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gift a! 
Mrs, Frances Ho rs burgh 




STANFORD UN. 



LIBRARIES 



WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

ANGLING SKETCHES. With Illustrations by W. G. BuRN- 
MuRDOCH. Crown 8vo. ^s. 6d. 

CUSTOM AND MYTH : Studies of Early Usage and Belief. 
With 15 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 

GRASS OF PARNASSUS. A Volume of Verses. 

BALLADS OF BOOKS. Edited by Andrew Lang. Fcap. 

8vo. 6s. 

LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. Crown Bvo. 2j. 6d. 7iet. 

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. With 2 Coloured Plates and 17 
Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 2J. td. net, 

LETTERS ON LITERATURE. 

OLD FRIENDS : Essays in Epistolary Parody. 

THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK. Edited by Andrew Lang. With 
8 Plates and 130 Illustrations in the Text. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

THE RED FAIRY BOOK. Edited by Andrew Lang. With 
4 Plates and 96 Illustrations in the Text. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

THE BLUE POETRY BOOK. Edited by Andrew Lang. 
With 12 Plates and 88 Illustrations in the Text. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

LONDON; LONGMANS, GREEN, 6- CO. 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 



TO 

THE VISCOUNTESS WOLSELEY 

Madame, it is no modish thing, 
The bookman's tribute that I bring; 
A talk of antiquaries grey, 
Dust unto dust this many a day, 
Gossip of texts and bindings old, 
Of faded type, and tamish'd gold ! 

Can ladies care for this to-do 
With Payne, Derome, and Paddoup ? 
Can they resign the rout, the bail, 
For lonely joys of shelf and stall? 

The critic thus, serenely wise ; 
But you can read with other eyes, 
Whose books and bindings treasured are 
'Midst mingled spoils of peace and war ; 
Shields from the fights the Mahdi lost^ 
And trinkets from the Golden Coast, 
And many a thing divinely done 
By Chippendale and Sheraton, 



VI 



And trophies of Egyptian deeds, 

And fans, and plates, and Aggrey beads, 

Pomander boxes, assegais. 

And sword-hilts worn in Marlbro's days. 

In this abode of old and new, 
Of war and peace, my essays, too, 
For long in serials tempest-tost. 
Are landed now, and are not lost : 
Nay, on your shelf secure they lie, 
As in the amber sleeps the fly. 
Tis true, they are not " rich nor rare ; " 
Enough, for me, that they are — there ! 

A. L. 



PREFACE 

The Essays in this volume have, for the most 
part, already appeared in an American edition 
(Combes, New York, 1886). The Essays on 
** Ohd French Title-Pages " and " Lady Book- 
Lovers " take the place of " Book Binding " and 
" Bookmen at Rome ; " " Elzevirs " and " Some 
Japanese Bogie-Books " are reprinted, with 
permission of Messrs. Cassell, from the Maga- 
zine of Art ; "Literary Forgeries" from the 
Contemporary Review ; " Lady Book- Lovers" 
from the Fortnightly Review ; " A Bookman's 
Purgatory " and two of the pieces of verse from 
Longman's Magazine — with the courteous per- 
mission of the various editors. All the chapters 
have been revised, and I have to thank Mr. H. 
Tedder for his kind care in reading the proof 
sheets. 



The Author learns, on the best authority, that the modern 
flat-backed bindings, referred to on p. 175, line 7, are well 
supplied with nerfsy though these do not show, and are perfectly 
permanent. The artistic and traditional objeclion to flat, still 
more to hollow backs, is another question. 

As the reference on p. 155 is intended to show, **A Book- 
man's Purgatory " is adapted from a little volume, now rather 
rare, **L'Enfer d'un Bibliophile," by the late M. Charles 
Asselinean. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Elzevirs i 

Ballade of the Real and Ideal 19 

Rich and Poor 21 

Doris's Books 40 

The Rowfant Books 42 

To F. L 44 

Some Japanese Bogie-Books 46 

Ghosts in the Library 69 

Literary Forgeries 73 

Bibliomania in France 102 

Old French Title- Pages 127 

A Bookman's Purgatory 142 

Ballade of the Unattainable 157 

Lady Book-Lovers 159 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Elzevir Spheres 3 

Elzevir Title-Page of the ** Imitation *' of 

Thomas k Kempis 7 

Elzevir **Sage" ii 

Japanese Children. Drawn by Hokusai ... 47 

A Storm Fiend 51 

A Snow-Bogie 57 

The Simulacrum Vulgare 61 

A Well and Water Bogie 63 

Raising the Wind 65 

A Chink and Crevice Bogie 67 

Fac-Simile of Binding from the Library of 

Grolier To face 116 

Binding with the Arms of Madame de Pompa- 
dour To face 126 

Old French Title-Pages 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139 



, BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



ELZEVIRS, 

' The Countryman. " You know how much, for 

: time past, the editions of the Elzevirs 

[ have been in demand. The fancy for them 

I has even penetrated into the country. I am 

I acquainted with a man there who denies himself 

ssaries, for the sake of collecting into a 

L library (where other books are scarce enough) 

L as many little Elzevirs as he can lay his hands 

r upon. He is dying of hunger, and his conso- 

[. lation is to be able to say, ' I have all the poets 

1 whom the Elzevirs printed. I have ten examples 

of each of them, all with red letters, and all of 

the right date.' This, no doubt, is a craze, for, 

good as the books are, if he kept them to read 

[ them, one example of each would be enough." 

T/ie Parisitin. " If he had wanted to read 
Ithem, I would not have advised him to buy 
I EUcvirs. The editions of minor authors which 



X BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

these booksellers published, even editions ' of 
the right date,' as you say, are not too correct. 
Nothing is good in the books but the type and 
the paper. Your friend would have done better 
to use the editions of Gryphius or Estienne." 

This fragment of a literary dialogue I translate 
from "Entretiens sur les Contcs de Fees," a book 
which contains more of old talk about books 
and booksellers than about fairies and folk-lore. 
The " Entretiens " were published in 1699, about 
sixteen years after the Elzevirs ceased to be 
publishers. The fragment is valuable : first, 
because it shows us how early the taste for 
collecting Elzevirs was fully developed, and, 
secondly, because it contains very sound criticism 
of the mania. Already, in the seventeenth 
century, lovers of the tiny Elzevirian books 
waxed pathetic over dates, already they knew 
that a "C^sar" of 1635 was the right "Ca;sar," 
already they were fond of the red-lettered 
passages, as in the first edition of the " Virgil " 
of 1636. As early as 1699, too, the Parisian 
critic knew that the editions were not very 
correct, and that the paper, type, ornaments, and 
format were their main attractions, To these we 
must now add the rarity of really good Elzevirs. 
Though Elzevirs have been more fashionable 
than at present, they are still regarded by 



ELZEVms. 3 

novelists as the great prize of the book collector. 
You read in novels about " priceless little 
Elzevirs," about books " as rare as an old 
Elzevir." I have met, in the works of a lady 
I novelist (but not elsewhere), with an Elzevir 
I "Theocritus." The late Mr. Hepworth Dixon 
introduced into one of his romances a romantic 
Elzevir Greek Testament, " worth its weight in 
gold," Casual reraaiks of this kind encourage 




I a popular delusion that all Elzevirs are pearls 
I of considerable price. When a man is first 
smitten with the pleasant fever of book-collect- 
ing, it is for Elzevirs that he searches. At first 
he thinks himself in amazing luck. In Book- 
sellers' Row and in Castle Street he " picks up," 
for a shilling or two, Elzevirs, real or supposed. 
To the beginner, any book with a sphere on the 
title-page is an Elzevir. For the beginner's 
[instruction, two copies of spheres are printed 



4 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

here. The first is a sphere, an ill -cut, ilU 
drawn sphere, which is not Elzevirian at all 
The mark was used in the seventeenth century 
by many other booksellers and printers. The 
second, on the other hand, is a true Elzevirian 
sphere, from a play of Moli^re's, printed in 1675, 
Observe the comparatively neat drawing of the 
second sphere, and be not led away after spurious 
imitations. 

Beware, too, of the vulgar error of fancying 
that little duodecimos with the mark of the fox 
and the bee's nest, and the motto " Quaerendo," 
come from the press of the Elzevirs. The mark 
is that of Abraham Wolfgang, which name is 
not a pseudonym for Elzevir. There are three 
sorts of Elzevir pseudonyms. First, they occa- 
sionally reprinted the full title-page, publisher's 
name and all, of the book they pirated. 
Secondly, when they printed books of a 
"dangerous" sort, Jansenist pamphlets and so 
forth, they used pseudonyms like "NicSchouten," 
on the " Lettres Provinciales " of Pascal. Thirdly, 
there are real pseudonyms employed by the 
Elzevirs. John and Daniel, printing at Leyden 
(1652-1655), used the false name " Jean Sambix." 
The Elzevirs of Amsterdam often placed the 
name "Jacques le Jeune" on their title-pages. 
The collector who remembers these things must 



also see that his purchases have the right orna- 
ments at the heads of chapters, the right tail- 
pieces at the ends. Two of the most frequently 
recurring ornaments are the so-called "Tfite de 
BuRie " and the " Sirene." More or less clumsy 
copies of these and the other Elzevirian orna- 
ments are common enough in books of the 
period, even among those printed out of the 
Low Countries; for example, in books published 
in Paris. 

A brief sketch of the history of the Elzevirs 
may here be useful. The founder of the family, 
a Flemish bookbinder, Louis, left Louvain and 
settled in Leyden in 1580. He bought a house 
opposite the University, and opened a book- 
shop. Another shop, on college ground, was 
opened in 1587, Louis was a good bookseller, 
a very ordinary publisher. It was not till 
shortly before his death, in 1617, that his 
grandson Isaac bought a set of types and other 
material. Louis left six sons. Two of these, 
Matthew and Bonaventure, kept on the business, 
dating ex offictna Elzeviriana. In 1625 Bona- 
venture and Abraham (son of Matthew) became 
partners. The " good dates " of Elzevirian 
books begin from 1626, The two Elzevirs chose 
I excellent types, and after nine years' endeavours 
I turned out the beautiful " Cassar " of 1635, 




6 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Their classical series In petit format was 
opened with "Horace" and "Ovid" in 1629. 
In 1641 they began their elegant piracies of 
French plays and poetry with " Le Cid." It was 
worth while being pirated by the Elzevirs, who 
turned yoo out like a gentleman, with jleiirons 
and red letters, and a pretty frontispiece, The 
modern pirate dresses you in rags, prints you 
murderously, and binds you, if he binds you at 
all, in some hideous example of " cloth extra," 
all gilt, like archaic gingerbread, Bonaventure 
and Abraham both died in 1652. They did 
not depart before publishing (1628), in grand 
format, a desirable work on fencing, Thibault's 
" Academic de I'Espee," This Tibbald also 
killed by the book. John and Daniel Elzevir 
came next. They brought out the " Imitation " 
(Thom^B a Kempis canonici regularis ord. S. 
Augustini De Imitatione Christi, libri iv.) ; I 
wish by taking thought I could add eight milli- 
metres to the stature of my copy. In l6sS 
Daniel joined a cousin, Louis, in Amsterdam, 
and John stayed in Leyden. John died in 1G61 ; 
his widow struggled on, but her son Abraham 
(16S1) let all fall into ruins. Abraham died 
1713. The Elzevirs of Amsterdam lasted till 
1680, when Daniel died, and the business was 
wound up. The type, by Christopher Van 



8 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Dyck, was sold in i6Si, by Daniel's widow. 
Sic transit gloria. 

After he has learned all these matters the 
amateur has still a great deal to acquire. He 
may now know a real Elzevir from a book which 
is not an Elzevir at all. But there are enormous 
differences of value, rarity, and excellence among 
the productions of the Elzevirian press. The 
bookstalls teem with small, "cropped," dingy, 
dirty, battered Elzevirian editions of the classics, 
not "of the good date." On these it is not 
worth while to expend a couple of shillings, 
especially as Elzevirian type is too smal! to be 
read with comfort by most modern eyes. No, 
let the collector save his money ; avoid littering 
his shelves with what he will soon find to be 
rubbish, and let him wait the chance of acquiring 
a really beautiful and rare Elzevir. 

Meantime, and before we come to describe 
Elzevirs of the first flight, let it be remembered 
that the "taller" the copy, the less harmed and 
nipped by the binder's shears, the better, " Men 
scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley ; 
and we may say that most men hardly know 
how beautiful an Elzevir was in its uncut and 
original form. The Elzevirs we have may be 
" dear," but they are certainly " dumpy twelves." 
Their fair proportions have been docked by the 



binder. At the Beckford sale there was a pearl 
of a book, a. " Marot ; " not an Elzevir, indeed, 
but a book published by Wetstcin, a follower of 
the Elzevirs. This exquisite pair of volumes, 
bound in blue morocco, was absolutely un- 
impaired, and was a sight to bring happy tears 
into the eyes of the amateur of Elzevirs. There 
was a gracious svelte elegance about these tomes, 
an appealing and exquisite delicacy of propor- 
tion, that linger like sweet music in the memory. 
1 have a copy of the Wetstcin " Marot " myself, 
not a bad copy, though murderously bound in 
that ecclesiastical sort of brown calf antique, 
which goes well with hymn books, and reminds 
one of cakes of chocolate. But my copy is only 
some 128 millimetres in height, whereas the 
uncut Beckford copy {it had belonged to the 
great Pix^r^court) was at least 130 millimetres 
high. Beside the uncut example mine looks like 
Cinderella's plain sister beside the beauty of the 
family. 

Now the moral is that only tall Elzevirs arc 
beautiful, only tall Elzevirs preserve their 
ancient proportions, only tall Elzevirs are worth 
collecting. Dr. Lemuel Gulliver remarks that 
the King of Lilliput was taller than any of his 
court by almost the breadth of a nail, and that 
his altitude filled the minds of all with awe. 




lo BOOKS AND BOOKMEN: 

Well, the Philistine may think a few millimetres, 
more or less, in the height of an Elzevir are of 
little importance. When he comes to sell, he 
will discover the difference. An uncut, or almost 
uncut, copy of a good Elzevir may be worth 
fifty or sixty pounds or more ; an ordinary copy 
may bring fewer pence. The binders usually 
pare down the top and bottom more than the 
sides. I have a " Rabelais " of the good date, 
with the red title (1663), and some of the pages 
have never been opened, at the sides, But the 
height is only some 132 millimetres, a mere 
dwarf. Anything over 130 millimetres is very 
rare. Therefore the collector of Elzevirs should 
have one of those useful ivory-handled knives 
on which the French measures are marked, and 
thus he will at once be able to satisfy himself as 
to the exact height of any example which he 
encounters. 

Let us now assume that the amateur quite 
understands what a proper Elzevir should be : 
tali, clean, well bound if possible, and of the 
good date. But we have still to learn what the 
good dates are, and this is matter for the study 
and practice of a well-spent life. We may 
gossip about a few of the more famous Elzevirs, 
those without which no collection is complete. 
Of all Elzevirs the most famous and the most 



ELZEVIRS. n 

expensive is an old cookery book, " ' Le Pastissier 
Francois.' Wherein is taught the way to make 
alt sorts of pastry, useful to all sorts of persons. 
Also the manner of preparing all manner of 
eggs, for fast- days, and other days, in more than 
sixty fashions, Amsterdam, Louys, and Daniel 
Elsevier. 1665." The mark is not the old 
" Sage," but the "Minerva" with her owl. Now 
this book has no intrinsic value any more than 




a Tauchnitz reprint of any modern volume on 
cooking. The " Pastissier " is cherished because 
it is so very rare. The tract passed into the 
hands of cooks, and the hands of cooks are 
detrimental to literature. Just as nursery books, 
fairy tales, and the like are destroyed from 
generation to generation, so it happens with 
books used in the kitchen. The "Pastissier," 
to be sure, has a good frontispiece, a scene in 
a Low Country kitchen, among the dead game 



12 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

and the dainties. The buxom cook is making 
a game pie ; a pheasant pie, decorated with the 
bird's head and tail-feathers, is already made.' 

Not for these charms, but for its rarity, is the 
"Pastissier" coveted. In an early edition of the 
"Manuel" (1821) Brunet says, with a feigned 
brutality (for he dearly loved an Elzevir), "Till 
now I have disdained to admit this book into 
my work, but I have yielded to the prayers of 
amateurs. Besides, how could I keep out a 
volume which was sold for one hundred and one 
francs in 1819?" One hundred and one francs ! 
If I could only get a "Pastissier" for one 
hundred and one francs! But our grandfathers 
lived in the Bookman's Paradise. " II n'est pas 
jusqu'aux Anglais," adds Brunet — "the very 
English themselves — have a taste for the ' Pas- 
tissier,' " The Duke of Marlborough's copy was 
actually sold for ^£"1 41, It would have been 
money in the ducal pockets of the house of 
Marlborough to have kept this volume till the 
genera] sale of all their portable property at 
which our generation was privileged to assist. 
No wonder the " Pastissier " was thought rare. 
B^rard only knew two copies. Pietiers, writing 
on the Elzevirs in 1843, could cite only five 
" Pastissiers," and in his "Annales" he had 
I See il lustra lions, pp. 133, 135. 



I 

I 



ELZEVIRS. 13 

found out but five more. Willems, on the other 
hand, enumerates some thirty, not including 
Motteley's, Motteley was an uncultivated, un- 
taught enthusiast. He knew no Latin, but he 
had a flair for uncut Elzevirs, "Incomptis 
capillis," he would cry (it was all his lore) as he 
gloated over his treasures. They were all burnt 
by the Commune in the Louvre Libraiy, 

A few examples may be given of the prices 
brought by " Le Pastissier " in later days. 
Sensier's copy was but 128 millimetres in 
height, and had the old ordinary vellum bind- 
ing, — in fact, it closely resembled a copy which 
Messrs. Ellis and White had for sale in Bond 
Street in 1S83, The English booksellers asked, 
I think, about 1500 francs for their copy, 
Sensier's was sold for 128 francs in April, 1S2S ; 
for 201 francs in 1837, Then the book was 
gloriously bound by Trautz-Bauzoniiet, and 
was sold with I'otier's books in 1S70, when it 
fetched 2910 francs. At the Benzon sale (1875) 
it fetched 3255 francs, and, falling dreadfully in 
price, was sold again in 1877 for 2300 francs. 
M. Dutuit, at Rouen, has a taller copy, bound 
by Bauzonnet. Last time it was sold (1851) it 
brought 251 francs. The Due de Chartrcs has 
now the copy of Pictcrs, the historian of the 
Elzevirs, valued at 3000 francs. 



14 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

About thirty years ago no fewer than three 
copies were sold at Brighton, of all places. 
M. Quentin Bauchart had a copy only 127 
millimetres in height, which he swopped to 
M. Paillet. M, Chartener, of Metz, had a copy 
now bound by Bauzonnet which was sold for 
four francs in 1780. We call this the age of 
cheap books, but before the Revolution books 
were cheaper. It is fair to say, however, that 
this example of the " PastissJer " was then 
bound up with another book, Vlacq's edition of 
" Le Cuisinier Francois," and so went cheaper 
than it would otherwise have done. M. de 
Fontaine de Resbecq declares that a friend of 
his bought six original pieces of Molitre's 
bound up with an old French translation of 
Garth's " Dispensary." The one faint hope 
left to the poor book collector is that he may 
find a valuable tract lurking in the leaves of 
some bound collection of trash. I have an 
original copy of Molierc's " Les Fascheux" 
bound up with a treatise on precious stones, 
but the bookseller from whom I bought it knew 
it was there I That made all the difference. 

But, to return to our " Pastissicr," here is 
M. de Fontaine de Resbecq's account of how he 
wooed and won his own copy of this illustrious 
Elzevir. " I began my walk to-day," says this 



ELZEVmS. 



"S 



I 



haunftr of ancient stalls, "by the Pont Marie 
and the Qua! de la Grfeve, the pillars of 
Hercules of the book-hunting world. After 
having viewed and reviewed these remote books, 
I was going away, when my attention was 
caught by a small naked volume, without a 
stitch of binding. I seized it, and what was 
my delight when I recognised one of the rarest 
of that famed Elzevir collection whose height is 
measured as minutely as the carats of the 
diamond. There was no indication of price on 
the box where this jewel was lying ; the book, 
though unbound, was perfectly clean within. 
'How much?' said I to the bookseller. 'You 
can have it for six sous,' he answered ; ' is it too 
much?' 'No,' said I, and, trembling a little, I 
handed him the thirty centimes he asked for 
the ' I'astissier Fran<;ois.' You may believe, 
my friend, that after such a piece of luck at the 
start, one goes home fondly embracing the 
beloved object of one's search. That is exactly 
what 1 did." 

Can this tale be true ? Is such luck given by 
the jealous fates morialibus <egris ? M. de 
Resbecq's find was made apparently in 1856, 
when trout were plenty in the streams, and 
rare books not so very rare, To my own know- 
ledge an English collector has bought an 



i6 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

original play of Molifere's, in the original vellum, 
for eighteen pence. But no one has such luck 
any longer. Not, at least, in London. A more 
expensive " Pastissier " than that which brought 
six sous was priced in Bachelin-Deflorenne's 
catalogue at .£"240. A curious thing occurred 
when two uncut " Fastissiers " turned up simul- 
taneously in Paris. One of them Morgand and 
Fatout sold for £,i,ix>. Clever people argued 
that one of the twin uncut " Pastissicrs " must 
be an imitation, a fac-simile by means of photo- 
gravure, or some other process. But it was 
triumphantly established that both were genuine; 
they had minute points of difference in the 
ornaments. 

M. Willems, the learned historian of the 
Elzevirs, is indignant at the successes of a book 
which, as Brunct declares, is badly printed. 
There must be at least forty known " Pastissiers" 
in the world. Yes ; but there are at least 
4000 people who would greatly rejoice to 
possess a "Pastissier," and some of these de- 
sirous ones are very wealthy. While this state 
of the market endures, the "Pastissier" will 
fetch higher prices than the other varieties. 
Another extremely rare Elzevir is "L'lllustre 
Thi^atre de Mons. Corncillc" (Leyden, 1644). 
This contains "Le Cid," " Lcs Horaces," "Le 



I 



Cinna," " La Mort de Pomp^e," " Le Polyeucte." 
The name, "L'lUustre Thedtre," appearing at 
that date has an interest of its own. In 1643-44, 
Moliire and Madeleine Bi^jart had just started 
the company which they called "L'lUustre 
Th^Atre," Only six or seven copies of the 
book are actually known, though three or four 
are believed to exist in England, probably all 
covered with dust in the library of some lord. 
" He has a very good library," I once heard 
some one say to a noble carl, whose own library 
was famous. "And what can a fellow do with 
a very good library? " answered the descendant 
of the Crusaders, who probably (being a youth 
light-hearted and content) was ignorant of his 
own great possessions. An expensive copy of 
" L'lUustre ThMtre," bound by Trautz-Bau- 
Konnet, was sold for ;£'30o. 

Among Elzevirs desirable, yet not hopelessly 
rare, is the " Virgil " of 1636. Heinsius was the 
editor of this beautiful volume, prettily printed, 
but incorrect. Probably it is hard to correct 
with absolute accuracy works in the clear but 
minute type which the Elzevirs affected. They 
have won fame by the elegance of their books, 
but their intention was to sell good books cheap, 
like Michel Levy. The small type was required 
to get plenty of " copy " into little bulk. Nicholas 



i8 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Heinsius, the son of the editor of the "Virgil, 
when he came to correct his father's edition, 
found that it contained so many coqiiilles, 
misprints, as to be nearly the most incorrect 
copy in the world, Heyne says, " Let the 
•Virgil' be one of the rare Elzevirs, if you. 
please, but within it has scarcely a trace of any 
good quality," Yet the first edition of this 
beautiful little book, with its two passages of 
red letters, is so desirable that, till he could 
possess it, Charles Nodier would not profane hi! 
shelves by any "Virgil " at all. 

Equally fine is the "Cs:sar" of 1635, which, 
with the "Virgil" of 1636 and the " Imitation 
without date, M, Willeras thinks the most suc- 
cessful work of the Elzevirs, " one of the most 
enviable Jewels in the casket of the bibliophile. 
It may be recognised by the page 149, which is 
erroneously printed 1 53. A good average height 
is from 125 to 128 millimetres. The highest 
known is 130 millimetres. This book, like 
the " Imitation," has one of the pretty and in- 
genious frontispieces which the Elzevirs pre- 
fixed to their books. So farewell, and good 
speed in your sport, ye hunters of Elzevirs, and 
may you find perhaps the rarest Elzevir of all, 
" L'Aimable M^re de J^sus." 



( 19 ) 



BALLADE OF THE REAL AND IDEAL. 

(double refrain.) 

O VISIONS of salmon tremendous, 
Of trout of unusual weight, 
Of waters that wander as Ken does, 
Ye come through the Ivory Gate ! 
But the skies that bring never a " spate," 
But the flies that catch up in a thorn. 
But the creel that is barren of freight. 
Through the portals of horn I 

O dreams of the Fates that attend us 
With prints in the earliest state, 
O bargains in books that they send us. 
Ye come through the Ivory Gate ! 
But the tome that has never a mate, 
But the quarto that's tattered and torn. 
And bereft of a title and date. 
Through the portals of horn ! 



20 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

O dreams of the tongues that commend us, 
Of crowns for the laureate pate, 
Of a public to buy and befriend us, 
Ye come through the Ivory Gate ! 
But the critics that slash us and slate,^ 
But the people that hold us in scorn, 
But the sorrow, the scathe, and the hate, 
Through the portals of horn ! 

ENVOY. 

Fair dreams of things golden and great, 
Ye come through the Ivory Gate ; 
But the facts that are bleak and forlorn, 
Through the portals of horn ! 

* ** Slate ** is a professional term for a severe criticism. 
Clearly the word is originally " slat,'* a narrow board of wood, 
with which a person might be beaten. 

This was the note in earlier editions, but, in the Athencnum, 
October 31, 1891, Mr. Skeat gives another derivation, and 
insists that from his verdict only doll and ignorant people can 
differ, Ow tppovrXs 'linroKXti^jf, 



' mCH AND POOR. 



I The nature of the Collector's craze, which coin- 
I pels Rich men and Poor men to desire the very 
I same books, has made it inevitable that the 
Rich shall set the fashion. The fashion for 
rare books, like the market price and the state 
of the odds on the Turf, " follows the money." 
A wealthy sportsman could make the darkest 
horse in his stable a favourite if he only backed 
him largely enough, and probably a millionaire 
could set up a taste for the First Editions of 
Mrs. Hannah More's works if he went about 
paying large sums for them. There are a few 
exceptions to this general rule that the Fashion 
follows the money. Sometimes the money 
follows what (still to use the sporting metaphor) 
e may call " the Talent." A clever man writes 
I bibliography of a certain author (having first 




aa BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

carefully provided himself with that author's 
works), and then the rich collector loses his 
head and invests heavily, perhaps, in Restif de 
la Bretonne, Nodier sometimes made efforts 
of this kind, but Nodier was often before his 
age. He possessed a beautiful example of Per- 
rault's "Contes de ma Mere I'Oye" (Paris, 
1697), and he tried to write it into reputation. 
But in Nodier's time it did not sell for more 
than six or seven pounds. The price of this 
pleasant fountain-head of fairy tales is now, 
literally, beyond rubies. In recent catalogues 
of M. Damascene Morgand and of M. Fontaine, 
one finds no example of Perrault's first Pari 
editions. Both merchants offer the Dutch re 
print at prices varying from .^60 to £^0} Brunt 
says, but perhaps too hastily, that the Amster* 

' " Perraull, Histoires ou conUs du temps pass/, avtc dtt 
tnoralilcs. Par le fils de Monsieur Perrault, de I'Acad^n 
fraii^oise. Suivtititldce^t,h Paris [kaalti^am. Elievier), 161 
Pet. in iz. &ont gray, et Hg. war. fil. doe orn^, til. tr. d 
(Tratjtz Bauzonnet.)" Apparently the real reading 
Acadlmie FrafKois. It is curious to see how illustrations p 
sifitenUy survive in these old popular works. The frontispii 
of Canles de ma Mire f Oye, the group of the old womim sp 
Ring and telling hei taJe hy the cotlcige fice to the children s 
the cat, is only slightly modified in " Lumsden and Son'a N 
Edition of Mother Goose, (Chisgow, aixpence.) Embetiti 
• (sic) with Elegant Easravings." It is all very well to attiib 
Ihe Dutch reprint to the Elzevirs, but M. Willems does not gi\ 
it in his great work. 



» 



RICH AND POOR. 23 

dam is as rare as the original Paris edition. 1 
have only seen one copy of the latter, in the 
private collection of a London Bookseller. 
Nodier did not succeed in making it fashionable 
in his own day ; he was less fortunate than 
Motteley, who found a quantity of uncut Elze- 
virs lurking in Hungary, and then wrote on 
them till they became a treasure. But Time 
has brought round his revenges, and Nodier is 
justified. Only the rich can buy the original 
Paris " Contes de ma Mere I'Oye" of 1697. 
Perchance some poor man may light on it in 
the Fourpenny Box, that Fortunatus's cap 
of the lucky, that casket of Pandora, which 
always keeps Hope at the bottom of its dusty 
rubbish. A pretty modern fairy tale might be 
written on the King with three sons who sent 
them forth at adventure, to find Perrault's first 
edition. 

One could not have a better text than this 
rare work for a sermon about the Books of the 
Rich Man and the Books of the Poor Man. 
This is a book that both desire, and, as virtue 
always dwells in paupcrum iabernw, the Poor 
Man has the nobler reason for his choice. He 
wants Pcrrault for love of Perrault himself, for 
love of these old tales that come to us so 
prettily, the ancient nurse's story lisped out in 



24 SOOJCS AND BOOKMEN. 

courtly language by Perrault's little boy, who 
signs himself 

de Voire Allesse Royale 



in his dedication to Mademoiselle. 

But the wicked Rich Man merely desires this 
tiny tome because it is rare and precious. He 
has no thought of editing Perrault's "Contes." 
And it is an example of the touching fashion in 
which the Poor Man gleans in the Rich Man's 
harvest field, that he readily welcomes and 
cherishes quite a late copy of Mother Goose.* 
This little shabby cropped copy in sheepskin 
has, at least, the ancient spelling, the old frontis- 
piece, the tiny rude vignettes on copper. Such 
were the children's books of our great-great- 
grandfathers ; here you see the king in bed, 
with eagles' heads on the bedposts ; here a wolf 
as big as the wolf Fenris of the Twilight of the 
Gods is about to swallow Red Riding Hood's 
grandmother at one gulp. Here is Puss in 
Boots, as tall as his Master, the Marquis ; and 
little Hop o' my Thumb, in a frock coat, is 
' " Histaires bu Conies de Terns pass!, Avec da Msralitet. 
Far Mr. Permult. Nouvelle Edition DUgmenC^c d'unc Nciuvelle 
a la fin, A Amsterdam, Chei! Jaquea Desbotdes, vis4-vis la 
Porte de la Bourse. M, DCC. XXDC." So runs the title in 
black and red. 



I 
I 



RICH AlfD POOR. IS 

dragging the other famous boots from the sleep- 
ing Ogre, a most respectable-looking person ; 
and sister Anne is shrieking from the tower to 
her brothers that canter up in cocked hats even 
as Blue Beard is lifting his cruel sabre. This is 
not the Blue Rose of fairy Bibliography, but it 
has lived near the Blue Rose, and retains some- 
what of its morocco fragrance. Thus the heart 
of the Poor Man is glad, in the reflected joy of 
little lads and lasses who thumbed Mother 
Goose in Dutch nurseries long ago. But the 
Rich Man would throw the bouquin into tlie 
waste- paper basket. 

As the old original Ferrault, the relic, the 
sacred thing of Folk Lore is lost, like the grave 
of Arthur, the Rich Man has invented sub- 
stitutes, the Perrault of 1742 and the Perrault 
of 1781. These and the reflections they suggest 
introduce us to the last and fiercest fancy of the 
great Bibliophile, the fancy for the illustrated 
French books of 1730-1800. Here he is in an 
enchanted garden of Bibliomania, where we 
cannot follow him who have not the golden 
" key to the happy golden land." 

In the lyrical catalogue of the famous collec- 
tion, BibUotlteque ifiin Bibliophik, the delight of 
M. Eugene Paillet, and lately purchased by 
Damascene Morgand, we read M. Bcraldi's 



a6 BOOICS AND BOOKMEN. 

description of the Perrault of 1742, In M. Pail- 
let's copy of " Contes du Temps pass^ " ^ are 
inserted the tales of Giisclidis, Pcau d'Ane, and 
Les Souhaits Ridicules from the edition of 1781. 
M. Beraldi adds, " In Book collecting there are 
impenetrable mysteries." Yes, in the profligate 
collections of luxurious opulence ! " The edition 
of 1742 is the Right edition, with the plates in 
the freshest state. Yet it rules low (elk est d 
bas prix)} On the other hand, the edition of 
17S1 costs from ;ti2oto .^160. Why.' Because 
it is an unparalleled example of stinginess in 
the publisher Lamy. First, this economist used 
the plates of 1742. But he needed four head- 
pieces for the additional stories. He had only- 
two engraved, and used both of them twice over. 
That is why the edition of 1781 is such a re- 
markable book." This is, indeed, a mystery. 
The Rich Man pays £10 for a book in which 
the plates are fresh, and £i6o for a copy in 
which they are not so fresh, because the 
Publisher was so stingy ! ' 

' Par Perrault (Coustelier), in i3mo, figures de Sive. 

' From aoo to 250 francs. Cohen. 

' Nothing is more inslructive, as to dianges of tasle, than 
copy of an early edition of Brunei, say of 1821. Herein we find 
that the original and the lirsC Dutcli edEtion of Fermult an 
mentioned at all. These had no value in 1S21. But the 
illustrated edition of 1781 is mentioned. In Ijuge Paper, with 



RICH AND POOR. a; 

The Poor Man is not likely to follow the Rich 
into excesses which perhaps justify the book- 
burning Commune. Indeed he cannot follow 
him at all ia collecting the famed French 
illustrated books. For this there is an excellent 
reason. These works, copiously adorned with 
delicate (and indelicate) engravings on copper, 
e only desired when they are in the very prime 
[ of condition. They must be on the largest or 
I rarest paper used when they were first sub- 
I scribed for by the Parisian amateurs. They 
' must be bound in morocco, by famed binders 
of old, chiefly Derome and Padeloup, and 
the binding must be bright and untarnished. 
Lately a London bookseller had a copy of the 
1 " Contes " of La Fontaine, the noted edition of 
1762, for which Eisen designed vignettes 
f (admired in spite of the absurd badness of the 
drawing in many cases), and for which Choffard 
produced really exquisite tail-pieces. This copy 

I is clothed in old blue morocco, and the fly-leaf 
bears the ticket of Derome, which, for some 
unknown reason, is rarely found. The back is 
1 



r 

I 

t 

I' 



double proofs of the engravings, it sold (or 40 francs. A copy 

TKIXUM, with the original drawings, octuiilly fetched j^zy. 

Where is this copy now ? Perhaps in ibe colleclion of the Due 

d'Anmale. It was in London, M. Porlalis snjs, that the book 

cheap in 1790. Perhaps it is in England still. Dts- 

d'lllustrati'eni, p. 629. 



a8 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

tooled with a decorative pattern of birds and 
lyres, said to have been drawn by Gravelot, 
There is a luxurious rose-coloured silk for lin- 
ing, or doublure, and the book was clearly a 
presentation copy, a type of the pretty book of 
pretty Madame du Barry's time. But, alas, this 
relic of gay pre-Revolutlonary France had 
suffered, as Turner's water colours suffer, from 
the light of day. The famous " Derome blue " 
does not seem to stand the sunlight. It turns 
to a yellowish green in some cases, unless the 
book is kept in a drawer. This is presumably 
the reason why the Rich Man greatly desires 
the old French books in red morocco of the 
period, which tarnishes less than the greens and 
blues. Still, tarnished, or faded, or not, the 
"Contes" of 1763 are beyond the reach of the 
Poor Man. He will not find them on any stall, 
which, perhaps, is all the better for his morals. 

In the matter of these illustrated books, the 
Rich Man has sought out many devices. The 
books are made the victims of what a learned 
bookseller calls "The Higher Faking." To 
" fake " is to alter artificially, to improve mere- 
triciously : it is hard to find an English word 
for the cosmetics of the book trade. No doubt 
a book was originally published, as a rule, with 
but one set of engravings. Yet, even in the 



RICH AND POOR. 



WJ 



I 
I 



last century, cunning collectors would take a 
volume in sheets, and insert examples of the 
illustrations in every stage, even when they were 
what is technically styled eaux-fortss — merely 
etched. When he had completed his set, the 
cunning contemporary buyer had it nobly bound 
by Derome or Tessier. perhaps he was even wise 
enough to bind in the Original Wrapper. The 
paper of these Original Wrappers is now worth 
more than bank notes. A copy of this kind, in 
old binding, is a thing beyond the hopes of men 
to middle fortune born. 

Occasionally a copy in wrapper is discovered, 
even now, and then it is treated by the Rich 
Man in the same luxurious way. But here a 
question arises among amateurs. There is a 
famous book of the last century, "Les Chansons 
de la Borde," 1773, 4 vol. in 4, "figures de 
Moreau et autres." M. I'aillet succeeded in 
getting a copy caytonnS, uncut. It had belonged 
to the great Renouard, to Aguillon, Gresy, and 
Gonzales. Each of these intelligent men had 
contributed to its charms. One had secured 
the proofs before letters of the first volume. 
Another, or rather the collective industry of all, 
had accumulated all the eaiix-fortes. There are 
but four known examples of the portrait of 
Madame de la Borde in an interesting condition. 



30 BOOKS AND BOOfCMEK. 

One of these was obtained with four portraits of 
La Borde himself. 

When M. Paillet had brought the book to 
this pitch of perfection, he took a grave resolu- 
tion. He had it bound I The whole world 
passionately canvassed the question, was M. 
Paillet wise? The binding was by Cuzin, 
morocco, double viith blue, tooled in imitation of 
the decorative designs on the panels of the 
Trianon, What of that? The freshness has 
departed, the virginal charm of the cartonnage 
can never be restored. Moreover, one portrait 
the medallion of Marie Antoinette, is lacking. 
And some one else bought that rarest of rare 
engravings for six francs. This is what co 
of " faking." Better were it to leave the book 
alone. But "the lower faking," the patching 
and altering of books, is commonly a trick, and 
not a very worthy trick.' 

' Confession \i good for man ; let me confess that I 
"faked" a book myself. It was an instance of the jhabby 
rollies of the Poor Man. It befell me once to purchase Toi 
shilling " Moral Maxims and Reflections, written in French by 
the Duke of Rochefoucault. Now made English. London. 
Printed for M. Gillyflower in Westminster Hall. 1694." Thii 
is the first English Rochefoucauld. " Mrs, Behn, indeedj hath 
attempted part of it," says the translator, " but she seems not to 
have intended a perfect work, so much as the Entertaining her Sell 
and her Lysandtr, with such Passages as were most applicable, 
to her Darling Passion of Love," Nest I bought a seedy copy 



RICH Al^D POOR. 31 

The " Chansons de la Borde," which M. Paillet 
so audaciously got bound, was, in human memory, 
of no value. M, Paul Lacroix says that, in his 
lime, Dorat's books mouldered on the qitais in 
He himself bought the "Chansons," in 
old red morocco, for £2 \os., and gave them to 
X belle ignoranle, who handed them over to her 
child to scrawl upon. The old editions of 
Brunei place the book at about forty francs. 
Now the booksellers ask about j^i6o. Of all 
poets, Dorat has been, posthumously, the luckiest. 
Bom (says M, le Baron Roger Portalis) in 1734, 
he entered the Mousquetaires, where he was a 
iiterary musketeer, a kind of Aramis. He left 
the army, to please a pious aunt, and took to 
poetry which was not pious. He ruined himself 
gaily, and his prodigal taste for beautiful en- 
gravings in his books hastened his doom. Debts 
and disease killed him in 1780. He made a 
toilette two hours before his death, and expired, 
neatly shaven and freshly powdered, in his chair. 
Dorat's works were once in every Poor Man's 
reach. But, as Rich Men had not set the fashion, 
Ihe Poor did not follow it. In 1 82 r the " Fables 
the first ediiion of the " Maxims " (Paris, 1665}, a topy 
quarter af a pi^e, and having no fcontispiece. I had 
lenussing passage facsimiled, so that 1 don't know which it is 
lyseir, and I moved tbe English frontbpiece into ihe French 
\yX, and bound it in t 



31 BOOKS AMD BOOKMEN 

Nouvelles," on Large Paper, with early proofs c 
the designs, sold for a louis. " Les Baiscrs 
(Paris, 1770), zoitk the original designs, brough 
nineteen francs I But now it is, says M. Berald 
"the thirteenth labour of Hercules" to collec 
the complete engravings, in good conditioi 
and with the eaux-fortes. This passion lead 
men to excesses, like the old Dutch fancy fo 
tulips. 

Foolish or not, the fashion, and his foresight 
it, has gained Dorat a shadow of immortalil 
The epigram on him, untranslatable as it tur 
on a pun, is justified. 

LoTsquG j' admire ces eslampcs, 

Ces vignettes, ces culs de lampe, 

Je croia voit en loi, pauvre autenr, 

Pardomie i mon hnmeur trop franclie, - 

Un Tnolhcureux navigateur 

Qui se sauve de plunche en plmche. 

A good illustration of the Rich Man's luck ii 
M, Paillet's adventure with Fragonard's origini 
designs for La Fontaine's "Contes" (Didot 
Paris, 1795}. M. Paillet acquired, for nothinj 
a beautifully written copy of La Fontaine" 
"Contes;" nay, he actually made ^'200 bj 
acquiring it. Habenti dabiUtr. These 
beautiful quartos, bound in red 'morocco b] 
Derome and copied out by Morichauss^ in red 



RICH AND POOR. 33 

\ green, and black ink, contain fifty-seven original 
designs by Fragonard, The work was written 
out for Bergeret, one of the Fermiers G^ntjraux, 
who possessed the fifty-seven drawings. When 
M. Paillet procured these volumes, they were 
valued at ,£'1000. This does not seem dear; 
but M. Paillet thought it was a good deal to 
give for a book — to give, that is, in solid cash. 
Besides, any one could write a cheque for jfiooo. 
The amateur sought another way, by the ancient 
system of exchange or barter. He sacrificed to 
M, Morgand, the bookseller, a " Faublas," with 
the original designs by MarilUer and the suave 
binding (blue, doubled with orange) by Trautz, 
The "Contes" of Pcrrault (1781) were also 
offered up, and M. Paillet was more readily 
consoled than Calypso for the departure of his 
"Ti516maque" (first edition). The Heptameron 
f 1559, and the original comedies of Regnard, 
Bid the rarest romance of Restif (vile damnum) 
went the same way, and ;fi20 in actual 
boney was thro*vn in. Tanfm molis erat~dX 
[uch a sacrifice the amateur won his manuscript 
''Contes." They are not at all the kind of 

"manuscript that St. Jerome would have sent to 
the chaste Furia, daughter of a Senator of 
Rome. But this is only half the story. M, 
Jaillet acquircd'his original drawings by Moreau 




Zi BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

and his MSS. for five or six rare books and a 
cheque. But how did he make ;f200 by tb( 
bargain? Why, M. Rouquctte published ' 
engravings of the designs, and the profit wa 
about £3600, of which M. Paillet got ^xltH, 
Indeed we may say, Habenti dabitiir. Wh<i| 
had a poor collector such luck? 

Such are the successes of Wealth, 
brilliant books, all so fresh, so fair in moroct 
raiment, are the results of taste and labour 3 
well as of money. M. Beraldi describes 
Paillet seated in his library, with the sheets <] 
five unbound copies of one volume before hiiti 
comparing, selecting, examining with a micro- 
scope, page by page. The result is one perfect 
copy, to be perfectly bound, by Cuzin perhaps, 
and to be le plus bel exemplair& connu. 

These are not, after all, the enjoyments the 
poor collector envies most. He really wants to 
read his books, not that he could not have 
modern reprints, but he likes to see the famous 
masterpieces of old as Shakespeare saw them, 
when his quartos were cried at the doors of the 
Globe, as " book o' the Play." Well, the poor 
collector can never have that pleasure, unless he 
visits Mr, Locker's library and wonderful array 
of Shakspeare quartos. But, here and there, a 
cropped, maimed relic reaches us. "Lueasta," 



RICH AND POOR. 

without the illustrations ; Herrick, minus his 
portrait ; " Steps to the Temple," with a page 
missing.' How many of these twopenny trea- 

, sures one possesses, relics a trifle apocryphal.^ 
The poor collector is apt to burden himself 

\ with these dilapidated relics out of pure senti- 

' The Slefs to Ihe Temple (London, 1646) I fouad in a box 
outside a shop in Holywell Street, It had belonged, appaicnlly, 
to Collet, Cmshaw's friend, and certainly to Collet's Bon, who 
had iLdomed the f!y-leaf with xa inscription in a beautiful band, 
but in very bod Latin. As for ZhauAi (1649), by Richard Love- 
lace, the secand edition, perfect, is almost not to be found. The 
date is 1659. In Mr. Locker's catalogne the Rowfant cojiy 
is said to have an "old facsimile of Frontispiece by Hollar, 
after Francis Lovekce." Bnt Mr. Loclter has now supplied the 
genuine Hollar print, which lie purchased, for a ransom, at the 
Addington sale, in 1SS6. Hollar coUeclorsand other wild men 
have cut the portraits and prints out of most of the books of 

[ the Cavalier poets. 

I * I believe no man. Rich or Poor, has a library so rich in 
Imperfect works as Ihe author of these pages. Two of my 
iDutitated friends give me such concern, that I make bold to lay 
the cose before the benevolent public. I possess (in sF^ta 
morocco by W. PraK) an tincul copy of The Angler's Delighl, 
by William Gilbert, Gent. London, 1676. But this copy \^m, 
the Title page of the second portion of Ihe same book, namely 
" The Method of Fishing in Hackney Kivcr, with the Names of 
all the best Stands there," The only Stands there, now, arc 

_ fi*b-slands: but no matter. If any bibliophile has the other 

pail of the book, I will toss him for the whole ; and the same 

pITer is made to the owner of volumes iv.-vii. of Lis (Emires de 

9iaHAtiir de MvUire. Paris, 1676. These volumes, of which I 

il, iii. must be iemfickere : llie name Omialtun v 

in an old hand on the lillc-pages. 




36 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN- 



ment. He can scarcely expect to buy an un- 
harmed example of a rare first edition, but he 
lives in hope of completing liis own. Vain hope, 
pleasing aspirations ! The two halves of the 
imperfect work, like the two lovers that once 
were one body and soul, in the apologue of 
Aristophanes, wander round the world, and never 
meet again. And I think of these poor sundered 
volumes pained with a nostalgie, like that of the 
two obelisks in Thcophile Gautier's poem ; or 
afflicted with "an intense yearning for something" 
which the Soul desires and cannot tell, and o| 
which she has only a dark and doubtful presenti- 
ment." ' 

The tomes are divided for ever. One moie^ 
may be in Paris, one on a stall in Cairo, like 
the monoliths estranged, and no more to be 
united than these obMsqnes dt'pareilU's. 

It is easy to give the poor collector good 
advice, to bid him never waste his substance 
on imperfections, never spend his coppers on 
bougiiins, but wait, and "lie low" (like the 
would-be purchaser of Mark Twain's "celebrated 
Mexican plug "), till he has a chance of getting 
a real prize. This was the method of Balzac's 
fabled collector, Lc Cousin Pons, but th< 
wonderful story of his treasures is as great i 

' Aristophanes in Ihe Syinpaiiiim, p. igi. 



I 



I 



RICH AND POOR. 37 

myth as Foe's " Gold Beetle," It is one of 
Balzac's golden dreams. Moreover, the Poor 
collector has rarely the patience and self-denial 
for the task. He revels in brown shabby 
botiquins, for a reason the Rich Man would not 
suspect, namely for love of their contents, They 
are full of odd scraps of information, waifs of 
lore, sometimes, from the dead Court life of 
Moli^re's time. I have mislaid — for they lightly 
come and lightly go — a volume of courtly 
dialogues of 1670, in which an Abbi and a 
philosopher discourse on ghosts with a lady of 
Quality. This woman has had "an insolent 
person " beaten to death by her valets. She 
believes that she is always seeing his ghost, a 
belief out of which the Abbe and philosopher 
try to reason her, with arguments drawn from 
Science and Religion. No other punishment 
save what the Ghost inflicted, has dared to 
approach the grande dame de par le monde. 
What a world it was, when this kind of conversa- 
tion was not only possible, but probably was 
based on current gossip. It was the little black 
bouquin that gave one this peep into the age of 
Moli^re, the age of Alceste, who might well 
despise his kind, and of pretty C^lim^ne, who 
never, surely, would have acted like the cruel 
dy of Quality, 



38 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

The Poor Man, if he only wants to read, may 
actually enjoy the books which the wicked Rich 
keep idle in gilded saloons. For example, here 
is a volume for the student of Primitive 
Marriage ; it is De veteri ritu NUPTIARUM 
& jure CONNUBIORUM. Barnabas Bris- ] 
sonius, 

Apud FraHiis(Htn HatlaHm 
LVG. BATAVOR 



You buy it for fourpence, nay, for twOfSJ 
with its frontispiece of Adam flirting with Eve 
in Paradise. But, let it be in a morocco jacket, 
and the Bookseller shall charge you fifteen 
pounds, and attribute its binding to Padeloup. 
Surely better is sheepskin, for twopence, and 
content therewith, than, for ;^I5, Padeloup, — 
without his ticket ! 

So we might illustrate the joys of the trumpery 
collector. But Charles Lamb has made these 
things immortal in his prose, and Thackeray in 
his verse. 

Tliis snug little chamber is crammed in all nim/ts 

With verlhlas old knicknacks, and silly old books, 

And foolish old odds andfoeUsh old atdi, 

Crach'd bargains frepi brokers, nkeap keepsakes from fnends. 



RICH AND POOR. 39 

Old armour^ prints^ pictures^ pipes^ china {all cracked), 

Old rickety tables^ and chairs broken hack^d^ 

A twopenny treasuty, wondrous to see. 

What matter ? * Tis pleasant to you^ friend, and me} 

" All cracked " indeed, the cynic may cry, we 
and our treasures. But men may have their 
toys, like children ; and the Rich Man boasts 
his wax doll with moveable eyes, and the Poor 
Man has his fetish of rags tied up with a string, 
and is as happy as his opulent neighbour. 

The price of the original edition of Perrault's 
Tales is no longer far above rubies. A copy 
was sold by auction in Paris (March, 1872) for 
£i$. Still the book is very rare. The public 
libraries of Paris possess but one example. 

* Ballads, by W. M. Thackeray. London: Bradbury and 
Evans, Bouverie Street. 1856. In the Original Wrapper ! 



40 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN, 



DORIS'S BOOKS. 

Doris, on your shelves I note 

Many a grave ancestral tome. 
These, perhaps, you have by rote ; 
These are constantly at home. 
Ah, but many a gap I spy 
Where Miss Broughton's novels lie ! 

Doris, there, behind the glass, 

On your Sheratonian shelves — 
Oft I see them as I pass — 
Stubbs and Freeman sun themselves. 
All unread I watch them stand ; 
That's Belinda in your hand ! 

Doris, I, as you may know. 

Am myself a Man of Letters, 
But my learned volumes go 
To the top shelf, like my betters, 
High — so high that Doris could 
Scarce get at them if she would ! 



D0R2SS BOOKS. 41 

Doris, there be books of mine, 

That I gave you, wrote your name in, 
Tooled and gilded, fair and fine : 
Don't you ever peep the same in ? 
Yes, I see youVe kept them — but, 
Doris, they are ** Quite Uncut ! " 

Quite uncut, *' unopened " rather 

Are mine edifying pages, 
From this circumstance I gather 
That some other Muse engages, 
Doris, your misguided fancy : 
Yes, I thought so — reading Nancy, 

Well, when you are older^ Doris, 

Wiser, too, you'll love my verses ; 
Celia likes them, and, what more is, 
Oft — ^to me — their praise rehearses. 
" Celiacs Thirty:* did I hear ? 
Doris, too, can be severe ! 



42 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN 



THE ROWFANT BOOKS. 

BALLADE EN GUISE DE RONDEAU. 

The Rowfant books, how fair they shew, 
The Quarto quaint, the Aldine tall, 

Print, autograph, portfolio ! 

Back from the outer air they call. 

The athletes from the Tennis ball, 
This Rhymer from his rod and hooks, 

Would I could sing them one and all. 
The Rowfant books ! 

The Rowfant books ! In sun and snow 
They're dear, but most when tempests fall ; 

The folio towers above the row 

As once, o'er minor prophets, — Saul ! 

What jolly jest books and what small 
" Dear dumpy Twelves " to fill the nooks. 

You do not find on every stall 
The Rowfant books ! 



THE RO WFANT BOOKS. 43 

The Rowfant books ! These long ago 
Were chained within some College hall ; 

These manuscripts retain the glow 
Of many a coloured capital ; 

While yet the Satires keep their gall, 
While the Pastissier puzzles cooks, 

Theirs is a joy that does not pall, 
The Rowfant books ! 

ENVOI. 

The Rowfant books, — ah magical 

As famed Armida's ** golden looks," 
They hold the rhymer for their thrall. 
The Rowfant books. 



44 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



TO F. L. 

I MIND that Forest Shepherd's saw, 

For, when men preached of Heaven, quoth he, 
" It's a' that's bricht, and a' that's braw, 

But Bourhope's guid eneuch for me ! " 

Beneath the green deep-bosomed hills 
That guard Saint Mary's Loch it lies, 

The silence of the pastures fills 
That shepherd's homely paradise. 

Enough for him his mountain lake, . 

His glen the burn went singing through, 
And Rowfant, when the thrushes wake, 

May well seem good enough for you. 

For all is old, and tried, and dear. 

And all is fair, and round about 
The brook that murmurs from the mere 

Is dimpled with the rising trout. 



TO F. L. 45 

But when the skies of shorter days 
Are dark and all the ways are mire, 

How bright upon your books the blaze 
Gleams from the cheerful study fire. 

On quartos where our fathers read, 

Enthralled, the book of Shakespeare's play, 

On all that Poe could dream of dread. 
And all that Herrick sang of gay ! 

Fair first editions, duly prized, 
Above them all, methinks, I rate 

The tome where Walton's hand revised 
His wonderful receipts for bait ! 

Happy, who rich in toys like these 

Forgets a weary nation's ills, 
Who from his study window sees 

The circle of the Sussex hills ! 



46 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



SOME JAPANESE BOGIE-BOOKS. 

There is, or used to be, a poem for infant minds 
of a rather Pharisaical character, which was 
popular in the nursery when I was a youngster. 
It ran somqthing like this : — 

I thank my stars that I was born 
A little British child. 

Perhaps these were not the very Mrords, but that 
was decidedly the sentiment. Look at the 
Japanese infants, from the pencil of the famous 
Hokusai. Though they are not British, were 
there ever two jollier, happier small creatures ? 
Did Leech, or Mr. Du Maurier, or Andrea della 
Robbia ever present a more delightful view of 
innocent, well-pleased childhood ? Well, these 
Japanese children, if they are in the least in- 
clined to be timid or nervous, must have an 
awful time of it at night in the dark, and when 
they make that eerie " northwest passage " bed- 



48 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

wards through the darkling house of which Mr, 
Stevenson sings the perils and the emotions, 
All of us who did not suffer under parents 
brought up on the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer 
have endured, in childhood, a good deal from 
ghosts. But it is nothing to what Japanese 
children bear ; for our ghosts are to the spectres 
of Japan as mooiih'ght is to sunlight, or 
water unto whisky. Personally I may say 
that few people have been plagued by the terror 
that walketh in darkness more than myself. 
At the early age of ten I had the tales of the 
^^ ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte 

^H Bronte "put into my hands " by a cousin who 

^H had served as a Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the 

^H meaning of fear. But I did, and perhaps even 

^H Nelson would have found out " what fear was,' 

^H or the boy in the German tale would have 

^V " learned to shiver," if he had been left alone 

^H to peruse "Jane Eyre," and the "Black Cat," 

^H and the " Fall of the House of Usher," as I 

^B was. Every night I expected to wake up in my 

^H coffin, having been prematurely buried ; or to 

^H hear sighs in the area, followed by light, un- 

^V steady footsteps on the stairs, and then to see 

^^L a lady all in a white shroud, stained with blood 

^^k and clay, stagger into my room, the victim of 

^B too rapid interment. As to ihe notion that my 



SOME JAPANESE SOGIE-BOOKS. 49 

rrespected kinsman had a mad wife concealed on 

I the premises, and that a lunatic aunt, black in 

1 the face with suppressed mania, would burst 

Linto my chamber, it was comparatively a harm- 

Tless fancy, and not particularly disturbing. 

I Between these and the " Yellow Dwarf," who 

I (though only the invention of the Countess 

yAuInoy) might frighten a nervous infant into 

hysterics, I personally had as bad a time of it in 

: night watches as any happy British child 

iias survived. But our ogres are nothing to the 

which make not only night but day 

terrible to the studious infants of Japan and 

China. 

Chinese ghosts are probably much the same 

s Japanese ghosts. The Japanese have borrowed 

most things, including apparitions and awesome 

tes and grisly fiends, from the Chinese, and 

"then have improved on the original model. 

Now we have a very full, complete, and horror- 

stnking account of Chinese harnts (as the 

►country people in Tennessee call them) from 

Ir. Herbert Giles, who has translated scores of 

Chinese ghost stories in his "Strange Tales 

worn a Chinese Studio " (De la Rue, 1880). Mr. 

CUes's volumes prove that China is the place 

tor learned and active secretaries of the Psychical 

■^ ciety. 



5° 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



Ghosts do not live a hole-and-corner life ia 
China, but boldly come out and take their part 
in the pleasures and business of life. It has 
always been a question with me whether ghosts, 
in a haunted house, appear when there Is no 
audience. What docs the spectre in the tapes-* 
tried chamber do when the house is jiot full, and 
no guest is put in the room to bury strangers in, 
the haunted room ? Does the ghost sulk and 
complain that there is " no house," and refuse 
to rehearse his little performance, in a con^ 
scientious and disinterestedly artistic spirit, when 
deprived of the artist's true pleasure, the awaken- 
ing of sympathetic emotion in the mind of the 
spectator ? We give too little thought and 
sympathy to ghosts, who in our old castles and 
country houses often find no one to appear to 
from year's end to year's end. Only now and 
then is a guest placed in the " haunted room." 
Then I like to fancy the glee of the lady i 
green, or the radiant boy, or the headless man, 
or the old gentleman in snuff-coloured clothes, 
as he, or she, recognises the presence of a' 
spectator, and prepares to give his or her best 
effects in the familiar style. 

Now in China and Japan certainly 3 ghost 
does not wait till people enter the haunted 
room : a ghost, like a person of fashion, "goe^ 



53 BOOKS AKD BOOKMEN: 

everywhere." Moreover, he has this artistic 
excellence, that very often you don't know him 
from an embodied person. He counterfeits 
mortality so cleverly that he (the ghost) has 
been known to personate a candidate for 
honours, and pass an examination for him. 
pleasing example of this kind, illustrating the 
limitations of ghosts, is told in Mr. Giles's book, 
A gentleman of Huai Shang, named Chou-t'i 
had arrived at the age of fifty, but his family 
consisted of but one son, a fine boy, "strangely 
averse from study," as if there were anything 
strange in that. One day the son disappeared 
mysteriously, as people do from West Ham. In 
a year he came back, said he had been detained 
in a Taoist monastery, and, to all men's amaze- 
ment, took to his books. Next year he obtained 
his B.A. degree, a First Class. All the neigh- 
bourhood was overjoyed, for Huai Shang was' 
like Pembroke College (Oxford), where, accord- 
ing to the poet, " First Class men are few and 
far between." It was who should have the 
honour of giving his daughter as bride to this 
intellectual marvel, A very nice girl was 
selected, but most unexpectedly the B.A. would 
not marry. This nearly broke his father's heart 
The old gentleman knew, according to Chinese 
belief, that if he had no grandchild there wouli 



I 



SOME JAPANESE BOGIE-BOOKS, SJ 

Q one in the next generation to feed his 
own ghost, and pay it all the little needful 
attentions. " Picture, then, the father naming 
and insisting on the day ; " till K'o-ch'ang, B.A., 
got up and ran away. His mother tried to 
detain him, when his clothes "came off in her 
hand," and the bachelor vanished! Next day 
appeared the real flesh-and-blood son, who had 
been kidnapped and enslaved. The genuine 
K'o-ch'ang was overjoyed to hear of his ap- 
proaching nuptials. The rites were duly cele- 
brated, and in less than a year the old gentle- 
man welcomed his much-longed-for grandchild. 
But, oddly enough, K'o-ch'ang, though very jolly 
and universally beloved, was as stupid as ever, 
and read nothing but the sporting intelligence 
in the newspapers. It was now universally 
admitted that the learned K'o-ch'ang had been 
an impostor, a clever ghost. It follows that 
ghosts can take a very good degree ; but ladies 
need not be afraid of marrying ghosts, owing to 
the inveterate shyness of these learned spectres. 

The Chinese ghost is by no means always a 
malevolent person, as, indeed, has already been 
made clear from the affecting narrative of the 
ghost who passed an examination. Even the 
spectre which answers in China to the statue in 

Don Juan," the statue which accepts invita- 



SOOKS AND BOOKAfEM. 

tions to dinner, is anything but a malevolent 
guest. So much may be gathered from the 
story of Chu and Lu. Chu was an under- 
graduate of great courage and bodily vigour, 
but dull of wit. He was a married man, and 
hia children (as in the old Oxford legend) 
often rushed into their mother's presence, shout- 
ing, "Mamma! mamma! papa's been plucked 
again!" Once it chanced that Chu was at a 
wine party, and the negus (a favourite beverage 
of the Celestials) had done its work. His; 
young friends betted Chu a bird's-nest dinner' 
that he would not go to the nearest temple, 
enter the room devoted to coloured sculptures 
representing the torments of Purgatory, and 
carry off the image of the Chinese judge of the 
dead, their Osiris or Rhadamanthus. Off went 
old Chu, and soon returned with the august 
effigy (which wore " a green face, a red beard, 
and a hideous expression") in his arms. The 
other men were frightened, and begged Chu to 
restore his worship to his place on the infernal 
bench. Before carrying back the worthy 
magistrate, Chu poured a libation on the ground 
and said, "Whenever your excellency feels so 
disposed, I shall be glad to take a cup of wine 
with you in a friendly way." That very night, 
as Chu was taking a stirrup cup before going to 



SOME JAPANESE BOGIE-BOOKS. 55 

bed, the ghost of the awful judge came to the 
door and entered. Chu promptly put the kettle 
on, mixed the negus, and made a night of it 
with the festive fiend. Their friendship was 
never interrupted from that moment. The 
judge even gave Chu a new heart (literally) 
whereby he was enabled to pass examinations ; 
for the heart, in China, is the seat of all the 
intellectual faculties. For Mrs. Chu, a plain 
woman with a fine figure, the ghost provided a 
new head, of a handsome girl recently slain by 
a robber. Even after Chu's death the genial 
spectre did not neglect him, but obtained for 
him an appointment as registrar in the next 
world, with a certain rank attached. 

The next world, among the Chinese, seems 
to be a paradise of bureaucracy, patent places, 
jobs, mandarins' buttons and tails, and, in short, 
the heaven of officialism. All civilised readers 
are acquainted with Mr. Stockton's humorous 
story of "The Transferred Ghost." In Mr. 
Stockton's view a man does not always get his 
own ghostship; there is a vigorous competition 
among spirits for good ghostships, and a great 
deal of intrigue and party feeling. It may be 
long before a disembodied spectre gets any 
ghostship at all, and then, if he has little 
influence, he may be glad to take a chance of 




BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



haunting the Board of Trade, or the Post Offi< 

instead of "walking" in the Foreign Office 
One spirit may win a post as White Lady il 
the imperial palace, while another is put ol 
with a position in an old college library, o 
perhaps has to follow the fortunes of sonii 
seedy "medium " through boarding-houses am 
third-rate hotels. Now this is precisely thi 
Chinese view of the fates and fortunes of ghostJ 
Quisgue suos patimitr manes. 

In China, to be brief, and to quote a g;he 
(who ought to know what he was speakii 
about), " supernaturals are to be found every 
where." This is the fact that makes life si 
puzzling and terrible to a child of a believing 
and trustful character. These Oriental bogies 
do not appear in the dark alone, or only in 
haunted houses, or at cross-roads, or in gloomy 
woods. They are everywhere : every man has 
his own ghost, every place has its peculiar haunt- 
ing fiend, every natural phenomenon has its in- 
forming spirit ; every quality, as hunger, greed, 
envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape 
prowling about seeking what it may devour. 
Where our science, for example, sees (or rather 
smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a sHmy, 
meagre, insatiate wrath, crawling to devour the 
lives of men. Where we see a storm of si 




r dared to 
: diaw- 
lof 
, MM nc tuktttwg B oAjra Dorribly 
Tins embeUishnient, 
« camot reproduce. 
, if aa]r cfcSd loofe into this essay, 
let Ua (or her) aot be alanned by the pictures 
be bdiolda. Japanese gbods do not li\'e in this 
country ; there ate nooe of them even at the 
Japanese LegatiofL Just as bears, lions, and 
rattlesnakes are not to be seriously dreaded in 
our woods and commons, so the Japanese 
ghost cannot breathe (any more than a slave 
can) in the air of England or America. We do 
not yet even keep any ghostly zoological garden 
in which the bogies of Japanese, Australians, 
Red Indians, and other distant peoples may be 
accommodated. Such an establishment is per- 
haps to be desired in the interests of psychical 
research, but that form of research has not yet 
been endowed by a cultivated and progressive 
government. 



SO.\fE JAPANESE BOGIE-BOOKS. 59 

The first to attract our attention represents, 
as I understand, the common ghost, or siiiiu- 
lacriim vulgare of psychical science. To this 
complexion must we all come, according to the 
best Japanese opinion. Each of us contains 
within him "somewhat of a shadowy being," 
like the spectre described by Dr. Johnson : 
something like the Egyptian "Ka," for which 
the curious may consult the works of Miss 
Amelia B. Edwards and other learned Oriental- 
ists. The most recent French student of these 
matters, the author of "L'Homme Posthume," 
is of opinion that we do not all possess this 
double, with its power of surviving our bodily 
death. He thinks, too, that our ghost, when it 
does survive, has but rarely the energy and 
enterprise to make itself visible to or audible 
by "shadow-casting men." In some extreme 
cases the ghost (according to our French 
authority, that of a disciple of M. Comte) feeds 
fearsomely on the bodies of the living. In no 
event does he believe that a ghost lasts much 
longer than a hundred years. After that it 

izles into spectre, and is resolved into its 
dements, whatever they may be. 

A somewhat similar and (to my own mind) 
probably sound theory of ghosts prevails among 
savage tribes, and among such peoples as the 



6o BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

ancient Greeks, the modern Hindoos, and other 
ancestor worshippers. When feeding, as they 
al! do, or used to do, the ghosts of the ancestral 
dead, they gave special attention to the claims 
of the dead of the last three generations, leaving 
ghosts older than the century to look after their 
own supplies of meat and drink. The negli 
gence testifies to a notion that very old ghosts 
are of little account, for good or evil. On the 
other hand, as regards the longevity of spectres, 
we must not shut our eyes to the example of 
the bogie in ancient armour which appears in 
Glamis Castle, or to the Jesuit of Queen 
Elizabeth's date that haunts the library (and a 
very nice place to haunt: I ask no better, e 
ghost in the Pavilion at Lord's might cause a 
scandal) of an English nobleman. With these 
itistanliis contradictories, as Bacon calls them, 
present to our minds, we must not (in the 
present condition of psychical research) dogma- 
tise too hastily about the span of life allotted to 
the simulacrum vulgar e. Very probably his 
chances of a prolonged existence are in inverse 
ratio to the square of the distance of time 
which severs him from our modern days. No 
one has ever even pretended to see the ghost of 
an ancient Roman buried in these islands, still 
less of a Pict or Scot, or a Paleolithic man, 



6t BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

welcome as such an apparition would be to 
many of us. Thus the evidence does certainty 
look as if there were a kind of statute of limita- 
tions among ghosts, which, from many points of 
view, is not an arrangement at which we should 
repine. 

The Japanese artist expresses his own sense 
of the casual and fluctuating nature of ghosts by 
drawing his spectre in shaky lines, as if the 
model had given the artist the horrors. This 
simulacrum rises out of the earth like an exha- 
lation, and groups itself into shape above the 
spade with which all that is corporeal of its late 
owner has been interred. Please remark the 
uncomforted and dismal expression of the simn- 
lacrunt. We must remember that the ghost 
or "Ka" is not the "soul," which has other 
destinies in the future world, good or evil, but 
is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned, 
as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell in the 
tomb and hover near it. The Chinese and 
Japanese have their own definite theory of 
the next world, and we must by no means 
confuse the eternal fortunes of the permanent, 
conscious, and responsible self, already inhabit- 
ing other worlds than ours, with the eccentric 
vagaries of the semi-material tomb-haunting 
larva, which so often develops a noisy and bear- 



64 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

fighting disposition quite unlike the character oi 
its proprietor in life. 

The next bogie, so limp and washed-out 
he seems, with his white, drooping dripping arms 
and hands, reminds us of that horrid French 
species of apparition, "la lavandiferc de la nuit,' 
who washes dead men's linen in the moonlit 
pools and rivers. Whether this simulacrum be 
meant for the spirit of the well (for everything 
has its spirit in Japan), or whether it be the 
ghost of some mortal drowned in the well, I 
cannot say with absolute certainty ; but the 
opinion of the learned tends to the former con- 
clusion, Naturally a Japanese child, when sent 
in the dusk to draw water, will do so with fear 
and trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition 
might scare the boldest. Another bogie, a 
terrible creation of fancy, I take to be a vampire, 
about which the curious can read in Dom 
Calmet, who will tell them how whole villages 
in Hungary have been depopulated by vam- 
pires ; or he may study in Fauriel's " Chansons 
de la Grfece Moderne" the vampires of modi 
Hellas. 

Another plan, and perhaps even more satis- 
factory to a timid or superstitious mind, is to 
read in a lonely house at midnight a story 
named " Carmilla," printed in Mr. Sheridan Le 



66 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. V 

Fanu's " In a Glass Darkly." That work wiltj 
give you the peculiar sentiment of vampirismj 
will produce a gelid perspiration, and reduce thel 
patient to a condition in which he will be afraid! 
to look round the room. If, while in this moodj 
some one tells him Mr. Augustus Hare's story oiM 
Crooglin Grange, his education in the practices 
and theory of vampires will be complete, and hefl 
will be a very proper and well-qualified inmate! 

Lof Earlswood Asylum. The most awful Japanese! 
vampire, caught red-handed in the act, a hidcou^^ 
bestial incarnation of ghoulishness, we havM 
carefully refrained from reproducing. ■ 

Scarcely more agreeable is the bogie, or witch, 
blowing from her mouth a malevolent exhala- 
tion, an embodiment of malignant and maleficent 
sorcery. The vapour which flics and curls from 
the mouth constitutes '* a sending," in the 
technical language of Icelandic wizards, and is 
capable (in Iceland, at all events) of assuming 
the form of some detestable supernatural animal, 
to destroy the life of a hated rival. In the case 
of our last example it is very hard indeed to 
make head or tail of the spectre represented. 
Chinks and crannies are his domain ; through 
these he drops upon you. He is a merry but 
not an attractive or genial ghost. Where there 
arc such "visions about" it may be admitted 
, i 



pr 




L'^^fe 


^ 


^^H — -^'P^ "iTy " •'^Y'^ 


i^MfLz 


. 


ff 




^^^ 


m 



68 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN, 

that children, apt to believe in all such fancies, 
have a youth of variegated and intense misery, 
recurring with special vigour at bed-time. But 
we look again at our first picture, and hope and 
trust that Japanese boys and girls are as happy 
as these jolly little creatures appear. 



r.HOSTS IN THE LIBRARY. 

Suppose, when now the house is dumb, 

When lights are out, and ashes fall — 
Suppose their ancient owners come 

To claim our spoils of shop and stall, 

Ah me ! within the narrow hall 
How strange a mob would meet and go, 

What famous folk would haunt them all. 
Octavo, quarto, folio! 

The great Napoleon lays his hand 

Upon this eagle-headed N, 
That marks for his a pamphlet banned 

By all but scandal-loving men, — 
A libel from some nameless den 

Of Frankfort, — Arnaiid a la Sphire, 
Wherein one spilt, with venal pen, 

Lies o'er the loves of Moliire.^ 

' Niilairi uti Intrigues Amotireusn de MalSre, el di: cellcs de 
ufemmt. {A la Sphire.) A Fnincfort, chei Fr&liric Amaud, 
■DCXCVll. This anonymous tnicl has actually been atlribulcd 
p Sadne. The copy relerted lo is marked with a large N in 

1, irilh Itn eagle's heail. 



70 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Another shade — he does not sec 

" Boney," the foeman of his race — 
The great Sir Walter, this is he 

With that grave homely Border face. 
He claims his poem of the chase 

That rang Benvoirlich's valley through ; 
And this, that doth the lineage trace 

And fortunes of the bold Buccleuch ; ' 

For these were his, and these he gave 

To one who dwelt beside the Peel, 
That murmurs with its tiny wave 

To join the Tweed at Ashestiel, 
Now thick as motes the shadows wheel, 

And lind their own, and claim a share 
Of books wherein Ribou did deal, 

Or Roulland sold to wise Colbert.^ 

What famous folk of old are here ! 

A royal duke comes down to us, 
And greatly wants his Elzevir, 

His Pagan tutor, Lucius,^ 

' Thi Lady of the Laic, iBio. 
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1806. 

"To Mrs. Robert Laidlaw, Peel, Fiom the Author." 
' Dittys Cnlcitiis. Apud Lambertuni RoBlland. Li 
Paris., 1680. In red morocco, with the arms of Colbert, 

* L. Aniiai Seneca Opera Omnii. Lug. Bat. , apud EIzevirioK 1 
1649. With boolt-plale of the Dake of Sussei. 



CBOSTS IN THE UBRARY. It 

And Beckford claims an amorous 

Old heathen in morocco blue ;' 
And who demands Eobanus 

But stately Jacques Augustc de Thou ! ^ 

They come, the wise, the great, the true. 

They jostle on the narrow stair, 
The frolic Countess de Verrue, 

Lamoignon, ay, and Longepierre, 
The new and elder dead are there — 

The lords of speech, and song, and pen, 
Gambetta,* Schlegel,^ and the rare 

Drummond of haunted Hawthornden. * 

Ah, and with those, a hundred more, 

Whose names, whose deeds, are quite forgot ; 

Brave "Smiths" and "Thompsons" by the score, 
Scrawled upon many a shabby " lot." 

' SIratenis Epigrammala. Allenburgi, 1764. Slralon bound 
in one volume with Epictelus 1 From the Beckford libraiy. 
» Optra Htlii Eobarti HesH, Yellow moroeco, with Ihe first 
US of De Thou, Includes a poem addressed " Langb, decus 
um." Qoanlity of penultimate "Eobanus" taken for 
graoted, mrtrisratid. 

' LaJiHnUtdu ChrHUn. Coutinces, 1831. With inscrip- 
., " Lion Gambetla. Rue St. Honor^. Janvier i, 1848." 
Villoison's Homtr. Venice, 17B8. With Tcssict's ticket 
And Schl^el's book-plate. 

" La Eisais de Afidui,Seigniur de Monlaipte. " Pour Fran- 
lyAa 1e Febvre de Lyon, 1695." Wilh aulograph of Gul. 
" ' nd cipresso e palma. 



72 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

This playbook was the joy of TPbtt^ — 
Pott, for whom now no mortal grieves. 

Our names, like his, remembered not, 
Like his, shall flutter on fly-leaves ! 

At least in pleasant company 

We bookish ghosts, perchance, may flit ; 
A man may turn a page, and sigh. 

Seeing one's name, to think of it. 
Beauty, or Poet, Sage, or Wit, 

May ope our book, and muse awhile, 
And fall into a dreaming fit. 

As now we dream, and wake, and smile ! 

' "The little old foxed Moli^re," once the property of 
William Pott, unknown to fame. 



LITERARY FORGERIES, 

■In the whole amusing history of impostures, 
Ithere is no more diverting chapter than that 
I which deals with literary frauds. None contains 
I a more grotesque revelation of the smallness 
land the complexity of human nature, and none 
I — not even the records of the Tichborne trial, 
Inor of general elections — displays more plea- 
I santly the depths of mortal credulity. The 
I literary forger is usually a clever man, and it is 
I necessary for him to be at least on a level with 
I the literary knowledge and critical science of his 
I time. But how low tliat level commonly appears 
I to be 1 Think of the success of Ireland, a boy 
[of eighteen; think of Chatterton ; think of 
;s of Mainsforth, who took in the great 

Sir Walter himself, the father of all them that 
*re skilled in ballad lore. How simple were 

the artifices of these ingenious impostors, their 



74 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

resources how scanty ; how hand-to-mouth and 
improvised was their whole procedure ! Times 
have altered a little. Jo Smith's revelation and 
famed "Golden Bible" only carried captive the 
polygamous /o/«/« J qui vult dec'tpi, reasoners a 
little lower than even the believers in Anglo. 
Israel. The Moabite Ireland, who once gave 
Mr. Shapira the famous MS. of Deuteronomy, 
but did not delude M. Ctermont-Ganneau, was 
doubtless a smart man ; he was, however, a 
little too indolent, a little too easily satisfied. 
He might have procured better and less recog- 
nisable materials than his old " synagogue 
roUs ; " in short, he took rather too little trouble, 
and came to the wrong market, A literary 
forgery ought first, perhaps, to appeal to thi 
credulous, and only slowly should it come, with 
the prestige of having already won many 
believers, before the learned world. The in- 
scriber of the Phcenician inscriptions in Brazil 
{of all places) was a clever man. His account 
of the voyage of Hiram to South America 
probably gained some credence in Brazil, whlli 
in England it only carried captive Mr. Day, 
author of "The Prehistoric Use of Iron and 
Steel." But the Brazilians, from lack of energy, 
have dropped the subject, and the Phoeniciao_ 
inscriptions of Brazil are less successful, aftec 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 7S 

all, than the Moabitc stone, about which one 
begins to entertain disagreeable doubts. 

The motives of the literary forger arc curiously 
mixed ; but they may, perhaps, be analysed 
roughly into piety, greed, "push," and love of 
fun. Many literary forgeries have been pious 
frauds, perpetrated in the interests of a church, 
a priesthood, or a dogma. Then we have frauds 
of greed, as if, for example, a forger should offer 
wares for a million of money to the British 
Museum ; or when he tries to palm off his 
Samaritan Gospel on the " Bad Samaritan " of 
the Bodleian. Next we come to playful frauds, 
or frauds in their origin playful, like (perhaps) 
the Shakespearian forgeries of Ireland, the super- 
cheries of Prosper M^rimfie, the sham antique 
ballads (very spirited poems in their way) of 
Surtees, and manyother examples. Occasionally 
it has happened that forgeries, begun for the 
mere sake of exerting the imitative faculty, and 
of raising a laugh against the learned, have been 
persevered with in earnest. The humorous deceits 
are, of course, the most pardonable, though it is 
difficult to forgive the young archsologist who 
took in his own father with false Greek inscrip- 
tions. But this story may be a mere fable 
amongst archsologists, who are constantly ac- 

Ifling each other of all manner of crimes. Then 



7S BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

there are forgeries by " pushing " men, who hope 
to get a reading for poems which, if put forth as 
new, would be neglected. There remain forgeries 
of which the motives are so complex as to 
remain for ever obscure. We may generally 
ascribe them to love of notoriety in the forger ; 
such notoriety as Macpherson won by his 
dubious pinchbeck Ossian. More difficult still 
to understand are the forgeries which real 
scholars have committed or connived at for the 
purpose of supporting some opinion which they 
held with earnestness. There is a vein of mad- 
ness and self-deceit in the character of the man 
who half-persuades himself that his own false 
facts are true. The Payne Collier case is 
thus one of the most difficult in the world to 
explain, for it is equally hard to suppose that 
Mr. Payne Collier was taken in by the notes 
on the folio he gave the world, and to hold 
that he was himself guilty of forgery to support 
his own opinions. 

The further we go back in the history of 
literary forgeries, the more (as is natural) do we 
find them to be of a pious or priestly character. 
When the clergy alone can write, only the clergy 
can forge. In such ages people are interested 
chiefly in prophecies and warnings, or, if they 
are careful about literature, it is only when 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 

iterature contains some kind of title-deeds. 
Thus Solon is said to have forged a line in the 
Homeric catalogue of the ships for the purpose 
if proving that Salamis belonged to Athens. 
But the great antique forger, the " Ionian father 
tf the rest," is, doubtless, Onomacritus. There 
exists, to be sure, an Egyptian inscription pro- 
essing to be of the fourth, but probably of the 
twenty-sixth, dynasty. The Germans hold the 
latter view ; the French, from patriotic motives, 
naintain the opposite opinion. But this forgery 
9 scarcely " literary," 

I never can think of Onomacritus without a 
Xrtain respect : he began the forging business ■ 
io very early, and was (apart from this failing) 
Juch an imposing and magnificently respectable 
character. The scene of the error and the 
detection of Onomacritus presents itself always 
» me in a kind of pictorial vision. It is night, 
ihe clear, windless night of Athens ; not of the 
Athens whose ruins remain, but of the ancient 
:ity that sank in ashes during the invasion of 
Xerxes. The time is the time of Pisistratus the 
luccessful tyrant ; the scene is the ancient temple, 
the stately bouse of Athene, the fane where the 
(acred serpent was fed on cakes, and the primeval 
jlive-tree grew beside the well of Posidon. The 
Jarkness of the temple's inmost shrine is lit by 



78 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

the ray of one earthen lamp. You dimly dis« 
cem the majestic form of a venerable maft 
stooping above a coffer of cedar and ivory, 
carved with the exploits of the goddess, and 
with bousirophcdon inscriptions. In his hair this 
archaic Athenian wears the badge of the goldea 
grasshopper. He is Onomacritus, the famous 
poet, and the trusted guardian of the ancient 
oracles of Musaeus and Bacis. 

What is he doing ? Why, he takes from the 
fragrant cedar coffer certain thin stained sheets 
of lead, whereon are scratched the words of 
doom, the prophecies of the Greek Thomas th* 
Rhymer, From his bosom he draws another 
thin sheet of lead, also stained and corroded, 
On this he scratches, in imitation of the old 
"Cadmeian letters," a prophecy that "the Isles 
near Lemnos shall disappear under the sea,' 
So busy is he in this task, that he does not hear 
the rustle of a chiton behind, and suddenly 
man's hand is on his shoulder ! Onomacritus 
turns in horror. Has the goddess punished^ 
him for tampering with the oracles? No 
it is J^asus, of Hermione, a rival poet, who 
has caught the keeper of the oracles in the 
very act of a pious forgery, {Herodotus, 
yii. 6.) 

Pisistratus expelled the learned Onomacril 



UTERARY FORGERIES. 79 

from Athens, but his conduct proved, in the 
long run, highly profitable to the reputations of 
Musaeus and Bacis. Whenever one of their 
oracles was not fulfilled, people said, " Oh, that 
is merely one of the interpolations of Onoma- 
;ritus ! " and the matter was passed over. This 
Onomacritus is said to have been among the 
original editors of Homer under Pisistratus,* 
He lived long, never repented, and, many years 
later, deceived Xerxes into attempting his dis- 
astrous expedition. This he did by "keeping 
back the oracles unfavourable to the barbarians," 
and putting forward any that seemed favourable. 
The children of Pisistratus believed in him as 
spiritualists go on giving credit to exposed and 
exploded "mediums." 

Having once practised deceit, it is to be 
feared that Onomacritus acquired a liking for 
the art of literary forgery, which, as will be 
seen in the case of Ireland, grows on a man 
like dram-drinking. Onomacritus is generally 
charged with the authorship of the poems which 
the ancients usually attributed to Orpheus, the 
companion of Jason. Perhaps the most interest- 
ing of the poems of Orpheus to us would have 
been his " Inferno," or Karo/ioffti' ig ^Sov, in 

Thai there e' 
tloty may be a £1 



So BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

which the poet gave his own account of his 
descent to Hades in search of Eurydice. But 
only a dubious reference to one adventure in the 
journey is quoted by Plutarch. Whatever the 
exact truth about the Orphic poems may be 
(the reader may pursue the hard and fruitless 
quest in Lobeck's " Aglaophamus " '), it seems 
certain that the period between Pisistratus and 
Fericles, like the Alexandrian time, was a great 
age for literary forgeries. But of all these 
frauds the greatest (according to the most 
" advanced " theory on the subject) is the 
"Forgery of the Iliad and Odyssey 1" The 
opinions of the scholars who hold that the Iliad 
and Odyssey, which we know and which Plato 
knew, arc not the epics known to Herodotus, 
but later compositions, arc far from being clear 
or consistent. But it seems to be vaguely held 
that about the time of Pericles there arose a 
kind of Greek Macpherson. This ingenious 
impostor worked on old epic materials, but 
added many new ideas of his own about the 
gods, converting the Iliad (the poem which we 
now possess) into a kind of mocking romance, 
a Greek Don Quixote. He also forged a 
number of pseudo-archaic words, tenses, and 
expressions, and added the numerous references 
' Or, iiioie easil)', in Maury's RcHglom de hi Grid. 



LITERARY FORGERIES. Si 

on, a metal practically unknown, it is 
I asserted, to Greece before the sixth century. If 
I we are to believe, with Professor Paley, that the 
' chief incidents of the Iliad and Odyssey were 
unknown to Sophocles, ^schylus, and the con- 
temporary vase-painters, we must also suppose 
that the Greek Macpherson invented most of 
the situations in the Odyssey and Iliad, Ac- 
cording to this theory the "cooker" of the 
extant epics was far the greatest and most 
successful of all literary impostors, for he de- 
ceived the whole world, from Plato downwards, 
till he was exposed by Mr. Paley. There are 
times when one is inclined to believe that Plato 
must have been the forger himself, as Bacon, 
{according to the other hypothesis) was the 
author of Shakespeare's plays. Thus " Plato 
the wise, and large-browed Verulam," would 
be "the first of those who" forge! Next to 
this prodigious imposture, no doubt, the false 
" Letters of Phalaris " are the most important of 
classical forgeries. And these illustrate, like 
most literary forgeries, the extreme worthless- 
ness of literary taste as a criterion of the 
authenticity of writings. For what man ever 
was more a man of taste than Sir William 
Temple, "the most accomplished writer of 
age," whom Mr. Boyle never thought of 




BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



without calling to mind those happy lines ol 
Lucretius — 



Well, the ornate and excellent Temple held that 
"the Epistles of Phalaris have more race, more 
spirit, more force of wit and genius, than any 
others he had ever seen, either ancient 
modern." So much for what Bentley calls 
Temple's "Nicety of Tast." The greatest of 
English scholars readily proved that Phalaris 
used {in the spirit of prophecy) an idiom which 
did not exist to write about matters in his time 
not invented, but " many centuries younger than 
he." So let the Nicety of Temple's Tast and 
its absolute failure be a warning to us when we 
read (if read we must) German critics who deny 
Homer's claim to this or that passage, and. 
Plato's right to half his accepted dialogues, on 
grounds of literary taste. And farewell, aa 
Herodotus would have said, to the Letters of 
Phalaris, of Socrates, of Plato ; to the Lives 
of Pythagoras and of Homer, and to all the 
other uncounted literary forgeries of the classical 
world, from the Sibylline prophecies to th' 
Battle of the Frogs and Mice. 

Early Christian frauds were, naturally, pious. 
We have the apocryphal Gospels, and the works 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 83 

Dionysius the Areopagite, which were not 
exposed till Erasmus's time. Perhaps the most 
important of pious forgeries (if forgery be 
exactly the right word in this case) was that of 
"The False Decretals." "Of a sudden," says 
Milman, speaking of the pontificate f Nicholas 
I. {pb. 867 A-D,), " Of a sudden was promulgated, 
unannounced, without preparation, not ab- 
solutely unquestioned, but apparently over- 
awing at once all doubt, a new Code, which to 
■h& former authentic documents added fifty-nine 
Retters and decrees of the twenty oldest Popes 
nrom Clement to Melchiadea, and the donation 
f Constantine, and in the third part, among the 
Jdecrees of the Popes and of the Councils from 
■SylvestertoGregory 11., thirty-nine false decrees, 
And the acts of several unauthentic Councils." 
"The whole is composed," Milman adds, "with 
Min air of profound piety and reverence." The 
•False Decretals naturally assert the supremacy 
Pof the Bishop of Rome. " They arc full and 
minute on Church Property" (they were sure to 
be that); in fact, they remind one of another 
forgery, pious and Aryan, " The Institutes of 
Vishnu." " Let him not levy any tax upon 
Brahmans," says the Brahman forger of the 
Institutes, which "came from the mouths of 
f Vishnu," as he sat "clad in a yellow robe, im- 



H 



BOOKS AND BOOKME!^. 



perturbable, decorated with all kinds of gems, 
while Lakshmi was stroking his feet with her 
soft palms." The Institutes took excellent care 
of Brahmans and cows, as the Decretals did of' 
the Pope and the clergy, and the earliest Popes 
had about as much hand in the Decretals as 
Vishnu had in his Institutes. Homtnenay, in 
" Pantagruel," did well to have the praise of the 
Decretals sung by filles belles, blondelettes, doui~ 
celtes, et de bonne grace. And then Hommenay 
drank to the Decretals and their very good 
health. "O dives Decretalcs, tant par vous est 
le vin bon bon trouve"~-"0 divine Decretals, 
how good you make good wine taste I " " The 
miracle would be greater," said Pantagruel, "if 
they made bad wine taste good." The most 
that can now be done by the devout for the 
Decretals is " to palliate the guilt of their forger," 
whose name, like that of the Greek Macpherson, 
is unknown. 

If the early Christian centuries, and the 
Middle Ages, were chiefly occupied with pious 
frauds, with forgeries of gospels, epistles, and 
Decretals, the impostors of the Renaissance were- 
busy, as an Oxford scholar said, when he heard 
of a new MS. of the Greek Testament, " with 
something really important," that is with-classical 
imitations. After the Turks took Constantinople, 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 



SS 



when the learned Greeks were scattered all over 
Southern Europe, when many genuine classical 
Jmanuscripts were recovered by the zeal of 
•scholars, when the plays of Mcnander were seen 
jjnce, and then lost for ever, it was natural that 
[literary forgery should thrive. As yet scholars 
Kwere eager rather than critical ; they were col- 
lecting and unearthing, rather than minutely 
xaraining the remains of classic literature. 
They had found so much, and every year were 
iinding so much more, that no discovery seemed 
►impossible. The lost books of Livy and Cicero, 
the songs of Sappho, the perished plays of 
Sophocles and ^schylus might any day be 

I brought to light. This was the very moment 
for the literary forger ; but it is improbable that 
any forgery of the period has escaped detection. 
Three or four years ago some one published a 
book to show that the " Annals of Tacitus " were 
written by Poggio Bracciolini. This paradox 
gained no more converts than the bolder hypo- 
thesis of Hardouin, The theory of Hardouin 
jvas that all the ancient classics were produc- 
tions of a learned company which worked, in 
1' the thirteenth centuiy, under Severus Archontius. 
Hardouin made some exceptions to his sweeping 
general theory, Cicero's writings were genuine, 
admitted, so were Pliny's, of Virgil the 



86 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Georgics ; the satires and epistles of Horace 
Herodotus, and Homer. All the rest of the 
classics were a magnificent forgery of the illite- 
rate thirteenth century, which had scarce any 
Greek, and whose Latin, abundant in quantity^ 
in quality left much to be desired. 

Among literary forgers, or passers of false 
literary coin, at the time of the Renaissance, 
Annius is the most notorious. Annius (his real 
vernacular name was Nanni) was born at Viterbo, 
in 1432. He became a Dominican, and (after 
publishing his forged classics) rose to the position 
of Maitre du Palais to the Pope, Alexander 
Borgia. With Caesar Borgia it is said that 
Annius was never on good terms. He persisted 
in preaching " the sacred truth " to his highness, 
and this (according to the detractors of Annius) 
was the only use he made of the sacred truth. 
There is a legend that Ccesar Borgia poisoned 
the preacher (1502), but people usually brought 
that charge against Caesar when any one in 
any way connected with him happened to die. 
Annius wrote on the History and Empire of the 
Turks, who took Constantinople in his time 
but he is better remembered by his "Antiqui 
latum Variarum Volumina XVH.cum comment. 
Fr. Jo. Annii." These fragments of antiquity 
included, among many other desirable things 



UIERARY FORGERIES. S7 

the historical writings of Fabius Pictor, the pre- 
decessor of Livy. One is surprised that Annius, 
when he had his hand in, did not publish choice 
extracts from the "Libri Lintei," the ancient 
Roman annals, written on linen and preserved 
in the temple of Juno Moneta. Among the 
other discoveries of Annius were treatises by 
Berosus, Manetho, Cato, and poems by Archi- 
lochus. Opinion has been divided as to whether 
Annius was wholly a knave, or whether he was 
himself imposed upon. Or, again, whether he 
had some genuine fragments, and eked them 
out with his own inventions. It is observed 
that he did not dovetail the really genuine 
relics of Berosus and Manetho into the works 
attributed to them. This may be explained as 
the result of ignorance or of cunning; there can 
be no certain inference. " Even the Dominicans," 
as Bayle says, admit that Annius's discoveries 
are false, though they excuse them by averring 
that the pious man was the dupe of others. But 
a learned Lutheran has been found to defend 
the "Antiquitates" of the Dominican. 

It is amusing to remember that the great and 
erudite Rabelais was taken in by some pseudo- 
classical fr^ments. The Joker of jokes was 
hoaxed. He published, says Mr. Hesant, 
couple of Latin foi^eries, which he proudly 



A 



88 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

called "Ex reliquiis venerandae aiitiquitatis,' 
consisting of a pretended will and a contract." 
The name of the book is "Ex reliquiis vene- 
rand^ antiquitatis. Lucii Cuspidii Testamentum. 
Item contractus venditionisantiquisRomanorum 
temporibus initus. Lngdutd apud Gryphitim 
(1532)." Pomponius La;tus and Jovianus Pon- 
tanus were apparently authors of the hoax. 

Socrates said that he " would never lift up 
his hand against his father Parmcnides." The 
fathers of the Church have not been so respect- 
fully treated by literary forgers during the 
Renaissance. The " Flowers of Theology " of 
St. Bernard, which were to be a primrose path 
ad gaitdia Paradisi (Strasburg, 1478), were 
really, it seems, the production of Jean de 
Garlande. Athanasius, his " Eleven Books con- 
cerning the Trinity," are attributed to Virgilius, 
a colonial Bishop in Northern Africa. Among 
false classics were two comic Latin fragments 
with which Muretus beguiled Scaligcr. Meursius 
has suffered, posthumously, from the attribution 
to him of a very disreputable volume indeed. 
In 1583, a book on " Consolations," by Cicero, 
was published at Venice, containing the reflec- 
tions with which Cicero consoled himself for the 
death of Tullia, It might as well have been 
attributed to Mrs. BHmber, and described as 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 89 

P replete with the thoughts by which that lady 

supported herself under the affliction of never 

having seen Cicero in his Tusculan villa. The 

real aiitlior was Charles Sigonius, of Modena. 

Sigonius actually did discover some Ciceronian 

fragments, and, if he was not the builder, at 

least he was the restorer of Tully's lofty theme. 

In 1693, Francois Nodot, conceiving the world 

I had not already enough of Petronius Arbiter, 

published an edition, in which he added to the 

works of that lax though accomplished author. 

Nodot's story was that he had found a whole 

MS, of Petronius at Belgrade, and he published 

I it with a translation of his own Latin into 

' French. Still dissatisfied with the existing 

[ supply of Petronius's humour was Marchena, a 

I writer of Spanish books, who printed at BSle 

fa translation and edition of a new fragment. 

\ This fragment was very cleverly inserted in a 

presumed lacuna. In spite of the ironical style 

of the preface many scholars were taken In by 

I this fragment, and their credulity led Marchena 

■to find a new morsel (of Catullus this time) at 

■Herculaneum. Eichstadt, a Jena professor, 

Pgravely announced that the same fragment 

■ existed in a MS. in the university library, and, 

■ under pretence of giving various readings, cor- 
frected Marchena's faults in prosody. Another 



9° 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



sham Catullus, by Corradino, a Venetian, 
published in 1738. 

The most famous forgeries of the eighteenth 
century were those of Macpherson, Chatterton, 
and Ireland. Space (fortunately) does not 
permit a discussion of the Ossianic question. 
That fragments of Ossianic legend {if not of 
Ossianic poetry) survive in oral Gaelic traditions, 
seems certain. How much Macpherson knew 
of these, and how little he used them in the 
bombastic prose which Napoleon loved (and 
spelled " Ocean "), it is next to impossible to 
discover. The case of Chatterton is too well 
known to need much more than mention. The 
most extraordinary poet for his years who ever 
lived began with the forgery of a sham feudal 
pedigree for Mr, Bergum, a pewterer. Ireland 
started on his career in much the same way, 
unless Ireland's " Confessions " be themselves 
a fraud, based on what he knew about Chatter- 
ton. Once launched in his career, Chatterton 
drew endless stores of poetry from " Rowley's 
MS." and the muniment chest in St. Mary 
Redcliffe's. Jacob Eryant believed in them and 
wrote an " Apology " for the credulous. Bryant, 
who believed in his own system of mythology, 
might have believed in anything. When Chat- 
terton sent his " discoveries " to Walpole {him- 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 

self somewhat of a mediteval imitator), Grag 
and Mason detected the imposture, and Walpole.l 
his feelings as an antiquary injured, took no 
more notice of the boy. Chatterton's death was 
due to his precocity. Had his genius come to 
him later, it would have found him wiser, and 
better able to command the fatal demon of 
intellect, for which he had to find work, like 
Michael Scott in the legend. 

The end of the eighteenth century, which had 
been puzzled or diverted by the Chatterton and 
Macpherson frauds, witnessed also the great 
and famous Shakespearian forgeries. We shall 
never know the exact truth about the fabrica- 
tion of the Shakespearian documents, and 
"Vortigern" and the other plays. We have, 
indeed, the confession of tlie culprit: habemus 
confitentem reum, but Mr. W, H. Ireland was 
a liar and a solicitor's clerk, so versatile and 
accomplished that we cannot always trust him, 
even when he is narrating the tale of his own 
iniquities, Tlie temporary but wide and turbu- 
lent success of the Ireland forgeries suggests 
the disagreeable reflection that criticism and 
learning arc (or a hundred years ago were) 
worth very little as literary touchstones. A 
polished and learned society, a society devoted 
to Shakespeare and to the stage, was taken in 




92 BOOKS AND BOOKME^T. 

by a boy of eighteen. Young Ireland not only 
palmed off his sham prose documents, most 
makeshift imitations of the antique, but even 
his ridiculous verses on the experts. James 
Boswell went down on his knees and thanked 
Heaven for the sight of them, and, feeling thirsty 
after these devotions, drank hot brandy and 
water. Dr. Parr was not less readily gulled, 
and probably the experts, like Malone, who 
held aloof, were as much influenced by jealousy 
as by science. The whole story of young 
Ireland's forgeries is not only too long to be 
told here, but forms the topic of a novel (" The 
Talk of the Town ") by Mr. James Payn. The 
frauds in his hands lose neither their humour nor 
their complicated interest of plot To be brief, 
then, Mr. Samuel Ireland was a gentleman 
extremely fond of old literature and old books. 
If we may trust the "Confessions " (1805) of his 
candid son, Mr. W. II, Ireland, a more harmless 
and confiding old person than Samuel never 
collected early English tracts. Living in his 
learned society, his son, Mr, W, H. Ireland, 
acquired not only a passion for black letters, 
but a desire to emulate Chatterton. His first 
step in guilt was the forgery of an autograph 00 
an old pamphlet, with which he gratified Samuel 
Ireland, He also wrote a sham inscription on 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 93 

a modern bust of Cromwell, which he represented 
as aa authentic antique. Finding that the 
critics were taken in, and attributed this new 
bust to the old sculptor Simeon, Ireland con- 
ceived a very low and not unjustifiable opinion 
of critical tact. Critics would find merit in 
anything which seemed old enough. Ireland's 
next achievement was the forgery of some legal 
'documents concerning Shakespeare. Just as 
the bad man who deceived the guileless Mr. 
Shapira forged his " Deuteronomy " on the 
blank spaces of old synagogue rolls, so young 
Ireland used the cut-off ends of old rent rolls. 
He next bought up quantities of old fly-leaves 
of books, and on this ancient paper he indicted 
a sham confession of faith, which he attributed 
to Shakespeare, Being a strong " evangelical," 
young Mr. Ireland gave a very Protestant com- 
plexion to this edifying document. And stilt 
the critics gaped and wondered and believed. 

Ireland's method was to write in an ink made 
by blending various liquids used in the marbling 
of paper for bookbinding. This stuff was 
supplied to him by a bookbinder's apprentice. 
When people asked questions as to whence all 
the new Shakespeare manuscripts came, he said 
they were presented to him by a gentleman who 
wished to remain anonymous. Finally, the 



9t BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

impossibility of producing this gentleman was 
one of the causes of the detection of the fraud. 
According to himself, Ireland performed pro- 
digies of acuteness. Once he had forged, at 
random, the name of a contemporary of Shake- 
speare. He was confronted with a genuine 
signature, which, of course, was quite different. 
He obtained leave to consult his " anonymous 
gentleman," rushed home, forged the name 
again on the model of what had been shown to 
him, and returned with this signature as a new 
gift from his benefactor. That nameless friend 
had informed him (he swore) that there were 
two persons of the same name, and that both 
signatures were genuine. Ireland's impudence 
went the length of introducing an ancestor of 
his own, with the same name as himself, among 
the companions of Shakespeare. If " Vortigern" 
had succeeded (and it was actually put on the 
stage with all possible pomp), Ireland meant to 
have produced a series of pseudo-Shakespearian 
plays from William the Conqueror to Queea 
Elizabeth, When busy with "Vortigern," he 
was detected by a friend of his own age, who 
pounced on him while he was at work, as Lasus 
pounced on Onomacritus. The discoverer, how- 
ever, consented to " stand in " with Ireland, and 
did not divulge his secret. At last, after the 



LITERARY FORGERIES. 

asco of " Vortigern," suspicion waxed so strong, 
nd disagreeable inquiries for the anonymous 
lenefactor were so numerous, that Ireland fled 
■om his father's house. He confessed all, and, 
ccording to his own account, fell under the un- 
lying wrath of Samuel Ireland. Any reader of 
reland's confessions will be likely to sympathise 
nth old Samuel as the dupe of his son. The 
fhole story is told with a curious mixture of 
mpudence and humour, and with great plausi- 
bility. Young Ireland admits that his "desire 
br laughter " was almost irresistible, when 
leople^Iearned, pompous, sagacious people — 
listened attentively to the papers. One feels 
»alf inclined to forgive the rogue for the sake of 
i youth, his cleverness, his humour. But the 
' Confessions " are, not improbably, almost as 
ipocryphal as the original documents. They 
: written for the sake of money, and it is 
inposslble to say how far the same mercenary 
notive actuated Ireland in his forgeries. Dr. 
Engleby, in his " Shakespeare Fabrications," 
takes a very rigid view of the conduct, not only 
^f William, but of old Samuel Ireland. Sam, 
according to Dr. Ingleby, was a partner in the 
whole imposture, and the confession was only 
one element in the scheme of fraud. Old 
Samuel was the Fagin of a band of young 



96 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEl^. 



literary Dodgers. He " positively trained his 
whole family to trade in forgery," and as foi 
Mr. W. H. Ireland, he was "the most ac- 
complished liar that ever lived," which 
certainly a distinction in its way. The point 
of the joke is that, after the whole conspiracy 
exploded, people were anxious to buy examples 
of the forgeries. Mr, W. H, Ireland was' equal- 
to the occasion. He actually forged his own, of 
(according to Dr. Ingleby) his father's forgeries, 
and, by thus increasing the supply, he deluged 
the market with sham shams, with imitations of 
imitations. If this accusation be correct, it is 
impossible not to admire the colossal impudence 
of Mr, W. H. Ireland. Dr. Ingleby, in the 
ardour of his honest indignation, pursues 
William into his private life, which, it appears, 
was far from exemplary. But literary criticism' 
should be content with a man's works ; his 
domestic life is matter, as Aristotle often says, 
"for a separate kind of investigation." Old 
Ritson used to say that "every literary impostor 
deserved hanging as much as a common thief," 
W. H. Ireland's merits were never recognised 
by the law. 

How old Ritson would have punished "the 
old corrector," it is "better only guessing," aa 
the wicked say, according to Clough, in regard 



LITMRARY PORGEfllES. 

to their own possible chaslrsement. The difl 
culty is to ascertaui who the apocryphal old 
corrector really was. The story of his misdeeds 
was recently brought back to mind by the 
death, at an advanced age, of the learned 
Shakespearian, Mr. J. Payne Collier. Mr. 
Collier was, to put it mildly, the Shapira ( 
the old corrector. He brought that artist'^ 
works before the public; but zvhy? how de- 
ceived, or how influenced, it is once more ' 
"better only guessing." Mr. Collier first in- 
troduced to the public notice his singular copy 
of a folio Shakespeare {second edition), loaded 
with ancient manuscript emendations, in 1849. 
His account of this book was simple and 
plausible. He chanced, one day, to be in the 
shop of Mr. Rudd, the bookseller, in Great 
Newport Street, when a parcel of second-hand 
volumes arrived from the country. When the 
parcel was opened, the heart of the Bibliophile 
b^an to sing, for the packet contained two old 
folios, one of them an old folio Shakespeare of 
the second edition (1632), The volume (mark 
this) was " much cropped," greasy, and imper- 
fect. Now the student of Mr. Hamilton's 
" Inquiry " into the whole affair is already 
puzzled. In later days, Mr. Collier said that _ 
his folio had previously been in the 1 

H 



100 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

new Shakespearian documents will in future b 
received with extreme scepticism ; and this is al 
the fruit, except acres of newspaper correspon 
dence, which the world has derived from Ml 
Collier's greasy and imperfect but unique " 
rccted folio." 

The recency and {to a Shakespearian criti< 
the importance of these forgeries obscures th( 
humble merits of Surtees, with his ballad; 
the "Slaying of Antony Featherstonhaugh,' 
and of "Bartram's Dirge." Surtees left clcv( 
lacmim in these songs, "collected from oral 
tradition," and furnished notes so learned that 
they took in Sir Walter Scott. There are 
moments when I half suspect " the Shirra him- 
sel " (who blamelessly forged so many extracts 
from "Old Plays") of having composed "Kim 
mont Willie." To compare old Scott of Satchell' 
account of Kinmont Willie with the baliad is 
to feel uncomfortable doubts. But this is 
rank impiety. The last ballad forgery of mucl 
note was the set of sham Macedonian epics and 
popular songs (all about Alexander the Great^ 
and other heroes) which a schoolmaster in the 
Rhodope imposed on M. Verkovitch, The tricl 
was not badly done, and the imitation of " balla* 
slang " was excellent The " Oera Linda " bool 
too, was successful enough to be translated intq 



LITERARY FORGERIES. lol 

English. With this latest effort of the tenth 
muse, the crafty muse of Literary Forgery, we 
may leave a topic which could not be exhausted 
in a ponderous volume. We have not room 
even for the forged letters of Shelley, to which 
Mr. Browning, being taken in thereby, wrote a 
preface^ nor for the forged letters of Mr. Ruskin, 
which occasionally hoax all the newspapers. 

Surtees apparently forged, not only ballads, 
but the Latin legend of the Spectre Knight 
which Scott wove into ** Marmion." See the 
author's " Old Friends," appendix. 



BOOfCS AND BOOKMEN. 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCE. 

The love of books' for their own sake, for their 
paper, print, binding, and for their associations, 
as distinct from the love of literature, is a 
stronger and more universal passion in France 
than elscwliere in Europe. In England pub- 
lishers are men of business ; in France they 
aspire to be artists. In England people borrow 
what they read from the libraries, and take what 
gaudy cloth-binding chance chooses to send, 
them. In France people buy books, and bind 
them to their heart's desire with quaint and 
dainty devices on the morocco covers. Books 
arc lifelong friends in that country ; in England' 
they arc the guests of a week or of a fortnight. 
The greatest French writers have been collector^ 
of curious editions ; they have devoted whole 
treatises to the love of books, The literature 
and history of France are full of anecdotes o! 
the good and bad fortunes of bibliophiles, 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FJtANCE. 



"3 



^eir bai^ains, discoveries, disappointments. 
There lies before us at this moment a small 
library of books about books, — the "Bibliophile 
Fran^ais," in seven large volumes, " Les Sonnets 
d'uo Bibliophile," "La Bibliomanie en 1878," 
" I-a Bibliothique d'un Bibliophile" (1885) and 
a dozen other works of Janin, Nodicr, Beraldi, 
Pieters, Didot, great collectors who have written 
for the instruction of beginners and the pleasure 
■of every one who takes delight in printed paper. 

The passion for books, like other forms of 
desire, has its changes of fashion. It is not 
always easy to justify the caprices of taste. 
The presence or absence of half an inch of 
paper in the " uncut " margin of a book makes 

difference of value that ranges from iive 
Bhillings to a hundred pounds. Some books are 
run after because they are beautifully bound ; 
some are competed for with equal eagerness 
because they never have been bound at all. The 
uninitiated often make absurd mistakes about 
these distinctions. Some time ago the Daily 
Telegraph reproached a collector because his 
books were " uncut," whence, argued the journa- 
list, it was clear that he had never read them. 
" Uncut," of course, only means that the margins 
■have not been curtailed by the binder's plough. 
1 a point of sentiment to like books just as 



104 ffOOSS AND BOOHM£tr. 

they left the hands of the old printers, — of 
Estienne, Aldus, or Louis Elzevir. 

It is because the passion for books is a 
sentimental passion that people who have not 
felt it always fail to understand it. Sentiment 
is not an easy thing to explain. Englishmen 
especially find it impossible to understand tastes 
and emotions that are not their own, — the 
wrongs of Ireland, (till quite recently) the aspira- 
tions of Eastern Roumelia, the demands of 
Greece. If we are to understand the book- 
hunter, we must never forget that to him books 
are, in the first place, relics. He likes to think 
that the great writers whom he admires handled 
just such pages and saw such an arrangement of 
type as he now beholds. Moli^re, for example, 
corrected the proofs for this edition of the 
" Fri^cieuses Ridicules," when he first discovered 
" what a labour it is to publish a book, and how 
green {'teuf) an author is the first time they 
print him." Or it may be that Campanella 
turned over, with hands unstrung, and still 
broken by the torture, these leaves that contain 
his passionate sonnets. Here again is the copy 
of Theocritus from which some pretty page 
may have read aloud to charm the pagan and 
pontifical leisure of Leo X, This Gargantua is 
the counterpart of that which the martyred 



BlSLlOMANIA IN FRANCE. 105 

I>olet printed for {or pirated from, alas !) Maitre 
l^'ran^ois Rabelais. This woeful ballade, with 
the woodcut of three thieves hanging from one 
gallows, came near being the " Last Dying 
Speech and Confession of Francois Villon." 
This shabby copy of " The Eve of St, Agnes " 
s precisely like that which Shelley doubled up 
ind thrust into his pocket when the prow of the 
)iratical felucca crashed into the timbers of the 
« Juan. Some rare books have these associa- 
ions, and they bring you nearer to the authors 
han do the modern reprints. Bibliophiles will 
ell you that it is the early readings they care 
—the author's first fancies, and those more 
[Urried expressions which he afterwards cor- 
ected. These readings have their literary value, 
specially in the masterpieces of the great; but 
he sentiment after all is the main thing. 

Other books come to be relics in another way. 
fhey are the copies which belonged to illustrious 
mple, — to the famous collectors who make a 
ind of catena (a golden chain of bibliophiles) 
brough the centuries since printing was in- 
ented, There are Grolier {1479-1565), — not a 
ookbiiider, as an English newspaper supposed 
irobably when Mr. Sala was on his travels), — 
te Thou (1553-1G17), the great Colbert, the 
(uc dc la Valli^jre {t;o8~i73o), Charles Nodier, 



io6 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

a man of yesterday, M. Didot, and the rest, 
too numerous to name. Again, there are the 
books of kinga, like Francis I., Henri III., and 
Louis XIV. These princes had their favourite 
devices. Nicolas Eve, Padeloup, Derome, and 
other artists arrayed their books in morocco, — 
tooled with skulls, cross-bones, and crucifixions 
for the voluptuous pietist Henri III., with the 
salamander for Francis I,, and powdered with 
fleurs dc lys for the monarch who " was the 
State." There are relics also of noble beauties. 
The volumes of Marguerite d'Angoul^nie are 
covered with golden daisies. The cipher of 
Marie Antoinette adorns too many books that 
Madame du Barry might have welcomed to her 
hastily improvised library. The three daughters 
of Louis XV. had their favourite colours of 
morocco, citron, red, and olive, and their books 
are valued as much as if they bore the bees of 
De Thou, or the interwined Cs of the illustrious 
and ridiculous Abbe Cotin, the Trissolin of the 
comedy, Surely in all these things there is a 
human interest, and our fingers are faintly 
thrilled, as we touch these books, with the far- 
off contact of the hands of kings and cardinals, 
scholars and coquettes, pedants, poets, and pri- 
cieuses, the people who are unforgotten in the 
mob that inhabited dead centuries. 



BmUOMANlA IN FRANCE. 

So universal and ardent has the love of 
magnificent books been in France, that it would 
be possible to write a kind of bibliomaniac 
history of that country. All her rulers, kings, 
cardinals, and ladies have had time to spare for 
collecting. Without going too far back, to the 
time when Bertha span and Charlemagne was 
an amateur, we may give a few specimens of an 
auecdotical history of French bibliolatry, be- 
ginning, as is courteous, with a lady. " Can a 
woman be a bibliophile ? " is a question which 
was once discussed at the weekly breakfast party 
of Guilbert de Hxer^court, tlie famous book- 
lover and playwright, the " Corncille of the 
Boulevards," The controversy glided into a dis- 
cussion as to "how many books a man can love 
at a time ; " but historical examples prove that 
French women (and Italian, witness the Princess 
d'Este) may be bibliophiles of the true strain. 
Diane de Poictiers was their illustrious patroness. 
The mistress of Henri II. possessed, iu the 
Chateau d'Anet, a library of the first triumphs 
of typography. Her taste was wide in range, 
including songs, plays, romances, divinity; her 
copies of the Fathers were bound in citron 
morocco, stamped with her arms and devices, 
and closed with clasps of silver. In the love of 
books, as in everything else, Diane and Henri II. 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

were inseparable. The interlaced H and D are 
scattered over the covers of their volumes ; the 
lily of France is twined round the crescents 
of Diane, or round the quiver, the arrows, and 
the bow which she adopted as her cognisance, 
in honour of the maiden goddess. The books 
of Henri and of Diane remained in the Chateau 
d'Anet till the death of the I'rincesse de Condi 
in 1723, when they were dispersed. The son of 
the famous Madame de Guyon bought the 
greater part of the library, which has since been 
scattered again and again. M. Li5opold Double, 
a well-known bibliophile, possessed several 
examples.' 

Henri UI. scarcely deserves, perhaps, the 
name of a book-lover, for he probably never 
read the works which were bound for him in the 
most elaborate way. But that great historian, 
Alexandre Dumas, takes a far more friendly 
view of the king's studies, and, in " La Dame de 
Monsoreau," introduces us to a learned monarch. 
Whether he cared for the contents of his books 
or not, his books are among the most singular 
relics of a character which excites even morbid 
curiosity. No more debauched and worthless 
wretch ever filled a throne ; but, like the bad 
man in Aristotle, Henri III. was " full of rcpent- 
■ See Es=ay un "Lady Book -Lovers." 



BIBLIOMANIA m FRANCE. 

ance." When he was not dancing \\ 
seemly revel, he was on his knees in his chapel. 
The board of one of his books, of which an 
engraving lies before mc, bears his cipher and 
crown in the corners ; but the centre is occupied 
in front with a picture of the Annunciation, 
while on the back is the crucifixion and the 
bleeding heart through which the swords have 
pierced. His favourite device was the death's- 
head, with the motto Memento Mori, or Spt 
mea Deus. WJiile he was still only Due d'Anjouj^ 
Henri loved Marie de Cloves, Princesse 
Condd. On her sudden death he expressed his 
grief, as he had done his piety, by aid of the 
petits fers of the bookbinder. Marie's initials 
were stamped on his book-covers in a chaplet 
of laurels. In one corner a skull and cross- 
bones were figured ; in the other the motto Mort 
m'est vie; while two curly objects, which did 
duty for tears, fiiled up the lower corners. The 
books of Henri III,, even when they are abso- 
lutely worthless as literature, sell for high prices ; 
and an inane treatise on theology, decorated with 
his sacred emblems, lately brought about ;ti30 
in a London sale. 

Francis 1., as a patron of all the arts, wa«j 
naturally an amateur of bindings. The fates of 
books were curiously illustrated by the story of 



n 




BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

the copy of Homer, on large paper, which 
Aldus, the great Venetian printer, presented to 
Francis I. After the death of the late Marquis 
of Hastings, better known as an owner of horses 
than of books, his possessions were brought to 
the hammer. With the instinct, \^t^ flair, as the 
French say, of the bibliophile, M, Ambroise 
Firmin Didot, the biographer of Aldus, guessed 
that the marquis might have owned something 
in his line. He sent his agent over to England, 
to the country town where the sale was to be 
held. M. Didot had his reward. Among the 
books which were dragged out of some mouldy 
store-room was the very Aldine Homer of 
Francis I., with part of the original binding still 
clinging to the leaves. M. Didot purchased the 
precious relic, and sent it to what M. Fertiault 
{who has written a century of sonnets on biblio- 
mania) calls the hospital for books, 

Le dos humide, je I'eponge j 

Oil manque un coin, vile une allonge. 

Pour lous j'ai nmison de santc. 

M. Didot, of course, did not practise this amateur I 
surgery himself, but had the arms and devices I 
of Francis I. restored by one of those famous I 
binders who only work for dukes, millionaires, I 
and Rothschilds. 

During the religious wars and the troubles of I 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCE. iii 

; Fronde, it Is probable that few people gave 
nuch time to the collection of books. The 
jlustrious exceptions are Richelieu and Cardinal 
llazarin, who possessed a "snuffy Davy" of his 

wn, an iodefatigable'prowler among book-stalls 
aid dingry purlieus, in Gabriel Naude. In 1664, 
btaudt^, who was a learned and ingenious writer, 
Jie apologist for "great men suspected of 
nagic," published the second edition of liis 
PAvis pour dresser une Biblioth^que," and 

^Dved himself to be a true lover of the chase, a 
inighty hunter (of books) before the Lord, 
Maude's advice to the collector is rather amusing. 
fie pretends not to care much for bindings, and 
juotes Seneca's rebuke of the Roman biblio- 
Baniacs, Quos 'jolumhium siiorum f routes viaxime 
•uent tituliqtte, — who chiefly care for the backs 

fid lettering of their volumes. The fact is that 
Maude had the wealth of Mazarin at his back, 
and we know very well, from the remains of the 
Cardinal's library which exist, that he liked as 
well as any man'to sec his cardinal's hat glittering 
pti red or olive morocco in the midst of the 

leautiful tooling of the early seventeenth cen- 

[Ory. When once he got a book, he would not 

pare to give it a worthy Jacket. Naudii's ideas 
rout buying were peculiar. Perhaps he sailed 

lather nearer the wind than even Monkbarns 



112 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

would have cared to do. His favourite plan was 
to buy up whole libraries in the gross, " specula- 
tive lots" as the dealers call them. In the 
second place, he advised the book-lover to haunt 
the retreats of Libraires fripiers, et ks vieux- 
fonds et magasins. Here he truly observes that 
you may find rare books, brochis, — that is, un- 
bound and uncutj — ^just as Mr. Symonds bought 
two uncut copies of " Laon and Cythna " in a 
Bristol stall for a crown, " You may get things 
for four or five crowns that would cost you forty 
or fifty elsewhere," says Naudd Thus a few 
years ago M. Paul Lacroix bought for two 
francs, in a Paris shop, the very copy of " Tar- 
tuffe " which had belonged to Louis XIV. The 
example may now be worth perhaps ^200. But 
we are digressing into the pleasures of the 
modem sportsman. 

It was not only in second-hand bookshops 
that Naud^ hunted, but among the dealers \\\ 
waste paper. " Thus did Poggio find Quintilian 
on the counter of a wood-merchant, and Masson 
picked up ' Agobardus ' at the shop of a binder, 
who was going to use the MS. to patch his 
books withal." Rossi, who may have seen 
Naudii at work, tells us how he would enter a 
shop with a yard-measure in his hand, buying 
books, we are sorry to say, by the ell. " The 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCE. 113 

stalls where he had passed were like the towns 
through which Attila or the Tartars had swept, 
with ruin in their train, — ut non hominis unius 
sedulitas, sed calamitas guaedam per oimies biblio- 
polarum tabernas pervasisse videatur ! " Naudd 
had sorrows of his own. In 1652 the Parliament 
decreed the confiscation of the splendid library 
of Mazarin, which was perhaps the first free 
library in Europe, — the first that was open to 
all who were worthy of right of entrance. There 
is a painful description of the sale, from which 
the book-lover will avert his eyes. On Mazarin's 
return to power he managed to collect again and 
enrich his stores, which form the germ of the 
existing Biblwthique Mazarin. 

Among princes and popes it is pleasant to 
meet one man of letters, and he the greatest of 
the great age, who was a bibliophile. The 
enemies and rivals of MoHire — De Vis^ De 
Villiers, and the rest — are always reproaching 
him with his love of bongiiins. There is some 
difference of opinion among philologists about 
the derivation of bouquin, but all book-hunters 
know the meaning of tlie word. The bouquin is 
the "small, rare volume, black with tarnished 
gold," which lies among the wares of the stall- 
kecpcr, patient in rain and dust, till the hunter 
comes who can appreciate the quarry. We like 




114 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



to think of Moli^re lounging through the narrow 
streets Jn the evening, returning, perhaps, from 
some noble house where he has been reading 
the proscribed " Tartuffe," or giving an imitation 
of the rival actors at the H6tel Bourgogne. 
Absent as the contemplateur is, a dingy book- 
stall wakens him from his reverie. His lace 
ruffles are soiled in a moment with the learned 
dust of ancient volumes. Perhaps he picks up 
the only work out of all his library that is known 
to exist, — unravissant petit Ehevir, "Delmperio 
Magni Mogolis" (Lugd. Bat 1651). On the 
title-page of this tiny volume, one of the minute 
series of "Republics" which the Elzevirs pub- 
lished, the poet has written his rare signature, 
" J. B, P. Molitre," with the price the book cost 
him, " I livre, 10 sols." " II n'est pas de bouquin 
qui s'echappe de scs mains," says the author of 
" La Guerre Comique," the last of the pamphlets 
which flew about during the great literary quarrel 
about "L'Ecole des Femraes." Thanks to M. 
Souli^ the catalogue of Moli^re's library has 
been found, though the books themselves have 
passed out of view. There are about three 
hundred and fifty volumes in the inventory, but 
Molifere's widow may have omitted as valueless 
(it is the foible of her sex) many rusty botiquins, 
now worth far more than their weight in gold. 



I 



BISllOMANIA m FRANCE. 115 

r Moliire owned no fewer than two hundred and 
forty volumes of French and Italian comedies. 
From these he took what suited him wherever 
he found it. He had plenty of classics, histories, 
philosophic treatises, the essays of Montaigne, 
a Plutarch, and a Bible. 

We know nothing, to the regret of bibliophiles, 
of Molifere's tasto in bindings. Did he have a 
comic mask stamped on the leather (that device 
chased on his plate), or did he display his 
cognizance and arms, the two apes that support 
a shield charged with three mirrors of Truth ? 
It is certain — La Bruy^re tells us as much — that 
the sillier sort of boofc-lover in the seventeenth 
century was much the same sort of person as his 
successor in our own time. " A man tells me 
he has a library," says La Bruyire {De la Mode) ; 
I ask permission to see it. I go to visit my 
friend, and he receives me in a house where, 
even on the stairs, the smell of the black morocco 
with which his books are covered is so strong 
that I nearly faint. He does his best to revive 
me; shouts in my ear that the volumes 'have 
gilt edges,' that they arc ' elegantly tooled,' that 
they are ' of the good edition,' . . . and informs 
me that 'he never reads,' that 'he never sets 
foot in this part of his house,' that he ' will come 
to oblige me ! ' I thank him for all his kindness, 





iiG 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



and have no more desire than himself to see t) 

tanner's shop that he calls his library." 

Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV., w; 
a bibliophile at whom perhaps La Bruy^rewouli 
have sneered. He was a collector who did no 
read, but who amassed beautiful books, 
looked forward, as business men do, to the day 
when he should have time to study them. Afti 
Grolier, De Thou, and Mazarin, Colbert posr 
sessed probably the richest private library ia 
Europe. The ambassadors of France wei 
charged to procure him rare books and manu* 
scripts, and it is said that in a commercial treaty 
with the Porte he inserted a clause demanding 
a certain quantity of Levant morocco for tht 
use of the royal bookbinders. England, in those 
days, had no literature with which France 
deigned to be acquainted, Even into England, 
however, valuable books had been imported 
and we find Colbert pressing the French ambi 
sador at SL James's to bid for him at a cert; 
sale of rare heretical writings. People wh< 
wanted to gain his favour approached him witl 
presents of books, and the city of Metz gave hin 
two real curiosities — the famous " Metz Bible 
and the Missal of Charles the Bald. Tb( 
Elzevirs sent him their best examples, and 
though Colbert probably saw more of the gil 



BIBLIOMAmA IN FRANCE. 117 

covers of his books than of their contents, at 
east he preserved and handed down many 
valuable works. As much may be said for the 
reprobate Cardinal Dubois, who, with all his 
faults, was a collector, Bossuct, on the other 
hand, left little or nothing of interest except a 
copy of the 1682 edition of Moliere, whom he 
detested and condemned to "the punishment of 
those who laugh." Even this book, which has 
a curious interest, has slipped out of sight, and 
may have ceased to exist. 

If Colbert and Dubois preserved books from 
destruction, there are collectors enough who 
have been rescued from oblivion by books. The 
diplomacy of D'Hoym is forgotten ; the plays 
of Longepierre, and his quarrels with J. B. 
Rousseau, are known only to the literary his- 
torian. These great amateurs have secured an 
eternity of gilt edges, an immortality of morocco. 
Absurd prices are given for any trash that 
belonged to them, and the writer of this notice 
has bought for four shillings an Elzevir classic, 
which when it bears the golden fleece of Longe- 
pierre is worth about /"loo. Longepierre, 
D'Hoym, McCarthy, and the Due de la Valiiere, 
with all their treasures, are less interesting to us 
than Graille, Cochc and Loque, the neglected 
daughters of Louis XV. They found some pale 



Ii8 BOOKS AND &OOKMEM 

constilation in their little cabinets of books, in 
their various liveries of olive, citron, and red 
morocco. 

A lady amateur of high (book-collecting) 
reputation, the Comtesse de Verrue, was repre- 
sented in the Beckford sale by one of three 
copies of "L'Histoire de Mi^lusiiie," of Melusine, 
thetwy-formed fairy, and ancestress of the house 
of Lusignan, The Comtesse de Verrue, one of 
the few women who have really understood 
book-collecting,^ was born January iS, 1670, and 
died November 18, 1736. Shewas the daughter 
of Charles de Luynes and of his second wife, 
Anne de Rohan. When only thirteen she 
married the Comte de Verrue, who somewhat 
injudiciously presented \\^x,2.fleur de qiiinse ans, 
as Ronsard says, at the court of Victor Amadeus 
of Savoy. It is thought that the countess was 
less cruel than the fenr Angevine of Ronsard. 
For some reason the young matron fled from 
the court of Turin and returned to Paris, where 
she built a magnificent hotel, and received the 
most distinguished company. According to her 
biographer, the countess loved science and art 
jusqu'aii di'ltre, and she collected the furniture 
of the period, without neglecting the blue china 
of the glowing Orient. In ebony bookcases 
' See Essay on " Lndy Book- Lovers." 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCH. 119 

she possessed about eighteen thousand volumes, 
bound by the greatest artists of the day. 
" Without care for the present, without fear of 
the future, doing good, pursuing the beautiful, 
protecting the arts, with a tender heart and open 
hand, the countess passed through life, calm, 
happy, beloved, and admired." She left an 
epitaph on herself, thus rudely translated : — 

Here lies, in sleep secure, 

A dnme inclined [o mirth, 
Who, by way of making sure. 

Chose her Parailise on earth. 

During the Revolution, to like well-bound 
books was as much as to proclaim one an 
aristocrat. Condorcct might have escaped the 
scaffold if he had only thrown away the neat 
little Horace from the royal press, which 
betrayed him for no true Republican, but an 
educated man. The great libraries from the 
chateaux of the nobles were scattered among 
all the book-stalls. True sons of freedom tore 
off the bindings, with their gilded crests and 
scutcheons. One revohitionary writer declared, 
and perhaps he was not far wrong, that the art 
of binding was the worst enemy of reading. 
He always began his studies by breaking the 
backs of the volumes he was about to attack. 
The art of bookbinding in these sad years took 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

flight to England, and was kept alive by artists 
robust rather than refined, like Thompson and 
Roger Payne. These were evil days, when the 
binder had to cut the aristocratic coat of arms 
out of a book cover, and glue In a gilt cap of 
liberty, as in a volume In an Oxford amateur's 
collection. 

When Napoleon became Emperor, he strove 
in vain to make the troubled and feverish years 
of his power produce a literature. He himself 
was one of the most voracious readers of novels 
that ever lived. He was always asking for the 
newest of the new, and, unfortunately, even the 
new romances of his period were hopelessly bad. 
Barbier, his librarian, had orders to send parcels 
of fresh fiction to his majesty wherever he 
might happen to be, and great loads of novels 
followed Napoleon to Germany, Spain, Italy, 
Russia, The conqueror was very hard to please. 
He read in his travelling carriage, and, after 
skimming a few pages, would throw a volume 
that bored him out of the window into the 
highway. He might have been tracked by his 
trail of romances, as was Hop-o'-ray-Thumb, in 
the fairy tale, by the white stones he dropped 
behind him. Poor Barbier, who ministered to 
a passion for novels that demanded twenty 
volumes a day, was at his wit's end. He tried 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCE. 121 

to foist on the Emperor tlie romances of the 
year before last ; but these Napoleon had 
generally read, and he refused, with imperial 
scorn, to look at them again. He ordered a 
travelling library of three thousand volumes to 
be made for him, but it was proved that the task 
could not be accomplished in less than six 
years. The expense, if only fifty copies of each 
example had been printed, would have amounted 
to more than six million francs. A Roman 
emperor would not have allowed these con- 
siderations to stand in his way ; but Napoleon, 
after all, was a modern. He contented himself 
with a selection of books conveniently small in 
shape, and packed in sumptuous cases. The 
classical writers of France could never content 
Napoleon, and even from Moscow, in 1812, he 
wrote to Barbier clamorous for new books, and 
good ones. Long before they could have 
reached Moscow, Napoleon was flying home- 
ward before Kotousoff and Bennigscn. 

Napoleon was the last of the book-lovers who 
governed France, The Due d'Aumalc, a famous 
bibliophile, has never " come to his own," and of 
M. Gambetta it is only known that his devotional 
library, at least, has found its way into the 
market We have reached the era of private 
book-fanciers: of Nodier who had three libraries 



122 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

in his time, but never a Virgil ; and of Fixture- 
court, the dramatist, who founded the Soci^td \ 
des Bibliophiles Fran^ais. The Romantic move- 
ment in French literature brought in some new 
fashions in book-hunting. The original editions i 
of Ronsard, Des Fortes, Belleau, and Du Eellay 1 
became invaluable ; while the writings of ] 
Gautier, Petrus Borel, and others excited the | 
passion of collectors, Pix^ri^court was a be- 1 
liever in the works of the Elzevirs. On one J 
occasion, when he was outbid by a friend at I 
an auction, he cried passionately, " I shall have | 
that book at your sale ! " and, the other poor I 
bibliophile soon falling into a decline and dying, ' 
Pixert^court got the volume which he so much ' 
desired. The superstitious might have been 
excused for crediting him with the gift otjitta- 
tura, — of the evil eye. On Pixerecourt himself 
the evil eye fell at last ; his theatre, the Gaietd, J 
was burned down in 1S35, and his creditors! 
intended to impound his beloved books. The | 
bibliophile hastily packed them in boxes, and I 
conveyed thera in two cabs, and under coverj 
of night, to the house of M. Paul Lacroix 
There they languished in exile till the affain 
of the manager were settled. 

Pixerecourt and Nodier, the most reckless t 
men, were the leaders of the older school ( 



BlBUOMAmA IN FRANCE. 



"3 



ft 



bibliomaniacs. The former was not a rich man ; 
the second was poor, but he never hesitated in 
face of a price that he could not afford. He 
would literally ruin himself in the accumulation 
of a library, and then would recover his fortunes 
by selling his books. Nodier passed through 
life without a Virgil, because he never succeeded 
in finding the ideal Virgil of his dreams, — a 
clean, uncut copy of the right Elzevir edition, 
with the misprint, and the two passages in red 
letters. Perhaps this failure was a judgment on 
him for the trick by which he beguiled a certain 
collector of Bibles. He invented an edition, and 
put the collector on the scent, which he followed 
vainly, till he died of the sickness of hope de- 
ferred. 

One has more sympathy with the eccentrici- 
ties of Nodier than with the mere extravagance 
of the new haute icole of bibliomaniacs, the 
school of millionaires, royal dukes, and Roths- 
childs. These amateurs are reckless of prices, 
and by their competition have made it almost 
impossible for a poor man to buy a precious 
book. The dukes, the Americans, the public 
libraries, snap them all up in the auctions. A 
glance at M. Gustave Brunet's little volume, 
La Bibliomanie en 1878," will prove the ex- 
cesses which these people commit. The funeral 




I2i BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

oration of Bossuet over Henriettc Marie of 
France (1669), and Henriettc Anne of England 
(1670), quarto, in the original binding, are sold 
for ;t200. It is true that this copy had possibly- 
belonged to Bossuet himself, and certainly to 
his nephew. There is an example, as we have 
seen, of the 1683 edition of Molicrc, — of Moli6re 
whom Bossuet detested, — which also belonged 
to the eagle of Meaux. The manuscript notes 
of the divine on the work of the poor player 
must be edifying, and in the interests of science 
it is to be hoped that this book may soon 
come into the market. While pamphlets of 
Bossuet are sold so dear, the first edition of 
Homer — the beautiful edition of 148S, which the 
three young Florentine gentlemen published — 
may be had for £roo. Yet even that seems 
expensive, when we remember that the copy 
in the library of George III. cost only seven 
shillings. This exquisite Homer, sacred to the 
memory of learned friendships, the chief offering 
of early printing at the altar of ancient poetry, 
is really one of the most interesting books in 
the world. Yet this Homer is less valued than 
the tiny octavo which contains the ballades and 
huitains of the scamp Francois Villon (1533). 
" The History of the Holy Grail " {L'Hystoire 
(ill Sainct Griaal : Paris, 1523), in a binding 



BIBLIOMANIA IN FRANCE. uj 

stamped with the four crowns of Louis XIV,, is 
valued at about ^£^500, A chivalric romance of 
the old days, which was treasured even in the 
time of the grand monarqne, when old French 
I literature was so much despised, is certainly 
I a curiosity. The Rabelais of Madame de 
Pompadour (in morocco) seems comparatively 
cheap at ;f6o. There is something piquant in 
the idea of inheriting from that famous beauty 
the work of the colossal genius of Rabelais.^ 

The natural sympathy of collectors "to middle 
fortune born" is not with the rich men whose 
sport in book-hunting resembles the M//«e. We 
side with the poor hunters of the wild game, 
who hang over the fourpenny stalls on the qitaU, 
and dive into the dusty boxes after literary 
pearls. These devoted men rise betimes, and 
hurry to the stalls before the common tide of 
passengers goes by. Early morning is the best 
moment in this, as in other sports. At half-past 
seven, in summer, the boitqiiiniste, the dealer in 
cheap volumes at second-hand, arrays the books 
which he purchased over night, the stray posses- 
sions of ruined families, the outcasts of libraries. 
The old-fashioned bookseller knew little of the 

' For s specimen of Mad.imc Pompadonr's bindirg see over- 
leftT. She had aoolher Rnbelnis in calf, lately lo lie seen in a 
sbop in roll Mall, 



J26 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



value of his wares ; it was his object to turn a 
small certain profit on his expeiiditura It is 
reckoned that an energetic, business-like old 
bookseller will turn over 150,000 volumes in a 
year. In this vast number there must be pick- 
ings for the humble collector who cannot afford 
to encounter the children of Israel at Sotheby's 
or at the H6tel Drouot. 

Let the enthusiast, in conclusion, throw a 
handful of lilies on the grave of the martyr of 
the love of books, — the poet Albert Glatigny, 
Poor Glatigny was the son of a garde champitre ; 
his education was accidental, and his poetic 
taste and skill extraordinarily fine and delicate. 
In his life of starvation (he had often to sleep in 
omnibuses and railway stations), he frequently 
spent the price of a dinner on a new book. He 
lived to read and to dream, and if he bought 
books he had not the wherewithal to live. Still, 
he bought them, — and he died ! His own poems 
were beautifully printed by Lemerre, and it may 
be a joy to him, if he knows it, that they are 
now so highly valued that the price of a copy 
would have kept the author alive and happy for 
a month. 




BINDINQ WITH THE ARMS OF MADAME DE POMPADOUK. 



OLD FRENCH TITLE-PAGES. 

Nothing can be plainer, as a rule, than a 
modern English title-page. Its only beauty (if 
beauty it possesses) consists in the arrangement 
and "massing" of lines of type in various sizes. 
We have returned almost to the primitive sim- 
plicity of the oldest printed books, which had no 
title-pages, properly speaking, at all, or merely 
gave, with extreme brevity, the name of the 
work, without printer's mark, or date, or place. 
These were reserved for the colophon, if it was 
thought desirable to mention them at all. 
Thus, in the black-letter example of Guido de 

IColumna's " History of Troy," written about 
1283, and printed at Strasburg in 1489, the title- 
page is blank, except for the words, 
I^UStorfa SCtoiana CSiiilronfg, 
standing alone at the top of the leaf. The 
colophon contains all the restof the information, 



128 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



" happily completed in the City of Strasburg, in 
the year of Grace Mcccclxxxix, about the Feast 
of St. Urban." The printer and publisher give 
no name at all. 

This early simplicity is succeeded, in French 
books, from, say, 1510, and aftenvards, by the 
insertion cither of the printer's trade mark, or, in 
black-letter books, of a rough woodcut, illustra- 
tive of the nature of the volume. The woodcuts 
have occasionally a rude kind of grace, with a 
touch of the classical taste of the early Renais- 
sance surviving in extreme decay. An excellent 
example is the title-page of "Les Demandes 
d'amours, avcc Ics responses joyeuses," published 
by Jacques Moderne, at Lyon, 1540, There is 
a certain Pagan breadth and joyousness in the 
figure of Amor, and the man in the hood 
sembles traditional portraits of Dante, 

There is more humour, and a good deal of 
skill, in the title-page of a book on late marriages 
and their discomforts, " Les dictz et complainctes 
de trop Tard marit^ " (Jacques Moderne, Lyon, 
1540), where we see the elderly and comfortable 
couple sitting gravely under their own fig-tree. 

Jacques Moderne was a printer curious in 
these quaint devices, and used them in most of 
his books : for example, in " How Satan and the 
God Bacchus accuse the Publicans that spoil 




€s tcmandes 
tumours aucc 
k^refpofestoyeiifta 

^etitade refponfe. 




I30 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN: 

the wine," Bacchus and Satan (exactly like 
other, as Sir Wilfrid Lawson will not be si 
prised to hear) are encouraging dishonest tavei 

:^2lc60ict5t colli' 




keepers to stew in their own juice in a caldn 
over a huge fire. From the same popular pub 
iisher came a little tract on various modes o 
sport, if the name of sport can be applied to th 



OLD FRENCff TITLE-PAGES. 

netting of fish and birds. The work is si 
" Livret nouveau auquel sont contenuz xxv 
receptes de prendre poissons et oiseaulx avec 
les mains." A countryman clad in a goat's sltin 
with the head and horns drawn over his head as 
a hood, is dragging ashore a net full of fishes. 
There is no more characteristic frontispiece of 
this black-letter sort than the woodcut repre- 
senting a gallows with three men hanging on i^ 
which illustrates Villon's " Ballade des Pendus," 
and is reproduced in Mr. John Payne's "Poems 
of Master Francis Villon of Paris " (London, 
i878).' 

Earlier in date than these vignettes of Jacques 
Moderne, but much more artistic and refined in 
design, are some frontispieces of small octavos 
printed ew leftres rondes, about 1530. In these 
rubricated letters are used with brilliant effect 
One of the best is the title-page of Galliot du 
Pr^'s edition of " Le Rommant de la Rose") 
Paris, 1529).^ Galliot du Prt^'s artist, however, 
surpassed even the charming device of the 
Lover plucking the Rose, in his title-page, of 
the same date, for the small octavo edition of 
Alain Chartier's poems, which we reproduce here. 

' Mr. Payne does nol give the date of the edition from which 
he copie* the cm. Apparently it is of the fifteenth century. 
' Keproduced in The Library, p. 94. 



4 



V 



133 BOOKS AlfD BOOKMEN. 

The arrangement of letters, and the use of I 
red, make a charming frame, as it were, to the < 

H'LES OEVVRES*« 
feu maiftrc Alatn chanfcr en Ton 

viuantSccretaircdufeuroy Chars 

les fepdcrine dunon. Nouuelle* 

fncntfmprimees icucuesSf 

corrigiecs ouJtrelei pre 

ccdetes (inprefTions . 




r.t'Onlesvcnd aParis^nl^ Srani 

fallcdu palaisau prcinietp,)iJeT«n 

iabouticquedeGaliiotdu pre Lp 

brairc iuredeLuniuerfife. 



drawing of the mediaeval ship, with the motto i 
VOGUE LA GALEE. 

Title-pages like these, with designs appro- I 



PASTISSIER 

FRANCOIS. 

a 

Ouicn; eriTeigne la manicreJe 

filre taute forte de Pafliffe- 

jtiei cres-utilearoQte forte 

de petfonnes. 

ENS E M B I E 

iDKBjen d'itmjfir teiitts fartit dauft 

"UrleijuHTs mattes e^aiitrcs, 

(nplui de foix^mcf^com. 




Ctcz Locys & Daniel. Elzevi'er. 



I.U BOOKS AMD BOOKMEN. 

priate to the character of the text, were super- 
seded presently by the fashion of badges, devices, 
and mottoes. As courtiers and ladies had their 
private badges, not hereditary, like crests, but 
personal — the crescent of Diane, the salamander 
of Francis I„ the skulls and crossbones of Henri 
III,, the marguerites of Marguerite, with mottoes 
like the Le Banny de Hesse, Le traverseur des 
voies pMlleiises, Tout par Soulas, and the like, 
so printers and authors had their emblems, 
and their private literary slogans. These they 
changed, according to fancy, or the vicissitudes 
of their lives. Clement Marot's motto was La 
Mort n'y Mord. It is indicated by the letters 
L. M, N. M, in the curious title of an edition of 
Marot's works published at Lyons by Jean de 
Tournes in 1579. The portrait represents the I 
poet when the tide of years had borne him far I 
from his youth, far from L Adolescence Climen- 
tine. 

The unfortunate Etienne Dolet, perhaps the 1 
only publisher who was ever burned, used an 1 
ominous device, a trunk of a tree, with the axe 
struck into it. In publishing " Les Marguerites I 
de la Marguerite des Princesses, tr^s illustre I 
Royne de Navarre," Jean de Tournes employed [ 
a pretty allegorical fancy. Love, with the I 
bandage thrust back from his eyes, and with 4 



13S 



BOOJtS AND BOOK^mN. 



the bow and arrows in his hand, has flown up to 
the sun, which he seems to touch ; like Pro- 
metheus in the myth when he stole the fire, 
a shower of flowers and flames falls around him. 
Groueleau, of Paris, had for motto Nul ne iy 
frotte, with the thistle for badge. These are 
beautifully combined in the title-page of his 
version of Apuleius, " L'Amour de Cupido et de 
Psyche" (Paris, 1557). There is probably no 
better date for frontispieces, both for ingenuity 
of device and for elegance of arrangement of 
title, than the years between 1530 and 1560. 
By 1562, when the first edition of the famous 
Fifth Book of Rabelais was published, the 
printers appear to have thought devices wasted 
on popular books, and the title of the Master's 
posthumous chapters is printed quite simply. 

In 1533—35 there was a more adventurous 
taste — witness the title of " Gargantua." This 
beautiful title decorates the first known edition, 
with a date of the First Book of Rabelais. It 
was sold, most appropriately, (^«'rt«^«oji'r?i?flWff 
de Confort. Why should so glorious a relic of 
the Master have been carried out of England. 
at the Sunderland sale? All the early titles of 
Francois Juste's Lyons editions of Rabelais are 
on this model. By 1 542 he dropped the frame- 
work of architectural design. By 1565 Richard 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Breton, in Paris, was printing Rabelais with j 
a frontispiece of a classical dame holding a 
heart to the sun, a figure which is almost in the 
taste of Stothard, or Flaxman. 

The taste for vignettes, engraved on copper, 
not on wood, was revived under the Elzevirs. 
Their pretty little frontispieces arc not so well | 
known but that we offer examples. In the | 
essay on the Elzevirs in this volume will be | 
found a copy of the vignette of the " Imitatio \ 
Christi," and of " Le Pastissier Francois " 
reproduction is given here (pp, 133, 135). The I 
artists they employed had plenty of fancy, not 
backed by very profound skill in design. 

In the same ^fwrf as the big-wigged classicism 
of the Elzevir vignettes, in an age when Louis 
XIV. and Moli^re (in tragedy) wore laurel 
wreaths over vast perruques, are the early 
frontispieces of Moli^re's own collected works. 
Probably the most interesting of all French 
title-pages are those drawn by Chauveau for the 
two volumes " Lcs Oeiivres de M, dc Moliire," 
published in 1666 by Guillaume de Luynes. 
The first shows Moli^re in two characters, as 
Mascarille, and as Sganarelle, in " Le Cocu 
Imaginaire." Contrast the full-blown jollity of 
the fourhtm imperator, in his hat, and feather, 
and wig, and vast canons, and tremendous shoe- 



I40 BOOKS Al^D BOOKMEN. 

tie, with the lean melancholy of jealous Sgana- 
relle. These are two notable aspects of the 
genius of the great comedian. The apes below 
are the supporters of his scutcheon. 

The second volume shows the Muse of 
Comedy crowning Mile, de MoH^re (Armande 
B^jart) in the dress of Agn^s, while her husband 
is in the costume, apparently, of Tartuffe, or 
of Sganarelle in " L'Ecole des Ferames.' 
"Tartuffe" had not yet been licensed for a 
public stage. The interest of the portraits and 
costumes makes these frontispieces precious, they 
are historical documents rather than mere 
curiosities. 

These title-pages of Molifere gre the hi^- 
water mark of French taste in this branch of 
decoration. In the old quarto first editions of 
Corneille's early plays, such as " Le Cid " (Paris, 
1637). tlie printers used lax and sprawling com- 
binations of flowers and fruit. These, a little 
better executed, were the staple of Ribou, de 
Luynes, Quinet, and the other Parisian book- 
sellers who, one after another, failed to satisfy 
Moli^re as publishers. The basket of fruits on 
the title-page of " Iphig^nie," par M. Racine 
(Barbin, Paris, 1675), is almost, but not quite, 
identical with the similar ornament of De 
Visa's "La Cocue Imaginaire" (Ribou, Paris, 



OLD FSENCff TITLE-PAGES. 141 

662). Many of Moliire's plays appearing first, 
separately, in small octavo, were adorned with 
frontispieces, illustrative of some scene in the 
comedy. Thus, in the "Misanthrope" (Ribou, 
1667) we see Alceste, green ribbons and all, 
discoursing with Philiute, or perhaps listening 
to the famous sonnet of Oronte ; it is not easy 
to be quite certain, but the expression of 
Alceste's face looks rather as if he were being 
baited with a sonnet. From the close of the 
seventeenth century onwards, the taste for 
frontispieces declined, except when Moreau or 
Gravelot drew vignettes on copper, with abun- 
dance of cupids and nymphs. These were 
designed for very luxurious and expensive 
books ; for others, men contented themselves 
with a bald simplicity, which has prevailed till 
own time. In recent years the employment 
of publishers' devices has been less unusual and 
more agreeable. Thus Poulet Malassis had his 
armes parlantes, a chicken very uncomfortably 
perched on a rail. In England we have the 
cipher and bees of Messrs. MacmiUan, the Trees 
of Life and Knowledge of Messrs. Kegan Paul 
and Trench, the Ship, which was the sign of 
Messrs. Longman's early place of business, and 
doubtless other symbols, all capable of being 
quaintly treated in a title-page. 



BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



A BOOKMAN'S PURGATORY. 

Thomas Blinton was a book-hunter. He \ 
had always been a book-hunter, ever sine* 
an extremely early age, he had awakened to ] 
the errors of his ways as a collector of stamps I 
and monograms. In book-hunting he saw no I 
harm ; nay, he would contrast its joys, in a f 
ratlier pharisaical style, with the pleasures of I 
shooting and fishing. He constantly declined I 
to believe that the devil came for that renowned f 
amateur of black letter, G. Steevens, Dibdin I 
himself, who tells the story {with obvious | 
anxiety and alarm), pretends to refuse credit to j 
the ghastly narrative. " His language," says I 
Dibdin, in his account of the book-hunter's end, I 
"was, too frequently, the language of impreca- j 
tion." This is rather good, as if Dibdin thought f 
a gentleman might swear pretty often, but not 1 
" too frequently," " Although I am not disposed I 
to admit," Dibdin goes on, "the wkole of the 



A BOOKMAN'S PURGATORY. 143 

ftestimony of the good woman who watched by 
Steevens's bedside, although my prejudices (as 
they may be called) will not allow me to believe 
that the windows shook, and that strange noises 

I and deep groans were heard at midnight in his 
room, yet no creature of common sense (and 
this woman possessed the quality in an eminent 
degree) could mistake oaths for prayers ; " and 
so forth. In short, Dibdin clearly holds that 
the windows did shake " without a blast," like 
the banners in Branxholme Hall when some- 
body came for the Goblin Page. 
But Thomas Blinton would hear of none of 
these things. He said that his taste made him 
take exercise; that he walked from the City to 
West Kensington every day, to beat the covers 
of the book-stalls, while other men travelled in 
the expensive cab or the unwholesome Metro- 
politan Railway. We are all apt to hold 
favourable views of our own amusements, and, 
for my own part, I believe that trout and salmon 

I are incapable of feeling pain. But the flimsi- 
ness of Blinton's theories must be apparent to 
every unbiassed moralist. His "harmless taste" 
really involved most of the deadly sins, or at all 
events a fair working majority of them. He 
coveted his neighbours' books. When he got 
tiie chance he bought books in a cheap market 



144 BOOJCS AND BOOKMEN. 

and sold them in a dear market, thereby de- 
grading literature to the level of trade. He 
took advantage of the ignorance of uneducated 
persons who kept book-stalls. He was env 
and grudged the good fortune of others, while 
he rejoiced in their failures. He turned a deaf 
ear to the appeals of poverty. He was lux- 
urious, and laid out more money than he should 
have done on his selfish pleasures, often adorn- 
ing a volume with a morocco binding wher 
Mrs. BJinton sighed in vain for some old point 
dAlenqon lace. Greedy, proud, envious, stingy, 
extravagant, and sharp in his dealings, BHaton 
was guilty of most of the sins which the Church 
recognises as "deadly." 

On the very day before that of which the 
affecting history is now to be told, Blinton had 
been running the usual round of crime. He 
had (as far as intentions went) defrauded a 
bookseller in Holywell Street by purchasing 
from him, for the sum of two shillings, what he 
took to be a very rare Elzevir. It is true that 
when he got home and consulted " Willenis," he 
found that he had got hold of the wrong copy, 
in which the figures denoting the numbers of 
pages are printed right, and which is therefore 
worth exactly "nuppence" to the collector. 
But the intention is the thing, and Elinton's 






A BOOKATAN'S PURGATORY. U5 

f intention was distinctly fraudulent. When he 
discovered his error, then "his language," as 
Dibdin says, " was that of imprecation." Worse 
(if possible) than this, BHnton had gone to a 
sale, begun to bid for "Les Essais de Michel, 
Seigneur de Montaigne" (Foppens, MDCLIX,), 
and, carried away by excitement, had " plunged " 
Lto the extent of £i^, which was precisely the 
■amount of money he owed his plumber and 
'■ gasfitter, a worthy man with a large family. 
Then, meeting a friend (if the book-hunter has 
friends), or rather an accomplice in lawless 
enterprise, Blinton had remarked the glee on 
the other's face. The poor man had purchased 
a little old Olaus Magnus, with woodcuts, repre- 
senting were-wolves, fire-drakes, and other 
fearful wild-fowl, and was happy in his bargain. 
But Blinton, with fiendish joy, pointed out to 
him that the index was imperfect, and left him 
sorrowing. 

Deeds more foul have yet to be told. Thomas 
Blinton had discovered a new sin, so to speak, 
in the collecting way. Aristophanes says of one 
of his favourite blackguards, "Not only is he a 
villain, but he has invented an original villainy." 
Blinton was like this. He maintained that 
every man who came to notoriety had, at some 
^^ period, published a volume of poems which he 



146 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

had afterwards repented of and withdrawn. It 
was Blinton's hideous pleasure to collect stray 
copies of these unhappy volumes, these " P^ch^s 
de Jeunesse," which, always and invariably, 
bear a gushing inscription from the author to a 
friend. He had all Lord John Manners's 
poems, and even Mr. Ruskin's. He had the 
"Ode to Despair" of Smith (presently a comic 
■ft-riter), and the " Love Lyrics " of Brown, who 
is now a permanent under-secretary, than which 
nothing can be less gay nor more permanent 
He had the amatory songs which a dignitary of 
the Church published and withdrew from circu- 
lation. Blinton was wont to say he expected 
to come across " Triolets of a Tribune," by Mr. 
John Bright, and " Original Hymns for Infant 
Minds," by Mr. Henry Labouchere, if he only 
hunted long enough. 

On the day of which I speak he had secured 
a volume of love-poems which the author had 
done his best to destroy, and he had gone to 
his club and read all the funniest passages 
aloud to friends of the author, who was on the 
club tommittee. Ah, was this a kind action ? 
In short, Blinton had filled up the cup of his 
iniquities, and nobody will be surprised to hear 
that he met the appropriate punishment of his 
offence. Blinton had passed, on the whole, a 



A BOOKMAN'S FVRGATORY. m 

happy day, notwithstanding the error about the 
Elzevir. He dined well at his club, went home, 
slept well, and started next morning for his 
office in the City, walking, as usual, and intend- 
ing to pursue the pleasures of the chase at all 
the book-stalls. At the very first, in the 
Brompton Road, he saw a man turning over 
the rubbish in the cheap box. Blinton stared 
at him, fancied he knew him, thought he didn't, 
and then became a prey to the glittering eye of 
the other. The Stranger, who wore the con- 
venb'onal cloak and slouched soft hat of 
Strangers, was apparently an accomplished 
mesmerist, or thought-reader, or adept, or 
esoteric Buddhist. He resembled Mr. Isaacs, 
Zanoni (in the novel of that name), Mendoza 
(in " Codlingsby "), the soul-less man in "A 
Strange Story," Mr. Home, Mr. Irving Bishop, 
a Buddhist adept in the astral body, and most 
j other mysterious characters of history and 
I fiction. Before his Awful Will, Blinton's mere 
modern obstinacy shrank back like a child 
abashed. The Stranger glided to him and 

I whispered, " Buy these." 
"These" were a complete set of Auerbach's 
novels, in English, which, I need not say, Blinton 
would never have dreamt of purchasing had he 
been left to his own devices. 



I 



148 BOOKS AND BOOKMBK 

" Buy these ! " repeated the Adept, or what- 
ever he was, in a cruel whisper. Paying the 
sum demanded, and trailing his vast load of 
German romance, poor Blinton followed the 
fiend. 

They reached a stall where, amongst much 
trash, Glatigny's " Jour de I'An d'un Vagabond " 
was exposed. 

" Look," said Blinton, " there is a book I have 
wanted some time. Glatignys are getting rather 
scarce, and it is an amusing trifle." 

" Nay, buy Utatl' said the implacable Stranger 
pointing with a hooked forefinger at Alison's 
"History of Europe," in an indefinite number 
of volumes. Blinton shuddered. 

"What, buy that, and why? In heaven's 
name, what could I do with it ? " 

" Buy it," repeated the persecutor, " and tkat 
(indicating the " Ilios " of Dr. Schliemann, a 
bulky work), "and these" (pointing to all Mr. 
Theodore Alois Buckley's translations of the 
Classics), " and these " (glancing at the collected 
writings of the late Mr. Hain Friswell, and at a 
"Life," in more than one volume, of Mr. Glad' 
stone). 

The miserable Blinton paid, and trudged 
along carrying the bargains under his arm. 
Now one book fell out, now another dropped 



A BOOKMAN'S FURGATORY. 



'49 



I 



by the way. Sometimes a portion of Alison 
came ponderously to earth ; sometimes the 
"Gentle Life" sunk resignedly to the ground. 
The Adept kept picking them up again, and 
packing them under the arms of the weary 
Blinton. 

The victim now attempted to put on an air 
of geniality, and tried to enter into conversation 
with his tormentor. 

" He does know about books," thought Blinton, 
"and he must have a weak spot somewhere." 

So the wretched amateur made play in his 
best conversational style. He talked of bind- 
ings, of Maioli, of Grolier, of De Thou, of Derome, 
of Clovis Eve, of Roger Payne, of Trautz, and 
eke of Bauzonnet. He discoursed of first 
editions, of black letter, and even of illustrations 
and vignettes. He approached the topic of 
Bibles, but here his tyrant, with a fierce yet 
timid glance, interrupted him. 

" Buy those ! " he hissed through his teeth. 

" Those " were the complete publications of 
the Folk Lore Society, 

Blinton did not care for folk lore (very bad 
men never do), but he had to act as he was told. 

Then, without pause or remorse, he was 
charged to acquire the " Ethics " of Aristotle, 
in the agreeable versions of Williams and Chase. 



ISO BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Next he secured " Strathmore," " Chandt 
" Under Two Flags," and " Two Little Wooden 
Shoes," and several dozens more of Ouida's 
novels. The next stall was entirely filled with 
school-books, old geographies, Livys, Delectuses, 
Arnold's " Greek Exercises," Oilendorffs, and 
what not. 

" Buy them all," hissed the fiend. He seized 
whole boxes, and piled them on Blinton's head. 

He tied up Ouida's novels in two parcels, 
with string, and fastened each to one of the 
buttons above the tails of Blinton's coat, 

" You are tired ? " asked the tormentor. 
" Never mind, these books will soon be off your 
hands." 

So speaking, the Stranger, with amazing 
speed, hurried Blinton back through Holywell 
Street, along the Strand, and up to Piccadilly, 
stopping at last at the door of Blinton's famous 
and very expensive binder. 

The binder opened his eyes, as well he might, 
at the vision of Blinton's treasures. Then the 
miserable Blinton found himself, as it were 
automatically and without any exercise of his 
will, speaking thus : — 

" Here are some things I have picked up, — 
extremely rare, — and you will oblige me by 
binding them in your best manner, regardless of 



A BOOKMAN'S PURGATORY. 151 

expense, Morocco, of course ; crushed levant 
morocco, doubU, every book of 'Ca&m., petits fers, 
my crest and coat of arms, plenty of gilding. 
Spare no cost. Don't keep me waiting, as you 
generally do ; " for indeed bookbinders are the 
most dilatory of the human species. 

Before the astonished binder could ask the 
most necessary questions, Blinton's tormentor 
had hurried that amateur out of the room. 

" Come on to the sale," he cried. 

" What sale ? " said Blinton, 

" Why, the Beckford sale ; it is the thirteenth 
day, a lucky day." 

" But I have forgotten my catalogue." 

" Where is it ? " 

" In the third shelf from the top, on the right- 
hand side of the ebony book-case at home." 

The stranger stretched out his arm, which 
swiftly elongated itself till the hand disappeared 
from view round the corner. In a moment the 
hand returned with the catalogue. The pair sped 
on to Messrs. Sotheby's auction-rooms in Wel- 
lington Street. Every one knows the appearance 
of a great book-sale. The long table, surrounded 
by eager bidders, resembles from a little distance 
a roulette table, and communicates the same 
sort of excitement. The amateur is at a loss to 
know how to conduct himself If he bids in his 



153 



BOOKS AND SOOfCMEff. 



own person, some bookseller will outbid him, 
partly because the bookseller knows that, after 
all, he knows little about books, and suspects 
that the amateur may, in this case, know more. 
Besides, professionals always dislike amateurs, 
and, in this game, they have a very great 
advantage. Blinton knew all this, and was in 
the habit of giving his commissions to a broker. 
But now he felt (and very naturally) as if a 
demon had entered into him. " Tirante il Bianco 
Valorosissimo Cavaliere" was being competed 
for, an excessively rare romance of chivalry, in 
magnificent red Venetian morocco, from Cane- 
vari's library. The book is one of the rarest of 
the Venetian Press, and beautifully adorned 
with Canevari's device, — a simple and elegant 
affair in gold and colours. "Apollo is driving 
his chariot across the green waves towards the 
rock, on which winged Pegasus is pawing the 
ground," though why this action of a horse 
should be called " pawing " (the animal notori- 
ously not possessing paws) it is hard to say. 
Round this graceful design is the inscription 
OPeSJS KAI MH A0SIQ2 ("straight not 
crooked"). In his ordinary mood Blinton could 
only have admired " Tirante il Bianco " from a 
distance. But now, the demon inspiring him, 
he rushed into the lists, and challenged the great 



I 



A BOOKMAN'S PURGATORY. 1S3 

Mr. , the Napoleon of bookselling. The 

price had already reached five hundred pounds. 

" Six hundred," cried Blinton. 

" Guineas," said the great Mr . 

"Seven hundred," screamed Blinton. 

"Guineas," replied the other. 

This arithmetical dialogue went on till even 

Mr. struck his flag, with a sigh, when the 

maddened Blinton had said "Six thousand." The 
cheers of the audience rewarded the largest bid 
ever made for any book. As if he had not done 
enough, the Stranger now impelled Blinton to 

contend with Mr. for every expensive work 

that appeared. The audience naturally fancied 
that Blinton was in the earlier stage of softening of 
the brain, when a man conceives himself to have 
inherited boundless wealth, and is determined 
to live up to it. The hammer fell for the last 
time. Blinton owed some fifty thousand pounds, 
and exclaimed audibly, as the influence of the 
fiend died out, " I am a ruined man," 

"Then your books must be sold," cried the 
Stranger, and, leaping on a chair, he addressed 
the audience : — 

"Gentlemen, I invite you to Mr. BHnton's 
sale, which will immediately take place. The 
collection contains some very remarkable early 
English poets, many first editions of the French 



154 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

classics, most of the rarer Aldioes, and a singular 
assortment of Americana." 

In a moment, as if by magic, the shelves 
round the room were filled with Blintoa's books, 
all tied up in big lots of some thirty volumes 
each. His early Moli^res were fastened to old 
French dictionaries and school-books. His 
Shakespeare quartos were in the same lot with 
tattered railway novels. His copy (almost 
unique) of Richard Barnfield's much too " Affec- 
tionate Shepheard " was coupled with odd 
volumes of " Chips from a German Workshop " 
and a cheap, imperfect example of "Tom 
Brown's School-Days." Hookes's "Amanda" 
was at the bottom of a lot of American devo- 
tional works, where it kept company with an 
Elzevir Tacitus and the Aldine " Hypneroto- 
machia." The auctioneer put up lot after lot, 
and Blinton plainly saw that the whole affair 
was a "knock-out." His most treasured spoils 
were parted with at the price of waste paper. It 
is an awful thing to be present at one's own 
sale. No man would bid above a few shillings. 
Well did Blinton know that after the knock-out 
the plunderwould be shared among the grinning 
bidders. At last his "Adonais," uncut, bound 
by Lortic, went, in company with some old 
" Bradshaws," the "Court Guide" of 1881, and 



A BOOKMAN'S PURGATORY. 

a stray volume of the "Sunday at Home," for 
sixpence. The Stranger smiled a smile of 
peculiar malignity. Blinton leaped up to pro- 
test ; the room seemed to shake around him, 
but words would not come to his lips. 

Then he heard a familiar voice observe, as a 
familiar grasp shook his shoulder, — 

"Tom, Tom, what a nightmare you are en- 
joying ! " 

He was in his own arm-chair, where he had 
fallen asleep after dinner, and Mrs. EUnton was 
doing her best to arouse him from his awful 
m. Beside him lay " L'Enfer du Bibliophile, 
vu et d^crit 'par Charles Asselineau." {Paris : 
Tardieu, MDCCCLX,) 

If this were an ordinary tract, I should have 
to tell how Blinton's eyes were opened, how he 
gave up book -collecting, and took to gardening, 
or politics, or something of that sort. But truth 
:ompeis me to admit that Blinton's repentance 
had vanished by the end of the week, when he 
was discovered marking M. Claudia's catalogue, 
surreptitiously, before breakfast. Thus, indeed, 
end all our remorses. " Lancelot falls to his 
own love again," as in the romance. Much, and 
justly, as theologians decry a death-bed repent- 
ance, it is, perhaps, the only repentance that we 



156 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

do not repent of. AH others leave us ready, 
when occasion comes, to fall to our old love 
again ; and may that love never be worse than 
the taste for old books ! Once a collector, 
always a collector. Moi qui parley I have sinned, 
and struggled, and fallen. I have thrown cata- 
logues, unopened, into the waste-paper basket. 
I have withheld my feet from the paths that lead 
to Sotheby's and to Puttick's. I have crossed 
the street to avoid a book-stall. In fact, like 
the prophet Nicholas, "I have been known to 
be steady for weeks at a time." And then the 
fatal moment of temptation has arrived, and I 
have succumbed to the soft seductions of Eisen, 
or Cochin, or an old book on Angling. Probably 
Grolier was thinking of such weaknesses when 
he chose his devices Tanquam VentuSy and 
quisque suos patimur Manes. Like the wind we 
are blown about, and, like the people in the 
iEneid, we are obliged to suffer the consequences 
of our own extravagance. 



( 157 ) 



BALLADE OF THE UNATTAINABLE. 

The Books I cannot hope to buy, 
Their phantoms round me waltz and wheel, 
They pass before the dreaming eye, 
Ere Sleep the dreaming eye can seal. 
A kind of literary reel 
They dance ; how fair the bindings shine ! 
Prose cannot tell them what I feel, — 
The Books that never can be mine ! 

There frisk Editions rare and shy, 
Morocco clad from head to heel ; 
Shakespearian quartos ; Comedy 
As first she flashed from Richard Steele ; 
And quaint De Foe on Mrs. Veal ; 
And, lord of landing net and line. 
Old Izaak with his fishing creel, — 
The Books that never can be mine ! 



IS8 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Incunables ! for you I sigh, 
Black letter, at thy founts I kneel, 
Old tales of Perrault's nursery. 
For you Td go without a meal ! 
For Books wherein did Aldus deal 
And rare Galliot du Pr^ I pine. 
The watches of the night reveal 
The Books that never can be mine ! 

ENVOY. 

Prince, hear a hopeless Bard's appeal ; 
Reverse the rules of Mine and Thine ; 
Make it legitimate to steal 
The Books that never can be mine ! 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. 

E biographer of Mrs. Aphra Behn refutes the 
vulgar error that " a Dutchman cannot love." 
Whether or not a lady can love books is a 
question that may not be so readily settled. 
Mr. Ernest Quenttn Bauchart has contributed 
to the discussion of this problem by publishing 
a bibliography, in two quarto volumes, of books 
which have been in the libraries of famous 
beauties of old, queens and princesses of France. 
There can be no doubt that these ladies were 
possessors of exquisite printed books and manu- 
scripts wonderfully bound, but it remains un- 
certain whether the owners, as a rule, were 
bibliophiles ; whether their hearts were with 
their treasures. Incredible as it may seem to 
us now, literature was highly respected in the 
past, and was even fashionable. Poets were in 
favour at court, and Fashion decided that the 
, great must possess books, and not only books. 



l6o BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

but books produced in the utmost perfection of 1 

art, and bound with all the skill at the disposal 
of Clovis Eve, and Padeloup, and Duseuit. 
Therefore, as Fashion gave her commands, we 
cannot hastily affirm that the ladies who obeyed 
were really book-lovers. In our more polite 
age. Fashion has decreed that ladies shall smoke, 
and bet, and romp, but it would be premature 
to assert that all ladies who do their duty in 
these matters are born romps, or have an un- 
affected liking for cigarettes. History, however, 
maintains that many of the renowned dames 
whose books are now the most treasured of 
literary relics were actually inclined to study as 
well as to pleasure, like Marguerite de Valois 
and the Comtesse de Verrue, and even Madame 
de Pompadour. Probably books and arts were 
more to this lady's liking than the diversions by 
which she beguiled the tedium of Louis XV, ; 
and many a time she would rather have been 
quiet with her plays and novels than engaged in 
conscientiously conducted but distasteful revels. 
Like a true Frenchman, M. Bauchart has only 
written about French lady book-lovers, or about 
women who, like Mary Stuart, were more than 
half French. Nor would it be easy for an 
English author to name, outside the ranks of ] 
, crowned heads, like Elizabeth, any English- 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. iGi 

women of distinction who had a passion for the 
material side of literature, for binding, and first 
editions, and large paper, and engravings in 
■early " states." The practical sex, when studious, 
B| like the same sex when fond of equestrian 
Itxercise. " A lady says, ' My heyes, he's an 
orse, and he must go,'" according to Leech's 
groom. In the same way, a studious girl or 
matron says, "This is a book," and reads it, if 
read she does, without caring about the date, 
or the state, or the publisher's name, or even 
very often about the author's. I remember, 
before the publication of a novc! now celebrated, 
seeing a privately printed vellum-bound copy on 
large paper in the hands of a literary lady. She 
was holding it over the fire, and had already 
made the vellum covers curl wide open like the 
shells of an afflicted oyster. When I asked 
what the volume was, she explained that "It is 
a book which a poor man has written, and he's 
had it printed to see whether some one won't be 
kind enough to publish it." I ventured, perhaps 
pedantically, to point out that the poor man 
could not be so very poor, or he would not have 
made so costly an experiment on Dutch paper. 
But the lady said she did not know how that 
Blight be, and she went on toasting the experi- 
bent In all this there is a fine contempt for 



i6i BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

everything but the spiritual aspect of literature ; 
there is an aversion to the mere coquetry and 
display of morocco and red letters, and the toys 
which amuse the minds of men. Where ladies 
have caught " the Bibliomania," I fancy they 
have taken this pretty fever from the other sex. 
But it must be owned that the books they have 
possessed, being rarer and more romantic, are 
even more highly prized by amateurs than 
examples from the libraries of Grolier, and 
Longepierre, and D'Hoym. M.Eauchart's book 
is a complete guide to the collector of these 
expensive relics. He begins his dream of fair 
women who have owned books with the pearl 
of the Valois, Marguerite d'Angouleme, the sister 
of Francis I. The remains of her library are 
chieHy devotional manuscripts. Indeed, it is to 
be noted that all these ladies, however frivolous, 
possessed the most devout and pious books, and 
whole collections of prayers copied out by the 
pen, and decorated with miniatures, Mar- 
guerite's library was bound in morocco, stamped 
with a crowned M in interlacs sown with daisies, 
or, at least, with conventional flowers which 
may have been meant for daisies. If one could 
choose, perhaps the most desirable of the speci- 
mens extant is " Le Premier Livrc du Prince 
Ses Pontes, Hom6re,"in Salel's translation. For 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. 



,53 



this translation Roiisard writes a prologue, ad- 
dressed to the manes of Salel, in which he 
complains that he is ridiculed for his poetry. 
He draws a characteristic picture of Homer and 
Salel in Elysium, among the learned lovers : 
s fleurs deviicnt 



Marguerite's manuscript copy of the First 
Book of the Iliad is a small quarto, adorned 
with daisies, fleurs de-lis, and the crowned M. 
It is in the Due d'Aumale's collection at 
Chantilly. The books of Diane de Poitiers arc 
more numerous and more famous. When first 
a widow she stamped her volumes with a laurel 
springing from a tomb, and the motto, " Sola 
vivit in illo," But when she consoled herself 
with Henri II. she suppressed the tomb, and 
made the motto meaningless. Her crescent 
shone not only on her books, but on the palace 
walls of France, in the Louvre, Fontainebleau, 
and Anet, and her initial D. is inextricably 
interlaced with the H. of her royal lover. 
Indeed, Henri added the D to his own cypher, 
and this must have been so embarrassing for his 
wife Catherine, that people have good-naturedly 
tried to read the curves of the D's as C's. The 
D's and the crescentSj and the bows of his Diana 
are impressed even on the covers of Henri's 






BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 



13ook of Hours, Catherine's own cypher is 
double C enlaced with an H, or double K's 
(Katlierine) combined in the same manner. 
These, unlike the D.H., are surmounted with 
a crown — the one advantage which the wife 
possessed over the favourite. Among Diane's 
books arc various treatises on medicines and o 
surgery, and plenty of poetry and Italian novels. 
Among the books exhibited at the British 
Museum in glass cases is Diane's copy of 
Bembo's " History of Venice." An American 
collector, Mr, Barlow, of New York, is happy 
enough to possess her "Singularitez de la France 
Antarctique" (Antwerp, 1558). 

Catherine de Medicis got splendid books on 
the same terms as foreign pirates procure 
English novels— she stole them. The Marshal 
Strozzi, dying in the French service, left a noble 
collection, on which Catherine laid her hands, 
Brantome says that Strozzi's son often expressed 
to him a candid opinion about tliis transaction. 
What with her own collection and what with 
the Marshal's, Catherine possessed about four 
thousand volumes. On her death they were in 
peril of being seized by her creditors, but her 
almoner carried them to his own house, and De 
Thou had them placed in the royal library. 
Unluckily it was thought wiser to strip the 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. 



'H 



books of the coats with Catherine's compromis- 
ing device, lest her creditors should single them 
out, and take them away in their pockets. 
Hence, books with her arras and cypher are 
exceedingly rare. At the sale of the collections 
of the Duchesse de Berry, a Book of Hours of 
Catherine's was sold for ;£2400. 

Mary Stuart of Scotland was one of the lady 
book-lovers whose taste was more than a mere 
following of the fashion. Some of her books, 
like one of Marie Antoinette's, were the com- 
panions of her captivity, and stiil bear the sad 
complaints which she entrusted to these last 
friends of fallen royalty. Her note-book, in 
which she wrote her Latin prose exercises when 
a girl, still survives, bound in red morocco, with 
the arms of France. In a Book of Hours, now 
the property of the Czar, may be partly de- 
ciphered the quatrains which she composed in 
her sorrowful years, but many of them are 
mutilated by the binder's shears. The Queen 
used the volume as a kind of album : it contains 
the signatures of the "Countess of Schrewsbury" 
(as M. Bauchart has it), of Walsingham, of the 
Earl of Sussex, and of Charles Howard, Earl of 
Nottingham. There is also the signature, " Your 
most infortunat, Arbella Seymour," and 
" Fr. Bacon." 



166 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

This remarkable manuscript was purchased 
in Paris, during the Revolution, by Peter Du- 
browsky, who carried it to Russia. Another 
Book of Hours of the Queen's bears this in- 
scription, in a sixteenth-century hand: "Ce 
sont les Heures de Marie Setuart Renne. Mar- 
guerite de Blacuod de Rosay." In De Blacuod 
it is not very easy to recognise "Blackwood." 
Marguerite was probably the daughter of Adam 
Blackwood, who wrote a volume on Mary 
Stuart's sufferings (Edinburgh, 1587). 

The famous Marguerite de Valois, the wife of 
Henri IV., had certainly a noble library, and 
many beautifully bound books stamped with 
daisies are attributed to her collection, They 
bear the motto, "Expcctata non eludet," which 
appears to refer, first to tlie daisy (" Margarita "), 
which is punctual in the spring, or rather is 
"the constellated flower that never sets," and 
next, to the lady, who will " keep tryst." But 
is the lady Marguerite de Valois ? Though the 
books have been sold at very high prices as 
relics of the leman of La Mole, it seems im- 
possible to demonstrate that they were ever on 
her shelves, that they were bound by Clovis 
Eve from her own design. "No mention is 
made of them in any contemporary document, 
I the judicious are reduced to conjectures." 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. 



167 



Yet they form a most important collection, 
systematically bound, science and philosophy in 
citron morocco, the poets in green, and history 
and theology in red. In any case it is absurd 
to explain "Expectata non eludet " as a reference 
to the lily of the royal arms, which appears on 
the centre of the daisy-pied volumes. The 
motto, in that case, would run, " Expectata 
(lilia) non eludent." As it stands, the feminine 
adjective, "expectata," in the singular, must 
apply either to the lady who owned the volumes, 
or to the " Margarita," her emblem, or to both. 
Yet the ungrammatical rendering is that which 
M. Bauchart suggests. Many of the books. 
Marguerite's or not, were sold at prices over 
.£100 in London, in 1884 and 1883. The 
Macrobius, and Theocritus, and Homer are in 
the Cracherodc collection at the British Museum, 
The daisy-crowned Ronsard went for ,£'430 at 
the Beckford sale. These prices will probably 
never be reached again. 

If Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV,, 
was a bibliophile, she may be suspected of acting 
on the motive, " Love me, love my books." 
About her affection for Cardinal Mazarin there 
seems to be no doubt : the Cardinal had a 
famous library, and his royal friend probably 
imitated his tastes. In lier time, and on her 



1 68 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

volumes, the originality and taste of the skilled 
binder, Le Gascon, begin to declare themselves. 
The fashionable passion for lace, to which La 
Fontaine made such sacrifices, affected the art 
of book decoration, and Le Gascon's beautiful 
patterns of gold points and dots arc copies of 
the productions of Venice. The Queen-Mother's 
books include many devotional treatises, for, 
whatever other fashions might come and go, 
piety was always constant before the Revolu- 
tion. Anne of Austria seems to have been 
particularly fond of the lives and works of Saint 
Theresa, and Saint Francois de Sales, and John 
of the Cross. But she was not unread in the 
old French poets, such as Coquillart ; she con- 
descended to Ariosto ; she had that dubious 
character, Theophile de Viaud, beautifully 
bound; she owned the Rabelais of IS53; and, 
what is particularly interesting, M. de LigneroUes 
possesses her copy of "L'EschoIe des Femmcs, 
Comedie par J, B. P. MoUere. Paris ; Guillaumc 
de Luyncs, 1C63." In 12", red morocco, gilt 
edges, and the Queen's arms on the covers, 
This relic is especially valuable when we re- 
member that " L'EcoIe des Femmes " and 
Arnolphe's sermon to Agn6s, and his comic 
threats of future punishment first made envy 
take the form of religious persecution, The 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. 



i6g 



devout Queen-Mother was often appealed to by 
the enemies of Moii6re, yet Anne of Austria 
had not only seen his comedy, but possessed 
this beautiful example of the first edition. M. 
Paul Lacroix supposes that this copy was offered 
to the Queen-Mother by Moli^re himself. The 
frontispiece (Arnolphe preaching to Agnis) is 
thought to be a portrait of Molifere, but in the 
reproduction in M. Louis Lacour's edition it is 
not easy to see any resemblance. Apparently 
Anne did not share the views, even in her later 
years, of the converted Prince de Conty, for 
several comedies and novels remain stamped 
with her arms and device. 

The learned Marquise de Rambouillet, the 
parent of all the " Precieuses," must have owned 
a good library, but nothing Is chronicled save 
her celebrated book of prayers and meditations, 
written out and decorated by Jarry. It is bound 
in red morocco, doiibM with green, and covered 
with V's in gold. The Marquise composed the 
prayers for her own use, and Jarry was so much 
struck with their beauty that he asked leave to 
introduce them into the Book of Hours which 
lie had to copy, "for the prayers are often so 
silly," said he, "that I am ashamed to write 
them out." 

Here is an example of the devotions which 



170 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

Jarry admired, a prayer to Saint Louis. It was 
published in " Miscellanies Bibliographiques " by 
M, Prosper Blanchemain. 

PRIEIRE A SAINT-LOUIS, 

Rov DE France. 

Grand Roy, bien que votre cou^^nne ayt este <les plus 
esclatanles de la Teire, celle que vous portez dans le del est 
incomparablenient plus predeuse. L'une estoit perisssble 
I'autre est immortelle ct cee lys dont la blancheuc se pouvoit 
teroii, sont maintenant incormptibles. Vostre obeissance envers 
vostre inire ; vostre jaslice envers vns sujets ; et vos guerres 
contre lea inRdeles, vous ont acquis la veneration de tous les 
peoples J et la France doit i vos travaux et i vostre piil^ 
rineslimable tresor de la sanglante et glotiense couronne da 
Sauveut du monde, Priez-le incomparable Sainl qu'il donne 
une paix perpetuelle au Royaume dont vous avez porl^ le 
sceptre ; qo'il le preserve d'hdrdsie ; qu'il y face loQjours r^nei 
saintemcDt vostre illustre Sang ; et que tous ceux qui onl 
rhonnctir d'en descendre soient pour jamais fiddles fi son Eglise. 

The daughter of the Marquise, the fair Julie, 
heroine of that " long courting " by M. de 
Montausier, survives in those records as the 
possessor of " La Guirlande de Julie," the manu- 
script book of poems by eminent hands. But 
this manuscript seems to have been all the 
library of Julie ; therein she could constantly 
read of her own perfections. To be sure she 
had also " L'Histoire de Gustave Adolphe," a 
L hero for whom, like Major Diigald Dalgctty, she 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. i;i 

cherished a supreme devotion. In the "Guir- 
lande " Chapelain's verses turn on the pleasing 
fancy that the Protestant Lion of the North, 
changed into a flower (like Paul Limayrac in 
M. Banvilie's ode), requests Julie to take pity on 
his altered estate : 

Sois piloyable i ma langueut ; 
Et si je n'ay place en ton cceur 
Que je I'aye an moins sur ta teste, 

These verses were reckoned consummate. 

The "Guirlande" is still, with happier fate 
than attends most books, in the hands of the 
successors of the Due and Duchesse de Mon- 
tausier. 

Like Julie, Madame de Maintenon was a 
fr^cietise, but she never had time to form a 
regular library. Her books, however, were 
bound by Duseuil, a binder immortal in the 
verse of Pope ; or it might be more correct to 
say that Madame de Maintenon's own books 
are seldom distinguishable from those of her 
favourite foundation, St. Cyr, The most in- 
teresting is a copy of the first edition of 
" Esther," in quarto (1689), bound in red 
morocco, and bearing, in Racine's hand, "A 
Madame la Marquise de Maintenon, offert avec 
rrs/>cci,— Racine." 

Doubtless Racine had the book bound before 



171 BOOKS Al^D BOOKMEN. 

he presented it. " People are discontented," 
writes his son Louis, "if you offer them a book 
in a simple marbled paper cover." I could wish 
that this worthy -custom were restored, for the 
sake of the art of binding, and also because 
amateur poets would be more chary of their 
presentation copies. It is, no doubt, wise to 
turn these gifts with their sides against the 
inner walls of bookcases, to be bulwarks against 
the damp, but the trouble of acknowledging 
worthless presents from strangers is con- 
siderable.^ 

Another interesting example of Madame de 
Maintenon's collections is Dacier's " Remarques 
Critiques sur les CEuvrcs d'Horace," bearing the 
arms of Louis XIV., but with his wife's signature 
on the fly-leaf (1681). 

Of Madame de Montespan, ousted from the 
royal favour by Madame de Maintenon, who 
"married into the family where she had been 
governess," there survives one bookish relic of 
interest. This is "CEuvres Diverses par un 
auteur de sept ans," in quarto, red morocco, 
printed on vellum, and with the arms of the 
mother of the little Due du Maine (1678). 
When Madame de Maintenon was still playing 

' Country papers, please copy. Poets al a distance will liindly 
accept this ii ' 



I 



LADY BOQK-LQVERS. 173 

mother to the children of the king and of 
Madame de Montespan, she printed those 
"works" of her eldest pupil. 

These ladies were only bibliophiles by accident, 
and were devoted, In the first place, to pleasure, 
piety, or ambition. With the Comtesse de 
Vefruc, whose epitaph will be found on an 
earlier page, we come to a genuine and even 
fanatical collector. Madame de Verrue (1670- 
1736) got every kind of diversion out of life, 
and when she ceased to be young and fair, she 
turned to the joys of "shopping." In early 
years, "pleine de cceur, elle Ic donna sans 
comptes." In later life, she purchased, or 
obtained on credit, everything that caught her 
fancy, also sans comptes. " My aunt," says the 
Due de Luynes, "was always buying, and never 
baulked her fancy." Pictures, books, coins, 
jewels, engravings, gems (over 8,ooo>, tapestries, 
and furniture were all alike precious to Madame 
de Verrue. Her snuff-boxes defied computa- 
tion ; she had them in gold, in tortoise-shell, in 
porcelain, in lacquer, and in jasper, and she 
enjoyed the delicate fragrance of sixty different 
sorts of snuff. Without applauding the smoking 
of "cigarettes in drawing-rooms, we may admit 
that it is less repulsive than steady applications to 
tobacco in Madame de Verrue's favourite manner. 



174 BOOKS AND BOOKilEU. 

The Countess had a noble library, for old 
tastes survived in her commodious heart, and 
new tastes she anticipated. She possessed "The 
Romance of the Rose," and " Villon," in editions 
of Galliot du Pre {1529-1533} undeterred by the 
satire of Boileau. She had examples of the 
" Plelade," though they were not again admired 
in France til! 1830. She was also in the most 
modern fashion of to-day, for she had the 
beautiful quarto of La Fontaine's " Contes," 
and Bouchier's illustrated Moli^re (large paper). 
And, what I envy her more, she had Perrault's 
" Fairy Tales," in bhie morocco— the blue 1 
of the folklorist who is also a book-hunter. It 
must also be confessed that Madame de Verrue 
had a large number of books such as are usually 
kept under lock and key, books which her heirs 
did not care to expose at the sale of her library. 
Once I myself (w/ci chilif) owned a novel in blue 
morocco, which had been in the collection of 
Madame de Verrue. In her old age this ex- 
emplary woman invented a peculiarly comfort- 
able arm-chair, which, like her novels, was 
covered with citron and violet morocco ; the 
nails were of silver. If Madame de Verrue has 
met the Baroness Bernstein, their conversatioff 
in the Elysiau Fields must be of the most 
gallant and interesting description. 



I 



lABY BOOK-LOVEliS. 175 

Another literary lady of pleasure, Madame de 
Pompadour, can only be spoken of with modified 
approval. Her great fault was that she did not 
check the decadence of taste and sense in the 
art of bookbinding. In her time came in the 
habit of binding books (if binding it can be 
called) with flat backs, without exhibiting the 
sinews that are of the very essence of book- 
covers. Without showing these no binding can 
be orthodox, nor in the best and most legitimate 
manner. It is very deeply to be deplored that 
by far the most accomplished living English 
artist in bookbinding has reverted to this old 
and most dangerous heresy. The most original 
and graceful tooling is of much less real value 
than naturalness, and a book bound with a flat 
back can hardly be said to be properly bound 
at all. The practice was the herald of the 
French and may open the way for the English 
Revolution. Of what avail were the ingenious 
mosaics of Derome to sfcm the tide of change, 
when the books whose sides they adorned were 
hollow or flat-backed. Madame dc Pompadour's 
books were of all sorts, from the inevitable 
works of devotions to devotions of another sort, 
and the "Hours" of Erycina Ridens, One of 
her treasures had singular fortunes, a copy of 
"Daphnia and Chloe," with the Regent's illus- 



176 BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. 

trations, and those of Cochin and Eisen (Paris, 
quarto, 1757, red morocco). The covers are 
adorned with billing and cooing doves, with the 
arrows of Eros, with burning hearts, and sheep 
and shepherds, Eighteen years ago this volume 
was bought for ten francs in a village in 
Hungary. A bookseller gave LZ for it in Paris. 
M. Bauchart paid for it .£150; and as it has 
left his shelves, probably he too made no bad 
bargain. Madame de Pompadour's "Apology 
for Herodotus" (La Haye, 1735) has also its 
legend. It belonged to M. Paillet, who coveted 
a glorified copy of the " Pastissier Francois," in 
M. Bauchart's collection. M. Paillet swopped 
it, with a number of others, for the " Pastissier : " 

J'avais "L'Apoli^c 
Pour Hetodole," en reliflre onciennc, amour 
De livre provepant de chez la Pompadour 
II me le soutEra ! ' 

Of Marie Antoinette, with whom our lady 
book-lovers of the old rtgime must close, there 
survive many books. She had a library in the 
Tuileries, as well as at le petit Trianon. Of all 
her great and varied collections, none is now so 
valued as her little book of prayers, which was 
her consolation in the worst of all her evil days, 

' Bibliothiqui d'uu Bibliophik, Lille, 1S85. 



LADY BOOK-LOVERS. 177 

in the Temple and the Conciergerie. The book 
is "Office de la Divine Providence" (Paris, 1757, 
green morocco). On the fly-leaf the Queen 
wrote, some hours before her death, these touch- 
ing lines : " C<? 16 Octobre, d 4 A, ^^ du matin, 
Mon Dieu ! ayez piti^ de moi! Mes yeux tCont 
plus de larmes pour prier pour vous, mes pauvres 
enfants. Adieu, adieu ! — MARIE ANTOINETTE." 
There can be no sadder relic of a greater 
sorrow, and the last consolation of the Queen 
did not escape the French popular genius for 
cruelty and insult. The arms on the covers of 
the prayer book have been cut out by some 
fanatic of Equality and Fraternity. 



THE END. 



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