The Book-Hunter
of the Chess, Sir James Dier's Remembrancer of the Life of Sir Nicholas
Bacon, the Dialogus inter Deum et Evam, and others.
The possession of a private printing-press is, no doubt, a very
appalling type of bibliomania. Much as has been told us of the awful
scale on which drunkards consume their favoured poison, one is not
accustomed to hear of their setting up private stills for their own
individual consumption. There is a Sardanapalitan excess in this
bibliographical luxuriousness which refuses to partake with other vulgar
mortals in the common harvest of the public press, but must itself
minister to its own tastes and demands. The owner of such an
establishment is subject to no extraneous caprices about breadth of
margins, size of type, quarto or folio, leaded or unleaded lines; he
dictates his own terms; he is master of the situation, as the French
say; and is the true autocrat of literature. There have been several
renowned private presses: Walpole's, at Strawberry Hill; Mr Johnes's, at
Hafod; Allan's, at the Grange; and the Lee Priory Press. None of these,
however, went so distinctly into the groove afterwards followed by the
book clubs as Sir Alexander Boswell's Auchinleck Press. In the
Bibliographical Decameron is a brief history, by Sir Alexander himself,
of the rise and progress of his press. He tells us how he had resolved
to print Knox's Disputation: "For this purpose I was constrained to
purchase two small fonts of black-letter, and to have punches cut for
eighteen or twenty double letters and contractions. I was thus enlisted
and articled into the service, and being infected with the _type_ fever,
the fits have periodically returned. In the year 1815, having viewed a
portable press invented by Mr John Ruthven, an ingenious printer in
Edinburgh, I purchased one, and commenced compositor. At this period, my
brother having it in contemplation to present Bamfield to the Roxburghe
Club, and not aware of the poverty and insignificance of my
establishment, expressed a wish that his tract should issue from the
Auchinleck Press. I determined to gratify him, and the portable press
being too small for general purposes, I exchanged it for one of Mr
Ruthven's full-sized ones; and having increased my stock to _eight_
small fonts, roman and italic, with the necessary appurtenances, I
placed the whole in a cottage, built originally for another purpose,
very pleasantly situated on the bank of a rivulet, and, although
concealed from view by the surrounding wood, not a quarter of a mile
from my house."[74]
[Footnote 74: Bibliographical Decameron, vol. ii. p. 454.]
To show the kind of man who co-operated with Scott in such frivolities,
let me say a word or two more about Sir Alexander. He was the son,
observe, of Johnson's Jamie Boswell, but he was about as like his father
as an eagle might be to a peacock. To use a common colloquial phrase, he
was a man of genius, if ever there was one. Had he been a poorer and
socially humbler man than he was--had he had his bread and his position
to make--he would probably have achieved immortality. Some of his songs
are as familiar to the world as those of Burns, though their author is
forgotten,--as, for instance, the song of parental farewell, beginning--
"Good-night, and joy be wi' ye a';
Your harmless mirth has cheered my heart,"
and ending with this fine and genial touch--
"The auld will speak, the young maun hear;
Be canty, but be good and leal;
Your ain ills aye hae heart to bear,
Another's aye hae heart to feel:
So, ere I set I'll see you shine,
I'll see you triumph ere I fa';
My parting breath shall boast you mine.
Good-night, and joy be wi' you a'."
His "Auld Gudeman, ye're a drucken carle," "Jenny's Bawbee," and "Jenny
dang the Weaver," are of another kind, and perhaps fuller of the
peculiar spirit of the man. This consisted in hitting off the deeper and
typical characteristics of Scottish life with an easy touch that brings
it all home at once. His lines do not seem as if they were composed by
an effort of talent, but as if they were the spontaneous expressions of
nature.
Take the following specimen of ludicrous pomposity, which must suffer a
little by being quoted from memory: it describes a Highland
procession:--
"Come the Grants o' Tullochgorum,
Wi' their pipers on afore 'em;
Proud the mithers are that bore 'em,
Fee fuddle, fau fum.
Come the Grants o' Rothiemurchus,
Ilka ane his sword an' durk has,
Ilka ane as proud's a Turk is,
Fee fuddle, fau fum."
To comprehend the spirit of this, one must endow himself with the
feelings of a Lowland Scot before Waverley and Rob Roy imparted a glow
of romantic interest to the Highlanders. The pompous and the ludicrous
were surely never more happily interwoven. One would require to go
further back still to appreciate the spirit of "Skeldon Haughs, or the
Sow is Flitted." It is a picture of old Ayrshire feudal rivalry and
hatred. The Laird of Bargainy resolved to humiliate his neighbour and
enemy, the Laird of Kerse, by a forcible occupation of part of his
territory. For the purpose of making this aggression flagrantly
insulting, it was done by tethering or staking a female pig on the
domain of Kerse. The animal was, of course, attended by a sufficient
body of armed men for her protection. It was necessary for his honour
that the Laird of Kerse should drive the animal and her attendants away,
and hence came a bloody battle about "the flitting of the sow." In the
contest, Kerse's eldest son and hope, Jock, is killed, and the point or
moral of the narrative is, the contempt with which the old laird looks
on that event, as compared with the grave affair of flitting the sow. A
retainer who comes to tell him the result of the battle stammers in his
narrative on account of his grief for Jock, and is thus pulled up by the
laird--
"'Is the sow flitted?' cries the carle;
'Gie me an answer, short and plain--
Is the sow flitted, yammerin' wean?'"
To which the answer is--
"'The sow, deil tak her, 's ower the water,
And at her back the Crawfords clatter;
The Carrick couts are cowed and bitted.'"
Hereupon the laird's exultation breaks forth,--
"'My thumb for Jock--the sow's flitted!'"
Another man of genius and learning, whose name is a household one among
the book clubs, is Robert Surtees, the historian of Durham. You may
hunt for it in vain among the biographical dictionaries. Let us hope
that this deficiency will be well supplied in the Biographia Britannica,
projected by Mr Murray. Surtees was not certainly among those who flare
their qualities before the world--he was to a peculiar degree addicted,
as we shall shortly see, to hiding his light under a bushel; and so any
little notice of him in actual flesh and blood, such as this left by his
friend, the Rev. James Tate, master of Richmond School, interests one:--
"One evening I was sitting alone--it was about nine o'clock in the
middle of summer--there came a gentle tap at the door. I opened the door
myself, and a gentleman said with great modesty, 'Mr Tate, I am Mr
Surtees of Mainsforth. James Raine begged I would call upon you.' 'The
master of Richmond School is delighted to see you,' said I; 'pray walk
in.' 'No, thank you, sir; I have ordered a bit of supper; perhaps you
will walk up with me?' 'To be sure I will;' and away we went. As we went
along, I quoted a line from the Odyssey. What was my astonishment to
hear from Mr Surtees, not the next only, but line after line of the
passage I had touched upon. Said I to myself, 'Good Master Tate, take
heed; it is not often you catch such a fellow as this at Richmond.' I
never spent such an evening in my life." What a pity, then, that he did
not give us more of the evening, which seems to have left joyful
memories to both: for Surtees himself thus commemorated it in
macaronics, in which he was an adept:--
"Doctus Tatius hic residet,
Ad Coronam prandet ridet,
Spargit sales cum cachinno,
Lepido ore et concinno,
Ubique carus inter bonos
Rubei montis praesens honos."
In the same majestic folio in which this anecdote may be found--the
Memoir prefixed to the History of Durham--we are likewise told how, when
at college, he was waiting on a Don on business; and, feeling coldish,
stirred the fire. "Pray, Mr Surtees," said the great man, "do you think
that any other undergraduate in the college would have taken that
liberty?" "Yes, Mr Dean," was the reply--"any one as cool as I am!" This
would have been not unworthy of Brummell. The next is not in Brummell's
line. Arguing with a neighbour about his not going to church, the man
said, "Why, sir, the parson and I have quarrelled about the tithes."
"You fool," was the reply, "is that any reason why you should go to
hell?" Yet another. A poor man, with a numerous family, lost his only
cow. Surtees was collecting a subscription to replace the loss, and
called on the Bishop of Lichfield, who was Dean of Durham, and owner of
the great tithes in the parish, to ascertain what he would give. "Give!"
said the bishop; "why, a cow, to be sure. Go, Mr Surtees, to my
steward, and tell him to give you as much money as will buy the best cow
you can find." Surtees, astonished at this unexpected generosity,
said--"My Lord, I hope you will ride to heaven upon the back of that
cow." A while afterwards he was saluted in the college by the late Lord
Barrington, with--"Surtees, what is the absurd speech that I hear you
have been making to the dean?" "I see nothing absurd in it," was the
reply; "when the dean rides to heaven on the back of that cow, many of
you prebendaries will be glad to lay hold of her tail!"
I have noted these innocent trifles concerning one who is chiefly known
as a deep and dry investigator, for the purpose of propitiating the
reader in his favour, since the sacred cause of truth renders it
necessary to refer to another affair in which his conduct, however
trifling it might be, was not innocent. He was addicted to literary
practical jokes of an audacious kind, and carried his presumption so far
as to impose on Sir Walter Scott a spurious ballad which has a place in
the Border Minstrelsy. Nor is it by any means a servile imitation, which
might pass unnoticed in a crowd of genuine and better ballads; but it is
one of the most spirited and one of the most thoroughly endowed with
individual character in the whole collection. This guilty composition is
known as "The Death of Featherstonhaugh," and begins thus:--
"Hoot awa', lads, hoot awa';
Ha' ye heard how the Ridleys, and Thirlwalls, and a',
Ha' set upon Albany Featherstonhaugh,
And taken his life at the Dead Man's Haugh?
There was Williemoteswick
And Hardriding Dick,
And Hughie of Hawdon, and Will of the Wa',
I canna tell a', I canna tell a',
And many a mair that the deil may knaw.
The auld man went down, but Nicol his son
Ran awa' afore the fight was begun;
And he run, and he run,
And afore they were done
There was many a Featherston gat sic a stun,
As never was seen since the world begun.
I canna tell a', I canna tell a',
Some got a skelp and some got a claw,
But they gar't the Featherstons haud their jaw.
Some got a hurt, and some got nane,
Some had harness, and some got staen."
This imposture, professing to be taken down from the recitation of a
woman eighty years old, was accompanied with some explanatory notes,
characteristic of the dry antiquary, thus: "Hardriding Dick is not an
epithet referring to horsemanship, but means Richard Ridley of
Hardriding, the seat of another family of that name, which, in the time