The Book-Hunter, John Hill Burton [essential reading TXT] 📗

finally, "being absolute savages, and, like Indians and negroes, will ever continue so, all we can do is to plant colonies among them, and by this, and encouraging their emigration, try to get rid of the breed."

This fervency is all along of the question whether the Picts, or Piks, as Pinkerton chooses to call them, were Celts or Goths. If we turn to the books of his opponent on this question, Joseph Ritson, we find him paid back in his own coin, and that so genuine, that, on reading about gross ignorance, falsehood, and folly, one would think he was still enjoying Pinkerton's own flowers of eloquence, were it not that the tenor of the argument has somehow turned to the opposite side. I drop into the note below a specimen from the last words of this controversy, as characteristic of the way in which it was conducted, and a sample of the kind of dry fuel which, when ignited by these incendiaries, blazed into so much rage.[72]

Ritson was a man endowed with almost superhuman irritability of temper, and he had a genius fertile in devising means of giving scope to its restless energies. I have heard that it was one of his obstinate fancies, when addressing a letter to a friend of the male sex, instead of using the ordinary prefix of Mr or the affix Esq., to use the term "Master," as Master John Pinkerton, Master George Chalmers. The agreeable result of this was, that his communications on intricate and irritating antiquarian disputes were delivered to, and perused by, the young gentlemen of the family, so opening up new little intricate avenues, fertile in controversy and misunderstanding. But he had another and more inexhaustible resource for his superabundant irritability. In his numerous books he insisted on adopting a peculiar spelling. It was not phonetic, nor was it etymological; it was simply Ritsonian. To understand the efficacy of this arrangement, it must be remembered that the instinct of a printer is to spell according to rule, and that every deviation from the ordinary method can only be carried out by a special contest over each word. General instructions on such a matter are apt to produce unexpected results. One very sad instance I can now recall; it was that of a French author who, in a new edition of his works, desired to alter the old-fashioned spelling of the imperfect tense from o to a. To save himself trouble, on the first instance occurring in each proof, he put in the margin a general direction to change all such o's into a's. The instruction was so literally and comprehensively obeyed, that, happening to glance his eye over the volume on its completion, he found the letter o entirely excluded from it. Even the sacred name of Napoleon was irreverently printed Napalean, and the Revolution was the Revalutian. Ritson had far too sharp a scent for any little matter of controversy and irritating discussion to get into a difficulty like this. He would fight each step of the way, and such peculiarities as the following, profusely scattered over his books, may be looked upon as the names of so many battles or skirmishes with his printers—compileër, writeër, wel, kil, onely, probablely. Even when he condescended to use the spelling common to the rest of the nation, he could pick out little causes of quarrel with the way of putting it in type—as, for instance, in using the word Ass, which came naturally to him, he would not follow the practice of his day in the use of the long and short ([s]s), but inverted the arrangement thus, s[s]. This strange creature exemplified the opinion that every one must have some creed—something from without having an influence over thought and action stronger than the imperfect apparatus of human reason. Scornfully disdaining revelation from above, he groped below, and found for himself a little fetish made of turnips and cabbages. He was as fanatical a devotee of vegetarianism as others have been of a middle state or adult baptism; and, after having torn through a life of spiteful controversy with his fellow-men, and ribaldry of all sacred things, he thus expressed the one weight hanging on his conscience, that "on one occasion, when temptéed by wet, cold, and hunger in the south of Scotland, he ventured to eat a few potatoes dressed under the roast, nothing less repugnant to feelings being to be had."[73]

To return to the services of him of mightier renown, whose genial drolleries led to these notices. Scott printed, as a contribution to his favourite club, the record of the trial of two Highlanders for murder, which brought forth some highly characteristic incidents. The victim was a certain Sergeant Davis, who had charge of one of the military parties or guards dispersed over the Highlands to keep them in order after the '45. Davis had gone from his own post at Braemar up Glen Clunie to meet the guard from Glenshee. He chose to send his men back and take a day's shooting among the wild mountains at the head of the glen, and was seen no more. How he was disposed of could easily be divined in a general way, but there were no particulars to be had. It happened, however, that there was one Highlander who, for reasons best known to himself—they were never got at—had come to the resolution of bringing his brother Highlanders, who had made away with the sergeant, to justice. It was necessary for his own safety, however, that he should be under the pressure of a motive or impulse sufficient to justify so heartless and unnatural a proceeding, otherwise he would himself have been likely to follow the sergeant's fate. Any reference to his conscience, the love of justice, respect for the laws of the land, or the like, would of course have been received with well-merited ridicule and scorn. He must have some motive which a sensible Highlander could admit as probable in itself, and sufficient for its purpose.

Accordingly the accuser said he had been visited by the sergeant's ghost, who had told him everything, and laid on him the heavy burden of bringing his slaughterers in the flesh to their account. If that were not done, the troubled spirit would not cease to walk the earth, and so long as he walked would the afflicted denouncer continue to be the victim of his ghostly visits. The case was tried at Edinburgh, and though the evidence was otherwise clear and complete, the Lowland jury were perplexed and put out by the supernatural episode. A Highland story, with a ghost acting witness at second-hand, roused all their Saxon prejudices, and they cut the knot of difficulties by declining to convict. A point was supposed to have been made, when the counsel for the defence asked the ghost-seer what language the ghost, who was English when in the flesh, spoke to the Highlander, who knew not that language; and the witness answered, through his interpreter, that the spectre spoke as good Gaelic as ever was heard in Lochaber. Sir Walter Scott, however, remarks that there was no incongruity in this, if we once get over the first step of the ghost's existence. It is curious that Scott does not seem to have woven the particulars of this affair into any one of his novels.

Among those who contributed to place the stamp of a higher character on the labours of the book clubs, one of the most remarkable was Sir Alexander Boswell. A time there was, unfortunately, when his name could not easily be dissociated from exasperating political events; but now that the generation concerned in them has nearly passed away, it becomes practicable, even from the side of his political opponents, to glance at his literary abilities and accomplishments without recalling exciting recollections. He was a member of the Roxburghe, and though he did not live to see the improvement in the issues of that institution, or the others which kept pace with it, he, alone and single-handed, set the example of printing the kind of books which it was afterwards the merit of the book clubs to promulgate. He gave them, in fact, their tone. He had at his paternal home of Auchinleck a remarkable collection of rare books and manuscripts; one of these afforded the text from which the romance of Sir Tristrem was printed. He reprinted from the one remaining copy in his own possession the disputation between John Knox and Quentin Kennedy, a priest who came forward against the great Reformer as the champion of the old religion. From the Auchinleck press came also reprints of Lodge's Fig for Momus, Churchyard's Mirrour of Man, the Book of the Chess, Sir James Dier's Remembrancer of the Life of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Dialogus inter Deum et Evam, and others.

The possession of a private printing-press is, no doubt, a very appalling type of bibliomania. Much as has been told us of the awful scale on which drunkards consume their favoured poison, one is not accustomed to hear of their setting up private stills for their own individual consumption. There is a Sardanapalitan excess in this bibliographical luxuriousness which refuses to partake with other vulgar mortals in the common harvest of the public press, but must itself minister to its own tastes and demands. The owner of such an establishment is subject to no extraneous caprices about breadth of margins, size of type, quarto or folio, leaded or unleaded lines; he dictates his own terms; he is master of the situation, as the French say; and is the true autocrat of literature. There have been several renowned private presses: Walpole's, at Strawberry Hill; Mr Johnes's, at Hafod; Allan's, at the Grange; and the Lee Priory Press. None of these, however, went so distinctly into the groove afterwards followed by the book clubs as Sir Alexander Boswell's Auchinleck Press. In the Bibliographical Decameron is a brief history, by Sir Alexander himself, of the rise and progress of his press. He tells us how he had resolved to print Knox's Disputation: "For this purpose I was constrained to purchase two small fonts of black-letter, and to have punches cut for eighteen or twenty double letters and contractions. I was thus enlisted and articled into the service, and being infected with the type fever, the fits have periodically returned. In the year 1815, having viewed a portable press invented by Mr John Ruthven, an ingenious printer in Edinburgh, I purchased one, and commenced compositor. At this period, my brother having it in contemplation to present Bamfield to the Roxburghe Club, and not aware of the poverty and insignificance of my establishment, expressed a wish that his tract should issue from the Auchinleck Press. I determined to gratify him, and the portable press being too small for general purposes, I exchanged it for one of Mr Ruthven's full-sized ones; and having increased my stock to eight small fonts, roman and italic, with the necessary appurtenances, I placed the whole in a cottage, built originally for another purpose, very pleasantly situated on the bank of a rivulet, and, although concealed from view by the surrounding wood, not a quarter of a mile from my house."[74]

To show the kind of man who co-operated with Scott in such frivolities, let me say a word or two more about Sir Alexander. He was the son, observe, of Johnson's Jamie Boswell, but he was about as like his father as an eagle might be to a peacock. To use a common colloquial phrase, he was a man of genius, if ever there was one. Had he been a poorer and socially humbler man than he was—had he had his