The Book-Hunter
But the dignity and power of the historian's narrative cannot be fully
appreciated until we find him in the midst of the climax of the
contest--the battle, which gradually merged into a single combat, for
the possession of the Venetian Boccaccio. According to the established
historical practice, we have in the first place a statement of the
position taken up by the respective "forces."
"At length the moment of sale arrived. Evans prefaced the putting-up of
the article by an appropriate oration, in which he expatiated on its
extreme rarity, and concluding by informing the company of the regret,
and even anguish of heart, expressed by Mr Van Praet that such a
treasure was not to be found in the Imperial collection at Paris.
Silence followed the address of Mr Evans. On his right hand, leaning
against the wall, stood Earl Spencer; a little lower down, and standing
at right angles with his Lordship, appeared the Marquess of Bland-ford.
Lord Althorp stood a little backward, to the right of his father, Earl
Spencer."
The first movement of the forces gives the historian an opportunity of
dropping a withering sneer at an unfortunate man, so provincial in his
notions as to suppose that a hundred pounds or two would be of any avail
in such a contest.
"The honour of firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of
Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil
from the reverberation of the report himself had made. 'One hundred
guineas,' he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued; but anon the biddings rose
rapidly to five hundred guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident that
the firing was but masked and desultory. At length all random shots
ceased, and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other,
resolving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths. _A
thousand guineas_ were bid by Earl Spencer--to which the Marquess added
_ten_. You might have heard a pin drop. All eyes were turned--all
breathing wellnigh stopped--every sword was put home within its
scabbard--and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter except
that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand."
But even this exciting sort of narrative will tire one when it goes on
page after page, so that we must take a leap to the conclusion. "Two
thousand two hundred and fifty pounds," said Lord Spencer. "The
spectators were now absolutely electrified. The Marquess quietly adds
his usual _ten_" and so there an end. "Mr Evans, ere his hammer fell,
made a short pause--and indeed, as if by something preternatural, the
ebony instrument itself seemed to be charmed or suspended in the mid
air. However, at last down dropped the hammer."
Such a result naturally created excitement beyond the book-collectors'
circle, for here was an actual stroke of trade in which a profit of more
than two thousand per cent had been netted. It is easy to believe in
Dibdin's statement of the crowds of people who imagined they were
possessors of the identical Venetian Boccaccio, and the still larger
number who wanted to do a stroke of business with some old volume,
endowed with the same rarity and the same or greater intrinsic value.
The general excitement created by the dispersal of the Roxburghe
collection proved an epoch in literary history, by the establishment of
the Roxburghe Club, followed by a series of others, the history of which
has to be told farther on.
Of the great book-sales that have been commemorated, it is curious to
observe how seldom they embrace ancestral libraries accumulated in old
houses from generation to generation, and how generally they mark the
short-lived duration of the accumulations of some collector freshly
deposited. One remarkable exception to this was in the Gordonstoun
library, sold in 1816. It was begun by Sir Robert Gordon, a Morayshire
laird of the time of the great civil wars of the seventeenth century. He
was the author of the History of the Earldom of Sutherland, and a man of
great political as well as literary account. He laid by heaps of the
pamphlets, placards, and other documents of his stormy period, and thus
many a valuable morsel, which had otherwise disappeared from the world,
left a representative in the Gordonstoun collection. It was increased by
a later Sir Robert, who had the reputation of being a wizard. He
belonged to one of those terrible clubs from which Satan is entitled to
take a victim annually; but when Gordon's turn came, he managed to get
off with merely the loss of his shadow; and many a Morayshire peasant
has testified to having seen him riding forth on a sunny day, the shadow
of his horse visible, with those of his spurs and his whip, but his
body offering no impediment to the rays of the sun. He enriched the
library with books on necromancy, demonology, and alchemy.
The largest book-sale probably that ever was in the world, was that of
Heber's collection in 1834. There are often rash estimates made of the
size of libraries, but those who have stated the number of his books in
six figures seem justified when one looks at the catalogue of the sale,
bound up in five thick octavo volumes. For results so magnificent,
Richard Heber's library had but a small beginning, according to the
memoir of him in the Gentleman's Magazine, where it is said, that
"having one day accidentally met with a little volume called The Vallie
of Varietie, by Henry Peacham, he took it to the late Mr Bindley of the
Stamp-office, the celebrated collector, and asked him if this was not a
curious book. Mr Bindley, after looking at it, answered, 'Yes--not
very--but rather a curious book.'" This faint morsel of encouragement
was, it seems, sufficient to start him in his terrible career, and the
trifle becomes important as a solemn illustration of the _obsta
principiis_. His labours, and even his perils, were on a par with those
of any veteran commander who has led armies and fought battles during
the great part of a long life. He would set off on a journey of several
hundred miles any day in search of a book not in his collection.
Sucking in from all around him whatever books were afloat, he of course
soon exhausted the ordinary market; and to find a book obtainable which
he did not already possess, was an event to be looked to with the
keenest anxiety, and a chance to be seized with promptitude, courage,
and decision. At last, however, he could not supply the cravings of his
appetite without recourse to duplicates, and far more than duplicates.
His friend Dibdin said of him, "He has now and then an ungovernable
passion to possess more copies of a book than there were ever parties to
a deed or stamina to a plant; and therefore I cannot call him a
duplicate or a triplicate collector." He satisfied his own conscience by
adopting a creed, which he enounced thus: "Why, you see, sir, no man can
comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for a
show copy, and he will probably keep it at his country-house; another he
will require for his own use and reference; and unless he is inclined to
part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his
best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends."
This last necessity is the key-note to Heber's popularity: he was a
liberal and kindly man, and though, like Wolsey, he was unsatisfied in
getting, yet, like him, in bestowing he was most princely. Many scholars
and authors obtained the raw material for their labours from his
transcendent stores. These, indeed, might be said less to be personal
to himself than to be a feature in the literary geography of Europe.
"Some years ago," says the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, "he built
a new library at his house at Hodnet, which is said to be full. His
residence at Pimlico, where he died, is filled, like Magliabechi's at
Florence, with books, from the top to the bottom--every chair, every
table, every passage containing piles of erudition. He had another house
in York Street, leading to Great James's Street, Westminster, laden from
the ground-floor to the garret with curious books. He had a library in
the High Street, Oxford, an immense library at Paris, another at
Antwerp, another at Brussels, another at Ghent, and at other places in
the Low Countries and in Germany."
_PART II.--HIS FUNCTIONS._
The Hobby.
Having devoted the preceding pages to the diagnosis of the book-hunter's
condition, or, in other words, to the different shapes which the
phenomena peculiar to it assume, I now propose to offer some account of
his place in the dispensations of Providence, which will probably show
that he is not altogether a mischievous or a merely useless member of
the human family, but does in reality, however unconsciously to himself,
minister in his own peculiar way to the service both of himself and
others. This is to be a methodical discourse, and therefore to be
divided and subdivided, insomuch that, taking in the first place his
services to himself, this branch shall be subdivided into the advantages
which are purely material and those which are properly intellectual.
And, first, of material advantages. Holding it to be the inevitable doom
of fallen man to inherit some frailty or failing, it would be difficult,
had he a Pandora's box-ful to pick and choose among, to find one less
dangerous or offensive. As the judicious physician informs the patient
suffering under some cutaneous or other external torture, that the
poison lay deep in his constitution--that it must have worked in some
shape--and well it is that it has taken one so innocuous--so may even
the book-hunter be congratulated on having taken the innate moral malady
of all the race in a very gentle and rather a salubrious form. To pass
over gambling, tippling, and other practices which cannot be easily
spoken of in good society, let us look to the other shapes in which man
lets himself out--for instance to horse-racing, hunting, photography,
shooting, fishing, cigars, dog-fancying, dog-fighting, the ring, the
cockpit, phrenology, revivalism, socialism; which of these contains so
small a balance of evil, counting of course that the amount of pleasure
conferred is equal--for it is only on the datum that the book-hunter has
as much satisfaction from his pursuit as the fox-hunter, the
photographer, and so on, has in his, that a fair comparison can be
struck? These pursuits, one and all, leave little or nothing that is
valuable behind them, except, it may be, that some of them are conducive
to health, by giving exercise to the body and a genial excitement to the
mind; but every hobby gives the latter, and the former may be easily
obtained in some other shape. They leave little or nothing behind--even
the photographer's portfolio will bring scarcely anything under the
hammer after the death of him whose solace and pursuit it had been,
should the positives remain visible, which may be doubted. And as to the
other enumerated pursuits, some of them, as we all know, are immensely
costly, all unproductive as they are.
But the book-hunter may possibly leave a little fortune behind him. His
hobby, in fact, merges into an investment. This is the light in which a
celebrated Quaker collector of paintings put his conduct, when it was
questioned by the brethren, in virtue of that right to admonish one
another concerning the errors of their ways, which makes them so chary
in employing domestic servants of their own persuasion. "What had the
brother paid for that bauble [a picture by Wouvermans], for instance?"
"Well, L300." "Was not that then an awful wasting of his substance on
vanities?" "No. He had been offered L900 for it. If any of the Friends
was prepared to offer him a better investment of his money than one that