this matter ; 
 but they are (in the modern division of labor) not 
 binders so much as gilders. We have by us a vol- 
 ume bound in a mosaic of red, white, and brown 
 moroccos, double, with green morocco, and bearing 
 
Bookbindings gy 
 
 the names " Hardy-Mennil" and " Marius-Michel 
 Doreurs," whence we infer that Hardy - Mennil 
 bound the book, and Marius-Michel only did the gild- 
 ing. Therefore, Marius-Michel think chiefly not of 
 the leather, but of the gilding which decorates the 
 leather, and thus the Marius - Michel ' History of 
 Binding' is but a one-sided work. Mr. Quaritch 
 thinks we have fallen on an age of eclecticism in 
 binding, and his catalogue has even a good word for 
 Boz^rian, who bound about seventy years ago, and 
 may have been original, but is certainly not popular 
 among amateurs. 
 
 We need not vex ourselves with criticism of Car- 
 olingian bookbinding, which was of a sumptuous 
 and monumental character. " I don't call that jew- 
 eller's work ; I call it engineering," said an Italian 
 jeweller, as he contemplated a massive example of 
 British art in gold. And the bookbinding of " Karl 
 the Great " and his period partook almost of the 
 nature of architecture, and was ponderous with wood 
 and metal and encrusted pebbles about the size of 
 apples. Modern bookbinding came in during the 
 sixteenth century, when wood gave way to paste- 
 board, and morocco succeeded to sheep-skin, deer- 
 skin, and the skin of swine. Grolier, in his diplo- 
 matic capacity, lived from 1 510 to 1530 in Italy, and 
 brought back to France his magnificent library, and 
 the taste for morocco bindings with tooled geomet- 
 rical patterns and mottoes and devices. The royal 
 family of France had everything handsome about 
 them in the way of bookbinding, and " the golden 
 time " of this ornamental art was between 1525 and 
 
 1575- 
 On looking at the catalogue of the ^Beckford 
 
pS Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 Library, we shall see how many of the dearest and 
 most coveted volumes were bound in this period. 
 Grolieresque work came with fashion in England ; 
 the community of Little Gidding (see ' John Ingle- 
 sant ') dabbled in embroidered silk bindings, and 
 then " English binding subsided for a time into dull 
 and ugly plainness." How truly, then, does Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold say that the English spirit entered 
 the prison house of Puritanism, and had the key 
 turned on it for two hundred years ! The English 
 spirit came out in our day, and straightway wallowed 
 in music-halls and society journals, so that English 
 bookbinding has never really, to our mind, been 
 worth much since the direct traditions of Grolier's 
 taste expired. In France "plainness came in with 
 the Bourbons," and the stout bindings done for De 
 Thou, and decorated with his armorial bearings, are 
 good examples of the period. Le Gascon (1620), 
 introduced the fashion of " minute gold dots elabo- 
 rated into lines and crosses of singular brilliancy 
 and elegance." It were too long to tell of the 
 changes and fashions associated with the names of 
 Boyer, Dusseuil, the members of the house of De- 
 rome, and the "Padeloupian license" of Padeloup. 
 These binders are all in very high estimation, es- 
 pecially when their books are doubles, or lined with 
 morocco. Not less prized is the modern work of 
 Bauzonnet. 
 
 The third portion of the Beckford Library was 
 not less beautiful than its predecessors, and not less 
 rich in curiosities and in trash. Unfortunately, we 
 are ' acquainted only with the prices of the most 
 expensive books. We cannot tell for how much 
 the curious bought ' The Naiad : a Tale, with other 
 
Bookbindings gg 
 
 Poems,' on which Beckford wrote, " A poem of inef- 
 fable silliness." A quaint book, which sold for 
 about £iB,\s "Nicole, 'Les Imaginaires et les Vis- 
 ionnaires,' " a very fine copy, in blue morocco, bound 
 by Dusseuil (Liege, 1667). The book is in the Beck- 
 ford catalogue correctly assigned to the press of the 
 Elzevirs. The large price must be exclusively due 
 to the binding, as the interest of the matter, an at- 
 tack on Desmarets de St. Porlin, has absolutely evap- 
 orated. 
 
 Probably few students find it often necessary to 
 consult Niphus, 'De Pulchro,' which was bought for 
 £,70. The book is out of Grolier's library, and Gro- 
 liers are limited in number ; perhaps four hundred 
 are known to exist. The brown morocco cover 
 bears one of his devices, " Portio Mea, Domine, sit 
 in terra viventium." Possibly Grolier argued that 
 there would be no book-collecting in a future state, 
 and so prayed for long residence "in the land of the 
 living." Mr. Quaritch values at £600 his own Gro- 
 lier's copy of the first dated book printed in Italy, 
 Lactantius' ' Adversus Gentes ' (1465). This is 
 bound in orange morocco, "with grand geometrical 
 designs of interlacements tooled in broad compart- 
 ments of silver, with elegant subsidiary ornaments 
 of mosaic character, in green, red, and gold." Un- 
 luckily, an Italian marquis of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury has had his own coronet and monogram added, 
 but "no worm or marquis," cries the catalogue, "has 
 invaded the beauty of the rich decorations " of the 
 sides. "Worm or marquis" is good. Mr. Quaritch 
 thinks it probable that Grolier adopted various de- 
 vices at different periods and in different moods. 
 It would be interesting to know what he was think- 
 
100 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 ing of when he selected "Quisque suos patimur 
 Manes," and " Tanquam ventus." 
 
 A lady amateur of high (book-collecting) reputa- 
 tion, the Comtesse de Verrue, is represented in the 
 Beckford sale by one of three copies of ' L'Histoire 
 de M^lusine,' of Melusine, the troy-formed fairy, and 
 ancestress of the house of Lusignan. The Comtesse 
 de Verrue, one of the few women who have really 
 understood book-collecting, was born January i8, 
 1670, and died November 18, 1736. ' She was the 
 daughter of Charles de Luynes and of his second 
 wife, Anne de Rohan. When only thirteen she 
 married the Comtede Verrue, who somewhat injudi- 
 ciously presented her, a Jleur de quinze ans, as Ron- 
 sard says, at the court of Victor Amadeus of Savoy. 
 It is thought that the countess was less cruel than 
 the fleur Angevine of Ronsard. For some reason the 
 young matron fled from the court of Turin and re- 
 turned to Paris, where she built a magnificent hotel, 
 and received the most distinguished company. Ac- 
 cording to her biographer, the countess loved sci- 
 ence and art jtisqu'au dMre, and she collected the 
 furniture of the period, without neglecting the blue 
 china of the glowing Orient. In ebony bookcases 
 she possessed about eighteen thousand volumes, 
 bound by the greatest artists of the day. " Without 
 care for the present, without fear of the future, do- 
 ing good, pursuing the beautiful, protecting the arts, 
 with a tender heart and open hand, the countess 
 passed through life, calm, happy, beloved, and ad- 
 mired." She left an epitaph on herself, thus rudely 
 translated : — 
 
 " Here lies, in sleep secure, 
 A dame inclined to mirth, 
 
Bookbindings loi 
 
 Who, by way of making sure, 
 Chose her paradise on earth I " • 
 
 It is singular that the great lady book-collectors 
 have usually been dames averse to melancholy, such 
 as Madame de Pompadour, Madame Du Barry, and 
 the Comtesse de Verrue. The library of Marie An- 
 toinette herself was of the lightest and least heroic 
 character, and a French man of letters gave enor- 
 mous offence, during the Empire, when he indis- 
 creetly published the catalogue of the collection at 
 Trianon. 
 
 The worst of great sales like the Beckford affair 
 is that books of no particular value, but of a curious 
 interest, appealing only to few, are apt to slip away 
 out of sight and get into the hands of persons who 
 make no literary use of their contents. In the Sun- 
 derland sale there was a dumpy little duodecimo, in 
 Latin, on human sacrifices. If one could only have 
 secured this rare volume on a singular subject, im- 
 portant to the student of the history of religion, a 
 great many scrambling researches would have been 
 spared. Here were all the facts and references ready 
 collected, and nothing was wanting but theory and 
 the higher criticism, which any fellow can supply. 
 But the book disappeared, and probably, being cheap, 
 has filtered out of the way into some stall where one 
 will never see it more. In the Beckford sale, first 
 day, was Nynauld's ' De la Lycanthropie, Transfor-' 
 mation et Extase des Sorciers ' (Paris, 1615). What 
 a treat would this volume be for the folk-loriste, as 
 the French call the children of primeval Mother 
 Goose ! Lycanthropy, or the art by which men be- 
 come were-wolves, is' a truly charming topic. The 
 Romans were expert in this art, as we know from 
 
102 Books and Bookmen 
 
 Petronius. The Book of Glendalock tells us that 
 " the descendants of the wolf are in Ossory," and 
 that the wolf-tribe can transform themselves into 
 actual wolves. The Hirpini, " Wolves," an old Sa- 
 bine tribe, used to imitate their favorite animal in 
 "wolf-dances." "A snout of a wolf long dried is a 
 counter-charm against all witchcraft and sorcery," 
 says Pliny, " which is the reason that they usually 
 set it upon the gates of country farms." But, as a 
 rule, were-wolves were always malignant. Olaus 
 Magnus mentions one good fellow who, when his 
 company were starving, changed himself into a wolf 
 and slew a sheep for his comrades. But the more 
 common view of this accomplishment of skin-shift- 
 ing was entertained (saith Olaus) by a certain Duke 
 of Prussia. This duke did not believe in were- 
 wolves, but, by way of psychical research, he caught 
 a man who had a wolfish reputation, and bade him 
 turn into a wolf without more ado, which when the 
 poor caitiff did, as one anxious to oblige, our duke 
 straightway had him burned alive. " Talia enim fla- 
 gitia tam divinae quam humanse leges severissime 
 puniunt." Probably Nynauld's book throws much 
 light on a superstition which is almost universal, 
 and so persistent that it is firmly believed in by 
 M. D'Assier, a modern positivist, and author of 
 ' L'Homme Posthume.' 
 
 As we have touched on superstitions, in this un- 
 methodic causerie, we may as well go on to notice a 
 very rare book, number 347 in the Beckford Cata- 
 logue. This is styled, " Oxenham {James of Sale 
 Monachorum, Devon). 'True Relation of an Appa- 
 rition of a Bird with a white breast hovering over 
 the Death-beds of his Children.' Calf extra. Small 
 
Bookbindings loj 
 
 4to. 1641." Every one, or at all events everyone 
 who has read ' Westward Ho ! ' has heard of the 
 famous Oxenham Bird, the omen of death. The 
 bird is usually called a " white bird ; " in the rare 
 pamphlet of 1641 it is more correctly styled a bird 
 with a white breast. Now birds, as messengers of 
 death, are very familiar to mythology. The " birds 
 of Yama," the Indian god of the Dead, are men- 
 tioned in Rig-Veda, x. 165. But the family of Ox- 
 enham has long claimed possession of a bird-mes- 
 senger of its own, a bird of undetermined species. 
 The history of the legend, as far as it can be made 
 out, is very curious, and has lately been investigated 
 by Mr. R. W. Cotton. The question arises. What 
 is the earliest account of the apparition ? On this 
 point we can scarcely agree with Mr. Cotton. James 
 Howell's ' Epistolse-Ho-Elianae ' were first published 
 in 1645. In the first edition the letters, or the ma- 
 jority of them, are not dated. In later editions the 
 letters are dated, but very carelessly, and in some 
 cases wrongly. The following letter is undated in 
 the first edition ; in later editions it is dated July, 
 1632 : — 
 
 " To Mr. E. D. 
 
 " Sir, — I thank you a thousand times for the 
 Noble entertainment you gave me at Berry, and the 
 pains you took in shewing me the Antiquities of that 
 place. In requitall, I can tell you of a strange thing 
 I saw lately here and I beleeve 'tis true. As I pass'd 
 by Saint Dunstans in Fleet-street the last Saturday, 
 I stepp'd into a Lapidary or Stone-cutters Shop, to 
 treat with the Master for a Stone to be put upon 
 my Fathers Tomb ; And casting my eies up and 
 down, I might spie a huge Marble with a large in- 
 
I04 Books and Bookmen 
 
 scription upon 't, which was thus, to my best re- 
 membrance : 
 
 " Here lies John Oxenham a goodly young man, in 
 whose Chamber, as he was strugling with the pangs 
 of death, a Bird with a White-brest was seen flutter- 
 ing about his bed, and so vanish! d. 
 
 "Here lies also Mary Oxenham the sister of the 
 said John, who died the next day, and the same Ap- 
 parition was seen in the Room. 
 
 "Then another sister is spoke of. Then, Here 
 lies hard by James Oxenham, the son of the said 
 John, who died a child in his cradle a little after, 
 and such a Bird was seen fluttering about his head, 
 a little before he expir'd, which vanished afterwards. 
 
 " At the bottom of the Stone ther is, 
 
 " Here lies Elizabeth Oxenham, the Mother of the 
 said John, who died l6 yeers since, when such a Bird 
 with a Whiie-brest was seen about her bed before her 
 death. 
 
 "To all these ther be divers Witnesses, both 
 Squires and Ladies, whose names are engraven 
 upon the Stone : This Stone is to be sent to a Town 
 hard by Excester, wher this happen'd. 
 
 " Were you here, I could raise a choice discours 
 with you here-upon. So hoping to see you next 
 Term, to requite som of your favours, I rest Your 
 true Friend to serve you, J. H." 
 
 Is 1632 the genuine date of this letter? Mr. Cot- 
 ton thinks not. But the letter, in which Howell 
 speaks of ordering his father's tombstone, follows 
 shortly after an account of his father's death, which, 
 again, is fixed, by an allusion to a battle that cer- 
 tainly was fought in that year, as belonging to 1632. 
 If we are thus compelled to believe that the account 
 
Bookbindings lo^ 
 
 of the Oxenham bird by Howell was set down in 
 1632, it follows that Howell's version (though only 
 written according to his "best remembrance") is 
 prior to the pamphlet in the Beckford sale, the 
 pamphlet of 1641. That pamphlet avers that the 
 evidence for the apparition was " strictly examined 
 by the command of a reverent father of our Church," 
 who "gave approbation for the monument," described 
 by Howell, to be erected by the "tomb-worker" in 
 whose shop Howell says he saw it. But the extraor- 
 dinary thing is that, whereas Howell saw the tomb- 
 stone in 1632, the pamphlet declares that James 
 Oxenham (at whose death the bird appeared) died in 
 1635. Thomazine also "died, to the comfort of all 
 about her," in 1635, according to the pamphlet. The 
 other deaths and apparitions are chiefly in the same 
 year. In the parish register of Sale Monachorum 
 there is a portion of a leaf cut out, for 1635, j^st 
 where the deaths of the Oxenhams would be re- 
 corded, if they had occurred in that year. As to 
 the marble monument, it has disappeared. We are 
 thus left in considerable perplexity. Is it likely that 
 Howell read the pamphlet in 1641, and then invented 
 and antedated his own adventure with the monu- 
 ment ? In that case could he have been so careless 
 as to throw the adventure back three years before 
 the events recorded in the pamphlet.' One can 
 hardly believe that Howell was so stupid and so 
 dishonest. On the other hand, the author of the 
 pamphlet sticks consistently to his date of 1635, and 
 corroborates his narrative by the evidence of very 
 many witnesses. The whole affair is a puzzle. The 
 last apparition of the bird alluded to by Mr. Cotton 
 was on December 15, 1873, at 17 Earl's-Terrace, 
 
io6 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 Kensington. The bird seemed to be a common 
 pigeon, " the dove of Yama " in the Veda ! 
 
 Among the later books in the Beckford sale, few 
 were more "curious" than the ' Tresmerveilles Vic- 
 toires des Femmes' (15 S3), by Postet. Mr. Beckford 
 was very rich in the works of this learned fanatic 
 and Orientalist. Postet wrote on history, geogra- 
 phy, politics, and finally fell into the limbo of unful- 
 filled prophecy and heresy. He expected the event 
 of a female Messiah, whom he found in " La M^re 
 Jeanne," at Venice. He was a kind of male Joanna 
 Southcote, and Mr. Beckford had his most absurd 
 book bound in red morocco with a blue lining. But 
 the taste for literary insanities has almost gone out, 
 and the ' Tresmerveilles Victoires ' fetched only 
 £22,. A more enjoyable and more expensive vol- 
 ume was Dolet's ' Playsante et Joyeuse Histoyre du 
 grand Geant, Gargantua,' with wood-cuts (1542). 
 This edition, as the catalogue says, contains the 
 passages suppressed in 1537. Thereby hangs a 
 story. Dolet, the publisher, was a man of learning, 
 and a friend of Rabelais, but — he was also a pub- 
 lisher. Rabelais had suppressed some passages in 
 his earlier editions, for the very good reason that 
 they brought him within measurable distance of the 
 stake. Yet Dolet chose to pirate the book and re- 
 produce the perilous texts. After all, it was Dolet 
 that died at the stake, and Rabelais lived out his- 
 natural life. Dolet is perhaps the only example of 
 a publisher who perished for his religious opinions. 
 
 A very pretty book was the ' Rommant de la Rose,' 
 published by Galliot du Pr6 in 1529. It is bound in 
 red morocco, doubU, by Duseuil, and has a beautiful 
 title-page in black and red, with a wood-cut of a lover 
 
Bookbindings loj 
 
 plucking a rose. This romance, as times go, was 
 cheap at ;^46. A much more curious and expen- 
 sive relic of Marguerite de Valois was her copy of 
 Ronsard's poems (1587), three dumpy volumes 
 sprinkled with the daisies of Queen Marguerite on 
 brown morocco, the work of Clovis Eve, sold for 
 ;£430. About forty volumes of Marguerite's have 
 been sold at Christie's. Grolier's 'Sannazaro,' in 
 brown morocco, was not very dear, perhaps, at £,121, 
 nor the Aldine ' Seneca ' of Francis I., with the sal- 
 amander and crowned F., at £,i\. The Elzevir 
 'Seneca' of 1640 fetched ;^4i, as it was bound by 
 Le Gascon. The best copies previously had gone 
 for about ;£'4, except one, wholly uncut, and bound 
 by Trautz-Bauzonnet, which brought more than ;^90 
 at the sale of M. Potier. When John Smith wrote 
 his 'General History of Virginia' (1624) he could 
 not have guessed that a single copy would be sold 
 at the price of a good estate, namely £,toi). 
 
 " When land and riches all are spent. 
 Then Learning is most excellent ! " 
 
€l?et)ir0 
 
cBl?etir0 
 
 IHE Countryman. — "You know 
 how much, for some time past, 
 the editions of the Elzevirs have 
 been in demand. The fancy for 
 them has even penetrated into 
 the country. I am acquainted 
 with a man there who denies him- 
 self necessaries, for the sake of 
 collecting into a library (where other books are 
 scarce enough) as many little Elzevirs as he can lay 
 his hands upon. He is dying of hunger, and his 
 consolation is to be able to say, ' I have all the poets 
 whom the Elzevirs printed. I have ten examples 
 of each of them, all with red letters, and all of the 
 right date.' This, no doubt, is a craze, for, good as 
 the books are, if he kept them to read them, one ex- 
 ample of each would be enough." 
 
 The Parisian. — "If he had wanted to read them, 
 I would not have advised him to buy Elzevirs. The 
 editions of minor authors which these booksellers 
 published, even editions 'of the right date,' as you 
 say, are not too correct. Nothing is good in the 
 books but the type and the paper. Your friend 
 would have done better to use the editions of Sry- 
 phius or Etienne." 
 
112 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 This fragment of a literary dialogue I translate 
 from ' Entretiens sur les Contes de Fees,' a book 
 which contains more of old talk about books and 
 booksellers than about fairies and folk-lore. The 
 ' Entretiens ' were published in 1699, about sixteen 
 years after the Elzevirs ceased to be publishers. 
 The fragment is valuable : first, because it shows us 
 how early the taste for collecting Elzevirs was fully 
 developed, and, secondly, because it contains very 
 sound criticism of the mania. Already, in the sev- 
 enteenth century, lovers of the tiny Elzevirian books 
 waxed pathetic over dates, already they knew that 
 the 'Cassar' of 1635 was the right 'Caesar,' already 
 they were fond of the red-lettered pages, as in the 
 first edition of the 'Virgil' of 1636. As early as 
 1699, too, the Parisian critic knew that the editions 
 were not very correct, and that the paper, type, or- 
 naments, and g&nexdl format were their main attrac- 
 tions. To these we must now add the rarity of really 
 good Elzevirs. 
 
 Though Elzevirs have been more fashionable tban 
 at present, they are still regarded by novelists as the 
 great prize of the book collector. You read in nov- 
 els about "priceless little Elzevirs," about books "as 
 rare as an old Elzevir." I have met, in the works of 
 a lady novelist (but not elsewhere), with an Elzevir 
 'Theocritus.' The late Mr. Hepworth Dixon intro- 
 duced into one of his romances a romantic Elzevir 
 Greek Testament, "worth its weight in gold." Cas- 
 ual remarks of this kind encourage a popular delu- 
 sion that all Elzevirs are pearls of considerable price. 
 When a man is first smitten with the pleasant fever 
 of book collecting, it is for Elzevirs that he searches. 
 At first he thinks himself in amazing luck. In 
 
Els;evirs uj 
 
 Booksellers' Row and in Castle Street he "picks 
 up," for a shilling or two, Elzevirs, real or supposed. 
 To the beginner, any book with a sphere on the title- 
 page is an Elzevir. For the beginner's instruction, 
 two copies of spheres are printed here. The first is 
 
 a sphere, an ill-cut, ill-drawn sphere, which is not 
 Elzevirian at all. The mark was used in the seven- 
 teenth century by many other booksellers and print- 
 ers. The second, on the other hand, is a true Elze- 
 virian sphere, from a play of Moli^re's, printed in 
 1675. Observe the comparatively neat drawing of 
 the second sphere, and be not led away after spuri- 
 ous imitations. 
 
 Beware, too, of the vulgar error of fancying that 
 little duodecimos with the mark of the fox and the 
 bee's nest, and the motto "Quaerendo," come from 
 the press of the Elzevirs. The mark is that of 
 Abraham Wolfgang, which name is not a pseudo- 
 nym for Elzevir. There are three sorts of Elzevir 
 pseudonyms. First, they occasionally reprinted the 
 full title-page, publisher's name and all, of the book 
 they pirated. Secondly, when they printed books 
 of a "dangerous" sort, Jansenist pamphlets and so 
 forth, they used pseudonyms like "Nic. Schouter," 
 
114 Books and Bookmen 
 
 on the ' Lettres Provinciales ' of Pascal. Thirdly, 
 there are real pseudonyms employed by the Elze- 
 virs. John and Daniel, printing at Leyden (1652- 
 1655), used the false name "Jean Sambix." The 
 Elzevirs of Amsterdam often placed the name 
 "Jacques le Jeune" on their title-pages. The col- 
 lector who remembers these things must also see 
 that his purchases have the right ornaments at the 
 heads of chapters, the right tail-pieces at the ends. 
 Two of the most frequently recurring ornaments 
 are the so-called "T6te de Buffle " and the "Sirene." 
 More or less clumsy copies of these and the other 
 Elzevirian ornaments are common enough in books 
 of the period, even among those printed out of the 
 Low Countries ; for example, in books published in 
 Paris. 
 
 A brief sketch of the history of the Elzevirs may 
 here be useful. The founder of the family, a Flem- 
 ish bookbinder, Louis, left Louvain and settled in 
 Leyden in 1580. He bought a house opposite the 
 University, and opened a book-shop. Another shop, 
 on college ground, was opened in 1587. Louis was 
 a good bookseller, a very ordinary publisher. It was 
 not till shortly before his death, in 1617, that his 
 grandson Isaac bought a set of types and other 
 material. Louis left six sons. Two of these, Mat- 
 thew and Bonaventure, kept on the business, dating 
 eji: officina Elzeviriana. In 1625 Bonaventure and 
 Abraham (son of Matthew) became partners. The 
 "good dates" of Elzevirian books begin from 1626. 
 The two Elzevirs chose excellent types, and after 
 nine years' endeavors turned out the beautiful ' Cae- 
 sar' of 1635. 
 
 Their classical series in petit format was opened 
 
Elzevirs iiy 
 
 with 'Horace' and 'Ovid' in 1629. In 1641 they 
 began their elegant piracies of French plays and 
 poetry with 'Le Cid.' It was worth while being 
 pirated by the Elzevirs, who turned you out like 
 a gentleman, with fleurons and red letters, and a 
 pretty frontispiece. The modern pirate dresses you 
 in rags, prints you murderously, and binds you, if 
 he binds you at all, in some hideous example of 
 " cloth extra," all gilt, like archaic gingerbread. 
 Bonaventure and Abraham both died in 1652. They 
 did not depart before publishing, in grand format, 
 a desirable work on fencing, Thibault's ' Acad^mie 
 de I'Espee.' This Tibbald also killed by the book.'' 
 John and Daniel Elzevir came next. They brought 
 out the lovely ' Imitation ' (Thomas a Kempis cano- 
 nic! regularis ord. S. Augustini De Imitatione Chris- 
 ti) ; I wish by taking thought I could add eight mil- 
 limetres to the stature of my copy. In 1655 Daniel 
 joined a cousin, Louis, in Amsterdam, and John 
 stayed in Leyden. John died in 1661 ; his widow 
 struggled on, but her son Abraham (1681) let all fall 
 into ruins. Abraham died 1712. The Elzevirs of 
 Amsterdam lasted till 1680, when Daniel died, and 
 the business was wound up. The type, by Christo- 
 pher Van Dyck, was sold in 1681, by Daniel's widow. 
 Sic transit gloria. 
 
 After he has learned all these matters the am- 
 ateur has still a great deal to acquire. He may 
 now know a real Elzevir from a book which is 
 not an Elzevir at all. But there are enormous dif- 
 ferences of value, rarity, and excellence among the 
 productions of the Elzevirian press. The book- 
 stalls teem with small, "cropped," dingy, dirty, bat- 
 tered Elzevirian editions of the classics, not "of 
 
ii8 Books and Bookmen 
 
 the good date." On these it is not worth while 
 to expend a couple of shillings, especially as Elze- 
 virian type is too small to be read with comfort by 
 most modern eyes. No, let the collector save his 
 money; avoid littering his shelves with what he 
 will soon find to be rubbish, and let him wait the 
 rare chance of acquiring a really beautiful and rare 
 Elzevir. 
 
 Meantime, and before we come to describe Elze- 
 virs of the first flight, let it be remembered that the 
 "taller" the copy, the less harmed and nipped by 
 the binder's shears, the better. "Men scarcely know 
 how beautiful fire is," says Shelley; and we may say 
 that most men hardly know how beautiful an Elzevir 
 was in its uncut and original form. The Elzevirs we 
 have may be "dear," but they are certainly "dumpy 
 twelves." Their fair proportions have been docked 
 by the binder. At the Beckford sale there was a 
 pearl of a book, a 'Marot;' not an Elzevir, indeed, 
 but a book published by Wetstein, the successor of 
 the Elzevirs. This exquisite pair of volumes, bound 
 in blue morocco, was absolutely unimpaired, and was 
 a sight to bring happy tears into the eyes of the 
 amateur of Elzevirs. There was a gracious svelte 
 elegance about these tomes, an appealing and ex- 
 quisite delicacy of proportion, that linger like sweet 
 music in the memory. I have a copy of the Wet- 
 stein ' Marot ' myself, not a bad copy, though mur- 
 derously bound in that ecclesiastical sort of brown 
 calf antique, which goes well with hymn books, and 
 reminds one of cakes of chocolate. But my copy is 
 only some 128 millimetres in height, whereas the 
 uncut Bedford copy (it had belonged to the great 
 Pixer^court) was at least 1 30 millimetres high. Be- 
 
Eli^evirs 1 19 
 
 side the uncut example mine looks like Cinderella's 
 plain sister beside the beauty of the family. 
 
 Now the moral is that only tall Elzevirs are beau- 
 tiful, only tall Elzevirs preserve their ancient propor- 
 tions, only tall Elzevirs are worth collecting. Dr. 
 Lemuel Gulliver remarks that the King of Lilliput 
 was taller than any of his court by about half the 
 thickness of a nail, and that his altitude filled the 
 minds of all with awe. Well, the Philistine may think 
 a few millimetres, more or less, in the height of an 
 Elzevir are of little importance. When he comes to 
 sell, he will discover the difference. An uncut, or 
 almost uncut, copy of a good Elzevir may be worth 
 fifty or sixty pounds or more ; an ordinary copy may 
 bring fewer pence. The binders usually pare down 
 the top and bottom more than the sides. I have 
 a ' Rabelais ' of the good date, with the red letters 
 (1663), and some of the pages have never been 
 opened, at the sides. But the height is only some 
 122 millimetres, a mere dwarf. Anything over 130 
 millimetres is very rare. Therefore the collector of 
 Elzevirs should have one of those useful ivory-han- 
 dled knives on which the French measures are 
 marked, and thus he will at once be able to satisfy 
 himself as to the exact height of any example which 
 he encounters. 
 
 Let us now assume that the amateur quite under- 
 stands what a proper Elzevir should be : tall, clean, 
 well bound if possible, and of the good date. But 
 we have still to learn what the good dates are, and 
 this is matter for the study and practice of a well- 
 spent life. We may gossip about a few of the more 
 famous Elzevirs, those without which no collection 
 is complete. Of all Elzevirs the most famous and 
 
120 Books and Bookmen 
 
 the most expensive is an old cookery book, " ' Le 
 Pastissier Francois.' Wherein is taught the way to 
 make all sorts of pastry, useful to all sorts of per- 
 sons. Also the manner of preparing all manner of 
 eggs, for fast-days, and other days, in more than 
 sixty fashions. Amsterdam, Louys and Daniel El- 
 
 THE "SAGE. 
 
 zevir. 1665." The mark is not the old "Sage," but 
 the " Minerva " with her owl. Now this book has 
 no intrinsic value any more than a Tauchnitz re- 
 print of Mr. Reeves's volume on cooking. The 'Pas- 
 tissier ' is cherished because it is so very rare. The 
 tract passed into the hands of cooks, and the hands 
 of cooks are detrimental to literature. Just as nur- 
 sery books, fairy tales, and the like are destroyed 
 from generation to generation, so it happens with 
 books used in the kitchen. The ' Pastissier,' to be 
 sure, has a good frontispiece, a scene in a Low Coun- 
 try kitchen, among the dead game and the dainties. 
 The buxom cook is making a game pie ; a pheasant 
 pie, decorated with the bird's head and tail-feathers, 
 is already made. 
 
 Not for these charms, but for its rarity, is the ' Pas- 
 tissier ' coveted. In an early edition of the ' Man- 
 
A Amfterdanx, 
 dee Iioayj let {Darnel Elzemer ,A'.j6_g^. 
 
Els;evirs 12 j 
 
 uel' (1821) Brunei says, with a feigned brutality (for 
 he dearly loved an Elzevir), " Till now I have dis- 
 dained to admit this book into my work, but I have 
 yielded to the prayers of amateurs. Besides, how 
 could I keep out a volume which was sold for one 
 hundred and one francs in 1819?" One hundred 
 and one francs ! If I could only get a ' Pastissier ' 
 for one hundred and one francs ! But our grand- 
 fathers lived in the Bookman's Paradise. "II n'est 
 pas jusqu'aux Anglais," adds Brunei — "the very 
 English themselves — have a taste for the 'Pastis- 
 sier.' " The Duke of Marlborough's copy was actu- 
 ally sold for £1 4J. It would have been money in 
 the ducal pockets of the house of Marlborough to 
 have kept this volume till the general sale of all 
 their portable property at which our generation is 
 privileged to assist. No wonder the ' Pastissier ' 
 was thought rare. B^rard only knew two copies. 
 Pietiers, writing on the Elzevirs in 1845, could cite 
 only five ' Pastissiers,' and, in his ' Annales ' he had 
 found out but five more. Wilhelm, on the other 
 hand, enumerates some thirty, not including Motte- 
 ley's. Motteley was an uncultivated, untaught en- 
 thusiast. He knew no Latin, but he had a flair 
 for uncut Elzevirs. " Incomptis capillis," he would 
 cry (it was all his lore) as he gloated over his treas- 
 ures. They were all burnt by the lamented Com- 
 mune in the Louvre Library. 
 
 A few examples may be given of the prices 
 brought by ' Le Pastissier ' in later days. Sensier's 
 copy was but 1 28 millimetres in height, and had the 
 old ordinary vellum binding, — in fact, it closely 
 resembled a copy which Messrs. Ellis and White 
 had for sale in Bond Street in 1883. The Eng- 
 
124 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 lish booksellers asked, I think, about 1,500 francs 
 for their copy. Sensier's was sold for 128 francs 
 in April, 1828; for 201 francs in 1837. Then the 
 book was gloriously bound by Trautz-Bauzonnet, 
 and was sold with Potier's books in 1870, when it 
 fetched 2,910 francs. At the Benzon sale (1875) it 
 fetched 3,255 francs, and, falling dreadfully in price, 
 was sold again in 1877 for 2,200 francs. M. Dutuit, 
 at Rouen, has a taller copy, bound by Bauzonnet. 
 Last time it was sold (1851) it brought 251 francs. 
 The Due de Chartres has now the copy of Pieters, 
 the historian of the Elzevirs, valued at 3,000 francs. 
 About thirty years ago no fewer than three copies 
 were sold at Brighton, of all places. M. Quentin 
 Bauchart has a copy only 127 millimetres in height, 
 which was M^ d r amiable for ;^i8o. M. Char- 
 tenes, of Metz, has a copy now bound by Bauzon- 
 net which was sold for four francs in 1780. We 
 call this the age of cheap books, but before the Rev- 
 olution books were cheaper. It is fair to say, how- 
 ever, that this example of the ' Pastissier ' was then 
 bound up with another book, Vlacq's edition of 'Le 
 Cuisinier Fran9ois,' and so went cheaper than it 
 would otherwise have done. M. de Fontaine de 
 Resbecq declares that a friend of his bought six 
 original pieces of Moliere's bound up with an old 
 French translation of Garth's 'Dispensary.' The 
 one faint hope left to the poor book collector is that 
 he may find a valuable tract lurking in the leaves of 
 some bound collection of trash. I have an original 
 copy of Moliere's ' Les Fascheux ' bound up with a 
 treatise on precious stones, but the bookseller from 
 whom I bought it knew it was there ! That makes 
 all the difference. 
 
PASTISSIER 
 
 FRANCOIS. 
 
 Oui eH enfeigne la maniere de 
 
 faife touce forte de Paftjfle- 
 
 jflci cres-utile 4 coate foito 
 
 de perfonnes. 
 
 M N S E MH L E 
 
 Zemojen d'apreper teuter form ioiufs 
 
 "Ur Us. jours ma'tgru i cJ" aiims , 
 
 (fip'ltu de fotxaiefi^oni^ 
 
 .^ ^USTE R D ^ M. 
 
 Oxsz "LovLp 8i Daniel Elzevfef. 
 
Els;evirs 12^ 
 
 But, to return to our ' Pastissier,' here is M. de 
 Fontaine de Resbecq's account of how he wooed 
 and won his own copy of this illustrious Elzevir. " I 
 began my walk to-day," says this haunter of an- 
 cient stalls, " by the Pont Marie and the Quai de la 
 Gr^ve, the pillars of Hercules of the book-hunting 
 world. After having viewed and reviewed these 
 remote books, I was going away, when my attention 
 was caught by a small naked volume, without a 
 stitch of binding. I seized it, and what was my 
 delight when I recognized one of the rarest of that 
 famed Elzevir collection whose height is measured 
 as minutely as the carats of the diamond. There 
 was no indication of price on the box where this 
 jewel was lying; the book, though unbound, was 
 perfectly clean within. ' How much .' ' said I to 
 the bookseller. ' You can have it for six sous,' he 
 answered ; ' is it too much .' ' ' No,' said I, and, 
 trembling a little, I handed him the thirty centimes 
 he asked for the • Pastissier Francois.' You may 
 believe, my friend, that after such a piece of luck at 
 the start, one goes home fondly embracing the be- 
 loved object of one's search. That is exactly what 
 I did." 
 
 Can this tale be true .' Is such luck given by the 
 jealous fates mortalibus cegrisf M. de Resbecq's 
 find was made apparently in 1856, when trout were 
 plenty in the streams, and rare books not so very 
 rare. To my own knowledge an English collector 
 has bought an original play of Molifere's, in the 
 original vellum, for eighteen pence. But no one has 
 such luck any longer. Not, at least, in London. A 
 more expensive ' Pastissier ' than that which brought 
 
128 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 six sous was priced in Bachelin Deflorenne's cata- 
 logue at ;£240. A curious thing occurred when 
 two uncut ' Pastissiers ' turned up simultaneously in 
 Paris. One of them Morgand and Fatout sold for 
 ;£400. Clever people argued that one of the twin 
 uncut ' Pastissiers ' must be an imitation, a fac-simile 
 by means of photogravure, or some other process. 
 But it was triumphantly established that both were 
 genuine ; they had minute points of difference in the 
 ornaments. 
 
 M. Willems, the learned historian of the Elze- 
 virs, is indignant at the successes of a book which, 
 as Brunet declares, is badly printed. There must 
 be at least forty known ' Pastissiers ' in the world. 
 Yes ; but there are at least 4,000 people who would 
 greatly rejoice to possess a ' Pastissier,' and some 
 of these desirous ones are very wealthy. While 
 this state of the market endures, the ' Pastissier ' 
 will fetch higher prices than the other varieties. 
 Another extremely rare Elzevir is ' L'lllustre The- 
 atre de Mons. Corneille ' (Leyden, 1644). This con- 
 tains 'Le Cid,' 'Les Horaces,' 'Le Cinna,' 'La 
 Mort de Pompee,' 'Le Polyeucte.' The name, 'L'll- 
 lustre Th^itre,' appearing at that date has an inter- 
 est of its own. In 1643-44, Moli^re and Madeleine 
 B^jart had just started the company which they 
 called ' L'lllustre Th^Atre.' Only six or seven cop- 
 ies of the book are actually known, though three or 
 four are believed to exist in England, probably all 
 covered with dust in the library of some lord. " He 
 has a very good library," I once heard some one say 
 to a noble earl, whose own library is famous. " And 
 what can a fellow do with a very good library .? " an- 
 
Els^evirs 129 
 
 swered the descendant of the Crusaders, who proba- 
 bly (being a youth light-hearted and content) was 
 ignorant of his own great possessions. An expen- 
 sive copy of ' L'l'llustre Theatre,' bound by Trautz- 
 Bauzonnet, was sold for ;^300. 
 
 Among Elzevirs desirable, yet not hopelessly rare, 
 is the ' Virgil' of 1636. Heinsius was the editor of 
 this beautiful volume, prettily printed, but incor- 
 rect. Probably it is hard to" correct with absolute 
 accuracy works in the pretty but minute type which 
 the Elzevirs affected. They have won fame by the 
 elegance of their books, but their intention was to 
 sell good books cheap, like Michel L^vy. The small 
 type was required to get plenty of " copy " into lit- 
 tle bulk. Nicholas Heinsius, the son of the editor 
 of the 'Virgil,' when he came to correct his father's 
 edition, found that it contained so many coquilles, or 
 misprints, as to be nearly the most incorrect copy 
 in the world. Heyne says, "Let the 'Virgil' be one 
 of the rare Elzevirs, if you please, but within it has 
 scarcely a trace of any good quality." Yet the first 
 edition of this beautiful little book, with its two 
 pages of red letters, is so desirable that, till he could 
 possess it, Charles Nodier would not profane his 
 shelves by any ' Virgil ' at all. 
 
 Equally fine is the 'Caesar' of 1635, which, with 
 the 'Virgil' of 1636 and the 'Imitation' without 
 date, M. Willems thinks the most successful works 
 of the Elzevirs, "one of the most enviable jewels 
 in the casket of the bibliophile." It may be recog- 
 nized by the page 238, which is erroneously printed 
 248. A good average height is from 125 to 128 mil- 
 limetres. The highest known is 130 millimetres. 
 
IJO 
 
 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 This book, like the ' Imitation,' has one of the pretty 
 and ingenious frontispieces which the Elzevirs pre- 
 fixed to their books. So farewell, and good speed 
 in your sport, ye hunters of Elzevirs, and may you 
 find the rarest Elzevir of all, ' L'Aimable Mere de 
 J^sus.' 
 
^onte iapane^e 0509(0*050060 
 
^ome giapanegie 'Bofite*'Boolt0 
 
 HERE is or used to be a poem for 
 infant minds of a rather Pharisai- 
 cal character, which was popular 
 in the nursery when I was a 
 youngster. It ran something like 
 this : — 
 
 " I thank my stars that I was bom 
 A little British child." 
 
 Perhaps these were not the very words, but that 
 was decidedly the sentiment. Look at the Japanese 
 infants, from the pencil of the famous Hokusai. 
 Though they are not British, were there ever two 
 jollier, happier small creatures ? Did Leech, or Mr. 
 Du Maurier, or Andrea della Robbia ever present a 
 more delightful view of innocent, well-pleased child- 
 hood? Well, these Japanese children, if they are 
 in the least inclined to be timid or nervous, must 
 have an awful time of it at night in the dark, and 
 when they make that eerie " northwest passage " 
 bedwards through the darkling house of which Mr. 
 Stevenson sings the perils and the emotions. All 
 of us who did not suffer under parents brought up 
 on the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer have endured, 
 in childhood, a good deal from ghosts. But it is 
 
1^4 Books and Bookmen 
 
 nothing to what Japanese children bear, for our 
 ghosts are to the spectres of Japan as moonlight is 
 to sunlight, or as water unto whiskey. Personally I 
 may say that few people have been plagued by the 
 terror that walketh in darkness more than myself. 
 At the early age of ten I had the tales of the ingen- 
 ious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Bronte " put 
 into my hands " by a cousin who had served as a 
 Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the meaning of fear. 
 But I 'did, and perhaps even Nelson would have 
 found out " what fear was," or the boy in the Norse 
 tale would have " learned to shiver," if he had been 
 left alone to peruse ' Jane Eyre,' and the ' Black 
 Cat,' and the ' Fall of the House of Usher,' as I was. 
 Every night I expected to wake up in my coffin, 
 having been prematurely buried ; or to hear sighs 
 in the area, followed by light, unsteady footsteps on 
 the stairs, and then to see a lady all in a white shroud 
 stained with blood and clay stagger into my room, 
 the victim of too rapid interment. As to the notion 
 that my respected kinsman had a mad wife con- 
 cealed on the premises, and that a lunatic aunt, 
 black in the face with suppressed mania, would burst 
 into my chamber, it was comparatively a harmless 
 fancy, and not particularly disturbing. Between 
 these and the ' Yellow Dwarf,' who (though only the 
 invention of the Countess D'Aulnoy) might frighten 
 a nervous infant into hysterics, I personally had as 
 bad a time of it in the night watches as any happy 
 British child has survived. But our ogres are noth- 
 ing to the bogies which make not only night but day 
 terrible to the studious infants of Japan and China. 
 
 Chinese ghosts are probably much the same as 
 Japanese ghosts. The Japanese have borrowed most 
 
Some Japanese Bogie-Books ijy 
 
 things, including apparitions and awesome sprites 
 and grisly fiends, from the Chinese, and then have 
 improved on the original model. Now we have a 
 very full, complete, and horror-striking account of 
 Chinese harnts (as the country people in Tennessee 
 call them) from Mr. Herbert Giles, who has trans- 
 lated scores of Chinese ghost stories in his ' Strange 
 Tales from a Chinese Studio' (De la Rue, 1880). 
 Mr. Giles's volumes prove that China is tlie place 
 for Messrs. Gurney and Myers, the secretaries of the 
 Psychical Society. 
 
 Ghosts do not live a hole-and-corner life in China, 
 but boldly come out and take their part in the pleas- 
 ures and business of life. It has always been a 
 question with me whether ghosts, in a haunted 
 house, appear when there is no audience. What 
 does the spectre in the tapestried chamber do when 
 the house is not full, and no guest is put in the room 
 to bury strangers in, the haunted room ? Does the 
 ghost sulk and complain that there is "no house," 
 and refuse to rehearse his little performance, in 
 a conscientious and disinterestedly artistic spirit, 
 when deprived of the artist's true pleasure, the 
 awakening of sympathetic emotion in the mind of 
 the spectator.? We give too little thought and sym- 
 pathy to ghosts, who in our old castles and country 
 houses often find no one to appear to from year's 
 end to year's end. Only now and then is a guest 
 placed in the " haunted room." Then I like to 
 fancy the glee of the lady in green, or the radiant 
 boy, or the headless man, or the old gentleman in 
 snuff-colored clothes, as he, or she, recognizes the 
 presence of a spectator, and prepares to give his or 
 her best effects in the familiar style. 
 
1^8 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 Now in China and Japan, certainly a ghost does 
 not wait till people enter the haunted room : a ghost, 
 like a person of fashion, "goes everywhere." More- 
 over, he has this artistic excellence, that very often 
 you don't know him from an embodied person. He 
 counterfeits mortality so cleverly that he (the ghost) 
 has been known to personate a candidate for honors, 
 and pass an examination for him. A pleasing ex- 
 ample of this kind, illustrating the limitations of 
 ghosts, is told in Mr. Giles's book. A gentleman of 
 Huai Shang named Chou-t'ien-i had arrived at the 
 age of fifty, but his family consisted of but one son, 
 a fine boy, " strangely averse from study," as if there 
 were anything strange in that. One day the son 
 disappeared mysteriously, as people do from West 
 Ham. In a year he came back, said he had been 
 detained in a Taoist monastery, and, to all men's 
 amazement, took to his books. Next year he ob- 
 tained his B. A. degree, a First Class. All the neigh- 
 borhood was overjoyed, for Huai Shang was like 
 Pembroke College (Oxford), where, according to the 
 poet, " First Class men are few and far between." 
 It was who should have the honor of giving his 
 daughter as bride to this intellectual marvel.- A 
 very nice girl was selected, but most unexpectedly 
 the B. A. would not marry. This nearly broke his 
 father's heart. The old gentleman knew, accord- 
 ing to Chinese belief, that if he had no grandchild 
 there would be no one in the next generation to 
 feed his own ghost and pay it all the needful little 
 attentions. " Picture then the father naming and 
 insisting on the day ; " till K'o-ch'ang, B. A., got 
 up and ran away. His mother tried to detain him, 
 when his clothes " came off in her hand," and the 
 
A STORM-FIEND. 
 
Some Japanese Bogie-Books 141 
 
 bachelor vanished ! Next day appeared the real 
 flesh and blood son, who had been kidnapped and 
 enslaved. The genuine K'o-ch'ang was overjoyed 
 to hear of his approaching- nuptials. The rites were 
 duly celebrated, and in less than a year the old gen- 
 tleman welcomed his much -longed -for grandchild. 
 But, oddly enough, K'o-ch'ang, though very jolly and 
 universally beloved, was as stupid as ever, and read 
 nothing but the sporting intelligence in the news- 
 papers. It was now universally admitted that the 
 learned K'o-ch'ang had been an impostor, a clever 
 ghost. It follows that ghosts can take a very good 
 degree ; but ladies need not be afraid of marrying 
 ghosts, owing to the inveterate shyness of these 
 learned spectres. 
 
 The Chinese ghost is by no means always a ma- 
 levolent person, as, indeed, has already been made 
 clear from the affecting narrative of the ghost who 
 passed an examination. Even the spectre which an- 
 swers in China to the statue in 'Don Juan,' the 
 statue which accepts invitations to dinner, is any- 
 thing but a malevolent guest. So much may be 
 gathered from the story of Chu and Lu. Chu was 
 an undergraduate of great courage and bodily vigor, 
 but dull of wit. He was a married man, and his 
 children (as in the old Oxford legend) often rushed 
 into their mother's presence, shouting, " Mamma ! 
 mamma ! papa 's been plucked again ! " Once it 
 chanced that Chu was at a wine party, and the negus 
 (a favorite beverage of the Celestials) had done its 
 work. His young friends betted Chu a bird's-nest 
 dinner that he would not go to the nearest temple, 
 enter the room devoted to colored sculptures repre- 
 senting the torments of Purgatory, and carry o£E the 
 
142 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 image of the Chinese judge of the dead, their Osiris 
 or Rhadamanthus. Off went old Chu, and soon re- 
 turned with the august effigy (which wore "a green 
 face, a red beard, and a hideous expression ") in his 
 arms. The other men were frightened, and begged 
 Chu to restore his worship to his place on the infer- 
 nal bench. Before carrying back the worthy magis- 
 trate, Chu poured a libation on the ground and said, 
 "Whenever your excellency feels so disposed, I shall 
 be glad to take a cup of wine with you in a friendly 
 way." That very night, as Chu was taking a stirrup 
 cup before going to bed, the ghost of the awful judge 
 came to the door and entered. Chu promptly put 
 the kettle on, mixed the negus, and made a night of 
 it with the festive fiend. Their friendship was never 
 interrupted from that moment. The judge even gave 
 Chu a new heart (literally), whereby he was enabled 
 to pass examinations ; for the heart, in China, is the 
 seat of all the intellectual faculties. For Mrs. Chu, 
 a plain woman with a fine figure, the ghost provided 
 a new head, of a handsome girl recently slain by a 
 robber. Even after Chu's death the genial spectre 
 did not neglect him, but obtained for him an ap- 
 pointment as registrar in the next world, with a cer- 
 tain rank attached. 
 
 The next world, among the Chinese, seems to be 
 a paradise of bureaucracy, patent places, jobs, man- 
 darins' buttons and tails, and, in short, the heaven 
 of officialism. All civilized readers are acquainted 
 with Mr. Stockton's humorous story of 'The Trans- 
 ferred Ghost' In Mr. Stockton's view a man does 
 not always get his own ghostship ; there is a vigor- 
 ous competition among spirits for good ghostships, 
 and a great deal of intrigue and party feeling. It 
 
A SNOW BOGIE. 
 
THE SIMULACRUM VULGAHB. 
 
Some Japanese Bogie-Books 147 
 
 may be long before a disembodied spectre gets any 
 ghostship at all, and then, if he has little influence, 
 he may be glad to take a chance of haunting the 
 Board of Trade, or the Post Office, instead of "walk- 
 ing " in the Foreign Office. One spirit may win a 
 post as White Lady in the imperial palace, while an- 
 other is put off with a position in an old college li- 
 brary, or perhaps has to follow the fortunes of some 
 seedy "medium" through boarding-houses and third- 
 rate hotels. Now this is precisely the Chinese view 
 of the fates and fortunes of ghosts. Quisque suos 
 patimur manes. 
 
 In China, to be brief, and to quote a ghost (who 
 ought to know what he was speaking about), " su- 
 pernatural are to be found everywhere." This is 
 the' fact that makes life so puzzling and terrible to a 
 child of a believing and trustful character. These 
 Oriental bogies do not appear in the dark alone, or 
 only in haunted houses, or at cross-roads, or in 
 gloomy woods. They are everywhere : every man 
 has his own ghost, every place has its peculiar 
 haunting fiend, every natural phenomenon has its 
 informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, 
 envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowl- 
 ing about seeking what it may devour. Where our 
 science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer 
 gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate 
 wraith, crawling to devour the lives of. men. Where 
 we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds 
 a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man 
 under a vast umbrella. 
 
 The illustrations in this paper are only a few spec- 
 imens chosen out of many volumes of Japanese bo- 
 gies. We have not ventured to copy the very most 
 
t48 Books and Bookmen 
 
 awful spectres, nor dared to be as horrid as we can. 
 These native drawings, too, are generally colored re- 
 gardless of expense, and the coloring is often horri- 
 bly lurid and satisfactory. This embellishment, for- 
 tunately perhaps, we cannot reproduce. Meanwhile, 
 if any child looks into this essay, let him (or her) not 
 be alarmed by the pictures he beholds. Japanese 
 ghosts do not live in this country ; there are none of 
 them even at the Japanese Legation. Just as bears, 
 lions, and rattlesnakes are not to be seriously dreaded 
 in our woods and commons, so the Japanese ghost 
 cannot breathe (any more than a slave can) in the air 
 of England or America. We do not yet even keep 
 any ghostly zoological garden in which the bogies of 
 Japanese, Australians, Red Indians, and other dis- 
 tant peoples may be accommodated. Such an esfab- 
 lishment is perhaps to be desired in the interests of 
 psychical research, but that form of research has not 
 yet been endowed by a cultivated and progressive 
 government. 
 
 The first to attract our attention represents, as I 
 understand, the common ghost, or simulacrum vul- 
 gare of psychical science. To this complexion must 
 we all come, according to the best Japanese opin- 
 ion. Each of us contains within him " somewhat of 
 a shadowy being," like the spectre described by Dr. 
 Johnson: something like the Egyptian "Ka," for 
 which the curious may consult the works of Miss 
 Amelia B. Edwards and other learned Orientalists. 
 The most recent French student of these matters, 
 the author of 'L'Homme Posthume,' is of opinion 
 that we do not all possess this double, with its 
 power of surviving our bodily death. He thinks, 
 too, that our ghost, when it does survive, has but 
 
A WEIX AND WATER BOGIE. 
 
Some Japanese Bogie-Books 151 
 
 rarely the energy and enterprise to make itself vis- 
 ible to or audible by " shadow - casting men." In 
 some extreme cases the ghost (according to our 
 French authority, that of a disciple of M. Comte) 
 feeds fearsomely on the bodies of the living. In no 
 event does he believe that a ghost lasts much longer 
 than a hundred years. After that it mizzles into 
 spectre, and is resolved into its elements, whatever 
 they may be. 
 
 A somewhat similar and (to my own mind) prob- 
 ably sound theory of ghosts prevails among sav- 
 age tribes, and among such peoples as the ancient 
 Greeks, the modern Hindoos, and other ancestor 
 worshippers. When feeding, as they all do, or used 
 to do, the ghosts of the ancestral dead, they gave 
 special attention to the claims of the dead of the 
 last three generations, leaving ghosts older than the 
 century to look after their own supplies of meat and 
 drink. The negligence testifies to a notion that 
 very old ghosts are of little account, for good or 
 evil. On the other hand, as regards the longevity 
 of spectres, we must not shut our eyes to the ex- 
 ample of the bogie in ancient armor which appears 
 in Glamis Castle, or to the Jesuit of Queen Eliza- 
 beth's date that haunts the library (and a very nice 
 place to haunt : I ask no better, as a ghost at Lord's 
 might cause a scandal) of an English nobleman. 
 With these instantice contradictorice, as Bacon calls 
 them, present to our minds, we must not (in the 
 present condition of psychical research) dogmatize 
 too hastily about the span of life allotted to the 
 simulacrum vulgare. Very probably his chances of 
 a prolonged existence are in inverse ratio to the 
 square of the distance of time which severs him 
 
1^2 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 from our modern days. No one has ever even pre- 
 tended to see the ghost of an ancient Roman buried 
 in these islands, still less of a Pict or Scot, or a Pa- 
 laeolithic man, welcome as such an apparition would 
 be to many of us. Thus the evidence does certainly 
 look as if there were a kind of statute of limitations 
 among ghosts, which, from many points of view, is 
 not an arrangement at which we should repine. 
 
 The Japanese artist expresses his own sense of 
 the casual and fluctuating nature of ghosts by draw- 
 ing his spectre in shaky lines, as if the model had 
 given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum rises 
 out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself 
 into shape above the spade with which all that is 
 corporeal of its late owner has been interred. Please 
 remark the uncomforted and dismal expression of 
 the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost 
 or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies 
 in the future world, good or evil, but is only a shad- 
 owy resemblance, condemned, as in the Egyptian 
 creed, to dwell in the tomb and hover near it. The 
 Chinese and Japanese have their own definite the- 
 ory of the next world, and we must by no means 
 confuse the eternal fortunes of the permanent, con- 
 scious, and responsible self, already inhabiting other 
 worlds than ours, with the eccentric vagaries of the 
 semi-material tomb-haunting larva, which so often 
 develops a noisy and bear-fighting disposition quite 
 unlike the character of its proprietor in life. 
 
 The next bogie, so limp and washed-out as he 
 seems, with his white, drooping, dripping arms and 
 hands, reminds us of that horrid French species of 
 apparition, "la lavandifere de la nuit," who washes 
 dead men's linen in the moonlit pools and rivers. 
 
RAISING THE WIND. 
 
A CHINK AND CREVICE BOGIE. 
 
Some Japanese Bogie-Boohs 157 
 
 Whether this simulacrum be meant for the spirit of 
 the well (for everything has its spirit in Japan), or 
 whether it be the ghost of some mortal drowned in 
 the well, I cannot say with absolute certainty ; but 
 the opinion of the learned tends to the former con- 
 clusion. Naturally a Japanese child, when sent in 
 the dusk to draw water, will do so with fear and 
 trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition might 
 scare the boldest. Another bogie, a terrible crea- 
 tion of fancy, I take to be a vampire, about which 
 the curious can read in Dom Calmet, who will tell 
 them how whole villages in Hungary have been de- 
 populated by vampires ; or he may study in Fauriel's 
 ' Chansons de la Grece Moderne ' the vampires of 
 modern Hellas. 
 
 Another plan, and perhaps even more satisfactory 
 to a timid or superstitious mind, is to read in a 
 lonely house at midnight a story named ' Carmilla,' 
 printed in Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu's ' In a Glass 
 Darkly.' That work will give you the peculiar sen- 
 timent of vampirism, will produce a gelid perspira- 
 tion, and reduce the patient to a condition in which 
 he will be afraid to look round the room. If, while 
 in this mood, some one tells him Mr. Augustus 
 Hare's story of Crooglin Grange, his education in 
 the practice and theory of vampires will be com- 
 plete, and he will be a very proper and well-qualified 
 inmate of Earlswood Asylum. The most awful Jap- 
 anese vampire, caught red-handed in the act, a hid- 
 eous, bestial incarnation of ghoulishness, we have 
 carefully refrained from reproducing. 
 
 Scarcely more agreeable is the bogie, or witch, 
 blowing from her mouth a malevolent exhalation, an 
 embodiment of malignant and maleficent sorcery. 
 
1^8 
 
 Books and Bookmen 
 
 The vapor which flies and curls from the mouth con- 
 stitutes "a sending," in the technical language of 
 Icelandic wizards, and is capable (in Iceland, at all 
 events) of assuming the form of some detestable 
 supernatural animal, to destroy the life of a hated 
 rival. In the case of our last example it is very 
 hard indeed to make head or tail of the spectre rep- 
 resented. Chinks and crannies are his domain ; 
 through these he drops upon you. He is a merry 
 but not an attractive or genial ghost. Where there 
 are such " visions about " it may be admitted that 
 children, apt to believe in all such fancies, have a 
 youth of variegated and intense misery, recurring 
 with special vigor at bed-time. But we look again 
 at our first picture, and hope and trust that Jap- 
 anese boys and girls are as happy as these jolly lit- 
 tle creatures appear. 
 
a 'Boofeman'js l^t^mtv 
 
a QBoo6man'0 l^urgator^ 
 
 WHOMAS BLINTON was a book- 
 hunter. He had always been a 
 book-hunter, ever since, at an ex- 
 tremely early age, he had awak- 
 ened to the errors of his ways as 
 a collector of stamps and mono- 
 grams. In book-hunting he saw 
 no harm ; nay, he would contrast 
 its joys, in a rather pharisaical style, with the pleas- 
 ures of shooting and fishing. ' He constantly de- 
 clined to believe that the devil came for that re- 
 nowned amateur of black letter, G. Steevens. Dibdin 
 himself, who tells the story (with obvious anxiety 
 and alarm), pretends to refuse credit to the ghastly 
 narrative. " His language," says Dibdin, in his 
 account of the book-hunter's end, "was, too fre- 
 quently, the language of imprecation." This is 
 rather good, as if Dibdin thought a gentleman might 
 swear pretty often, but not " too frequently." " Al- 
 though I am not disposed to admit," Dibdin goes on, 
 " the whole of the testimony of the good woman 
 who watched by Steevens's bedside, although my 
 prejudices (as they may be called) will not allow me 
 to believe that the windows shook, and that strange 
 
1 62 Books and Bookmen 
 
 noises and deep groans were heard at midnight in 
 his room, yet no creature of common sense (and this 
 woman possessed the quahty in an eminent degree) 
 could mistake oaths for prayers ; " and so forth. In 
 short, Dibdin clearly holds that the windows did 
 shake " without a blast," like the banners in Branx- 
 holme Hall when somebody came for the Goblin 
 Page. 
 
 But Thomas Blinton would hear of none of these 
 things. He said that his taste made him take exer- 
 cise ; that he walked from the City to West Kensing- 
 ton every day, to beat the covers of the book-stalls, 
 while other men travelled in the expensive cab or 
 the unwholesome Metropolitan Railway. We are 
 all apt to hold favorable views of our own amuse- 
 ments, and, for my own part, I believe that trout 
 and salmon are incapable of feeling pain. But the 
 flimsiness of Blinton's theories must be apparent to 
 every unbiassed moralist. His " harmless taste " 
 really involved most of the deadly sins, or at all 
 events a fair working majority of them. He cov- 
 eted his neighbors' books. When he got the chance 
 he bought books in a cheap market and sold them 
 in a dear market, thereby degrading literature to 
 the level of trade. He took advantage of the igno- 
 rance of uneducated persons who kept book-stalls. 
 He was envious, and grudged the good fortune of 
 others, while he rejoiced in their failures. He 
 turned a deaf ear to the appeals of poverty. He 
 was luxurious, and laid out more money than he 
 should have done on his selfish pleasures, often 
 adorning a volume with a morocco binding when 
 Mrs. Blinton sighed in vain for some old point 
 d'Alenqon lace. Greedy, proud, envious, stingy, ex- 
 
A Bookman's Purgatory i6^ 
 
 travagant, and sharp in his dealings, Blinton was 
 guilty of most of the sins which the Church recog- 
 nizes as " deadly." 
 
 On the very day before that of which the affect- 
 ing history is now. to be told, Blinton had been run- 
 ning the usual round of crime. He had (as far as 
 intentions went) defrauded a bookseller in Holywell 
 Street by purchasing from him, for the sum of two 
 shillings, what he took to be a very rare Elzevir. It 
 is true that when he got home and consulted ' Wil- 
 lems,' he found that he had got hold of the wrong 
 copy, in which the figures denoting the numbers of 
 pages are printed right, and which is therefore 
 worth exactly " nuppence " to the collector. But 
 the intention is the thing, and Blinton's intention 
 ' was distinctly fraudulent. When he discovered his 
 error, then "his language," as Dibdin says, "was 
 that of imprecation." Worse (if possible) than this, 
 Blinton had gone to a sale, begun to bid for ' Les 
 Essais de Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne' (Fop- 
 pens, MDCLIX.), and, carried away by excitement, 
 had "plunged" to the extent of ;£i5, which was 
 precisely the amount of money he owed his plumber 
 and gas-fitter, a worthy man with a large family. 
 Then, meeting a friend (if the book-hunter has 
 friends), or rather an accomplice in lawless enter- 
 prise, Blinton had remarked the glee on the other's 
 face. The poor man had purchased a little old 
 Olaus Magnus, with wood-cuts, representing were- 
 wolves, fire-drakes, and other fearful wild-fowl, and 
 was happy in his bargain. But Blinton, with fiend- 
 ish joy, pointed out to him that the index was im- 
 perfect, and left him sorrowing. 
 
 Deeds more foul have yet to be told. Thomas 
 
J 64 Books and Bookmen 
 
 Blinton had discovered a new sin, so to speak, in 
 the collecting way. Aristophanes says of one of 
 his favorite blackguards, " Not only is he a villain, 
 but he has invented an original villainy." Blinton 
 was like this. He ijiaintained that every man who 
 came to notoriety had, at some period, published a 
 volume of poems which he had afterwards repented 
 of and withdrawn. It was Blinton's hideous pleas- 
 ure to collect stray copies of these unhappy vol- 
 umes, these ' P6ch^s de Jeunesse,' which, always 
 and invariably, bear a gushing inscription from the 
 author to a friend. He had all Lord John Man- 
 ners's poems, and even Mr. Ruskin's. He had the 
 'Ode to Despair' of Smith (now a comic writer), 
 and the ' Love Lyrics ' of Brown, who is now a per- 
 manent under-secretary, than which nothing can be 
 less gay nor more permanent. He had the revolu- 
 tionary songs which a dignitary of the Church pub- 
 lished and withdrew from circulation. Blinton was 
 wont to say he expected to come across ' Triolets 
 of a Tribune,' by Mr. John Bright, and ' Original 
 Hymns for Infant Minds,' by Mr. Henry Labou- 
 chere, if he only hunted long enough. 
 
 On the day of which I speak he had secured a 
 ' volume of love-poems which the author had done 
 his best to destroy, and he had gone to his club and 
 read all the funniest passages aloud to friends of the 
 author, who was on the club committee. Ah, was 
 this a kind action .? In short, Blinton had filled up 
 the cup of his iniquities, and nobody will be sur- 
 prised to hear that he met the appropriate punish- 
 ment of his offence. Blinton had passed, on the 
 whole, a happy day, notwithstanding the error about 
 the Elzevir. He dined well at his club, went home, 
 
A Bookman's Purgatory i65 
 
 slept well, and started next morning for his office in 
 the City, walking, as usual, and intending to pursue 
 the pleasures of the chase at all the book-stalls. At 
 the very first, in the Brompton Road, he saw a man 
 turning over the rubbish in the cheap box. Blinton 
 stared at him, fancied he knew him, thought he 
 did n't, and then became a prey to the glittering eye 
 of the other. The Stranger, who wore the conven- 
 tional cloak and slouched soft hat of Strangers, was 
 apparently an accomplished mesmerist, or thought- 
 reader, or adept, or esoteric Buddhist. He resem- 
 bled Mr. Isaacs, Zanoni (in the novel of that name), 
 Mendoza (in ' Codlingsby '), the soul-less man in ' A 
 Strange Story,' Mr. Home, Mr. Irving Bishop, a 
 Buddhist adept in the astral body, and most other 
 mysterious characters of history and fiction. Before 
 his Awful Will, Blinton's mere modern obstinacy 
 shrank back like a child abashed. The Stranger 
 glided to him and whispered, " Buy these." 
 
 " These " were a complete set of Auerbach's nov- 
 els, in English, which, I need not say, Blinton would 
 never have dreamt of purchasing had he been left 
 to his own devices. 
 
 " Buy these ! " repeated the Adept, or whatever 
 he was, in a cruel whisper. Paying the sum de- 
 manded, and trailing his vast load of German ro- 
 mance, poor Blinton followed the fiend. 
 
 They reached a stall where, amongst much trash, 
 Glatigny's ' Jour de I'An d'un Vagabond ' was ex- 
 posed. 
 
 " Look," said Blinton, " there is a book I have 
 wanted some time. Glatignys are getting rather 
 scarce, and it is an amusing trifle." 
 
 " Nay, buy that" said the implacable Stranger, 
 
1 66 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 pointing with a hooked forefinger at Alison's ' His- 
 tory of Europe ' in an indefinite number of volumes. 
 Blinton shuddered. 
 
 " What, buy that, and why ? In heaven's name, 
 what could I do with it ? " 
 
 " Buy it," repeated the persecutor, " and that (in- 
 dicating the ' Ilios ' of Dr. Schliemann, — a bulky 
 work), and these (pointing to all Mr. Theodore Alois 
 Buckley's translations of the Classics), and these " 
 (glancing at the collected writings of the late Mr. 
 Hain Friswell, and at a ' Life,' in more than one vol- 
 ume, of Mr. Gladstone). 
 
 The miserable Blinton paid, and trudged along, 
 carrying the bargains under his arm. Now one book 
 fell out, now another dropped by the way. Some- 
 times a portion of Alison came ponderously to earth ; 
 sometimes the ' Gentle Life ' sunk resignedly to the 
 ground. The Adept kept picking them up again, 
 and packing them under the arms of the weary Blin- 
 ton. 
 
 The victim now attempted to put on an air of 
 geniality, and tried to epter into conversation with 
 his tormentor. 
 
 "He does know about books," thought Blinton, 
 "and he must have a weak spot somewhere." 
 
 So the wretched amateur made play in his best 
 conversational style. He talked of bindings, of 
 Maioli, of Grolier, of De Thou, of Derome, of Clovis 
 Eve, of Roger Payne, of Trautz, and eke of Bauzon- 
 net. He discoursed of first editions, of black letter, 
 and even of illustrations and vignettes. He ap- 
 proached the topic of Bibles, but here his tyrant, 
 with a fierce yet timid glance, interrupted him. 
 
 " Buy those ! " he hissed through his teeth. 
 
A Bookman's Purgatory i6y 
 
 "Those" were the complete publications of the 
 Folk Lore Society. 
 
 Blinton did not care for folk lore (very bad men 
 never do), but he had to act as he was told. 
 
 Then, without pause or remorse, he was charged 
 to acquire the ' Ethics ' of Aristotle, in the agreeable 
 versions of Williams and Chace. Next he secured 
 ' Strathmore,' ' Chandos,' ' Under Two Flags,' and 
 'Two Little Wooden Shoes,' and several dozens more, 
 of Ouida's novels. The next stall was entirely filled 
 with school-books, old geographies, Livys, Delec- 
 tuses, Arnold's 'Greek Exercises,' Ollendorffs, and 
 what not. 
 
 " Buy them all," hissed the fiend. He seized whole 
 boxes and piled them on Blinton's head. 
 
 He tied up Ouida's novels, in two parcels, with 
 string, and fastened eaclj to one of the buttons above 
 the tails of Blinton's coat. 
 
 " You are tired .' " asked the tormentor. " Never 
 mind, these books will soon be off your hands." 
 
 So speaking, the Stranger, with amazing speed, 
 hurried Blinton back through Holywell Street, along 
 the Strand, and up to Piccadilly, stopping at last at 
 the door of Blinton's famous and very expensive 
 binder. 
 
 The binder opened his eyes, as well he might, at 
 the vision of Blinton's treasures. Then the miser- 
 able Blinton found himself, as it were automatically 
 and without any exercise of his will, speaking thus : — 
 
 " Here are some things I have picked up, — ex- 
 tremely rare, — and you will oblige me by binding 
 them in your best manner, regardless of expense. 
 Morocco, of course ; crushed levant morocco, double, 
 every book of them, petitsfers, my crest and coat of 
 
1 68 Boohs and Bookmen 
 
 arms, plenty of gilding. Spare no cost. Don't keep 
 me waiting, as you generally do ; " for indeed book- 
 binders are the most dilatory of the human species. 
 
 Before the astonished binder could ask the most 
 necessary questions, Blinton's tormentor had hurried 
 that amateur out of the room. 
 
 " Come on to the sale," he cried. 
 
 "What sale > " said Blinton. 
 
 " Why, the Beckford sale ; it is the thirteenth 
 day, a lucky day." 
 
 " But I have forgotten my catalogue." 
 
 " Where is it .? " 
 
 "In the third shelf from the top, on the right- 
 hand side of the ebony bookcase at home." 
 
 The Stranger stretched out his arm, which swiftly 
 elongated itself till the hand disappeared from view 
 round the corner. In a moment the hand returned 
 with the catalogue. The pair sped on to Messrs. 
 Sotheby's auction - rooms in Wellington Street. 
 Every one knows the appearance of a great book- 
 sale. The long table, surrounded by eager bidders, 
 resembles from a little distance a roulette table, and 
 communicates the same sort of excitement. The 
 amateur is at a loss to know how to conduct him- 
 self. If he bids in his own person some bookseller 
 will outbid him, partly because the bookseller knows, 
 after all, he knows little about books, and suspects 
 that the amateur may, in this case, know more. Be- 
 sides, professionals always dislike amateurs, and, in 
 this game, they have a very great advantage. Blin- 
 ton knew all this, and was in the habit of giving his 
 commissions to a broker. But now he felt (and very 
 naturally) as if a demon had entered into him. 
 'Tirante il Bianco Valorissimo Cavaliere' was be- 
 
A Bookman's Purgatory i6g 
 
 ing competed for, an excessively rare romance of 
 chivalry, in magnificent red Venetian morocco, from 
 Canevari's library. The book is one of the rarest of 
 the Aldine Press, and beautifully adorned with Cane- 
 vari's device, — a simple and elegant affair in gold 
 and colors. " Apollo is driving his chariot across 
 the green waves towards the rock, on which winged 
 Pegasus is pawing the ground," though why this ac- 
 tion of a horse should be called " pawing " (the ani- 
 mal notoriously not possessing paws) it is hard to 
 say. Round this graceful design is the inscription 
 OP®Q2 KAI MHjAOHinS (straight not crooked). In 
 his ordinary mood Blinton could only have admired 
 * Tirante il Bianco ' from a distance. But now, the 
 demon inspiring him, he rushed into the lists, and 
 
 challenged the great Mr. , the Napoleon of 
 
 bookselling. The price had already reached five 
 hundred pounds. 
 
 " Six hundred," cried Blinton. 
 
 " Guineas," said the great Mr. -. 
 
 " Seven hundred," screamed Blinton. 
 
 " Guineas," replied the other. 
 
 This arithmetical dialogue went on till even Mr. 
 
 struck his flag, with a sigh, when the maddened 
 
 Blinton had said " Four thousand." The cheers of 
 the audience rewarded the largest bid ever made for 
 any book. As if he had not done enough, the 
 Stranger now impelled Blinton to contend with Mr. 
 
 for every expensive work that appeared. The 
 
 audience naturally fancied that Blinton was in the 
 earlier stage of softening of the brain, when a man 
 conceives himself to have inherited boundless wealth, 
 and is determined to live up to it. The hammer 
 fell for the last time. Blinton owed some fifty thou- 
 
lyo Books and Bookmen 
 
 sand pounds, and exclaimed audibly, as the influence 
 of the fiend died out, " I am a ruined man." 
 
 "Then your books must be sold," cried the 
 Stranger, and, leaping on a chair, he addressed the 
 audience : — 
 
 "Gentlemen, I invite you to Mr. Blinton's sale, 
 which will immediately take place. The collection 
 contains some very remarkable early English poets, 
 many first editions of the French classics, most of 
 the rarer Aldines, and a singular assortment of 
 Americana." 
 
 In a moment, as if by magic, the shelves round 
 the room were filled with Blinton's books, all tied 
 up in big lots of some thirty volumes each. His 
 early Moli^res were fastened to old French diction- 
 aries and school-books. His Shakespeare quartos 
 were in the same lot with tattered railway novels. 
 His copy (happily almost unique) of Richard Barn- 
 field's ' Affectionate Shepheard ' was coupled with 
 two odd volumes of ' Chips from a German Work- 
 shop ' and a cheap, imperfect example of ' Tom 
 Brown's School-days.' Hookes's ' Amanda ' was at 
 the bottom of a lot of American devotional works, 
 where it kept company with an Elzevir Tacitus and 
 the Aldine ' Hypnerotomachia.' The auctioneer put 
 up lot after lot, and Blinton plainly saw that the 
 whole affair was a " knock-out." His most treasured 
 spoils were parted with at the price of waste paper. 
 It is an awful thing to be present at one's own sale. 
 No man would bid above a few shillings. Well did 
 Blinton know that after the knock-out the plunder 
 would be shared among the grinning bidders. At 
 last his ' Adonais,' uncut, bound by Lortic, went, in 
 company with some old 'Bradshaws,' the 'Court 
 
A Bookman's Purgatory 171 
 
 Guide ' of 1881, and an odd volume of the ' Sunday 
 at Home,' for sixpence. The Stranger smiled a smile 
 of peculiar malignity. Blinton leaped up to protest ; 
 the room seemed to shake around him, but words 
 would not come to his lips. 
 
 Then he heard a familiar voice observe, as a fa- 
 miliar grasp shook his shoulder, — 
 
 "Tom, Tom, what a nightmare you are enjoy- 
 ing ! " 
 
 He was in his own arm-chair, where he had fallen 
 asleep after dinner, and Mrs. Blinton was doing her 
 best to arouse him from his awful vision. Beside 
 him lay ' L'Enfer du Bibliophile, vu et d^crit par 
 Charles Asselineau.' (Paris : Tardieu, MDCCCLX.) 
 
 If this were an ordinary tract, I should have to 
 tell how Blinton's eyes were opened, how he gave up 
 book-collecting, and took to gardening, or politics, 
 or something of that sort. But truth compels me to 
 admit that Bhnton's repentance had vanished by the 
 end of the week, when he was discovered marking 
 M. Claudin's catalogue, surreptitiously, before break- 
 fast. Thus, indeed, end all our remorses. " Lance- 
 lot falls to his own love again," as in the romance. 
 Much, and justly, as theologians decry a death-bed 
 repentance, it is, perhaps, the only repentance that 
 we do not repent of. All others leave us ready, when 
 occasion comes, to fall to our old love again ; and 
 may that love never be worse than the taste for old 
 books ! Once a collector, always a collector. Moi 
 qui parle, I have sinned, and struggled, and fallen. 
 I have thrown catalogues, unopened, into the waste- 
 paper basket. I have withheld my feet from the 
 paths that lead to Sotheby's and Puttick's. I have 
 
172 
 
 Books and Bookmen 
 
 crossed the street to avoid a book-stall. In fact, like 
 the prophet Nicholas, "I have been known to be 
 steady for weeks at a time." And then the fatal 
 moment of temptation has arrived, and I have suc- 
 cumbed to the soft seductions of an Aldine, or an 
 Elzevir or an old book on Angling. Probably Grolier 
 was thinking of such weaknesses when he chose his 
 devices Tanquam Ventus, and quisque suos patimur 
 Manes. Like the wind we are blown about, and, 
 like the people in the .^Eneid, we are obliged to sufEer 
 the consequences of our own extravagance. 
 
^allatie of tt)e (IlnattatnaBle 
 
 The Books I cannot hope to huy, 
 
 Their phantoms round me vaalt^ and loheel, 
 
 They pass before the dreaming eye, 
 
 Ere Sleep the dreaming eye can seal. 
 
 A kind of literary reel 
 
 They dance ; hut fair the bindings shine. 
 
 Prose cannot tell them what I feel, — 
 
 The Books that never can he mine! 
 
 There frisk Editions rare and shy, 
 Morocco clad from head to heel ; 
 Shakspearian quartos; Comedy 
 As first she flashed from Richard Steele; 
 And quaint De Foe on Mrs. Veal ; 
 And, lord of landing net and line, 
 Old f^aak with his fishing creel, — 
 The Books that never can be mine ! 
 
 Incunables! for you I sigh, 
 Black letter, at thy founts I kneel. 
 Old tales of Perraulfs nursery, 
 For you I'd go without a meal! 
 
n4 
 
 Books and Bookmen 
 
 For Boohs wherein did Aldus deal 
 And rare Galioi du Pr/ 1 pine. 
 The watches of the night reveal 
 The Books thai never can he mine! 
 
 ENVOY. 
 
 Prince, hear a hopeless Bard's appeal ; 
 Reverse the rules of Mine and Thine ; 
 Make it legitimate to steal 
 The Books that never can he mine I 
 
\o »3 t> O 'W( .TX. 
 
 %nuv 
 
 jESCHYLUS, 21, 24 
 
 Aldus, 72, 77 
 
 AngoulSme, Marguerite d', 74 
 
 Annius, 24, 25 
 
 Archilochus, 25 
 
 Aristotle, 32, 76 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 65, 98 
 
 Asselineau, Charies, 171 
 
 Athanasius, 26 
 
 Aumale, Due d', 85 
 
 Bacon, 21 
 
 Barberini, Cardinal, 80 
 
 Bauchart, Quentin, 124 
 
 Bayle, 25 
 
 B^jart, Madeleine, 128 
 
 Bennet, M., 2 
 
 Besant, W., 26 
 
 Blimber, Mrs., 26 
 
 Bookman's Purgatory, A, 161 
 
 Borel, Petrus, 86 
 
 Borgia, Alexander, 25 
 
 Bossuet, 83, 87, 88 
 
 Boswell, James, 28 
 
 Bozerian, 97 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 134 
 
 Browning, Robert, 36, 6 
 
 Brunet, 87, 123 
 
 Bryant, Jacob, 28 
 
 Byron, Lord, 62 
 
 Campanella, 73 
 Cato, 25 
 
 Catullus, 27 
 
 fhambord, Comte de, 72 
 
 Charlemagne, 75, 97 
 
 Chateaubriand, 61-63, ^ 
 
 Chatterton, 15, 27, 28, 29 
 
 Cicero, 24, 26, 27 
 
 Clough, 32, 60, 65, 67 
 
 Colbert, 74, 82, 83 
 
 Collier, J. Payne, 17, 33, 34, 35 
 
 Comte, Auguste, 151 
 
 Condorcet, 84 
 
 Cotin, Abb^, 74 
 
 Cotton, R. W., 103, 104, 105 
 
 D'Assier, M., 102 
 
 Derome, 74, 98 
 
 Desmarets de St. Porlin, 99 
 
 Des Portes, 86 
 
 Dibdin, 161-163 
 
 Didot, A. F., 72, 74, 77 
 
 Dixon, Hepworth, T12 
 
 Dolet, 73, 106 
 
 Double, Leopold, 76 
 
 Du Barry, Madame, 74, loi 
 
 Du Bellay, Joachim, 60, 61, 65-67, 
 
 86 
 Dubois, Cardinal, 83 
 Dumas, Alex., 76 
 Du Moustier, 80 
 Dusseuil, 98, 99, 106 
 Dutuit, M., 124 
 
 Edwards, Amelia B., 148 
 
1^6 
 
 Index 
 
 Elzevir, Abraham, 114, 117 
 
 Elzevir, Bonaventure, 114, 117 
 
 Elzevir, Isaac, 1 14 
 
 Elzevir, John and Daniel, 114, 117 
 
 Elzevir, Louis, 72, 114 
 
 Elzevir, Matthew, 114 
 
 Erasmus, 22 
 
 Este, Princess d', 75 
 
 Estienne, Robert, 72 
 
 Eve, Clovis, 74, 107 
 
 Fertiault, 77 
 
 Fletcher, John, 41 
 
 Fletcher, Laurence, 41 
 
 Fontaine de Resbeck, 91, 124, 127 
 
 Francis L, 74, 77, 107 
 
 Froude, Anthony, 42 
 
 Galliot du Fr^, 106 
 Gambetta, L^on, 86 
 Ganneau, Clermont, 16 
 Garlande, Jean de, 26 
 Gautier, Th6ophile, 86 
 Gibbon, 60 
 
 Giles, Herbert, 137, 138 
 Glatigny, Albert, 91 
 Goethe, 64-66 
 Gray, 28 
 
 Gregory IL (Pope), 22 
 Grolier, 74, 82, 97-99, 107, 172 
 Guyon, Madame de, 76 
 
 Hardouin, 24 
 
 Hardy-Mennil, 97 
 
 Hare, Augustus, 157 
 
 Hawthorne, N., 67 
 
 Heine, H., 61 
 
 Henry IL (of France), 75 
 
 Henry III. (of France), 74, 76, 77 
 
 Henry VIII. (of England), 42, 43 
 
 Herodotus, 19, 20, 22, 24 
 
 Hokusai, 133, 135 
 
 Homer, 19, 22, 24 
 
 Houssarl, Amelot de la, 80 
 
 Howell, James, 103-105 
 
 Hoym, Comte d', 83, 84 
 
 Ingleby, Dr., 32 
 
 Inglesant, John, 98 
 Innocent X. (Pope), 80 
 Ireland, Samuel, 28, 31, 32 
 Ireland, W. H., 15, 16, 20, 27-32 
 
 Janin, Jules, 72 
 
 Japanese Bogie-Books, 133 
 
 La Bruybre, 82 
 Lacroix, Paul, 79, 86 
 Le Fanu, S., 157 
 Le Gascon, 98, 107 
 Livy, 24, 25 
 Longepierre, 83, 84 
 Lortic, 170 
 
 Louis XIV., 74, 79, 82 
 Louis XV., 74, 84 
 Lucretius, 21 
 Luynes, Charles de, 100 
 
 Macpherson, 17, 27, 28 
 Mainsforth, 15 
 Manetho, 25 
 Marchena, 27 
 Marcus Aurelius, 63 
 Marie Antoinette, 74, loi 
 Marius-Michel, 96, 97 
 Mazarin, Cardinal, 78, 79, 82 
 Mdrim^e, Prosper, 17 
 Meursius, 26 
 Milraan, 22 
 
 Moliire, 73, 80-83, 87, 91, 128 
 Montaigne, 60, 63, 64 
 
 Naud^, Gabriel, 78, 79 
 
 Nodier, Charles, 72, 74, 86, 87, 129 
 
 Nodot, Fran9ois, 27 
 
 Nymauld, zoi, I02 
 
 Olaus, Magnus, 102 
 Oldiield, Mrs., 45 
 Onomacritus, 18-20 
 Oxenham family (the), 102-105 
 
 Padeloup, 74, 98 
 Pascal, 114 
 Payn, James, 28 
 Payne, Roger, 84 
 
Index 
 
 177 
 
 Petrarch, 27 
 
 PetroniuS, 102 
 
 Pieters, 72, 123 
 
 Pindar, 41 
 
 Pisistratus, 18-20 
 
 Pix^r^court, G. de, 75, 86, 118 
 
 Plato, 20-22 
 
 Pliny, 24, 102 
 
 Plutarch, 20 
 
 Poe, Edgar, 134 
 
 Peggie, 24, 79 
 
 Peictiers, Diane de, 74, 75 
 
 Pompadour, Madame de, 88, loi 
 
 Rabelais, 26, 73, 88, 106 
 Richelieu, Cardinal, 78 
 Roberts, F. J., 41 
 Rohan, Anne de, 100 
 Ronsard, 86, loi, 107 
 Rousseau, J. B., 83 
 Ruskin, 36, 62 
 
 Sala, G. A., 74 
 Sappho, 24 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 35 
 Seneca, 78 
 Shapira, Mr., 16, 30 
 Shakespeare, 21, 30, 31, 35 
 Shelley, 36, 73, 118 
 Smith, Captain John, 107 
 Smith, Jo, 15 
 
 Socrates, 22, 26 
 Solon, i8 
 Sophocles, 21, 24 
 SouU6, M., 81 
 Spencer, Herbert, 133 
 Spenser, Edmund, 60, 61, 66 
 Steevens, G., 161 
 Surtees, 15, 17, 35 
 Symends, J. A., 78 
 
 Tacitus, 24 
 
 Tallemant des Rfiaux, 80 
 
 Temple, Sir William, 21, 22 
 
 Theocritus, 73 
 
 Thou, de, 74, 82, 98 
 
 Trautz-Bauzonnet, 98, 107, 124, 129 
 
 Valli&re, (Due) de la, 74, 84 
 Valois, Marguerite de, 107 
 Van Dyck, Christopher, 117 
 Villon, Franjois, 73, 88 
 Virgil, 24 
 Vishnu, 23 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 28 
 Waters, Chester, 40, 41, 49 
 Wetstein, 118 
 Willems, M., 128, 129 
 Wolfgang, Abraham, 113 
 
 Ximenes, Cardinal, 42