The Book-Hunter
its expenses, has made up the losses of his first publisher.
If we go out of the hard market and look at the tendency of sympathies,
they are all in the author's favour. Publishers, in fact, have, though
it is not generally believed, a leaning towards good literature, and a
tendency rather to over than to under estimate the reception it may meet
with from the world. In considering whether they will take the risk of a
new publication, they have no criterion to value it by except its
literary merit, for they cannot obtain the votes of the public until
they are committed; and, indeed, there have been a good many instances
where a publisher, having a faith in some individual author and his
star, has pushed and fought a way for him with dogged and determined
perseverance, sometimes with a success of which, were all known, he has
more of the real merit than the author, who seems to have naturally,
without any external aid, taken his position among the eminent and
fortunate.
There are, at the same time, special disquisitions on matters of science
or learning intended for peculiar and limited audiences, which find
their way to publicity without the aid of the publisher. For these there
is an opening in certain institutions far older than the book clubs, and
possessed of a far higher social and intellectual position, since they
have the means of conferring titles of dignity on those they adopt into
their circle--titles which are worn not by trinkets dangling at the
button-hole, but by certain cabalistic letters strung to the name in the
directory of the town where the owner lives, or in the numberless
biographical dictionaries which are to immortalise the present
generation. So the author of an essay, especially in scholarship or
science, will, if it be worth anything, find a place for it in the
Transactions of one or other of the learned societies. It will probably
keep company with, if indeed it be not itself one of, a series of papers
which appear in the quarto volumes of the learned corporation's
Transactions, merely because they cannot get into the octavo pages of
the higher class of periodicals; but there they are, printed in the face
of the world, whose inhabitants at large may worship them if they so
please, and their authors cannot complain that they are suppressed.
Whether the authors of these papers may have been ambitious of their
appearance in a wider sphere, or are content with their appearance in
"The Transactions," it suffices for the present purpose to explain how
these volumes are a more suitable receptacle than those printed by the
book clubs for essays or disquisitions by men following up their own
specialties in literature or science; and if it be the case that some of
the essays which appear in the Transactions of learned bodies would
have gladly entered society under the auspices of some eminent
periodical, yet it is proper at the same time to admit that many of the
most valuable of these papers, concerning discoveries or inventions
which adepts alone can appreciate, could only be satisfactorily
published as they have been. And so we find our way back to the
proposition, that the book clubs have been judiciously restricted to the
promulgation of the works of dead authors.
This has not necessarily excluded the literary contributions of living
men, in the shape of editing and commenting; and it is really difficult
to estimate the quantity of valuable matter which is thus deposited in
obscure but still accessible places. A deal of useful work, too, has
been done in the way of translation; and where the book to be dealt with
is an Icelandic saga, a chronicle in Saxon, in Irish Celtic, or even in
old Norman, one may confess to the weakness of letting the original
remain, in some instances, unexamined, and drawing one's information
with confiding gratitude from the translation furnished by the learned
editor.
Let me offer one instance of the important service that may be done by
affording a vehicle for translations. The late Dr Francis Adams, a
village surgeon by profession, was at the same time, from taste and
pursuit, a profound Greek scholar. He was accustomed to read the old
authors on medicine and surgery--a custom too little respected by his
profession, of whom it is the characteristic defect to respect too
absolutely the standard of the day. As a physician, who is an ornament
to his profession and a great scholar, once observed to me, the writings
of the old physicians, even if we reject them from science, may be
perused with profit to the practitioner as a record of the diagnosis of
cases stated by men of acuteness, experience, and accuracy of
observation. Adams had translated from the Greek the works of Paul of
AEgina, the father of obstetric surgery, and printed the first volume. It
was totally unnoticed, for in fact there were no means by which the
village surgeon could get it brought under the notice of the scattered
members of his profession who desired to possess such a book. The
remainder of his labours would have been lost to the world had it not
been taken off his hands by the Sydenham Club, established for the
purpose of reprinting the works of the ancient physicians.
The Roxburghe Club.
Great institutions and small institutions have each individually had a
beginning, though it cannot always be discovered, distance often
obscuring it before it has been thought worth looking after. There is an
ingenious theory abroad, to the effect that every physical impulse, be
it but a wave of a human hand, and that every intellectual impulse,
whether it pass through the mind of a Newton or a brickmaker, goes, with
whatever strength it may possess, into a common store of dynamic
influences, and tells with some operative power, however imperceptible
and infinitesimal, upon all subsequent events, great or small, so that
everything tells on everything, and there is no one specific cause,
primary or secondary, that can be assigned to any particular event. It
may be so objectively, as the transcendentalists say, but to common
apprehensions there are specific facts which are to them emphatic as
beginnings, such as the day when any man destined for leadership in
great political events was born, or that whereon the Cape of Good Hope
was doubled, or America was discovered.
The beginning of the book clubs is marked by a like distinctness, both
in date and circumstance. The institution did not spring in full
maturity and equipment, like Pallas from the brain of Jove; it was
started by a casual impulse, and remained long insignificant; but its
origin and early progress are as distinctly and specifically its own, as
the birth and infancy of any hero or statesman are his. It is to the
garrulity of Dibdin writing before there was any prospect that this
class of institutions would reach their subsequent importance and
usefulness, that we owe many minute items of detail about the cradle of
the new system. We first slip in upon a small dinner-party, on the 4th
of June in the year 1813, at the table of "Hortensius." The day was one
naturally devoted to hospitality, being the birthday of the reigning
monarch, George III.; but this the historian passes unnoticed, the
object of all-absorbing interest being the great conflict of the
Roxburghe book-sale, then raging through its forty-and-one days. Of
Hortensius it is needless to know more than that he was a distinguished
lawyer, and had a fine library, which having described, Dibdin passes on
thus to matters of more immediate importance: "Nor is the hospitality of
the owner of these treasures of a less quality and calibre than his
taste; for Hortensius regaleth liberally--and as the 'night and day
champagnes' (so he is pleased humorously to call them) sparkle upon his
Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, 'the master of the revels,' or (to
borrow the phraseology of Pynson) of the 'feste royalle,' discourseth
lustily and loudly upon the charms--not of a full-curled or
full-bottomed 'King's Bench' periwig--but of a full-margined
Bartholomaeus or Barclay like his own."[67]
[Footnote 67: Bibliographical Decameron, vol. iii. p. 28.]
After some forty pages of this sort of matter, we get another little
peep at this momentous dinner-party. "On the clearance of the
Gottingen-manufactured table-cloth, the Roxburghe battle formed the
subject of discussion, when I proposed that we should not only be all
present, if possible, on the day of the sale of the Boccaccio, but that
we should meet at some 'fair tavern' to commemorate the sale thereof."
They met accordingly on the 17th of June, some eighteen in number, "at
the St Albans Tavern, St Albans Street, now Waterloo Place." Surely the
place was symbolical, since on the 18th of June, two years afterwards,
the battle of Waterloo was fought; and as the importance attributed to
the contest at Roxburghe House on the 17th procured for it afterwards
the name of the Waterloo of book-battles, it came to pass that there
were two Waterloo commemorations treading closely one on the other's
heels.
The pecuniary stake at issue, and the consequent excitement when the
Valdarfer Boccaccio was knocked off, so far exceeded all anticipation,
that at the festive board a motion was made and carried by acclamation,
for meeting on the same day and in the same manner annually. And so the
Roxburghe Club, the parent of all the book clubs, came into existence.
It must be admitted that its origin bears a curious generic resemblance
to some scenes which produce less elevating results. On the day of some
momentous race or cock-fight, a parcel of sporting devotees, "regular
bricks," perhaps, agree to celebrate the occasion in a tavern, and when
the hilarity of the evening is at its climax, some festive orator,
whose enthusiasm has raised him to the table, suggests, amidst loud
hurrahs and tremendous table-rapping, that the casual meeting should be
converted into an annual festival, to celebrate the event which has
brought them together. At such an assemblage, the list of toasts will
probably include Eclipse, Cotherstone, Mameluke, Plenipo, the Flying
Dutchman, and other illustrious quadrupeds, along with certain bipeds,
distinguished in the second degree as breeders, trainers, and riders,
and may perhaps culminate in "the turf and the stud all over the world."
With a like appropriate reference to the common bond of sympathy, the
Roxburghe toasts included the uncouth names of certain primitive
printers, as Valdarfer himself, Pannartz, Fust, and Schoeffher,
terminating in "The cause of Bibliomania all over the world."[68]
[Footnote 68: As of other influential documents, there have been various
versions of the Roxburghe list of toasts, and a corresponding amount of
critical discussion, which leaves the impression common to such
disputes, that this important manifesto was altered and enlarged from
time to time. The version which bears the strongest marks of
completeness and authenticity, was found among the papers of Mr
Hazlewood, of whom hereafter. It is here set down as nearly in its
original shape as the printer can give it:--
The Order of y^e Tostes.
The Immortal Memory of
John Duke of Roxburghe.
Christopher Valdarfer, Printer of the Decameron of
1471.
Gutemberg, Fust, and Schoeffher, the Inventors of
the Art of Printing.
William Caxton, the Father of the British Press.
Dame Juliana Berners, and the St Albans Press.
Wynkyn de Worde, and Richard Pynson, the Illustrious
Successors of William Caxton.
The Aldine Family, at Venice.
The Giunta Family, at Florence.