The Book-Hunter
higher mathematics. The devotees get to think that all human knowledge
centres in their peculiar science and the cognate mysteries and
exquisite scientific manipulations of heraldry, and they may be heard
talking with compassionate contempt of some one so grossly ignorant as
not to know a bar-dexter from a bend-sinister, or who asks what is meant
by a cross potent quadrate party per pale.
[Footnote 77: I remember hearing of an instance at a jury trial in
Scotland, where counsel had an extremely subtle point of genealogy to
make out, and no one but a ploughman witness, totally destitute of the
genealogical faculty, to assist him to it. His plan--and probably a very
judicious one in the general case--was to get the witness on a
table-land of broad unmistakable principle, and then by degrees lure him
farther on. Thus he got the witness readily to admit that his own mother
was older than himself, but no exertion of ingenuity could get his
intellect a step beyond that broad admission.]
These are generally great readers--reading is absolutely necessary for
their pursuit; but they have a faculty of going over literary ground,
picking up the proper names, and carrying them away, unconscious of
anything else, as pointers go over stubble fields and raise the
partridges, without taking any heed of the valuable examples of
cryptogamic botany or palaeozoic entomology they may have trodden over. A
certain writer on logic and metaphysics was once as much astonished as
gratified by an eminent genealogical antiquary's expression of interest
in a discovery which his last book contained. The philosopher thought
his views on the subjectivity of the nominalists and the objectivity of
the realists had at last been appreciated; but the discovery was merely
this, that the name of a person who, according to the previously
imperfect science of the genealogist, ought not to have existed then and
there, was referred to in a letter from Spinoza, cited in defence of
certain views upon the absolute.
The votaries of this pursuit become powers in the world of rank and
birth, from the influence they are able to bring upon questions of
succession and inheritance. Hence they are, like all great influences,
courted and feared. Their ministry is often desired and sometimes
necessary; but it is received with misgiving and awe, since, like the
demons of old summoned by incantation, they may destroy the audacious
mortal who demands their services. The most sagacious and sceptical men
are apt to be mildly susceptible to conviction in the matter of their
own pedigrees, and, a little conscious of their weakness, they shrink
from letting the sacred tree be handled by relentless and unsympathising
adepts. One of these intellectual tyrants, a man of great ability, when
he quarrelled with any one, used to threaten to "bastardise" him, or to
find the bend-sinister somewhere in his ancestry; and his experience in
long genealogies made him feel assured, in the general case, of finding
what he sought if he went far enough back for it.
The next volume you lay hand on is manifestly edited by an
Ecclesiologist, or a votary of that recent addition to the constituted
"ologies," which has come into existence as the joint offspring of the
revival of Gothic architecture and the study of primitive-church
theology. Through this dim religious light he views all the things in
heaven and earth that are dealt with in his philosophy. His notes are
profusely decorated with a rich array of rood screens, finial crockets,
lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia,
credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is
evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in
bestiology, otherwise called bestial eikonography; and if he be
requested to give a more explicit definition of the article, he will
perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the
ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to
exhibit to you this solemn record, which he will open with befitting
reverence, the faintest suspicion of a smile curling on your lip will
suffuse him with a lively sorrow for your lost condition, mixed with
righteous indignation towards the irreverent folly whereof you have been
guilty. He finds a great deal beyond sermons in stones, and can point
out to you a certain piece of rather confused-looking architecture,
which he terms a symbolical epitome of all knowledge, human and
divine--an eikonographic encyclopaedia.
If you desire an antidote to all this, you may find it in the editor in
true blue who so largely refers to the Book of the Universal Kirk, The
Hynd Let Loose, The Cloud of Witnesses, Naphtali, and Faithful
Witness-Bearing Exemplified, and is great in his observations on the
Auchinshauch Testimony, the Sanquhar Declaration, and that fine
amalgamation of humility and dogmatism, the Informatory Vindication.[78]
[Footnote 78: "An Informatory Vindication of a poor, wasted,
misrepresented remnant of the suffering anti-popish, anti-prelatic,
anti-erastian, anti-sectarian, _only true_ church of Christ in
Scotland."]
There is no occasion for quarrelling with these specialties. They are
typical of a zeal often prolific both in amusement and instruction; and
when a man has gone through the labour of rendering many hundreds of
pages from a crabbed old manuscript, or of translating as much from a
nearly unknown tongue, it would be hard to deny him the recreation of a
few capers on his own hobby. Keep in mind that everything of this kind
is outside the substance of the book. The editor has his swing in the
introduction and appendix, and the notes; perhaps also in the title and
index, if he can make anything of them. But it is a principle of honour
throughout the clubs that the purity of the text shall not be tampered
with; and so, whether dark or light, faint or strong, it is a true
impression of the times, as the reader will perhaps find in the few
specimens I propose to show him. As touching the literary value of what
is thus restored, there are some who will say, and get applause for
doing so, that there are too many bad or second-rate books in existence
already; that every work of great genius finds its way to the world at
once; and that the very fact of its long obscurity proves a piece of
literature to be of little value. For all this, and all that can be
added to it, there are those who love these recovered relics of
ancestral literature, and are prepared to give reasons for their
attachment. In the first place, and apart from their purely literary
merits, they are records of the intellect and manners of their age.
Whoever desires to be really acquainted with the condition of a nation
at any particular time--say with that of England during Elizabeth's
reign, or the Commonwealth--will not attain his object by merely reading
the most approved histories of the period. He must endeavour as far as
he can to live back into the times, and to do this most effectually he
had better saturate himself to the utmost with its fugitive literature,
reading every scrap he may lay hand on until he can find no more.
Looking at these relics, on the other hand, as pure literature, no doubt
what is recalled out of the past loses the freshness and the fitness to
surrounding conditions which gave it pungency and emphasis in its own
day, while it has not that hold on our sympathies and attachment
possessed by the household literature which generation after generation
has been educated to admire, and which, indeed, has made itself a part
of our method of thought and our form of language. But precisely because
it wants this qualification has resuscitated literature a peculiar value
of its own. It breaks in with a new light upon the intellect of the day,
and its conventional forms and colours. There is not in the intellectual
history of mankind any so effective and brilliant an awakening as the
resuscitation of classical literature. It was not one solitary star
arising after another at long intervals and far apart in space, but a
sudden blazing forth of a whole firmament of light. But that is a
phenomenon to all appearance not to be repeated, or, more correctly
speaking, not to be completed, since it broke up unfinished, leaving the
world in partial darkness. Literature has been ever since wailing the
loss of the seventy per cent of Livy's History, of the eighty per cent
of Tacitus and of Euripides, of the still larger proportion of AEschylus
and Sophocles, of the mysterious triumphs of Menander, and of the whole
apparatus of the literary renown of Varro and of Atticus.[79] What would
the learned world give for the restoration of these things? It may
safely offer an indefinite reward, for so well has its surface been
ransacked for them that their existence is hardly possible, though some
sanguine people enjoy the expectation of finding them in some obscure
back-shelves in the Sultan's library. The literary results of the costly
and skilful scientific process for restoring the baked books found in
Herculaneum were so appallingly paltry, as to discourage the pursuit of
the lost classics. The best thing brought to light during the present
century, indeed, is that Institute of Gaius which cost Angelo Mai such a
world of trouble, and was the glory and boast of his life; but it is not
a very popular or extensively read book after all. The manuscripts that
have been extracted from the dirty greedy fingers of the Armenian and
Abyssinian monks, are the most valuable pieces of literature that have
been rescued from the far past. Important light on the early history of
Eastern Christianity will no doubt be extracted from them; but they are
written in those Oriental tongues which are available only to the
privileged few.
[Footnote 79: The applicability of this to Varro has been questioned. It
is a matter in which every one is entitled to hold his own opinion. To
say nothing of the other extant shreds of his writings--and I never
found any one who had anything to say for them--I cannot account even
the De Re Rustica as much higher in literary rank than a Farmers' and
Gardeners' Calendar. No doubt it is valuable, as any such means of
insight into the practical life of the Egyptians or the Phoenicians
would be, even were it less methodical than what we have from Varro. But
this, or other writing like it, will hardly account for his great fame
among contemporaries. Look, for instance, to Cicero at the outset of the
Academics: "Tu aetatem patriae, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum
jura, tu sacerdotum munera, tu domesticam, tu bellicam disciplinam, tu
sedem regionum et locorum, tu omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum
nomina, genera officia, causas aperuiste: plurimumque poetis nostris
omninoque latinis, et literis luminis attulisti, et verbis: atque ipse
varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti: philosophiamque multis
locis inchoasti--ad impellendum satis, ad edocendum parum." Laudation
could scarcely be pitched in higher tone towards the works of the great
Youatt, or Mr Huxtable's contributions to the department of literature
devoted to manure and pigs. The De Re Rustica, written when its author
was eighty years old, seems to have been about the last of what he calls
his seven times seventy works, and it is natural to suppose that
somewhere in the remaining four hundred and eighty-nine lay the merits
which excited such encomiums. The story about Gregory the Great
suppressing the best of Varro's works to hide St Augustine's pilferings
from them, would be a valuable curiosity of literature if it could be
established.]
Unlikely as the treasures opened by the revival of classic literature
are to be to any extent increased, let us not despise the harvest of our