The Book-Hunter
preserving the literature of the world from being lost to it, the
collector's or book-hunter's services are eminent and numerous. In the
first place, many of the great public libraries have been absolute
donations of the treasures to which some enthusiastic literary sportsman
has devoted his life and fortune. Its gradual accumulation has been the
great solace and enjoyment of his active days; he has beheld it, in his
old age, a splendid monument of enlightened exertion, and he resolves
that, when he can no longer call it his own, it shall preserve the
relics of past literature for ages yet to come, and form a centre whence
scholarship and intellectual refinement shall diffuse themselves around.
We can see this influence in its most specific and material shape,
perhaps, by looking round the reading-room of the British Museum--that
great manufactory of intellectual produce, where so many heads are at
work. The beginning of this great institution, as everybody knows, was
in the fifty thousand volumes collected by Sir Hans Sloane--a wonderful
achievement for a private gentleman at the beginning of the last
century. When George III. gave it the libraries of the kings of England,
it gained, as it were, a better start still by absorbing collections
which had begun before Sloane was born--those of Cranmer, Prince Henry,
and Casaubon. The Ambrosian Library at Milan was the private collection
of Cardinal Borromeo, bequeathed by him to the world. It reached forty
thousand volumes ere he died, and these formed a library which had
arisen in free, natural, and symmetrical growth, insomuch as, having fed
it during his whole life, it began with the young and economic efforts
of youth and poverty, and went on accumulating in bulk and in the
costliness of its contents as succeeding years brought wealth and
honours to the great prelate. What those merchant princes, the Medici,
did for the Laurentian Library at Florence is part of history. Old
Cosmo, who had his mercantile and political correspondents in all lands,
made them also his literary agents, who thus sent him goods too precious
to be resold even at a profit. "He corresponded," says Gibbon, "at once
with Cairo and London, and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books were
often imported by the same vessel." The Bodleian started with a
collection which had cost Sir Thomas Bodley L10,000, and it was
augmented from time to time by the absorption of tributary influxes of
the same kind. Some far-seeing promoters of national museums have
reached the conclusion that it is not a sound ultimate policy to press
too closely on the private collector. He is therefore permitted, under a
certain amount of watchful inspection, to accumulate his small treasury
of antiquities, shells, or dried plants, in the prospect that in the
course of time it will find its way, like the feeding rills of a lake,
into the great public treasury.[55]
[Footnote 55: The most complete mass of information which we probably
possess in the English language about the history of libraries, both
home and foreign, is in the two octavos called Memoirs of Libraries,
including a Handbook of Library Concerns, by Edward Edwards.]
In many instances the collectors whose stores have thus gone to the
public, have merely followed their hunting propensities, without having
the merit of framing the ultimate destiny of their collections, but in
others the intention of doing benefit to the world has added zest and
energy to the chase. Of this class there is one memorable and beautiful
instance in Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, who lived and laboured so
early as the days of Edward III., and has left an autobiographical
sketch infinitely valuable, as at once informing us of the social
habits, and letting us into the very inner life, of the highly endowed
student and the affluent collector of the fourteenth century. His little
book, called Philobiblion, was brought to light from an older obscure
edition by the scholar printer Badius Ascensius, and was the first fruit
of his press when he set it up in Paris in the year 1499. An English
translation of it was published in 1832. It is throughout adorned with
the gentle and elevated nature of the scholar, and derives a still
nobler lustre from the beneficent purpose to which the author destined
the literary relics which it was the enjoyment of his life to collect
and study. Being endowed with power and wealth, and putting to himself
the question, "What can I render to the Lord for all that he hath
conferred on me?" he found an answer in the determination of smoothing
the path of the poor and ardent student, by supplying him with the means
of study. "Behold," he says, "a herd of outcasts rather than of elect
scholars meets the view of our contemplations, in which God the
artificer, and nature his handmaid, have planted the roots of the best
morals and most celebrated sciences. But the penury of their private
affairs so oppresses them, being opposed by adverse fortune, that the
fruitful seeds of virtue, so productive in the unexhausted field of
youth, unmoistened by their wonted dews, are compelled to wither. Whence
it happens, as Boetius says, that bright virtue lies hid in obscurity,
and the burning lamp is not put under a bushel, but is utterly
extinguished for want of oil. Thus the flowery field in spring is
ploughed up before harvest; thus wheat gives way to tares, the vine
degenerates to woodbine, and the olive grows wild and unproductive."
Keenly alive to this want, he resolved to devote himself, not merely to
supply to the hungry the necessary food, but to impart to the poor and
ardent scholar the mental sustenance which might possibly enable him to
burst the bonds of circumstance, and, triumphing over his sordid lot,
freely communicate to mankind the blessings which it is the function of
cultivated genius to distribute.
The Bishop was a great and powerful man, for he went over Europe
commissioned as the spiritual adviser of the great conqueror, Edward
III. Wherever he went on public business--to Rome, France, or the other
states of Europe--"on tedious embassies and in perilous times," he
carried about with him "that fondness for books which many waters could
not extinguish," and gathered up all that his power, his wealth, and his
vigilance brought within his reach. In Paris he becomes quite ecstatic:
"Oh blessed God of gods in Zion! what a rush of the glow of pleasure
rejoiced our heart as often as we visited Paris--the Paradise of the
world! There we longed to remain, where, on account of the greatness of
our love, the days ever appeared to us to be few. There are delightful
libraries in cells redolent of aromatics--there flourishing greenhouses
of all sorts of volumes: there academic meads trembling with the
earthquake of Athenian peripatetics pacing up and down: there the
promontories of Parnassus and the porticos of the stoics."
The most powerful instrument in his policy was encouraging and bringing
round him, as dependents and followers, the members of the mendicant
orders--the labourers called to the vineyard in the eleventh hour, as he
calls them. These he set to cater for him, and he triumphantly asks,
"Among so many of the keenest hunters, what leveret could lie hid? What
fry could evade the hook, the net, or the trawl of these men? From the
body of divine law down to the latest controversial tract of the day,
nothing could escape the notice of these scrutinisers." In further
revelations of his method he says, "When, indeed, we happened to turn
aside to the towns and places where the aforesaid paupers had convents,
we were not slack in visiting their chests and other repositories of
books; for there, amidst the deepest poverty, we found the most exalted
riches treasured up; there, in their satchels and caskets, we discovered
not only the crumbs that fell from the master's table for the little
dogs, but, indeed, the shew-bread without leaven--the bread of angels
containing all that is delectable." He specially marks the zeal of the
Dominicans or Preachers; and in exulting over his success in the field,
he affords curious glimpses into the ways of the various humble
assistants who were glad to lend themselves to the hobby of one of the
most powerful prelates of his day.[56]
[Footnote 56: "Indeed, although we had obtained abundance both of old
and new works, through an extensive communication with all the religious
orders, yet we must in justice extol the Preachers with a special
commendation in this respect; for we found them, above all other
religious devotees, ungrudging of their most acceptable communications,
and overflowing with a certain divine liberality; we experienced them
not to be selfish hoarders, but meet professors of enlightened
knowledge. Besides all the opportunities already touched upon, we easily
acquired the notice of the stationers and librarians, not only within
the provinces of our native soil, but of those dispersed over the
kingdoms of France, Germany, and Italy, by the prevailing power of
money; no distance whatever impeded, no fury of the sea deterred them;
nor was cash wanting for their expenses, when they sent or brought us
the wished-for books; for they knew to a certainty that their hopes
reposed in our bosoms could not be disappointed, but ample redemption,
with interest, was secure with us. Lastly, our common captivatrix of the
love of all men (money), did not neglect the rectors of country schools,
nor the pedagogues of clownish boys, but rather, when we had leisure to
enter their little gardens and paddocks, we culled redolent flowers upon
the surface, and dug up neglected roots (not, however, useless to the
studious), and such coarse digests of barbarism, as with the gift of
eloquence might be made sanative to the pectoral arteries. Amongst
productions of this kind, we found many most worthy of renovation,
which, when the foul rust was skilfully polished off, and the mask of
old age removed, deserved to be once more remodelled into comely
countenances, and which we, having applied a sufficiency of the needful
means, resuscitated for an exemplar of future resurrection, having in
some measure restored them to renewed soundness. Moreover, there was
always about us in our halls no small assemblage of antiquaries,
scribes, bookbinders, correctors, illuminators, and, generally, of all
such persons as were qualified to labour advantageously in the service
of books.
"To conclude. All of either sex, of every degree, estate, or dignity,
whose pursuits were in any way connected with books, could, with a
knock, most easily open the door of our heart, and find a convenient
reposing place in our bosom. We so admitted all who brought books, that
neither the multitude of first-comers could produce a fastidiousness of
the last, nor the benefit conferred yesterday be prejudicial to that of
to-day. Wherefore, as we were continually resorted to by all the
aforesaid persons, as to a sort of adamant attractive of books, the
desired accession of the vessels of science, and a multifarious flight
of the best volumes were made to us. And this is what we undertook to
relate at large in the present chapter."]
The manner in which Richard of Bury dedicated his stores to the
intellectual nurture of the poor scholar, was by converting them into a
library for Durham College, which merged into Trinity of Oxford. It
would have been a pleasant thing to look upon the actual collection of
manuscripts which awakened so much recorded zeal and tenderness in the
great ecclesiastic of five hundred years ago; but in later troubles they
became dispersed, and all that seems to be known of their whereabouts
is, that some of them are in the library of Baliol.[57] Another eminent
English prelate made a worthy, but equally ineffectual, attempt to found