The Book-Hunter
great magazines of the world's literary treasures.
Librarians.
It will often be fortunate for these great institutions if they obtain
the services of the hunter himself, along with his spoils of the chase.
The leaders in the German wars often found it an exceedingly sound
policy to subsidise into their own service some captain of free lances,
who might have been a curse to all around him. Your great
game-preservers sometimes know the importance of taking the most
notorious poacher in the district into pay as a keeper. So it is
sometimes of the nature of the book-hunter, if he be of the genial sort,
and free of some of the more vicious peculiarities of his kind, to make
an invaluable librarian. Such an arrangement will sometimes be found to
be like mercy twice blessed,--it blesseth him that gives and him that
takes. The imprisoned spirit probably finds freedom at last, and those
purchases and accumulations which, to the private purse, were profuse
and culpable recklessness, may become veritable duty; while the wary
outlook and the vigilant observation, which before were only leading a
poor victim into temptation, may come forth as commendable attention and
zealous activity.
Sometimes mistakes have been made in selections on this principle, and a
zeal has been embarked which has been found to tend neither to profit
nor edification; for there have been known, at the head of public
libraries, men of the Cerberus kind, who loved the books so dearly as to
be unable to endure the handling of them by the vulgar herd of readers
and searchers--even by those for whose special aid and service they are
employed. They who have this morbid terror of the profanation of the
treasures committed to their charge suffer in themselves the direst
torments--something like those of a cat beholding her kittens tossed by
a dog--whenever their favourites are handled; and the excruciating
extent of their agonies, when any ardent and careless student dashes
right into the heart of some _editio princeps_ or tall copy, or perhaps
lays it open with its face on the table while he snatches another
edition that he may collate a passage, is not to be conceived. It is
then the dog _worrying_ the kittens. Such men will only give
satisfaction in great private libraries little disturbed by their
proprietors, or in monastic or other corporate institutions, where it
is the worthy object of the patrons to keep their collection in fine
condition, and, at the same time, to take order that it shall be of the
least possible service to education or literature. Angelo Mai, the great
librarian of the Vatican, who made so many valuable discoveries himself,
had the character of taking good care that no one else should make any
within his own strictly preserved hunting grounds.
In the general case, however, a bibliophile at the head of a public
library is genial and communicative, and has a pleasure in helping the
investigator through the labyrinth of its stores. Such men feel their
strength; and the immense value of the service which they may sometimes
perform by a brief hint in the right direction which the inquiry should
take, or by handing down a volume, or recommending the best directory to
all the learning on the matter in hand, has laid many men of letters
under great obligations to them.
The most eminent type of this class of men was Magliabecchi, librarian
to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, who could direct you to any book in any
part of the world, with the precision with which the metropolitan
policeman directs you to St Paul's or Piccadilly. It is of him that the
stories are told of answers to inquiries after books, in these terms:
"There is but one copy of that book in the world. It is in the Grand
Seignior's library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book in the
second shelf on the right hand as you go in." His faculties were, like
those of all great men, self-born and self-trained. So little was the
impoverished soil in which he passed his infancy congenial to his
pursuits in after life, that it was not within the parental intentions
to teach him to read, and his earliest labours were in the shop of a
greengrocer. Had his genius run on natural science, he might have fed it
here, but it was his felicity and his fortune to be transferred to the
shop of a patronising bookseller. Here he drank in an education such as
no academic forcing machinery could ever infuse. He devoured books, and
the printed leaves became as necessary to his existence as the
cabbage-leaves to the caterpillars which at times made their not welcome
appearance in the abjured greengrocery. Like these verdant reptiles,
too, he became assimilated to the food he fed on, insomuch that he was
in a manner hot-pressed, bound, marble-topped, lettered, and shelved. He
could bear nothing but books around him, and would allow no space for
aught else; his furniture, according to repute, being limited to two
chairs, the second of which was admitted in order that the two together
might serve as a bed.
Another enthusiast of the same kind was Adrien Baillet, the author, or,
more properly speaking, the compiler, of the Jugemens des Savans. Some
copies of this book, which has a quantity of valuable matter scattered
through it, have Baillet's portrait, from which his calm scholarly
countenance looks genially forth, with this appropriate motto, "Dans une
douce solitude, a l'abri du mensonge et de la vanite, j'adoptai la
critique, et j'en fis mon etude, pour decouvrir la verite." Him,
struggling with poverty, aggravated with a thirst for books, did
Lamoignon the elder place at the head of his library, thus at once
pasturing him in clover. When the patron told his friend, Hermant, of
his desire to find a librarian possessed of certain fabulous
qualifications for the duty, his correspondent said, "I will bring the
very man to you;" and Baillet, a poor, frail, attenuated, diseased
scholar, was produced. His kind patron fed him up, so far as a man who
could not tear himself from his books, unless when nature became
entirely exhausted, could be fed up. The statesman and his librarian
were the closest of friends; and on the elder Lamoignon's death, the
son, still more distinguished, looked up to Baillet as a father and
instructor.
Men of this stamp are generally endowed with deep and solid learning.
For any one, indeed, to take the command of a great public library,
without large accomplishments, especially in the languages, is to put
himself in precisely the position where ignorance, superficiality, and
quackery are subjected to the most potent test, and are certain of
detection. The number of librarians who have united great learning to a
love of books, is the best practical answer to all sneers about the two
being incompatible. Nor, while we count among us such names as Panizzi,
Birch, Halkett, Naudet, Laing, Cogswell, Jones, Pertz, and Todd, is the
race of learned librarians likely to decay.
It will be worth while for the patrons of public libraries, even in
appointments to small offices, to have an eye on bookish men for filling
them. One librarian differs greatly from another, and on this difference
will often depend the entire utility of an institution, and the question
whether it is worth keeping it open or closing its door. Of this class
of workman it may be said quite as aptly as of the poet, that he is
born, not made. The usual testimonies to qualification--steadiness,
sobriety, civility, intelligence, &c.--may all be up to the mark that
will constitute a first-rate book-keeper in the mercantile sense of the
term, while they are united in a very dreary and hopeless keeper of
books. Such a person ought to go to his task with something totally
different from the impulses which induce a man to sort dry goods or make
up invoices with eminent success. In short, your librarian would need to
be in some way touched with the malady which has been the object of
these desultory remarks.
Bibliographies.
A passing remark is due to the place and function in literature of those
books which act the part of gentleman-usher towards other books, by
introducing them to the notice of strangers. The talk about librarians,
in fact, brings these naturally before us by the law of association,
since the duties of the librarian are congenial to this special
department of the literary world, the work of which has indeed been
chiefly performed by eminent librarians.
The best general name for the class of books which I refer to, is that
of Bibliographies, given to them by the French. Like most other products
of human ingenuity, they are varied in their objects and their merits.
At the one end of the scale is the Leipsic Bibliotheca Horatiana,
ambitious only of commemorating the several editions of Horace, or
Kuster's Bibliotheca Historica Brandenburgica, sacred to the histories
of that duchy; while the other extremity aims at universality, an object
which has not yet been accomplished, and seems every day fleeing farther
off from those who are daring enough to pursue it. In 1545, when the
world of literature was rather smaller than it now is, Conrade Gesner,
in his Bibliotheca, made the first attempt at a universal bibliography.
The incompleteness of the result is confessed in the Epitome of the
Bibliotheca, printed five years afterwards, which professes only to
record _nearly_ all the books written since the world began, and yet
boasts of adding more than two thousand names of authors to the number
mentioned in the original Bibliotheca.[63]
[Footnote 63: Gesner's is a work in which many curious things may be
found, as, for instance the following, which would have gladdened the
heart of Scott, had it been his fortune to alight on it: "Thomas
Leirmant, vel Ersiletonus, natione Scotus, edidit Rhythmica quaedam, et
ob id Rhythmicus apud Anglos cognominatus est. Vixit anno 1286."]
Of what any list of all the books that have appeared in the world might
be, one may form some conception by the effort of Dr Watt, accomplished
nearly fifty years ago. The work is said to have killed him; and no one
who turns over the densely printed leaves of his four quartos, can feel
surprised at such a result. It is by no means perfect or complete, even
as a guide to books in the compiler's native tongue, yet stands in
honourable contrast with the failure of several efforts to continue this
portion of it down to later days. The voluminous France Litteraire of
Querard confesses its imperfections even to accomplish its limited
object, by professing to devote its special attention to books of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As to bibliographies of the present century aiming at universality, the
Allgemeines Gelehrten Lexicon of Joecher--when accompanied by Adelung's
supplement, which is its better-half--for scholarship and completeness
casts into shade anything produced either in France or here. It is a
guide which few people consult without passing a compliment either
internally or aloud on the satisfactory result. That it contains an
account of every, or nearly every, book is at once contradicted by its
bulk, yet it is often remarked that no one appeals to it in vain--a
specialty which seems to have arisen from the peculiar capacity of its
editors to dive, as it were, into the hearts of those likely to seek
their aid.
Naturally, the most satisfactory of bibliographies are those limited to
books of a special class. These are frequent in law and divinity, but
are most numerous in history. Hence have we such valued guides as
Lelong, Dupin, Dufresnoy, and our own dynasty of historical
bibliographers, which, including Leland, Bale, Pitts, and Tanner,
reached its climax in Bishop Nicholson, whose introduction to the
sources of British history, hitherto so valuable, will be superseded for