The Book-Hunter
most practical purposes on the completion of Mr Duffus Hardy's
Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great
Britain and Ireland. Science, though it can boast of the great
compilations of Haller, and of other sources of reference to its
literature, takes less aid from such guides than other departments of
intellectual labour, for the obvious reason that, except to the few who
are pursuing its history through its dawn and progress, the latest books
on any department generally supersede their predecessors. They are, in
fact, themselves the guides which show the scientific inquirer his work,
not lying like that of the historian and divine in old books, but in
existing things and practical experiments. Of books intended to show
what is to be found in others, an extremely curious history attaches to
one, the Bibliotheca of Photius. It is known of course to all divines,
but not necessarily, perhaps, to every other person, that this turbulent
and ambitious patriarch, during what he calls his embassy to Syria,
occupied himself in taking down notes of the contents of theological
treatises by his predecessors and contemporaries, with his judgments on
their merits. Being a man of controversial propensities, he selected for
criticism the works of the authors with whom he was at war. Ranking
himself among the orthodox, he thus collected notes of the works of
heterodox writers, and, among these, of several eminent Arians; and the
rather startling result of his labours is, that a considerable quantity
of Arian literature has thus been preserved, which, but for the
exertions of the man who intended to exterminate it by his censure,
would have been entirely lost to the world.
There are among bibliographers many highly meritorious leaders through
the mysteries of occult literature--as, for instance, those who, like
Placcius, Mylius, Barbiere, and Melzi, have devoted themselves to the
discovery and publication of the authorship of anonymous works. Their
function is, on the whole, a rather cruel one, and suggests that those
who betake themselves to it are men of austere character. Sometimes, to
be sure, it falls to their lot to place the laurel wreath of fame on the
deserving brow, but very seldom before the grave has closed over it. The
resuscitation of books which have passed unnoticed because they were
beyond their age, or failed to touch its sympathies, has been the class
of instances in which honour has been thus conferred; and it has seldom
fallen to the lot of the living, for the reason that it is the nature of
the human being not very resolutely to conceal from an inquiring public
those of his actions which receive the approval of his own conscience
and taste. In dealing with the living, and often the recently departed,
it is the function of this class of investigators to expose the
weaknesses and inconsistencies of the wise and great. It is they who
have told the world about the youthful Jacobitism of the eminent pillar
of the constitution; of the early Radicalism of the distinguished
Conservative; of the more than questionable escapades of the popular,
yet sedate divine, whose works are the supreme model of decorous piety.
In this wise, indeed, the function of the bibliographer of the anonymous
much resembles the detective's. Like that functionary, he must not let
feelings of delicacy or humanity interfere with the relentless execution
of his duty, for of those who have achieved eminence as public teachers,
all that they have ever told the world is the world's property. Whatever
mercy may be shown to the history of their private life, cannot be
claimed for the sayings which they have made or tried to make public. If
they have at other times uttered opinions different from those which
have achieved for them fame and eminence, those early utterances are an
effective test of the value and sincerity of the later, and were it for
this object only, the world is entitled to look at them. This is one of
the penalties which can only be escaped by turning aside from the path
to eminence.[64]
[Footnote 64: It will be agreeable news to the severely disposed, to
know that a wholesale exposure of those British authors who attempt to
hide their deeds in darkness is now in progress, the work having been
undertaken, as police reports say, by "a thoroughly efficient officer of
indomitable activity."]
Passing from this class of interesting though rather unamiable
elucidations, I come to another class of bibliographies, of which it is
difficult to speak with patience--those which either profess to tell
you how to find the best books to consult on every department of
learning, or undertake to point out to you the books which you should
select for your library, or for your miscellaneous reading. As to those
which profess to be universal mentors, at hand to help you with the best
tools for your work, in whichever department of intellectual labour it
may happen to be, _they_ break down at once. Whoever has set himself to
any special line of investigation, cannot open one of those books
without discovering its utter worthlessness and incapacity to aid him in
his own specialty. As to the other class of bibliographers, who profess
to act the guide, philosopher, and friend to the collector and the
reader, I cannot imagine anything more offensively audacious than the
function they assume. It is an attempt of the pedagogue to assert a
jurisdiction over grown intellects, and hence such books naturally
develop in flagrant exaggeration the pragmatical priggism which is the
pedagogue's characteristic defect. I would except from this condemnation
a few bibliographers, who, instead of sitting in the schoolmaster's
chair and dictating to you what it is proper that you should read,
rather give you a sly hint that they are going a-vagabondising through
the byways of literature, and will take you with them if you like. Among
these I would chiefly be inclined to affect the company of Peignot,
whose wild and wayward course of reading provides for you something like
to a ramble over the mountains with an Alpine hunter, the only kind of
guide to whom the thorough pedestrian wanderer should give up his
freedom. One of Peignot's books, called Predicatoriana, ou Revelations
Singulieres et Amusantes sur les Predicateurs, brings one into scenes
apt to shock a mind not tolerably hardened by eclectic reading. It is an
anonymous publication, but has been traced home by the literary
detectives. It may be characterised as a collection of the Buffooneries
of Sermons. A little book enlivened by something like the same spirit,
called The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, is known among ourselves; and
there is an answer to it assailing the Episcopal Church of Scotland, in
a tone which decidedly improves on the lesson of sarcasm and malignity
taught by the other side. Both writers are dishonest in the statements
they make and the passages they quote from their adversaries, and both
are grotesque and profane. Peignot, not being influenced by polemical
rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the
persons who preached the passages quoted by him uttered them in all
religious sincerity. Yet wide as the Christian world stretches beyond
our corner of it, by so far does the Frenchman's book in grotesqueness
and profanity out-shadow the attempts of the Scottish polemical
combatants.
Of that highly patrician class of bibliographies which offer their
services exclusively to the collectors of rare, curious, and costly
books, there are so many notices dotted over this volume, that I shall
only stop here to mark the recentness of their appearance in literature.
To judge from the title-page, one might trace them as far back as 1676,
in John Hallervord's Bibliotheca Curiosa, in which the editor professes
to indicate many authors which are very rare and known to few; but this
book would give no satisfaction to pure rarity seekers. Hallervord takes
curious in its old sense, which corresponds in some measure with the
present use of the word interesting; and the specialty of the books
being known to few, seems to refer to their profundity and the rarity of
learning sufficient to sound their depths. Nor does the list published a
few years later by the London bookseller Hartley, though it professes to
signalise very rare books, show that nice sense which discriminates game
of a high order from the vulgar and useful.[65] I suspect that before we
reach the dawn of this class of literature proper, we must descend at
once to the year 1750, distinguished by the simultaneous appearance of
Clement's Bibliotheque Curieuse, and Freytag's Analecta de Libris
Rarioribus.[66]
[Footnote 65: Catalogus Universalis Librorum in omni facultate linguaque
insignium et rarissimorum, &c. Londini, apud Joannem Hartley,
Bibliopolam, exadversum Hospitio Grayensi, in vico vulgo Holborn dicto.
MDCXCIX.]
[Footnote 66: Of course the Bibliographers prey relentlessly on each
other, and bibliographical notices of Bibliographies abound. Le Brun
sets aside a department for them, but the most handy reference to them
that has come my way is a chronological list in the Dictionnaire
Bibliographique, ou Nouveau Manuel du Libraire, by M. P*****--identified
by his brother detectives as M. Psaume.]
_PART III.--HIS CLUB._
Clubs in General.
An author of the last generation, professing to deal with any branch of
human affairs, if he were ambitious of being considered philosophical,
required to go at once to the beginning of all things, where, finding
man alone in the world, he would describe how the biped set about his
own special business, for the supply of his own wants and desires; and
then finding that the human being was, by his instincts, not a solitary
but a social animal, the ambitious author would proceed in well-balanced
sentences to describe how men aggregated themselves into hamlets,
villages, towns, cities, counties, parishes, corporations, select
vestries, and so on. I find that, without the merit of entertaining any
philosophical views, I have followed, unconsciously, the same routine.
Having discussed the book-hunter as he individually pursues his object,
I now propose to look in upon him at his club, and say something about
its peculiarities, as the shape in which he takes up the pursuit
collectively with others who happen to be like-minded to himself.
Those who are so very old as to remember the Episcopal Church of
Scotland in that brief period of stagnant depression when the repeal of
the penal laws had removed from her the lustre of martyrdom, and she had
not yet attained the more secular lustre which the zeal of her wealthy
votaries has since conferred on her, will be familiar with the name of
Bishop Robert Jolly. To the ordinary reader, however, it may be
necessary to introduce him more specifically. He was a man of singular
purity, devotedness, and learning. If he had no opportunity of attesting
the sincerity of his faith by undergoing stripes and bondage for the
Church of his adoption, he developed in its fulness that unobtrusive
self-devotion, not inferior to martyrdom, which dedicates to obscure
duties the talent and energy that, in the hands of the selfish and
ambitious, would be the sure apparatus of wealth and station. He had no
doubt risen to an office of dignity in his own Church--he was a bishop.
But to understand the position of a Scottish bishop in those days, one
must figure Parson Adams, no richer than Fielding has described him, yet
encumbered by a title ever associated with wealth and dignity, and only
calculated, when allied with so much poverty and social humility, to
deepen the incongruity of his lot, and throw him more than ever on the