The Book-Hunter
the ordinary members pay an annual sum, to be expended in the printing
of their books, have individual gentlemen come forward and borne the
expense of printing and distributing costly volumes. In some instances
valuable works have thus been presented to the members at the cost of
those who have also undergone the literary labour of editing them.
There is something extremely refined and gentlemanlike in this form of
liberality. The recipient of the bounty becomes the possessor of a
handsome costly book without being subjected in any way to the
obligation of receiving a direct gift at the hands of the munificent
donor; for the recipient is a sort of corporation--a thing which the
lawyers say has no personal responsibility and no conscience, and which
all the world knows to have no gratitude.
_PART IV.--BOOK-CLUB LITERATURE._
Generalities.
Nearly a quarter of a century after the birth of the first book club, a
new era was ushered in by its brother, the Camden, established for the
printing of books and documents connected with the early civil,
ecclesiastical, and literary history of the British Empire. It discarded
the rule which threw on each member the duty of printing and
distributing a book, and tried the more equitable adjustment of an
annual subscription to create a fund for defraying the expense of
printing volumes to be distributed among the members. These, at first
limited to 1000, expanded to 1200. Clubs with various objects now
thickly followed. Any attempt to classify them as a whole, is apt to
resemble Whately's illustration of illogical division--"_e.g._, if you
were to divide 'book' into 'poetical, historical, folio, quarto, French,
Latin,'" &c. One of the systems of arrangement is topographical, as the
Chetham, "for the purpose of publishing biographical and historical
books connected with the counties palatine of Lancaster and
Chester."[76] The Surtees, again, named after our friend the
ballad-monger, affects "those parts of England and Scotland included in
the east between the Humber and the Firth of Forth, and in the west
between the Mersey and the Clyde--a region which constituted the ancient
kingdom of Northumberland." The Maitland, with its headquarters in
Glasgow, gives a preference to the west of Scotland, but has not been
exclusive. The Spalding Club, established in Aberdeen, the granite
capital of the far north, is the luminary of its own district, and has
produced fully as much valuable historical matter as any other club in
Britain. Then there is the Irish Archaeological--perhaps the most learned
of all--with its casual assistants, the Ossianic, the Celtic, and the
Iona. The AElfric may be counted their ethnical rival, as dealing with
the productions of the Anglo-Saxon enemies of the Celt. The Camden
professes, as we have seen, to be general to the British Empire. The
name of the club called "The Oriental Translation Fund," tells its own
story.
[Footnote 76: Among other volumes of interest, the Chetham has issued a
very valuable and amusing collection of documents about the siege of
Preston, and other incidents of the insurrection of 1715 in Lancashire.]
There are others, too, with no topographical connection, which express
pretty well their purpose in their names--as the Shakespeare, for the
old drama--the Percy, for old ballads and lyrical pieces. The Hakluyt
has a delightful field--old voyages and travels. The Rae Society sticks
to zoology and botany; and the Wernerian, the Cavendish, and the
Sydenham, take the other departments in science, which the names given
to them readily indicate.
In divinity and ecclesiastical history we have the Parker Society, named
after the archbishop. Its tendencies are "Low," or, at all events,
"Broad;" and as it counted some seven thousand members, it could not be
allowed the run of the public mind without an antidote being accessible.
Hence "The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology," the tendency of which
was not only shown in its name, but in its possessing among its earliest
adherents the Rev. E.B. Pusey and the Rev. John Keble. The same party
strengthened themselves by a series of volumes called the "Library of
the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division of the
East and West, translated by Members of the English Church." In
Scotland, the two branches which deny the supremacy of Rome (it would
give offence to call them both Protestant) are well represented by the
Spottiswoode, already referred to as the organ of Episcopacy; and the
more prolific Wodrow, which, named after the zealous historian of the
Troubles, was devoted to the history of Presbyterianism, and the works
of the Presbyterian fathers.
Thus are the book clubs eminently the republic of letters, in which no
party or class has an absolute predominance, but each enjoys a fair
hearing. And whereas if we saw people for other purposes than literature
combining together according to ecclesiastical divisions, as High Church
or Low, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, we should probably find that each
excluded from its circle all that do not spiritually belong to it, we
are assured it is quite otherwise in the book clubs--that High Churchmen
or Romanists have not been excluded from the Parker, or Evangelical
divines prohibited from investing in the Library of Anglo-Catholic
Theology. Nay, the most zealous would incline to encourage the
communication of their own peculiar literary treasures to their avowed
theological opponents, as being likely to soften their hearts, and turn
them towards the truth. Some adherents of these theological clubs there
also are of slightly latitudinarian propensities, to whom the
aspirations of honest religious zeal, and the records of endurance and
martyrdom for conscience' sake, can never be void of interest, or fail
in summoning up feelings of respectful sympathy, whatever be the
denominational banner under which they have been exhibited. Some of
these clubs now rest from their labours, the literary strata in which
they were employed having been in fact worked out. Whether dead or
living, however, their books are now a considerable and varied
intellectual garden, in which the literary busy bee may gather honey all
the day and many a day.
It will be readily supposed from the different and utterly separate
grooves in which they run, and is very well known to the prowler among
club books, that although these volumes profess to be printed from old
manuscripts, or to be mere reprints of rare books, they take a
considerable portion of their tone and tendency from the editor. In
fact, the editor of a club book is, in the general case, a sort of
literary sportsman, who professes to follow entirely his own humour or
caprice, or, say, his own taste and enjoyment, in the matter which he
selects, and the manner in which he lays it before his friends. Hence,
many of these volumes, heavy and unimpressible as they look, yet are
stamped strongly with the marks of the individuality, or of the peculiar
intellectual cast, of living men. Take down, for instance, the volume of
the Camden called "De Antiquis Legibus Liber," otherwise, "Cronica
Majorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum," printed from "a small folio, nine
inches and a half in length and seven inches in breadth, the binding of
white leather covering wooden backs, and containing 159 leaves of
parchment, paged continuously with Arabic cyphers." It is partly a
record of the old municipal laws of the city of London, partly a
chronicle of events. Had it fallen to be edited by a philosophical
inquirer into the origin and principles of jurisprudence, or an
investigator of the rise and progress of cities, or a social philosopher
of any kind, it is hard to say what might have been made of it--easy to
say that it would have been made something very different from what it
is. The editor was an illustrious genealogist. Accordingly, early in his
career as expositor of the character of the volume, he alights upon a
proper name, not entirely isolated, but capable of being associated with
other names. Thus, he is placed on a groove, and off he goes travelling
in the fashion following over 220 pages of printed quarto: "Henry de
Cornhill, husband of Alice de Courcy, the heiress of the Barony of Stoke
Courcy Com. Somerset, and who, after his decease, re-married Warine
Fitz-Gerald the king's chamberlain, leaving by each an only daughter,
co-heirs of this Barony, of whom Joan de Cornhill was the wife of Hugh
de Neville, Proto Forester of England, wife first of Baldwine de
Riviers, eldest son and heir-apparent of William de Vernon, Earl of
Devon, deceased in his father's lifetime; and, secondly, of the
well-known favourite of King John, Fulk de Breaute, who had name from a
commune of the Canton of Goderville, arrondissement of Le Havre,
department of La Seine Inferieure, rendered accompt of this his debt in
the same roll;" and so on over the remainder of the 220 pages. If you
turn over a few of them you will find the same sort of thing: "Agnes,
the first daughter, was married to William de Vesey, of whom John de
Vesey, issueless, and William de Vesey, who had issue, John de Vesey,
who died before his father; and afterwards the said William de Vesey,
the father, without heir of his body;" and so on.
The reader whose fortune it has been to pass a portion of his early days
among venerable Scottish gentlewomen of the old school, will perhaps
experience an uneasy consciousness of having encountered matter of this
description before. It may recall to him misty recollections of
communications which followed a course something like this: "And so ye
see, auld Pittoddles, when his third wife deed, he got married upon the
laird o' Blaithershin's aughteenth daughter, that was sister to Jemima,
that was married intil Tam Flumexer, that was first and second cousin to
the Pittoddleses, whase brither became laird afterwards, and married
Blaithershin's Baubie--and that way Jemima became in a kind o' way her
ain niece and her ain aunty, an' as we used to say, her gude-brither was
married to his ain grannie."
But there is the deep and the shallow in genealogy, as in other arts and
sciences, and, incoherent as it may sound to the uninitiated, the
introduction to the Liber de Antiquis Legibus is no old woman's work,
but full of science and strange matter.[77] It all grows, however, in
genealogical trees, these being the predominant intellectual growth in
the editor's mind. In fact, your thorough genealogist is quite a
peculiar intellectual phenomenon. He is led on by a special and
irresistible internal influence or genius. If he should for some time
endeavour to strive after a more cosmopolite intellectual vitality, the
ruling spirit conquers all other pursuits. The organism of the tree
resumes its predominance, and if he have healthy sturdy brains, whatever
other matter they may have collected is betimes dragged into the growth,
and absorbed in the vitality of the majestic bole and huge branches.
There is perhaps no pursuit more thoroughly absorbing. The reason is
this: No man having yet made out for himself an articulate pedigree from
Adam--Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, to be sure, made
one for himself, but he had his tongue in his cheek all the while--no
clear pedigree going back to the first of men, every one, whether short
or long, Celtic or Saxon, comes into the clouds at last. It is when a
pedigree approaches extinction that the occasion opens for the
genealogist to exercise his subtlety and skill, and his exertions become
all the more zealous and exciting that he knows he must be baffled
somewhere. The pursuit is described as possessing something like the
same absorbing influence which is exercised over certain minds by the