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

There are others, too, with no topographical connection, which express pretty well their purpose in their names—as the Shakespeare, for the old drama—the Percy, for old ballads and lyrical pieces. The Hakluyt has a delightful field—old voyages and travels. The Rae Society sticks to zoology and botany; and the Wernerian, the Cavendish, and the Sydenham, take the other departments in science, which the names given to them readily indicate.

In divinity and ecclesiastical history we have the Parker Society, named after the archbishop. Its tendencies are "Low," or, at all events, "Broad;" and as it counted some seven thousand members, it could not be allowed the run of the public mind without an antidote being accessible. Hence "The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology," the tendency of which was not only shown in its name, but in its possessing among its earliest adherents the Rev. E.B. Pusey and the Rev. John Keble. The same party strengthened themselves by a series of volumes called the "Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division of the East and West, translated by Members of the English Church." In Scotland, the two branches which deny the supremacy of Rome (it would give offence to call them both Protestant) are well represented by the Spottiswoode, already referred to as the organ of Episcopacy; and the more prolific Wodrow, which, named after the zealous historian of the Troubles, was devoted to the history of Presbyterianism, and the works of the Presbyterian fathers.

Thus are the book clubs eminently the republic of letters, in which no party or class has an absolute predominance, but each enjoys a fair hearing. And whereas if we saw people for other purposes than literature combining together according to ecclesiastical divisions, as High Church or Low, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, we should probably find that each excluded from its circle all that do not spiritually belong to it, we are assured it is quite otherwise in the book clubs—that High Churchmen or Romanists have not been excluded from the Parker, or Evangelical divines prohibited from investing in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Nay, the most zealous would incline to encourage the communication of their own peculiar literary treasures to their avowed theological opponents, as being likely to soften their hearts, and turn them towards the truth. Some adherents of these theological clubs there also are of slightly latitudinarian propensities, to whom the aspirations of honest religious zeal, and the records of endurance and martyrdom for conscience' sake, can never be void of interest, or fail in summoning up feelings of respectful sympathy, whatever be the denominational banner under which they have been exhibited. Some of these clubs now rest from their labours, the literary strata in which they were employed having been in fact worked out. Whether dead or living, however, their books are now a considerable and varied intellectual garden, in which the literary busy bee may gather honey all the day and many a day.

It will be readily supposed from the different and utterly separate grooves in which they run, and is very well known to the prowler among club books, that although these volumes profess to be printed from old manuscripts, or to be mere reprints of rare books, they take a considerable portion of their tone and tendency from the editor. In fact, the editor of a club book is, in the general case, a sort of literary sportsman, who professes to follow entirely his own humour or caprice, or, say, his own taste and enjoyment, in the matter which he selects, and the manner in which he lays it before his friends. Hence, many of these volumes, heavy and unimpressible as they look, yet are stamped strongly with the marks of the individuality, or of the peculiar intellectual cast, of living men. Take down, for instance, the volume of the Camden called "De Antiquis Legibus Liber," otherwise, "Cronica Majorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum," printed from "a small folio, nine inches and a half in length and seven inches in breadth, the binding of white leather covering wooden backs, and containing 159 leaves of parchment, paged continuously with Arabic cyphers." It is partly a record of the old municipal laws of the city of London, partly a chronicle of events. Had it fallen to be edited by a philosophical inquirer into the origin and principles of jurisprudence, or an investigator of the rise and progress of cities, or a social philosopher of any kind, it is hard to say what might have been made of it—easy to say that it would have been made something very different from what it is. The editor was an illustrious genealogist. Accordingly, early in his career as expositor of the character of the volume, he alights upon a proper name, not entirely isolated, but capable of being associated with other names. Thus, he is placed on a groove, and off he goes travelling in the fashion following over 220 pages of printed quarto: "Henry de Cornhill, husband of Alice de Courcy, the heiress of the Barony of Stoke Courcy Com. Somerset, and who, after his decease, re-married Warine Fitz-Gerald the king's chamberlain, leaving by each an only daughter, co-heirs of this Barony, of whom Joan de Cornhill was the wife of Hugh de Neville, Proto Forester of England, wife first of Baldwine de Riviers, eldest son and heir-apparent of William de Vernon, Earl of Devon, deceased in his father's lifetime; and, secondly, of the well-known favourite of King John, Fulk de Breauté, who had name from a commune of the Canton of Goderville, arrondissement of Le Havre, department of La Seine Inférieure, rendered accompt of this his debt in the same roll;" and so on over the remainder of the 220 pages. If you turn over a few of them you will find the same sort of thing: "Agnes, the first daughter, was married to William de Vesey, of whom John de Vesey, issueless, and William de Vesey, who had issue, John de Vesey, who died before his father; and afterwards the said William de Vesey, the father, without heir of his body;" and so on.

The reader whose fortune it has been to pass a portion of his early days among venerable Scottish gentlewomen of the old school, will perhaps experience an uneasy consciousness of having encountered matter of this description before. It may recall to him misty recollections of communications which followed a course something like this: "And so ye see, auld Pittoddles, when his third wife deed, he got married upon the laird o' Blaithershin's aughteenth daughter, that was sister to Jemima, that was married intil Tam Flumexer, that was first and second cousin to the Pittoddleses, whase brither became laird afterwards, and married Blaithershin's Baubie—and that way Jemima became in a kind o' way her ain niece and her ain aunty, an' as we used to say, her gude-brither was married to his ain grannie."

But there is the deep and the shallow in genealogy, as in other arts and sciences, and, incoherent as it may sound to the uninitiated, the introduction to the Liber de Antiquis Legibus is no old woman's work, but full of science and strange matter.[77] It all grows, however, in genealogical trees, these being the predominant intellectual growth in the editor's mind. In fact, your thorough genealogist is quite a peculiar intellectual phenomenon. He is led on by a special and irresistible internal influence or genius. If he should for some time endeavour to strive after a more cosmopolite intellectual vitality, the ruling spirit conquers all other pursuits. The organism of the tree resumes its predominance, and if he have healthy sturdy brains, whatever other matter they may have collected is betimes dragged into the growth, and absorbed in the vitality of the majestic bole and huge branches. There is perhaps no pursuit more thoroughly absorbing. The reason is this: No man having yet made out for himself an articulate pedigree from Adam—Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, to be sure, made one for himself, but he had his tongue in his cheek all the while—no clear pedigree going back to the first of men, every one, whether short or long, Celtic or Saxon, comes into the clouds at last. It is when a pedigree approaches extinction that the occasion opens for the genealogist to exercise his subtlety and skill, and his exertions become all the more zealous and exciting that he knows he must be baffled somewhere. The pursuit is described as possessing something like the same absorbing influence which is exercised over certain minds by the higher mathematics. The devotees get to think that all human knowledge centres in their peculiar science and the cognate mysteries and exquisite scientific manipulations of heraldry, and they may be heard talking with compassionate contempt of some one so grossly ignorant as not to know a bar-dexter from a bend-sinister, or who asks what is meant by a cross potent quadrate party per pale.

These are generally great readers—reading is absolutely necessary for their pursuit; but they have a faculty of going over literary ground, picking up the proper names, and carrying them away, unconscious of anything else, as pointers go over stubble fields and raise the partridges, without taking any heed of the valuable examples of cryptogamic botany or palæozoic entomology they may have trodden over. A certain writer on logic and metaphysics was once as much astonished as gratified by an eminent genealogical antiquary's expression of interest in a discovery which his last book contained. The philosopher thought his views on the subjectivity of the nominalists and the objectivity of the realists had at last been appreciated; but the discovery was merely this, that the name of a person who, according to the previously imperfect science of the genealogist, ought not to have existed then and there, was referred to in a letter from Spinoza, cited in defence of certain views upon the absolute.

The votaries of this pursuit become powers in the world of rank and birth, from the influence they are able to bring upon questions of succession and inheritance. Hence they are, like all great influences, courted and feared. Their ministry is often desired and sometimes necessary; but it is received with misgiving and awe, since, like the demons of old summoned by incantation, they may destroy the audacious mortal who demands their services. The most sagacious and sceptical men are apt to be mildly susceptible to conviction in the matter of their own pedigrees, and, a little conscious of their weakness, they shrink from letting the sacred tree be handled by relentless and unsympathising adepts. One of these intellectual tyrants, a man of great ability, when he quarrelled with any one, used to threaten to "bastardise" him, or to find the bend-sinister somewhere in his ancestry; and his experience in long genealogies made him feel assured, in the general case, of finding what he sought if he went far enough back for it.

The next volume you lay hand on is manifestly edited by an Ecclesiologist, or a votary of that recent addition to the constituted "ologies," which has come into existence as the joint offspring of the revival of Gothic architecture and the study of primitive-church theology. Through this dim religious light he views all the things in heaven and earth that are dealt with in his philosophy. His notes are profusely decorated with a rich array of rood screens, finial crockets, lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia, credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in bestiology, otherwise called bestial eikonography; and if he be requested to give