The Book-Hunter
tried to achieve completeness by lengthening the title-page; but they
found that the longer they made it, the more it wriggled itself into
devious tracks, and the farther did it depart from a comprehensive name.
Some title-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.[42]
One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy titles--they
afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their
malignity towards each other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the
face of the adversary. It will thus often happen that the
controversialist states his case first in the title-page; he then gives
it at greater length in the introduction; again, perhaps, in a preface;
a third time in an analytical form, through means of a table of
contents; after all this skirmishing, he brings up his heavy columns in
the body of the book; and if he be very skilful, he may let fly a few
Parthian arrows from the index.
[Footnote 42: A good modern specimen of a lengthy title-page may be
found in one of the books appropriate to the matter in hand, by the
diligent French bibliographer Peignot:--
"DICTIONNAIRE RAISONNE DE BIBLIOLOGIE: contenant--1mo, L'explication des
principaux termes relatifs a la bibliographie, a l'art typographique, a
la diplomatique, aux langues, aux archives, aux manuscrits, aux
medailles, aux antiquites, &c.; 2do, Des notices historiques detaillees
sur les principales bibliotheques anciennes et modernes; sur les
differentes sectes philosophiques; sur les plus celebres imprimeurs,
avec une indication des meilleures editions sorties de leurs presses, et
sur les bibliographes, avec la liste de leurs ouvrages; 3tio, enfin,
L'exposition des differentes systemes bibliographiques, &c.,--ouvrage
utile aux bibliothecaires, archivistes, imprimeurs, libraires, &c. Par
G. Peignot, Bibliothecaire de la Haute-Saone, membre-correspondant de la
Societe libre d'emulation du Haut-Rhin. _Indocti discant, et ament
meminisse periti._ Paris, An x. 1802."
Here follows a rival specimen selected from the same department of
literature:--
"BIBLIOGRAPHIE INSTRUCTIVE; OU, TRAITE DE LA CONNAISSANCE DES LIVRES
RARES ET SINGULIERS; contenant un catalogue raisonne de la plus grande
partie de ces livres precieux, qui ont paru successivement dans la
republique des lettres, depuis l'invention de l'imprimerie jusqu'a nos
jours; avec des notes sur la difference et la rarete de leurs editions,
et des remarques sur l'origine de cette rarete actuelle, et son degre
plus ou moins considerable; la maniere de distinguer les editions
originales, d'avec les contrefaites; avec une description typographique
particuliere, du compose de ces rares volumes, au moyen de laquelle il
sera aise de reconnoitre facilement les exemplaires, ou mutiles en
partie, ou absolument imparfaits, qui s'en rencontrent journellement
dans le commerce, et de les distinguer surement de ceux qui seront
exactement complets dans toutes leurs parties. Dispose par ordre de
matieres et de facultes, suivant le systeme bibliographique generalement
adopte; avec une table generale des auteurs, et un systeme complet de
bibliographie choisie. Par Guillaume-Francois de Bure le jeune, Libraire
de Paris."]
It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and had
his ears cut off, and become one of the chief causes of our great civil
wars, all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book
containing more than a thousand. It was as far down in his very index as
W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio-Mastix was found, under the
head "Women actors." The words which follow are rather unquotable in
this nineteenth century; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen
Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her--something
like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use
the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of
the Emperor." The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a
thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by
the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little
inclination to peruse it as he had. The calamitous discovery of the
sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental
student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the
Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible.
Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing
the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger,
until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop
to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading
immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked
the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immorality of stage-plays to
exclaim that church-music is not the noise of men, but rather "a
bleating of brute beasts--choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen,
bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of
bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney
took surely a more nice distinction when he made a charge against the
author in these terms: "All stage-players he terms them rogues: in this
he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament; for _unless they go abroad_,
they are not rogues."
In the very difficulties in the way of framing a conclusive and
exhaustive title, there is a principle of compensation. It clears
literature of walls and hedgerows, and makes it a sort of free forest.
To the desultory reader, not following up any special inquiry, there are
delights in store in a devious rummage through miscellaneous volumes, as
there are to the lovers of adventure and the picturesque in any district
of country not desecrated by the tourist's guide-books. Many readers
will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edition
of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive
book-hunter, Dr Richard Farmer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty
of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by
quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the
technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of
Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind
of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No
doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which
they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native
wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they
are examples of what may be found in the place they have come from.
But there are passages worth finding in books less promising. Those who
potter in libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big
volumes, sometimes find curious things--for all gems are not collected
in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of Hatsell's Precedents
in Parliament for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to
alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to
throw light on the mysterious process called "naming a member." "A story
used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict
observance of forms were fond of repeating, that as he often, upon a
member's not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder,
threatened to name him--'Sir, sir, I must name you'--on being asked what
would be the consequence of putting that threat in execution and naming
a member, he answered, 'The Lord in heaven knows.'"
In the perusal of a very solid book on the progress of the
ecclesiastical differences of Ireland, written by a native of that
country, after a good deal of tedious and vexatious matter, the reader's
complacency is restored by an artless statement how an eminent person
"abandoned the errors of the Church of Rome, and adopted those of the
Church of England."
So also a note I have preserved of a brief passage descriptive of the
happy conclusion of a duel runs thus:--
"The one party received a slight wound in the breast; the other fired in
the air--and so the matter terminated."[43]
[Footnote 43: This passage has been quoted and read by many people quite
unconscious of the arrant bull it contains. Indeed, an eminent London
newspaper, to which the word Bull cannot be unfamiliar, tells me, in
reviewing my first edition, that it is no bull at all, but a plain
statement of fact, and boldly quotes it in confirmation of this opinion.
There could be no better testimony to its being endowed with the subtle
spirit of the genuine article. Irish bulls, as it has been said of
constitutions, "are not made--they grow," and that only in their own
native soil. Those manufactured for the stage and the anecdote-books
betray their artificial origin in their breadth and obviousness. The
real bull carries one with it at first by an imperceptible confusion and
misplacement of ideas in the mind where it has arisen, and it is not
until you reason back that you see it. Horace Walpole used to say that
the best of all bulls, from its thorough and grotesque confusion of
identity, was that of the man who complained of having been "changed at
nurse;" and perhaps he is right. An Irishman, and he only, can handle
this confusion of ideas so as to make it a more powerful instrument of
repartee than the logic of another man: take, for instance, the beggar
who, when imploring a dignified clergyman for charity, was charged not
to take the sacred name in vain, and answered, "Is it in vain, then? and
whose fault is that?" I have doubts whether the saying attributed to Sir
Boyle Roche about being in two places at once "like a bird," is the
genuine article. I happened to discover that it is of earlier date than
Sir Boyle's day, having found, when rummaging in an old house among some
Jacobite manuscripts, one from Robertson of Strowan, the warrior poet,
in which he says about two contradictory military instructions, "It
seems a difficult point for me to put both orders in execution, unless,
as the man said, I can be in two places at once, like a bird." A few
copies of these letters were printed for the use of the Abbotsford Club.
This letter of Strowan's occurs in p. 92.]
Professional law-books and reports are not generally esteemed as light
reading, yet something may be made even of them at a pinch. Menage wrote
a book upon the amenities of the civil law, which does anything but
fulfil its promise. There are many much better to be got in the most
unlikely corners; as, where a great authority on copyright begins a
narrative of a case in point by saying, "One Moore had written a book
which he called Irish Melodies;" and again, in an action of trespass on
the case, "The plaintiff stated in his declaration that he was the true
and only proprietor of the copyright of a book of poems entitled The
Seasons, by James Thomson." I cannot lay hands at this moment on the
index which refers to Mr Justice Best--he was the man, as far as memory
serves, but never mind. A searcher after something or other, running his
eye down the index through letter B, arrived at the reference "Best--Mr
Justice--his great mind." Desiring to be better acquainted with the
particulars of this assertion, he turned up the page referred to, and
there found, to his entire satisfaction, "Mr Justice Best said he had a
great mind to commit the witness for prevarication."
The following case is curiously suggestive of the state of the country
round London in the days when much business was done on the road:--A
bill in the Exchequer was brought by Everett against a certain Williams,
setting forth that the complainant was skilled in dealing in certain
commodities, "such as plate, rings, watches, &c.," and that the