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

A glance at the reprint of the Life of Surtees for the book club called after his name, confirms the suspicions raised by the exposure of the other ballad—this also is an imposition.[75]

Altogether, such affairs create an unpleasant uncertainty about the paternity of that delightful department of literature, our ballad poetry. Where next are we to be disenchanted? Of the way in which ancient ballads have come into existence, there is one sad example within my own knowledge. Some mad young wags, wishing to test the critical powers of an experienced collector, sent him a new-made ballad, which they had been enabled to secure only in a fragmentary form. To the surprise of its fabricator, it was duly printed; but what naturally raised his surprise to astonishment, and revealed to him a secret, was, that it was no longer a fragment, but a complete ballad,—the collector, in the course of his industrious inquiries among the peasantry, having been so fortunate as to recover the missing fragments! It was a case where neither could say anything to the other, though Cato might wonder quod non rideret haruspex, haruspicem cum vidisset. This ballad has been printed in more than one collection, and admired as an instance of the inimitable simplicity of the genuine old versions!

It may perhaps do something to mitigate Surtees's offence in the eye of the world, that it was he who first suggested to Scott the idea of improving the Jacobite insurrections, and, in fact, writing Waverley. In the very same letter, quoted above, where Scott acknowledges the treacherous gift, he also acknowledges the hints he has received; and, mentioning the Highland stories he had imbibed from old Stewart of Invernahyle, says: "I believe there never was a man who united the ardour of a soldier and tale-teller—or man of talk, as they call it in Gaelic—in such an excellent degree; and as he was as fond of telling as I was of hearing, I became a violent Jacobite at the age of ten years old; and even since reason and reading came to my assistance, I have never got rid of the impression which the gallantry of Prince Charles made on my imagination. Certainly I will not renounce the idea of doing something to preserve these stories, and the memory of times and manners which, though existing as it were yesterday, have so strangely vanished from our eyes."

So much for certain men of mark whose pursuits or hobbies induced them to cluster round the cradle of this new literary organisation. When it was full grown it gathered about it a large body of systematic workers, who had their own special departments in the great republic of letters. To offer a just and discriminating account of these men's services would draw me through an extensive tract of literary biography.

There is a shallow prejudice very acceptable to all blockheads, that men who are both learned and laborious must necessarily be stupid. It is best to meet the approach of such a prejudice at once, by saying that the editors of club books are not mere dreary drudges, seeing the works of others accurately through the press, and attending only to dates and headings. Around and throughout the large library of volumes issued by these institutions, there run prolific veins of fresh literature pregnant with learning and ability. The style of work thus set agoing has indeed just the other day been incorporated into a sort of department of state literature since the great collection called The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, of which the Master of the Rolls accepts the responsibility, is carried out in the very spirit of the book clubs, in which indeed most of the editors of the Chronicles have been trained.

Without prejudice to others, let me just name a few of those to whom the world is under obligation for services in this field of learned labour. For England, there are James Orchard Halliwell, Sir Frederic Madden, Beriah Botfield, Sir Henry Ellis, Alexander Dyce, Thomas Stapleton, William J. Thoms, Crofton Croker, Albert Way, Joseph Hunter, John Bruce, Thomas Wright, John Gough Nichols, Payne Collier, Joseph Stevenson, and George Watson Taylor, who edited that curious and melancholy book of poems, composed by the Duke of Orleans while he was a prisoner in England after the battle of Agincourt—poems composed, singularly enough, in the English language, and at a period extremely deficient in native vernacular literature.

In Scotland, it was in the earlier issues of the Bannatyne that Thomas Thomson, too indolent or fastidious to commit himself to the writing of a book, left the most accessible vestiges of that power of practically grasping historical facts and conditions, which Scott admired so greatly, and acknowledged so much benefit from. He was followed by Professor Innes, who found and taught the secret of extracting from ecclesiastical chartularies, and other early records, the light they throw upon the social condition of their times, and thus collected matter for the two pleasant volumes which have become so popular. The Bannatyne Club, lately finding no more to do, wound up with a graceful compliment to David Laing—the man to whom, after Scott, it has been most indebted. And, lastly, it is in the Scotch book clubs that Joseph Robertson has had the opportunity of exercising those subtle powers of investigation and critical acumen, peculiarly his own, which have had a perceptible and substantial effect in raising archæology out of that quackish repute which it had long to endure under the name of antiquarianism. For Ireland, of which I have something farther to say at length, let it suffice in the mean time to name Dean Butler, Dr Reeves, Mr O'Donovan, Mr Eugene Curry, and Dr Henthorn Todd.

There is another and distinct class of services which have been performed through the medium of the club books. The Roxburghe having been founded on the principle that each member should print a volume, to be distributed among his colleagues, an example was thus set to men of easy fortune and scholarly tastes, which has been followed with a large liberality, of which the public have probably but a faint idea. Not only in those clubs founded on the reciprocity system of each member distributing and receiving, but in those to be presently noticed, where the ordinary members pay an annual sum, to be expended in the printing of their books, have individual gentlemen come forward and borne the expense of printing and distributing costly volumes. In some instances valuable works have thus been presented to the members at the cost of those who have also undergone the literary labour of editing them.

There is something extremely refined and gentlemanlike in this form of liberality. The recipient of the bounty becomes the possessor of a handsome costly book without being subjected in any way to the obligation of receiving a direct gift at the hands of the munificent donor; for the recipient is a sort of corporation—a thing which the lawyers say has no personal responsibility and no conscience, and which all the world knows to have no gratitude.

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Nearly a quarter of a century after the birth of the first book club, a new era was ushered in by its brother, the Camden, established for the printing of books and documents connected with the early civil, ecclesiastical, and literary history of the British Empire. It discarded the rule which threw on each member the duty of printing and distributing a book, and tried the more equitable adjustment of an annual subscription to create a fund for defraying the expense of printing volumes to be distributed among the members. These, at first limited to 1000, expanded to 1200. Clubs with various objects now thickly followed. Any attempt to classify them as a whole, is apt to resemble Whately's illustration of illogical division—"e.g., if you were to divide 'book' into 'poetical, historical, folio, quarto, French, Latin,'" &c. One of the systems of arrangement is topographical, as the Chetham, "for the purpose of publishing biographical and historical books connected with the counties palatine of Lancaster and Chester."[76] The Surtees, again, named after our friend the ballad-monger, affects "those parts of England and Scotland included in the east between the Humber and the Firth of Forth, and in the west between the Mersey and the Clyde—a region which constituted the ancient kingdom of Northumberland." The Maitland, with its headquarters in Glasgow, gives a preference to the west of Scotland, but has not been exclusive. The Spalding Club, established in Aberdeen, the granite capital of the far north, is the luminary of its own district, and has produced fully as much valuable historical matter as any other club in Britain. Then there is the Irish Archæological—perhaps the most learned of all—with its casual assistants, the Ossianic, the Celtic, and the Iona. The Ælfric may be counted their ethnical rival, as dealing with the productions of the Anglo-Saxon enemies of the Celt. The Camden professes, as we have seen, to be