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

a more explicit definition of the article, he will perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to exhibit to you this solemn record, which he will open with befitting reverence, the faintest suspicion of a smile curling on your lip will suffuse him with a lively sorrow for your lost condition, mixed with righteous indignation towards the irreverent folly whereof you have been guilty. He finds a great deal beyond sermons in stones, and can point out to you a certain piece of rather confused-looking architecture, which he terms a symbolical epitome of all knowledge, human and divine—an eikonographic encyclopædia.

If you desire an antidote to all this, you may find it in the editor in true blue who so largely refers to the Book of the Universal Kirk, The Hynd Let Loose, The Cloud of Witnesses, Naphtali, and Faithful Witness-Bearing Exemplified, and is great in his observations on the Auchinshauch Testimony, the Sanquhar Declaration, and that fine amalgamation of humility and dogmatism, the Informatory Vindication.[78]

There is no occasion for quarrelling with these specialties. They are typical of a zeal often prolific both in amusement and instruction; and when a man has gone through the labour of rendering many hundreds of pages from a crabbed old manuscript, or of translating as much from a nearly unknown tongue, it would be hard to deny him the recreation of a few capers on his own hobby. Keep in mind that everything of this kind is outside the substance of the book. The editor has his swing in the introduction and appendix, and the notes; perhaps also in the title and index, if he can make anything of them. But it is a principle of honour throughout the clubs that the purity of the text shall not be tampered with; and so, whether dark or light, faint or strong, it is a true impression of the times, as the reader will perhaps find in the few specimens I propose to show him. As touching the literary value of what is thus restored, there are some who will say, and get applause for doing so, that there are too many bad or second-rate books in existence already; that every work of great genius finds its way to the world at once; and that the very fact of its long obscurity proves a piece of literature to be of little value. For all this, and all that can be added to it, there are those who love these recovered relics of ancestral literature, and are prepared to give reasons for their attachment. In the first place, and apart from their purely literary merits, they are records of the intellect and manners of their age. Whoever desires to be really acquainted with the condition of a nation at any particular time—say with that of England during Elizabeth's reign, or the Commonwealth—will not attain his object by merely reading the most approved histories of the period. He must endeavour as far as he can to live back into the times, and to do this most effectually he had better saturate himself to the utmost with its fugitive literature, reading every scrap he may lay hand on until he can find no more.

Looking at these relics, on the other hand, as pure literature, no doubt what is recalled out of the past loses the freshness and the fitness to surrounding conditions which gave it pungency and emphasis in its own day, while it has not that hold on our sympathies and attachment possessed by the household literature which generation after generation has been educated to admire, and which, indeed, has made itself a part of our method of thought and our form of language. But precisely because it wants this qualification has resuscitated literature a peculiar value of its own. It breaks in with a new light upon the intellect of the day, and its conventional forms and colours. There is not in the intellectual history of mankind any so effective and brilliant an awakening as the resuscitation of classical literature. It was not one solitary star arising after another at long intervals and far apart in space, but a sudden blazing forth of a whole firmament of light. But that is a phenomenon to all appearance not to be repeated, or, more correctly speaking, not to be completed, since it broke up unfinished, leaving the world in partial darkness. Literature has been ever since wailing the loss of the seventy per cent of Livy's History, of the eighty per cent of Tacitus and of Euripides, of the still larger proportion of Æschylus and Sophocles, of the mysterious triumphs of Menander, and of the whole apparatus of the literary renown of Varro and of Atticus.[79] What would the learned world give for the restoration of these things? It may safely offer an indefinite reward, for so well has its surface been ransacked for them that their existence is hardly possible, though some sanguine people enjoy the expectation of finding them in some obscure back-shelves in the Sultan's library. The literary results of the costly and skilful scientific process for restoring the baked books found in Herculaneum were so appallingly paltry, as to discourage the pursuit of the lost classics. The best thing brought to light during the present century, indeed, is that Institute of Gaius which cost Angelo Maï such a world of trouble, and was the glory and boast of his life; but it is not a very popular or extensively read book after all. The manuscripts that have been extracted from the dirty greedy fingers of the Armenian and Abyssinian monks, are the most valuable pieces of literature that have been rescued from the far past. Important light on the early history of Eastern Christianity will no doubt be extracted from them; but they are written in those Oriental tongues which are available only to the privileged few.

Unlikely as the treasures opened by the revival of classic literature are to be to any extent increased, let us not despise the harvest of our own home gleaners. They do not find now and then a buried Hamlet, or Paradise Lost, or Hudibras—though, by the way, the Poetical Remains of Butler, which in wit and sarcasm are second only to his great work, were rescued from oblivion by the drudging antiquary Thyer, who was so conceited of the performance that he had the portrait of his own respectable and stupid face engraved beside that of Butler, in order perhaps that all men might see how incapable he was of fabricating the pieces to which it is prefixed. There is a good deal of the poetry of the club books of which it may at least be said, that worse is printed and praised as the produce of our contemporaries.

It is not so much, however, in Poetry or the Drama as in Historical literature that the clubs develop their strength. It is difficult to estimate the greatness of the obligations of British history to these institutions. They have dug up, cleansed, and put in order for immediate inspection and use, a multitude of written monuments bearing on the greatest events and the most critical epochs in the progress of the empire. The time thus saved to investigators is great and priceless. In no other department of knowledge can the intellectual labourer more forcibly apply the Latin proverb which warns him that his work is indefinite, but his life brief. In the ordinary sciences the philosopher may and often does content himself with the well-rounded and professedly completed system of the day. But no one can grapple with history without feeling its inexhaustibleness. Its final boundaries seem only to retreat to a farther distance the more ground we master, as Mr Buckle found, when he betook himself, like another Atlas, to grapple with the history of the whole world.

The more an investigator finds his materials printed for him, the farther he can go. No doubt it is sometimes desirable, even necessary, to look to some manuscript authority for the clearing-up of a special point; but too often the profession of having perused a great mass of manuscript authorities is an affectation and a pedantry. He who searches for and finds the truth in any considerable portion of history, performs too great an achievement to care for the praise of deciphering a few specimens of difficult handwriting, and revealing the sense hidden in certain words couched in obsolete spelling. If casual discoveries of this kind do really help him to great truths, it is well; but it too often happens that he exaggerates their value, because they are his own game, shot on his own manor. Until he has exhausted all that is in print, the student of history wastes his time in struggling with manuscripts. Hence the value of the services of the book clubs in immensely widening the arena of his immediate materials. To him their volumes are as new tools to the mechanic, or new machinery to the manufacturer. They economise, as it is termed, his labour: more correctly speaking, they increase its productiveness.

These books are fortunately rich in memorials of the great internal contest of the seventeenth century. The notes, for instance, of the proceedings of the Long Parliament, by Sir Ralph Verney, edited for the Camden by Mr Bruce, come upon us fresh from that scene of high debate, carrying with them the very marks of strife. The editor informs us that the manuscript is written almost entirely in pencil on slips of foolscap paper, which seem to have been so folded as to be conveniently placed on the knee, and transferred to the pocket as each was completed. "They are," he says, "full of abrupt terminations, as if the writer occasionally gave up the task of following a rapid speaker who had got beyond him, and began his note afresh. When they relate to resolutions of the House, they often contain erasures, alterations, or other marks of the haste with which the notes were jotted down, and of the changes which took place in the subject-matter during the progress towards completion. On several important occasions, and especially in the instance of the debate on the Protestation [as to the impeachment of Strafford], the confusion and irregularity of the notes give evidence to the excitement of the House; and when the public discord rose higher, the notes become more brief and less personal, and speeches are less frequently assigned to their speakers, either from greater difficulty in reporting, or from an increased feeling of the danger of the time, and the possible use that might be made of notes of violent remarks. On several of the sheets there are marks evidently made by the writer's pencil having been forced upwards suddenly, as if by some one, in a full House, pressing hastily against his elbow while he was in the act of taking his note."

John Spalding.

Looking from the opposite end of the island, and from a totally different social position, another watchful observer recorded the events of the great contest. This was John Spalding, commonly supposed to have been Commissary-Clerk of Aberdeen, but positively known in no other capacity than as author of the book aptly entitled The Troubles, or, more fully, "Memorials of the Troubles in Scotland and in England," from 1624 to 1645. Little, probably, did the Commissary-Clerk imagine, when he entered on his snug quiet office, where he recorded probates of wills and the proceedings in questions of marriage law, that he was to witness and record one of the most momentous conflicts that the world ever beheld—that contest which has been the prototype of all later European convulsions.