The Book-Hunter, John Hill Burton [essential reading TXT] 📗
- Author: John Hill Burton
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"G.M. M'C."
[22] Since deceased—October 30, 1881—and also buried there.
[23] To afford the reader, however, an opportunity of noting at a glance the appropriate learned terms applicable to the different sets of persons who meddle with books, I subjoin the following definitions, as rendered in D'Israeli's Curiosities, from the Chasse aux Bibliographes et aux Antiquaires mal avisés of Jean Joseph Rive:—
"A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiæ of a book."—"A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements."—"A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy."—"A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure."—"A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass-cases."
The accurate Peignot, after accepting of this classification with high admiration of its simplicity and exhaustiveness, is seized in his supplementary volume with a misgiving in the matter of the bibliotaphe, explaining that it ought to be translated as a grave of books, and that the proper technical expression for the performer referred to by Rive, is bibliothapt. He adds to the nomenclature bibliolyte, as a destroyer of books; bibliologue, one who discourses about books; bibliotacte, a classifier of books; and bibliopée, "l'art d'écrire ou de composer des livres," or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author. Of the dignity with which this writer can invest the objects of his nomenclature, take the following specimen from his description of the bibliographe:—
"Nothing is rarer than to deserve the title of bibliographe, and nothing more difficult and laborious than to attain a just title to it.
"Bibliography being the most universal and extensive of all sciences, it would appear that all subjects should come under the consideration of the bibliographe; languages, logic, criticism, philosophy, eloquence, mathematics, geography, chronology, history, are no strangers to him; the history of printing and of celebrated printers is familiar to him, as well as all the operations of the typographic art. He is continually occupied with the works of the ancients and the moderns; he makes it his business to know books useful, rare, and curious, not only by their titles and form, but by their contents; he spends his life in analysing, classifying, and describing them. He seeks out those which are recommended by talented authors; he runs through libraries and cabinets to increase the sum of his knowledge; he studies authors who have treated of the science of books, he points out their errors; he chooses from among new productions those which bear the stamp of genius, and which will live in men's memories; he ransacks periodicals to keep himself well up to the discoveries of his age, and compare them with those of ages past; he is greedy of all works which treat of libraries, particularly catalogues, when they are well constructed and well arranged, and their price adds to their value. Such is the genuine Bibliographe." This reminds one of the old Roman jurists, who briefly defined their own science as the knowledge of things human and divine.
[24] It has often been observed that it is among the Society of Friends, who keep so tight a rein on the passions and propensities, that these make the most terrible work when they break loose. De Quincey, in one of his essays on his contemporaries, giving a sketch of a man of great genius and high scholarship, whose life was early clouded by insanity, gives some curious statements about the effects of the system of rigid restraint exercised by the Society of Friends, which I am not prepared either to support or contradict. After describing the system of restraint itself, he says: "This is known, but it is not equally known that this unnatural restraint, falling into collision with two forces at once—the force of passion and of youth—not unfrequently records its own injurious tendencies, and publishes the rebellious movements of nature by distinct and anomalous diseases. And, further, I have been assured, upon most excellent authority, that these diseases—strange and elaborate affections of the nervous system—are found exclusively among the young men and women of the Quaker Society; that they are known and understood exclusively amongst physicians who have practised in great towns having a large Quaker population, such as Birmingham; that they assume a new type and a more inveterate character in the second or third generation, to whom this fatal inheritance is often transmitted; and, finally, that if this class of nervous derangements does not increase so much as to attract public attention, it is simply because the community itself—the Quaker body—does not increase, but, on the contrary, is rather on the wane."
There exist many good stories which have for their point the passions of the natural man breaking forth, in members of this persuasion, in a shape more droll than distressing. One of the best of these is a north-country anecdote preserved by Francis Douglas in his Description of the East Coast of Scotland. The hero was the first Quaker of that Barclay family which produced the apologist and the pugilist. He was a colonel in the great civil wars, and had seen wild work in his day; but in his old age a change came over him, and, becoming a follower of George Fox, he retired to spend his latter days on his ancestral estate in Kincardineshire. Here it came to pass that a brother laird thought the old Quaker could be easily done, and began to encroach upon his marches. Barclay, a strong man, with the iron sinews of his race, and their fierce spirit still burning in his eyes, strode up to the encroacher, and, with a grim smile, spoke thus: "Friend, thou knowest that I have become a man of peace and have relinquished strife, and therefore thou art endeavouring to take what is not thine own, but mine, because thou believest that, having abjured the arm of the flesh, I cannot hinder thee. And yet, as thy friend, I advise thee to desist; for shouldst thou succeed in rousing the old Adam within me, perchance he may prove too strong, not only for me, but for thee." There was no use of attempting to answer such an argument.
[25] In the renowned Dame aux Camélias, the respectable, rigid, and rather indignant father, addresses his erring son thus: "Que vous ayez une maîtresse, c'est fort bien; que vous la payiez comme un galant homme doit payer l'amour d'une fille entretenue, c'est on ne peut mieux; mais que vous oubliez les choses les plus saintes pour elle, que vous permettiez que la bruit de votre vie scandaleuse arrive jusqu'au fond de ma province, et jette l'ombre d'une tache sur le nom honorable que je vous ai donné—voilà ce qui ne peut être, voilà ce qui ne sera pas."
So even the French novelists draw the line "somewhere," and in other departments of morals they may be found drawing it closer than many good uncharitable Christians among us would wish. In one very popular novel the victim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to starve, lives with another woman, and, having committed forgery, plots with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains. It is told in a smothered whisper, by the faithful domestic, to the horrified family, that he has reason to suspect his master of having indulged, once at least, if not oftener, in brandy-and-water!
[26] Of the copy of the celebrated 1635 Elzevir Cæsar, in the Imperial Library at Paris, Brunet triumphantly informs us that it is four inches and ten-twelfths in height, and occupies the high position of being the tallest copy of that volume in the world, since other illustrious copies put in competition with it have been found not to exceed four inches and eight, or, at the utmost, nine, twelfths.
"Ces détails," he subjoins, "paroitront sans doute puérils à bien des gens: mais puisque c'est la grandeur des marges de ces sorts de livres qu'en détermine la valeur, il faut bien fixer le maximum de cette grandeur, afin que les amateurs puissent apprécier les exemplaires qui approchent plus ou moins de la mésure donnée."
[27] "Si quis in aliena tabula pinxerit, quidam putant, tabulam picturæ cedere: aliis videtur picturam (qualiscunque sit) tabulæ cedere: sed nobis videtur melius esse tabulam picturæ cedere. Ridiculum est enim picturam Apellis vel Parrhasii in accessionem vilissimæ tabulæ cedere."—Inst. ii. 1. 34.
[28] "The great point of view in a collector is to possess that not possessed by any other. It is said of a collector lately deceased, that he used to purchase scarce prints at enormous prices in order to destroy them, and thereby render the remaining impressions more scarce and valuable."—Grose's Olio, p. 57. I do not know to whom Grose alludes; but it strikes me, in realising a man given to such propensities—taking them as a reality and not a joke—that it would be interesting to know how, in his moments of serious thought, he could contemplate his favourite pursuit—as, for instance, when the conscientious physician may have thought it necessary to warn him in time of the approaching end—how he could reckon up his good use of the talents bestowed on him, counting among them his opportunities for the encouragement of art as an elevator and improver of the human race.
[29] A traditional anecdote represents the Rev. William Thomson, a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, as having got into a scrape by a very indecorous alteration of a word in Scripture. A young divine, on his first public appearance, had to read the solemn passage in 1st Corinthians, "Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump." Thomson scratched the letter c out of the word changed. The effect of the passage so mutilated can easily be tested. The person who could play such tricks was ill suited for his profession, and being relieved of its restraints, he found a more congenial sphere of life among the unsettled crew of men of letters in London, over whom Smollett had just ceased to reign. He did a deal of hard work, and the world owes him at least one good turn in his translation of Cunningham's Latin History of Britain from the Revolution to the Hanover Succession. The value of this work, in the minute light thrown by it on one of the most memorable periods of British history, is too little known. The following extract may give some notion of the curious and instructive nature of this neglected book. It describes the influences which were in favour of the French alliance, and against the Whigs, during Marlborough's campaign. "And now I shall take this opportunity to speak of the French wine-drinkers as truly and briefly as I can. On the first breaking out of the Confederate war, the merchants in England were prohibited from all commerce with France, and a heavy duty was laid upon French wine. This caused a grievous complaint among the topers, who have great interest in
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