Page 1. Lamb.—The extracts from the works of Charles Lamb are from the Oxford edition, edited by T. Hutchinson. Not content with 'grace' before Milton and Shakespeare, Lamb suggests elsewhere (see p. 130) a solemn service.

P. 1. Petrarch.—When the love-sick Petrarch retired from Avignon to Vaucluse, in 1338, his only companions were his books; for his friends rarely visited him, alleging that his mode of life was unnatural. Petrarch replied as in the text, which is quoted from Mrs. S. Dodson's Life. On another occasion, however, Petrarch wrote: 'Many have found the multitude of their books a hindrance to learning, and abundance has bred want, as sometimes happens. But if the many books are at hand, they are not to be cast aside, but to be gleaned, and the best used; and care should be taken that those which might have proved seasonable auxiliaries do not become hindrances out of season.' See Leigh Hunt's reference on page 20 to Petrarch as 'the god of the Bibliomaniacs'.

P. 2. Waller.—Carlyle, aged 22, wrote to Robert Mitchell that, lacking society, he found 'books are a ready and effectual resource'. 'It is lawful,' he added, 'for the solitary wight to express the love he feels for those companions so steadfast and unpresuming—that go or come without reluctance, and that, when his fellow-animals are proud or stupid or peevish, are ever ready to cheer the languor of his soul, and gild the barrenness of life with the treasures of bygone times.'

Walter Pater, in Appreciations: Style, observes that 'different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not only scholars but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat".'

P. 4. Chesterfield.—Folio, a book whose sheets are folded into two leaves; quarto, sheets folded into four leaves, abbreviated into 4to; octavo, sheets folded into eight leaves, 8vo; duodecimo, sheets folded into twelve leaves, 12mo. The first three words come to us from the Italian, through the French; the last is from the Latin duodecim.

P. 4. Southey.—

P. 5. Southey ('A heavenly delight').—See p. 320.

P. 5. Southey ('The best of all possible company').—Castanheda died in 1559, Barros in 1570, Osorio (da Fonseca) in 1580. They were Portuguese historians.

P. 6. Emerson.

P. 7. Whittier.—The poet explains that the 'lettered magnate' was his friend Fields (James Thomas, 1817-81), who edited the Atlantic Monthly. Among Fields's friends were Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, Miss Mitford, and Dickens. Longfellow's 'Auf Wiedersehen' was written 'in memory of J. T. F.', and Whittier himself wrote some elegiac verse after his death.

It may be noted that Elzevir was the name of a famous family of Dutch printers, whose books were chiefly issued between 1592 and 1681. Louis Elzevir (? 1540-1617) was the first to make the name famous.

P. 9. Roscoe.—The sale of Roscoe's library, necessary on account of financial failure, took place in August and September 1816. This Roscoe is the historian of the Medici.

Washington Irving quotes Roscoe's sonnet in his reference to the incident.

P. 10. Longfellow.—These valedictory lines were written in December 1881. In the following year Longfellow died.

P. 10. Jonson.—Goodyer or Goodier (spelt Goodyere by Herrick) was the friend of Donne and of many other literary men, and he wrote verses on his own account. His father, Sir Henry Goodyer, was the patron of Michael Drayton.

P. 11. Sheridan.—Written to Dean Swift, then in London.

P. 12. Tupper.—'Next to possessing a true, wise, and victorious friend seated by your fireside, it is blessed to have the spirit of such a friend embodied—for spirit can assume any embodiment—on your bookshelves. But in the latter case the friendship is all on one side. For full friendship your friend must love you, and know that you love him.'—George MacDonald.

Compare C. S. C.'s parody on page 135; and Goethe's statement that he only hated parodies 'because they lower the beautiful, noble, and great'.

P. 13. de Bury.—Richard de Bury was born near Bury St. Edmunds in 1287, his father being Sir Richard Aungervile. He had a distinguished career at Oxford, and was the tutor of Edward III. Sent as ambassador to the papal court at Avignon, he formed a friendship with Petrarch (see pp. 1 and 369). While Bishop of Durham, he was for a short time Lord Chancellor and also Treasurer of England. He finished the Philobiblon less than three months before he died, in 1345. Thomas Fuller says that he had more books than all the other English bishops in that age put together. He had a library at each of his residences, and Mr. E. C. Thomas tells us, on the authority of William de Chambre, that wherever he was residing so many books lay about his bedchamber that it was hardly possible to stand or move without treading upon them. All the time he could spare from business was devoted either to religious offices or to books, and daily at table he would have a book read to him. The Philobiblon was printed first at Cologne in 1473, then ten years later at Spires, and in 1500 at Paris. The first edition printed in England appeared in 1598, and it was a product of the Oxford Press. It was not until 1832 that any English translation was published. This, although the name was not divulged in the book, was the work of John Bellingham Inglis. More than half a century passed before another translation was made—that of Mr. Thomas, who personally examined or collated twenty-eight MSS. Inglis's translation, according to his successor, is a work of more spirit than accuracy, but it is the spirit that quickeneth, and it is the 1832 volume which I have used.

P. 14. Addison.—Ovid, Met. xv. 871:

Fielding says in Tom Jones:—'I question not but the ingenious author of the Spectator was principally induced to prefix Greek and Latin mottoes to every paper, from the same consideration of guarding against the pursuit of those scribblers who, having no talents of a writer but what is taught by the writing-master, are yet not more afraid nor ashamed to assume the same titles with the greatest genius, than their good brother in the fable was of braying in the lion's skin. By the device, therefore, of his motto, it became impracticable for any man to presume to imitate the Spectators, without understanding at least one sentence in the learned languages.'

'No praise of Addison's style,' Lord Lytton declares, 'can exaggerate its merits. Its art is perfectly marvellous. No change of time can render the workmanship obsolete. His manner has that nameless urbanity in which we recognize the perfection of manner—courteous, but not courtier-like; so dignified, yet so kindly; so easy, yet so high-bred. Its form of English is fixed—a safe and eternal model, of which all imitation pleases—to which all approach is scholarship—like the Latin of the Augustan age.'

So much for style. For the rest Hazlitt remarks that 'it is the extremely moral and didactic tone of the Spectator which makes us apt to think of Addison (according to Mandeville's sarcasm) as "a parson in a tie-wig"'. How often history repeats itself.

P. 15. Dodd.—His Beauties of Shakespeare, published in 1752, is still well known. Dodd was hanged for forgery, despite many efforts, including those of Dr. Johnson, on his behalf.

P. 16. Hunt.—The periods referred to by Leigh Hunt are 'the dark ages, as they are called', and 'the gay town days of Charles II, or a little afterwards'. In the first the essayist imagines 'an age of iron warfare and energy, with solitary retreats, in which the monk or the hooded scholar walks forth to meditate, his precious volume under his arm. In the other, I have a triumphant example of the power of books and wit to contest the victory with sensual pleasure:—Rochester staggering home to pen a satire in the style of Monsieur Boileau; Butler, cramming his jolly duodecimo with all the learning that he laughed at; and a new race of book poets come up, who, in spite of their periwigs and petit-maÎtres, talk as romantically of "the bays" as if they were priests of Delphos.'

In Chapman's translation of Homer occur the words: 'The fortresses of thorniest queaches.' A queach is a thick bushy plot, or a quickset hedge.

P. 17. Lamb.—

P. 18. Burton.—Compare the remark of the 'Hammock School' reviewers in Mr. G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill—'Next to authentic goodness in a book (and that, alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness.'

P. 19. Channing.—An address introductory to the Franklin lectures delivered at Boston, 1838. Channing's influence increased after his death, which occurred in 1842. In the seventies nearly 50,000 copies of his Complete Works were circulated in America and Europe.

P. 20. Hunt.—The novel Camilla is Madame D'Arblay's; the entire passage relating to the Oxford scholar's books is given on page 216. Petrarch is quoted on pages 1 and 369.

P. 21. Landor.—See 'Old-Fashioned Verse' on p. 186.

P. 26. Burton.—Lord Byron is reported by Moore to have said: 'The book, in my opinion, most useful to a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble, is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the most amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes I ever perused. But a superficial reader must take care, or his intricacies will bewilder him. If, however, he has patience to go through his volumes, he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted, at least in the English language.'

Dr. Johnson, while admitting that the Anatomy is a valuable work, suggests that it is overloaded with quotation. But he adds, 'It is the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise.'

P. 28. Southey.—'Southey's appearance is Epic; and he is the only existing entire man of letters. All the others have some pursuit annexed to their authorship'.—Lord Byron.

P. 32. Montaigne.—Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, began to write his essays in his chÂteau at Montaigne in PÉrigord in 1572, at the age of thirty-nine. The essays were published in 1580, and five editions had appeared before his death in 1592.

The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne translated by John Florio were first published in 1603. The translator was born in London about 1553, and he died in 1625. It is this translation from which my excerpts are given, and it is the only book known to have been in Shakespeare's library; the volume contains his autograph, and is now in the British Museum.

Emerson classes Montaigne in his Representative Men as the Sceptic. He calls to mind that Gibbon reckoned, in the bigoted times of the period, but two men of liberality in France—Henry IV and Montaigne—and adds, 'Though a Biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence is superficial.... I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.'

P. 33. Denham.—Dominico Mancini wrote the Libellus de quattuor Virtutibus, published in Paris, 1484.

P. 37. Johnson.—The excerpts from Johnson and from Boswell's Life are taken, where possible, from Dr. Birkbeck Hill's Oxford edition.

P. 41. Rabelais.—The translation is that of Peter Anthony Motteux (1660-1718) and of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660).

It may be remembered that Pantagruel on his travels found in Paris 'the library of St. Victor, a very stately and magnificent one, especially in some books which were there', of which the Repertory or Catalogue is given. A few of the titles are:—The Pomegranate of Vice, The Henbane of the Bishops, The Crucible of Contemplation, The Flimflams of the Law, The Pleasures of the Monachal Life, Sixty-nine fat Breviaries, and The Chimney-sweeper of Astrology. Some of the titles are too 'Rabelaesian', or what some booksellers call 'curious', to print. A certain number of the books appear to have actually existed outside the author's imagination.

P. 45. Herrick.—These are, of course, separate poems, scattered fruit of the Hesperides. See also the note on page 390.

'Absyrtus-like': an allusion, of course, to the story of Medea, who took her brother Absyrtus with her when she fled with Jason. Being nearly overtaken by her father, Medea murdered Absyrtus, and strewed the road with pieces of his body so that the pursuit might be stayed.

P. 46. Daniel.—This sonnet was prefaced to the second edition of Florio's Montaigne (1613), and is often ascribed to the translator; but the weight of criticism credits the authorship to Daniel. Mr. Locker-Lampson was tempted to write a couple of verses for the fly-leaf of the Rowfant Montaigne, which not only belonged to Shakespeare, but was also given by Pope to Gay and enjoyed by Johnson:

See note on previous page.

P. 47. Milton.—Milton's prose masterpiece was printed, in a modified form, by Mirabeau, under the title Sur la LibertÉ de la Presse, imitÉ de l'Anglais, de Milton.

P. 49. Leighton.—

P. 49. Hazlitt.—'Because they both wrote essays and were fond of the Elizabethans,' Mr. Augustine Birrell says, 'it became the fashion to link Hazlitt's name with Lamb's. Hazlitt suffered by the comparison.'

P. 50. Hunt.—The poet is Wordsworth and the lines 'Oh that my name' are found in 'Personal Talk'. See page 21.

P. 52. Carlyle.—In The Hero as Priest Carlyle wrote of Luther's written works: 'The dialect of these speculations is now grown obsolete for us; but one still reads them with a singular attraction. And indeed the mere grammatical diction is still legible enough; Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest; his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He flashes-out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humour too, nay, tender affection, nobleness, and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.'

P. 53. Macaulay.—'Macaulay is like a book in breeches.'—Sydney Smith.

P. 53. Maurice.—The first Ptolemy founded the famous Alexandrian Library which is supposed to have been partly destroyed by Christian fanatics in 391 A.D., the Arabs in 641 completing the work of destruction.

P. 57. Fuller.—'Fuller's language!' Coleridge writes: 'Grant me patience, Heaven! A tithe of his beauties would be sold cheap for a whole library of our classical writers, from Addison to Johnson and Junius inclusive. And Bishop Nicolson!—a painstaking old charwoman of the Antiquarian and Rubbish Concern! The venerable rust and dust of the whole firm are not worth an ounce of Fuller's earth!'

The rest of this essay will be found on page 79. The learned man referred to in the last paragraph is Erasmus.

P. 58. Browne.—Pineda in Monarchica Ecclesiastica mentions 1,040 authors. See the note above on Maurice.

P. 60. Addison.—'The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of loaves. On the day when Christ created that symbol, he caught a glimpse of printing. His miracle is this marvel. Behold a book. I will nourish with it five thousand souls—a million souls—all humanity. In the action of Christ bringing forth the loaves, there is Gutenberg bringing forth books. One sower heralds the other.... Gutenberg is for ever the auxiliary of life; he is the permanent fellow-workman in the great work of civilization. Nothing is done without him. He has marked the transition of the man-slave to the free man. Try and deprive civilization of him, you become Egypt.'—Victor Hugo on Shakespeare.

P. 61. De Quincey.—'The few shelves which would hold all the true classics extant might receive as many more of the like as there is any chance that the next two or three centuries could produce, without burthening the select and leisurely scholar with a sense of how much he had to read.'—C. Patmore. Principle in Art: William Barnes.

P. 63. Temple.—Sir William Temple's historic dispute with Wotton and Bentley, in which he had the assistance of Charles Boyle, afterwards Earl of Orrery, provoked Swift's Battle of the Books. Compare Boileau's La Lutrin.

P. 63. Swift.—'"The Battle of the Books" is the fancy of a lover of libraries.'—Leigh Hunt.

The royal library at St. James's alluded to was one of the nine privileged libraries which received copies of new books under the Copyright Act of Anne. The privilege passed to the British Museum in 1757, when George II made over the royal collection to the nation.

P. 65. Bacon.—Sir William Temple in his Essay on the Ancient and Modern Learning (pp. 59, 63, 110) concludes 'with a Saying of Alphonsus Sirnamed the Wise, King of Aragon: That among so many things as are by Men possessed or pursued in the Course of their Lives, all the rest are Bawbles, Besides Old Wood to Burn, Old Wine to Drink, Old Friends to Converse with, and Old Books to Read'.

P. 67. Goldsmith.—Horace Walpole wrote to the Rev. William Cole (Letter 2337; Oxford edition): 'There is a chapter in Voltaire that would cure anybody of being a great man even in his own eyes. It is the chapter in which a Chinese goes into a bookseller's shop, and marvels at not finding any of his own country's classics.'

P. 69. Hazlitt.—'William Hazlitt, I believe, has no books, except mine; but he has Shakespeare and Rousseau by heart.'—Leigh Hunt.

P. 71. Hazlitt.—Hazlitt wrote this essay in Florence, on his honeymoon, and it opens with a quotation from Sterne: 'And what of this new book, that the whole world make such a rout about?' Lord Byron had died in the previous year, 1824.

'Laws are not like women, the worse for being old.'—The Duke of Buckingham's speech in the House of Lords in Charles the Second's time (Hazlitt's note).

P. 72. Dudley.—Rogers is reported to have said, 'When a new book comes out I read an old one.'

P. 73. Macaulay.—Pyrgopolynices (Plautus: Miles Gloriosus); Thraso (Terence: Eunuch); Bobadil (Ben Jonson: Every Man in his Humour); Bessus (Beaumont and Fletcher: A King and no King); Pistol (The Merry Wives of Windsor); Parolles (All's Well that Ends Well); Nephelococcygia (Aristophanes: The Birds—the cuckoos' town in the clouds); Lilliput (Swift: Gulliver's Travels—the pygmies' country).

P. 77. Ascham.—Thomas Blundeville wrote some lines in praise of Roger Ascham's Latin grammar:—

This was published in 1561.

P. 78. Wither.—Bevis of Hampton, a hero of early mediaeval romance. The story has been published by the Early English Text Society.

Compare 'The common rabble of scribblers and blur-papers which nowadays stuff stationers' shops.'—Montaigne.

P. 79. Fuller.—The other portion of this essay will be found on page 57. Arius Montanus was the court chaplain of Philip II of Spain, and he personally superintended the printing of the Biblia Polyglotta (8 vols., 1569-73), the most famous of the books printed by Christophe Plantin. The printing office is one of the sights of Antwerp, whose council bought the property from Plantin's descendants in 1876 for £48,000.

Compare also: 'Evil books corrupt at once both our manners and our taste.'—Fielding.

P. 80. Addison.—Addison 'takes off the severity of this speculation' with an anecdote of an atheistical author who was sick unto death. A curate, to comfort him, said he did not believe any besides the author's particular friends or acquaintance had ever been at the pains of reading his book, or that anybody after his death would ever inquire after it. 'The dying Man had still so much the Frailty of an Author in him, as to be cut to the Heart with these Consolations; and without answering the good Man, asked his Friends about him (with a Peevishness that is natural to a sick Person) where they had picked up such a Blockhead?' It seems that the author recovered, 'and has since written two or three other Tracts with the same Spirit, and very luckily for his poor Soul with the same success.'

P. 83. Milton.—'For he [Pliny the Elder] read no book which he did not make extracts from. He used to say that "no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it."'—Pliny the Younger.

P. 84. Baxter.—'Richard, Richard, dost thou think we will let thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old knave. Thou hast written books enough to load a cart, and every book as full of sedition as an egg is full of meat.'—Judge Jeffreys' address at Baxter's trial.

P. 85. Athenian Mercury.—An 'answer to correspondents'—the question 'Whether 'tis lawful to read Romances?' being asked in The Athenian Mercury. This, the first popular periodical published in this country, was started in 1691, and written by John Dunton, R. Sault, and Samuel (the father of John) Wesley; the last number appeared in 1697, and Dunton collected into three volumes the most valuable questions and answers under the title of The Athenian Oracle.

Gray's wish was to be always lying on sofas, reading 'eternal new novels of CrÉbillon and Marivaux'.

P. 86. Cobbett.—Cobbett attacks Dr. Johnson, because in a pamphlet he urged war on the American colonies; Burke, because in another pamphlet he urged war on revolutionary France. 'The first war lost us America, the last cost us six hundred millions of money, and has loaded us with forty millions a year of taxes.'

P. 86. More.—Tom Hickathrift, who killed a giant at Tylney, Norfolk, with a cartwheel. He dates from the Conquest, and was made governor of Thanet.

P. 87. Austen.—Cecilia and Camilla, both by Mme. D'Arblay; Belinda, by Miss Edgeworth.

'She [Diana] says of Romance: "The young who avoid that region escape the title of Fool at the cost of a celestial crown."'-George Meredith. Diana of the Crossways.

P. 87. Herschel.—'The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.'—R. L. Stevenson.

P. 89. Burton.—'They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.'—Burton.

P. 90. Milton.—South said that Eikon Basilike was 'composed with such an unfailing majesty of diction, that it seems to have been written with a sceptre rather than a pen'.

Milton condemns the king for having 'so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself, or to his friends, or sense of his afflictions, or of that sad hour which was upon him, as immediately before his death to pop into the hand of that grave bishop [Juxon] who attended him, for a special relic of his saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god; and that in no serious book, but the vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia'.

P. 91. Dryden.—Hazlitt, who could not 'much relish Ben Jonson', describes him as 'a great borrower from the works of others, and a plagiarist even from nature; so little freedom is there in his imitations of her, and he appears to receive her bounty like an alms'. J. A. Symonds, stating that Jonson 'held the prose writers and poets of antiquity in solution in his spacious memory', points out that such looting on his part of classical treasuries of wit and wisdom was accounted no robbery in his age.

P. 91. Sheridan.—Churchill has the same thought in The Apology:

P. 93. Pattison.—Matthew Arnold, in the preface to Literature and Dogma (1873), points out that 'To read to good purpose we must read a great deal, and be content not to use a great deal of what we read. We shall never be content not to use the whole, or nearly the whole, of what we read, unless we read a great deal.'

P. 96. Mitford.—'Every abridgement of a good book is a stupid abridgement.'—Montaigne.

P. 98. Tennyson.—J. J. Jusserand, in the first annual Shakespeare lecture before the British Academy (July 5, 1911), used eloquent language which might be said to justify bibliographies:—'Books, like their authors, have their biography. They live their own lives. Some behave like honourable citizens of the world of thought, do good, propagate sound views, strengthen heart and courage, assuage, console, improve those men to whose hearths they have been invited. Others corrupt or debase, or else turn minds towards empty frivolities. In proportion to their fame, and to the degree of their perenniality, is the good or evil that they do from century to century, eternal benefactors of mankind or deathless malefactors. Posted on the road followed by humanity, they help or destroy the passers-by; they deserve gratitude eternal, or levy the toll of some of our life's blood, leaving us weaker; highwaymen or good Samaritans. Some make themselves heard at once and continue to be listened to for ever; others fill the ears for one or two generations, and then begin an endless sleep; or, on the contrary, long silent or misunderstood, they awake from their torpor, and astonished mankind discovers with surprise long-concealed treasures like those trodden upon by the unwary visitor of unexplored ruins.'

P. 99. Helps.—'My desire is ... that mine adversary had written a book.'—The Author of Job, ch. 31.

'Curll, Pope's victim and accomplice ... hit on one of those epoch-making ideas which are so simple when once they are conceived, so difficult, save for the loftiest genius, in their first conception. It occurred to him that, in a world governed by the law of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another's remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate Lives, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, of famous and notorious persons who had the ill-fortune to die during his lifetime.... His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.'—Sir W. Raleigh. Six Essays on Johnson.

It is related in The Percy Anecdotes that 'A gentleman calling on Archbishop Tillotson observed in his library one shelf of books of various forms and sizes, all richly bound, finely gilt and lettered. He inquired what favourite authors these were that had been so remarkably distinguished by his Grace. "These," said the Archbishop, "are my own personal friends; and what is more I have made them such (for they were avowedly my enemies), by the use I have made of those hints which their malice had suggested to me. From these I have received more profit than from the advice of my best and most cordial friends; and therefore you see I have rewarded them accordingly."'

P. 99. Disraeli.—Compare Emerson: 'There is properly no history, only biography; and Carlyle: 'History is the essence of innumerable biographies.'

'Those that write of men's lives,' says Montaigne, 'forasmuch as they amuse and busy themselves more about counsels than events, more about that which cometh from within than that which appeareth outward; they are fittest for me.'

P. 102. Glanvill.—An original Fellow of the Royal Society, and in many ways an interesting divine, probably best known in these days through Matthew Arnold's 'Scholar-Gypsy', whose story is told in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), from which this quotation and that on page 118 are made.

P. 103. Jonson.—The poem 'To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us' appeared in 1623.

P. 105. Jonson.—This was printed in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, 1623, on the page opposite the Droeshout portrait.

P. 105. Milton.—These lines were printed anonymously in the Second Folio Shakespeare, 1632, and, it is believed, this was Milton's first appearance as a poet.

P. 106. Dryden.—This was printed under the engraving in Tonson's folio edition of Paradise Lost (1688). Mr. F. A. Mumby, in The Romance of Bookselling, recalls that in Moseley's first edition of Milton's poems there was an atrocious portrait of the poet by William Marshall. Milton wrote four lines in Greek, which the artist, innocent of that language, gravely cut into the plate, lines that Dr. Masson has thus translated:

P. 106. Fletcher.—The subject of this poem was Giles Fletcher, the author of Christ's Victory and Triumph, 'equally beloved of the Muses and Graces.'

P. 106. Crashaw.—From The Flaming Heart. 'His masterpiece, one of the most astonishing things in English or any literature, comes without warning at the end of The Flaming Heart. For page after page the poet has been playing on some trifling conceit ... and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet's inspiration catches fire, and then rushes up into the heaven of poetry the marvellous rocket of song: "Live in these conquering leaves," &c. The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the colourlessness of the beginning and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw's work.'—Professor Saintsbury. History of Elizabethan Literature.

As an interesting example of Crashaw's conceits it may be noted that, when alluding to Mary Magdalene, he speaks of her eyes as 'Portable and compendious oceans.'

P. 107. Voltaire.—The philosopher also remarks, in the same article, that 'there is hardly a single philosophical or theological book in which heresies and impieties may not be found by misinterpreting, or adding to, or subtracting from, the sense'.

P. 112. Carlyle.—Abelard, born 1079, died 1142, is less known now as a famous teacher at the University of Paris than as the lover of HÉloise.

P. 113. Trapp and Browne.—When George I sent a present of some books, in November 1715, to the University of Cambridge, he sent at the same time a troop of horse to Oxford. This inspired Dr. Trapp and provoked the rejoinder from Sir William Browne.

P. 114. Earle.—Mr. A. S. West, in his edition of Earle's Microcosmographie; or a Piece of the World discovered; in Essayes and Characters, says: 'The critic supposed that omneis was the original form of the accusative plural of omnis, and that the forms omnes and omnis had taken its place. In order to adhere to the older spelling "he writes omneis at length". Quicquid is cited as an instance of pedantry because the ordinary man wrote the word as quidquid, and doubtless so pronounced it. The critic's gerund may be described as "inconformable" because it resists attraction—remains a gerund and does not become a gerundive. Or Earle may have had in view passages in which the gerund of transitive verbs with est govern an object.'

P. 115. Goldsmith.—'When Dr. Johnson is free to confess that he does not admire Gray's Elegy, and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the courage of their opinions?' Such is the question asked by James Payn in the Nineteenth Century (March 1880), his article being entitled 'Sham Admiration in Literature'. Mr. Payn noted that 'curiously enough, it is women who have the most courage in the expression of their literary opinions', instancing the authoress of Jane Eyre, who 'did not derive much pleasure from the perusal of the works of the other Jane [Austen]', and Harriet Martineau, who confessed to him that she could see no beauties in Tom Jones.

'There is no ignorance more shameful than to admit as true that which one does not understand: and there is no advantage so great as that of being set free from error.'—Xenophon. Memorabilia.

P. 118. Fielding.—'What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, The Alchemist, and Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned.... How charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is!'—S. T. Coleridge. Table Talk.

P. 123. Erasmus.—The translation is the work of Nathaniel Bailey, lexicographer and schoolmaster, who died in 1742. Desiderius and Erasmus are Latin and Greek for Gerhard 'the beloved', the name of the scholar's father.

P. 123. Colton.—Compare R. B. Sheridan's: 'Easy writing's curst hard reading.'

P. 124. Bacon.—Mr. A. S. Gaye, in the new Clarendon Press edition of the Essays, points out that on almost every page the reader will find quotations from the Bible and from the Greek and Latin classics, especially Tacitus, Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid, besides frequent allusions to biblical, classical, and mediaeval history. 'It is also remarkable that the quotations are more often than not inaccurate, not only in words but in sense.... Bacon furnished in himself an exception to the rule which he laid down in his Essay "Of Studies"; for though "reading" made him "a full man", "writing" did not make him "an exact man".'

P. 128. Boswell.—One of Mrs. Piozzi's anecdotes of Dr. Johnson is that he asked 'Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?' Johnson declared that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, 'speaking of it, I mean, as a book of entertainment.'

P. 132. Emerson.—Shakespeare's phrase: Taming of the Shrew, Act I, sc. i.

P. 133. Emerson.—O. W. Holmes applies the proverb to the Bible. 'What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.'

P. 135. Calverley.—See Tupper's lines on page 12. The allusions are, of course, to the creations of Bulwer-Lytton.

P. 138. Gibbon.—F. W. Robertson's opinion is worth recording: 'It is very surprising to find how little we retain of a book, how little we have really made our own, when we come to interrogate ourselves as to what account we can give of it, however we may seem to have mastered it by understanding it. Hundreds of books read once have passed as completely from us as if we had never read them; whereas the discipline of mind got by writing down, not copying, an abstract of a book which is worth the trouble, fixes it on the mind for years, and, besides, enables one to read other books with more attention and more profit.'

P. 140. Hamilton.—'This assumes that the book to be operated on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of perfection for most of us.'—Lord Morely.

P. 145. Addison.—Hor. Ars Poet. 1. 319:—

Butler, writing of 'A small poet' (Characters), says: 'There was one that lined a hat-case with a paper of Benlowe's poetry: Prynne bought it by chance, and put a new demicastor into it. The first time he wore it he felt a singing in his head, which within two days turned to a vertigo.' A 'demicastor' is a hat.

P. 147. Scott.—Mr. W. J. Courthope, in his Warton Lecture on English Poetry before the British Academy, read on October 25, 1911, observes that 'the best illustration of historic change in "romantic" temper is perhaps to be found in a comparison of Cervantes' account of the character of Don Quixote [see p. 155] with Walter Scott's representation of the romanticism of the hero of Waverley. Don Quixote's "fancy", says Cervantes, "grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it." ... "My intention," says Scott, "is not to follow the steps of the inimitable Cervantes in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but the more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic colouring."' Scott expatiates at length on Waverley's reading in the third chapter of his novel.

P. 148. Boswell.—Macaulay writes in his review of Southey's edition of The Pilgrim's Progress: 'Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of The Pilgrim's Progress. That work was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories.'

Boswell relates that Dr. Johnson 'had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end.'

P. 149. Chandos.—The authorship of Horae Subsecivae is not absolutely known, but it is attributed to James I's favourite courtier. It was published in 1620, the year before Chandos died.

P. 149. Waller.—'A library well chosen cannot be too extensive, but some there are who amass a great quantity of books, which they keep for show, and not for service. Of such persons, Louis XI of France aptly enough observed, that "they resembled hunch-backed people, who carried a great burden, which they never saw".'—W. Keddie. Cyclopaedia.

P. 153. Coleridge.—The most deadly thing that Coleridge wrote was when he classed the patrons of the circulating libraries as lower in the scale than that reading public nine-tenths of whose reading is confined to periodicals and 'Beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas [Anecdotes]'.

P. 153. Boswell.—Dr. Birkbeck Hill points out that Boswell alludes to this opinion in one of his letters, modestly adding: 'I am afraid I have not read books enough to be able to talk from them.' Johnson particularized Langton as talking from books, 'and Garrick would if he talked seriously.'

P. 154. S. Smith.—Bettinelli, a scholar and a Jesuit (1718-1808), who attacked the reputation of Dante and Petrarch.

Coventry Patmore wrote: 'If you want to shine as a diner-out, the best way is to know something which others do not know, and not to know many things which everybody knows. This takes much less reading, and is doubly effective, inasmuch as it makes you a really good, that is, an interested listener, as well as a talker.'—(On Obscure Books.)

P. 154. Colton.—'Methinks 'tis a pitiful piece of knowledge that can be learnt from an index and a poor ambition to be rich in the inventory of another's treasure.'—J. Glanvill. The Vanity of Dogmatizing.

P. 155. Cervantes.—A whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of Don Quixote's library. (Part i, chap, vi.) The books that, condemned by the priest, were passed into the housekeeper's hands and thence into the fire were:—Adventures of Esplandian; Amadis of Greece; Don Olivante de Laura; Florismarte of Hyrcania; The Knight Platir; The Knight of the Cross; Bernardo del Carpio; Roncesvalles; Palmerin de Oliva; Diana, called the Second, by Salmantino; The Shepherd of Iberia; The Nymphs of Henares; and The Curse of Jealousy. The priest, however, put by for further examination or determined to save: Amadis de Gaul; The Mirror of Chivalry, and 'all other books that shall be found treating of French matters'; Palmerin of England; Don Belianis; Tirante the White; Diana, of Montemayor, and its continuation by Gil Polo; Ten Books of the Fortune of Love; The Shepherd of Filida; The Treasure of Divers Poems (de Padilla); Book of Songs, by Lopez Maldonado; Galatea, by Cervantes; Araucana; Austriada; Monserrate; and the Tears of Angelica. The curious reader will find these volumes traced in the admirable notes in J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly's edition of Don Quixote in 'The World's Classics'. Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly says, devoured in his wandering youth, 'those folios of chivalrous adventures which he, and he alone, has saved from the iniquity of oblivion'. The early association of Barabbas and books will be noticed.

It is the translation by Charles Jervas, first published in 1742, which is here employed.

The Renowned Romance of Amadis of Gaul, by Vasco Lobeira, which was expressly condemned by Montaigne (see p. 144), was translated from the Spanish version of Garciodonez de Montalvo by Southey.

P. 159. Ruskin.—As Mr. Frederic Harrison points out, 'Books are no more education than laws are virtue; and, just as profligacy is easy within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found with a narrow education.'

P. 159. E. B. Browning.—This letter was written to 'Orion' Horne three years before Mrs. Browning's marriage in 1843, when she was thirty-seven. Compare Matthew Arnold in the preface to Literature and Dogma (1873): 'Nothing can be truer than what Butler says, that really, in general, no part of our time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading. Still, culture is indispensably necessary, and culture is reading; but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system.'

P. 161. Maurice.—This is better than Sydney Smith's attitude expressed in the question, 'Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?'

P. 162. Blackie.—'Reading is seeing by proxy—is learning indirectly through another man's faculties, instead of directly through one's own faculties; and such is the prevailing bias, that the indirect learning is thought preferable to the direct learning, and usurps the name of cultivation.'—Herbert Spencer. The Study of Sociology.

P. 163. Montaigne.—'Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.'—Lord Morley.

P. 163. Davies.—

P. 164. Hall.—'Hard students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppitations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill-coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives, and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies.'—R. Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy.

P. 165. Lytton.—'I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop, filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.'—O. W. Holmes. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table.

P. 169. Walpole.—Mr. Augustine Birrell in Obiter Dicta: The Office of Literature writes that the author's office is to make the reader happy:—

'Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce: toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books—these are our demands....

'Literature exists to please—to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures—and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest office.'

P. 169. Chaucer.—The book referred to is Ovid's Metamorphoses.

P. 169. Digby.—Sir Kenelm Digby's 'observations' are generally printed with Religio Medici, although in a letter to Sir T. Browne, who had written to him on the subject, he explained that the hastily set down notes did not merit the press, and would 'serve only for a private letter, or a familiar discourse with lady-auditors'.

To Sir Thomas Browne, 'a library,' says Coleridge, 'was a living world, and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood.'

P. 170. Boswell.—'Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, where as in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, ends, falls of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c. Plutarch therefore calls them secundas mensas et bellaria, the second courses and junkets, because they were usually read at noblemen's feasts.'—R. Burton. Anatomy.

P. 171. Rabelais.—

P. 171. Wilson.—This is often taken to be an antique. As a matter of fact, Mr. John Wilson, a London bookseller, stated to Mr. Austin Dobson that he wrote the lines as a motto for one of his second-hand catalogues. Wilson, Mr. Dobson tells us, was amused at the vogue the lines eventually obtained.

P. 172. Chaucer.—This is the earlier version, and to be preferred to the later, in which the passage ends:

wel unethe=scarcely any.

P. 175. Tickle.—'Written in a fit of the gout.'

'And laid the storm,' &c.: the advice given to Augustus by Athenodorus the Stoic philosopher.

See Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Act v, sc. i. Holofernes 'teaches boys the horn-book'.

P. 181. Richardson.—In his preface to Pamela Richardson claims to give 'practical examples worthy to be followed in the most critical and affecting cases by the modest virgin, the chaste bride, and the obliging wife'. The heroine becomes Mrs. B——, and Billy is the first-born. Locke's treatise was published in 1693, or forty-seven years before Richardson's novel, and the philosopher observes 'That most Children's Constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by Cockering and Tenderness'. 'Mr. B.' recommended better than he knew.

P. 181. Johnson ('At large in the library').—Ruskin gives the same advice. See p. 208.

P. 183. Gibbon.—The Autobiography, in Sir Archibald Alison's opinion, is 'the most perfect account of an eminent man's life, from his own hand, which exists in any language'.

P. 186. Landor.—See the poem to Wordsworth on p. 21.

P. 187. Hunt.—The friend referred to was Shelley.

P. 188. Dickens.—Of this passage, Forster says in the Life of Dickens, 'It is one of the many passages in Copperfield which are literally true.... Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into David Copperfield; the only change in the fiction being his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by means of which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books.'

Apropos of Defoe, Macaulay, who could not 'understand the mania of some people about Defoe', admitted that 'he certainly wrote an excellent book—the first part of Robinson Crusoe ... my delight before I was five years old'.

P. 189. Hazlitt.—It is reported (Dibdin relates in Bibliomania) that a certain man, of the name of Similis, who fought under the Emperor Hadrian, became so wearied and disgusted with the number of troublesome events which he met with in that mode of life, that he retired and devoted himself wholly to leisure and reading, and to meditations upon divine and human affairs, after the manner of Pythagoras. In this retirement, Similis was wont frequently to exclaim that 'now he began to live': at his death he desired the following inscription to be placed upon his tomb.

In a note it is stated that 'This story is related by Dion Cassius and from him told by Spizelius in his Infelix Literarius'.

P. 190. Donne.—This is the title given by Donne's editors, but is nonsense. Grosart explains that Pindar's instructress was Corinna the Theban, and that Lucan's 'help' is probably his helpmeet—Argentaria Polla, his wife who survived him.

P. 192. Dante.—This is the famous passage in Canto V referring to Paolo and Francesca.—(Cary's translation.)

P. 196. Moore.—

P. 198. More.—Warton thinks it probable that Sir Thomas More—'one of the best jokers of the age'—may have written this epigram, which he considers the first pointed epigram in our language. But by some the lines are credited to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who is memorable, among other things, for introducing the sonnet from Italy into England, a distinction which he shares with Wyatt.

P. 199. Moore.—'Mamurra was a dogmatic philosopher, who never doubted about anything, except who was his father; Bombastus, one of the names of the great scholar and quack Paracelsus. St. Jerome was scolded by an angel for reading Cicero, as Gratia tells the story in his Concordantia discordantium Canonum, and says, that for this reason bishops were not allowed to read the classics'.

P. 203. Scott.—The Roxburgh Club was inaugurated on the day of the sale of the Duke of Roxburgh's library in 1812 in order to print for members rare books or manuscripts. The club had numerous offspring, including the Bannatyne Club (see p. 270, and the note thereon). The Duke of Roxburgh's library, which was celebrated for its Caxtons, sold for £23,341.

P. 205. E. B. Browning.—

P. 207. Macaulay.—'Neither we nor divinity require much learning in women; Francis, Duke of Brittany, son to John V, when he was spoke unto for a marriage between him and Isabel, a daughter of Scotland, and some told him she was meanly brought up, and without any instruction of learning, answered he loved her the better for it, and that a woman was wise enough if she could but make a difference between the shirt and doublet of her husband's.'—Montaigne.

P. 208. Ruskin.—Compare Johnson's advice on page 181.

P. 209. Addison.—Virgil Aeneid, vii. 805:

The Virgil of Ogilby, or Ogilvy, originally a dancing-master, was published in 1649, and was the first complete English translation (Ogilby is mentioned by Pope, see page 313); Cassandra, Cleopatra, Astraea, The Grand Cyrus and Clelia were French romances translated into English. Sidney called his pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Sherlock's Discourse on Death passed through forty editions; The Fifteen Comforts, a translation of a French satirical work of the fifteenth century; Sir Richard Baker's Chronicle of the Kings of England from the time of the Romans' Government unto the Death of King James (1641); Mrs. Manley was tried for libelling the nobility in her Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atlantis (1707); the Fielding referred to is Beau Fielding, tried at the Old Bailey in 1706 for a bigamous marriage with the Duchess of Cleveland.

In Addison's time, Dr. Johnson wrote, 'in the female world, any acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be censured.'

P. 211. Addison.—Hor. 2 Ep. ii. 61:

The Vindication was the work of Charles Leslie, the non-juror; Pharamond, a romance dealing with the Frankish empire, by La CalprenÈde; Cassandra is wrong—the French work, also by La CalprenÈde, was Cassandre (the son of Antipater); All for Love, Dryden's play; Sophonisba, by Lee; The Innocent Adultery, the second name of Sotherne's The Fatal Marriage; Mithridates was by Lee, who also wrote The Rival Queens, or The Death of Alexander the Great, and Theodosius; Aureng-Zebe, Dryden's tragedy. (T. Arnold's Addison: Clarendon Press).

P. 213. Sheridan.—The first reference to a circulating library given in the Oxford English Dictionary is an advertisement, June 12, 1742—'Proposals for erecting a Public Circulating Library in London.' Joseph Knight, in the Oxford edition of Sheridan's Plays, annotates this passage fully. Dillingham, sending his Latin translation of Herbert's Porch to Sancroft, says: 'I know that if these should be once published, it would be too late then to prevent, if not to correct a fault; I therefore shall take it as a great kindness if you will please to put on your critical naile, and to give your impartial censure on these papers while they are yet in the tireing roome; and I shall endeavour to amend them with one great or more lesser blotts.' Sancroft replies: 'I greedily took your original in one hand, and your copy in the other, of which I had suffered one nayl (though it pretends not to be a critical one) to grow ever since you bespoke its service.'

Compare Herrick:—

Blonds=blond laces, produced from unbleached silk.

All the works mentioned have been identified. The Innocent Adultery is the alternative title of Sotherne's Fatal Marriage; The Whole Duty of Man was by Allestree, once Provost of Eton; the 'admirable Mrs. Chapone', an admirer of Richardson, and a contributor to the Rambler; 'Under the most repulsive exterior that any woman ever possessed she concealed very superior attainments and extensive knowledge'; Fordyce was Johnson's friend, and his sermons were specially addressed to young women.

P. 216. Chaucer.—holwe=hollow; courtepy=short upper coat of a coarse material; fithele=fiddle; sautrye=psaltery; hente=borrow; yaf=gave; scoleye=to attend school; sentence=sentiment; souninge in=conducing to.

P. 216. Brant.—Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, published in 1497, at Basle, was the first printed book that treated of contemporaneous events and living persons, instead of old German battles and French knights. Barclay's translation, Professor Max MÜller points out, 'was not made from the original but from Locher's Latin translation. It reproduces the matter, but not the marrow of the original satire ... in some parts his translation is an improvement on the original.' The Ship of Fools in its original form, and in numerous translations, had an enormous success, edition after edition being printed.

aparayle=apparatus.

P. 219. Young.—T—n=Tonson.

P. 220. Ferriar.—The first edition of this poem was issued as a quarto pamphlet in 1809. It is reprinted in the second volume of the second edition of Ferriar's Illustrations of Sterne, and other Essays, 1812, with some 140 additional lines.

'He, whom chief the laughing Muses own' is Aristophanes; the lines that follow refer to the fire of London. D—n=Dryden.

'On one of these occasions [a book-auction] a succession of valuable fragments of early English poetry brought prices so high and far beyond those of ordinary expensive books in the finest condition, that it seemed as if their imperfections were their merit; and the auctioneer, momentarily carried off with this feeling, when the high prices began to sink a little, remonstrated thus, "Going so low as thirty shillings, gentlemen,—this curious book—so low as thirty shillings—and quite imperfect!"'—J. H. Burton. The Book-Hunter.

Ferriar mentions incidentally most of the famous printers of olden time. Aldine editions were those printed by Aldo Manuzio and his family in Venice from 1490 to 1597. The Elzevir family became famous on account of its duodecimos.

P. 225. Beresford.—Bibliosophia; or Book-wisdom, by the Rev. J. Beresford, was written as 'a feeling remonstrance against the prose work, lately published by the Reverend T. F. Dibdin under the title of Bibliomania; or Book-madness', quoted in successive pages.

P. 226. d'Israeli.—The verse is imitated from the Latin of 'Henry Rantzau, a Danish gentleman, the founder of the great library at Copenhagen, whose days were dissolved in the pleasures of reading', who 'discovers his taste and ardour in the following elegant effusion'.

P. 227. d'Israeli.—'An allusion and pun which occasioned the French translator of the present work an unlucky blunder: puzzled no doubt by my facetiously, he translates "mettant comme on l'a trÈs judicieusement fait observer, l'entendement humain sous la clef". The book, and the author alluded to, quite escaped him.'—I. d'Israeli. Curiosities of Literature: The Bibliomania, note.

P. 228. Dibdin.—Magliabechi was born at Florence, October 29, 1633. 'He had never learned to read; and yet he was perpetually poring over the leaves of old books that were used in his master's shop. A bookseller, who lived in the neighbourhood, and who had often observed this, and knew the boy could not read, asked him one day "what he meant by staring so much on printed paper?" Magliabechi said that he did not know how it was, but that he loved it of all things. The consequence was that he was received, with tears of joy in his eyes, into the bookseller's shop; and hence rose, by a quick succession, into posts of literary honour, till he became librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany.'

P. 234. Longfellow.—Bayard Taylor, born 1825, died 1878. The allusion is to the famous monument of the Emperor Maximilian in the Franciscan church, or Hofkirche, at Innsbruck, where a kneeling figure of Maximilian is surrounded by statues of his contemporaries and ancestors. The emperor is buried actually at Wiener-Neustadt. Taylor published Prince Deukalion: a lyrical drama, in 1878.

P. 236. Browning.—Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis 'is apparently', Mrs. Orr says, without adding to our store of knowledge, 'the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book.'

P. 239. de Bury.—J. H. Burton, in The Book-Hunter, tells the following story:—It was Thomson, I believe, who used to cut the leaves with his snuffers. Perhaps an event in his early career may have soured him of the proprieties. It is said that he had an uncle, a clever active mechanic, who could do many things with his hands, and contemplated James's indolent, dreamy, 'feckless' character with impatient disgust. When the first of The Seasons—Winter it was, I believe—had been completed at press, Jamie thought, by a presentation copy, to triumph over his uncle's scepticism, and to propitiate his good opinion he had the book handsomely bound. The old man never looked inside, or asked what the book was about, but turning it round and round with his fingers in gratified admiration, exclaimed: 'Come, is that really our Jamie's doin' now? Weel, I never thought the cratur wad hae had the handicraft to do the like!'

P. 246. H. Coleridge.—See Roscoe's poem to his books on parting with them, p. 9.

P. 247. Dibdin.—'There are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces set to sale; who shall prohibit them? shall twenty licensers?'—Milton. Areopagitica.

P. 249. Burns.—Mr. Andrew Lang states that Burns saw a splendidly bound but sadly neglected copy of Shakespeare in the library of a nobleman in Edinburgh, and he wrote these lines on the ample margin of one of its pages, where they were found long after the poet's death.

P. 250. Parnell.—'It was supposed that a binding of Russian leather secured books against insects, but the contrary was recently demonstrated at Paris by two volumes pierced in every direction. The first bookbinder in Paris, Bozerian, told me he knew of no remedy except to steep the blank leaves in muriatic acid.'—Pinkerton's Recollections of Paris. Parnell's poem is translated from Theodore Beza.

'Smith was very comical about a remedy of Lady Holland's for the bookworms in the library at Holland House, having the books washed with some mercurial preparation. He said it was Sir Humphry Davy's opinion that the air would become charged with the mercury, and that the whole family would be salivated, adding, "I shall see Allen some day, with his tongue hanging out, speechless, and shall take the opportunity to stick a few principles into him."'—Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith, edited by W. Jerrold.

John Allen, M.D., was the librarian, described by Byron as 'the best informed and one of the ablest men I know—a perfect Magliabechi; a devourer, a heluo of books'. His scepticism earned him the title of 'Lady Holland's atheist'.

P. 252. King.—This is from J. Nichols's Collection of Poems, vol. iii, Bibliotheca, and is ascribed 'upon conjecture only' to Dr. W. King. See p. 311.

P. 253. d'Arblay.—Macaulay notes that Miss Burney 'describes this conversation as delightful; and, indeed, we cannot wonder that, with her literary tastes, she should be delighted at hearing in how magnificent a manner the greatest lady in the land encouraged literature'. The conversation took place at Windsor in December, 1785.

P. 255. Lamb.—Walter Pater says of Charles Lamb: 'He was a true "collector", delighting in the personal finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little accidents which attest previous ownership. Wither's Emblems, "that old book and quaint," long-desired, when he finds it at last, he values none the less because a child had coloured the plates with his paints.'

P. 256. Milton.—'The call for books was not in Milton's age what it is in the present. To read was not then a general amusement; neither traders, nor often gentlemen, thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women had not then aspired to literature nor was every house supplied with a closet of knowledge.'—Dr. Johnson.

P. 257. Browning.—The statue referred to is that of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, father of Cosimo de' Medici, in the Piazza San Lorenzo. The imaginative Sienese is Ademollo; the 'Frail one of the Flower' will be recognized as La Dame aux CamÉlias. Browning 'translates' the title-page of his 'find' thus:—

P. 260. Eliot.—

P. 263. Lewis.—This is a portion of an imitation of Horace. Ep. 20, Bk. i.

P. 265. Gay.—The authorship of this and the following poem cannot be decided definitely, but it is presumed that they were written by Gay and Pope respectively, and they have been so credited in the text.

P. 269. Lamb.—This appeared originally in The London Magazine, and was reprinted by Hone in The Every-Day Book. It was in Hone's Table Book that Lamb's extracts from the Elizabethan dramatists were published.

P. 269. Goldsmith.—See Bacon, on p. 65, and the note thereon.

P. 270. Scott.—Sir Walter was the first President of the Bannatyne Club, and he wrote these lines for the anniversary dinner in 1823. The club had been founded in the previous year with the object of printing works on the history and antiquities of Scotland. Bannatyne himself, whose name was given to the club, achieved immortality by copying out nearly all the ancient poetry of Scotland in 1568, at a time when the country was ravaged by plague, and the records of Scottish literature were also in danger of destruction. Of the other names mentioned here, Ritson had written a vegetarian book. The 'yeditur' was the name given by Lord Eldon to James Sibbald. 'Greysteel' was a romance that David Herd sought in vain, and it gave him his nickname.

P. 271. Maginn.—Sung at the Booksellers' Annual Dinner, Blackwall, June 7, 1840. Fraser, whose name lives in his magazine, died in the following year.

It is very tempting to give more passages about booksellers but I must refrain as it would be foreign to the purpose of this volume, and the subject has been recently treated with great fullness and greater ability by Mr. Frank A. Mumby in The Romance of Bookselling.

P. 273. de Bury.—'Would it not grieve a man of a good spirit to see Hobson finde more money in the tayles of 12 jades than a scholler in 200 bookes?'—The Pilgrimage to Parnassus. Hobson, the carrier, celebrated by Milton, is the hero of 'Hobson's choice'.

P. 274. Lamb.—'The motto I proposed for the [Edinburgh] Review was: Tenui Musam meditamur avena—"we cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal."'—Sydney Smith.

P. 274. Ruskin.—Mark Pattison said that nobody who respected himself could have less than 1,000 volumes, and that this number of octavo volumes could be stacked in a bookcase 13 feet by 10 feet and 6 inches deep. He complained that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary middle-class family is shamefully small, and he thought it monstrous that a man who is earning £1,000 a year should spend less than £1 a week on books. 'A shilling in the pound to be spent on books,' is Lord Morley's comment, 'by a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected.'

P. 276. Lamb.—Comberbatch was the name in which Coleridge enlisted in the Dragoons. The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., was by Thomas Amory. Leigh Hunt describes Buncle as 'a kind of innocent Henry VIII of private life'.

Charles Lamb, who at last grew tired of lending his books, threatened to chain Wordsworth's poems to his shelves, adding:—'For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it.'—Sir T. N. Talfourd.

P. 289. Shakespeare.—Also in a later scene of the same play:—'Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.'

P. 292. Wesley.—'Next morning he was still better: ... he desired to be drawn into the library, and placed by the central window, that he might look down upon the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should read to him, and when I asked from what book, he said—"Need you ask? There is but one."'—J. G. Lockhart. Life of Sir Walter Scott.

'It is our duty to live among books, especially to live by ONE BOOK, and a very old one.'—John Henry Newman in Tracts for the Times.

P. 296. De Vere.—Addison speaks of Horace and Pindar as showing, when confronted with the Psalms, 'an absurdity and confusion of style,' and 'a comparative poverty of imagination'.

Coleridge has left on record his opinion that, 'after reading Isaiah or St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me, and Milton himself scarcely tolerable.'

Milton's own words may be recalled: 'There are no songs comparable to the songs of Sion; no orations equal to those of the Prophets.'

P. 296. Swift.—Compare Cowper in Hope:—

Macaulay described the Bible as 'a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power'.

P. 297. Arnold.—Wordsworth's opinion was that the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Bible formed 'the great storehouse of enthusiastic and meditative imagination'.

P. 297. Faber.—Professor Huxley wrote in the Contemporary Review, in his famous article on 'The School Boards':—'Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso were once to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world.'

P. 299. Eliot.—Maggie Tulliver, during the home troubles caused by her father's bankruptcy, receives a present of books, among which is the Imitation of Christ.

P. 304. Gaskell.—The essay by Mrs. Gaskell, first published in Household Words in 1854, was suggested by an article by Victor Cousin on Madame de SablÉ in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Madame was a habitual guest at the HÔtel Rambouillet and friend of the Duchess de Longueville; her crowning accomplishment was the ability tenir un salon.

P. 311. Alcuin.—Born at York in 735, Alcuin was the adviser of Charlemagne, whose court, under the Englishman's direction became a centre of culture. After fifteen years of court life at Aix-la-Chapelle Alcuin retired to Tours, where he died in 804. His English name is given as Ealwhine.

The catalogue refers to the library of Egbert, Archbishop of York. The translator is D. McNicoll.

P. 311. King.—This is an extract from a poem of 1,500 lines preserved in vol. iii of Nichols's Poems, where it is said to be probably by Dr. W. King. It first appeared in 1712. See p. 252.

P. 313. Pope.—For the fate of the bonfire the reader is referred to the Dunciad itself. Pope explains that 'this library is divided into three parts; the first consists of those authors from whom he (the hero, i.e. Colley Cibber) stole, and whose works he mangled; the second, of such as fitted the shelves, or were gilded for show, or adorned with pictures; the third class our author calls solid learning, old Bodies of Divinity, old Commentaries, old English Printers, or old English Translations; all very voluminous, and fit to erect altars to Dulness'. Tibbald, or Theobald, wrote Shakespear Restored; Ogilby, poet and printer, is mentioned by Addison on p. 210; the Duchess of Newcastle was responsible for eight folios of poetical and philosophical works; Settle, the hero's brother Laureate 'for the city instead of the court'; Banks, his rival in tragedy; Broome, 'a serving man of Ben Jonson'; De Lyra or Harpsfield, whose five volumes of commentaries in folio were printed in 1472; Philemon Holland, 'the translator general of his age'; Cibber's Birthday Ode as Laureate.

William Caxton (1422-91), of course, printed, at Bruges, the first book printed in English—the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye—in 1474. His printing press in Westminster was set up two years later. Wynkyn de Worde, his servant and successor, started business on his own account in 1491.

P. 314. Sterne.—'Sterne has generally concealed the sources of his curious trains of investigation, and uncommon opinions, but in one instance he ventured to break through his restraint by mentioning Bouchet's Evening Conferences, among the treasures of Mr. Shandy's library.... I have great reason to believe that it was in the Skelton library some years ago, where I suspect Sterne found most of the authors of this class. I entertain little doubt, that from the perusal of this work, Sterne conceived the first precise idea of his Tristram, as far as anything can be called precise, in a desultory book, apparently written with great rapidity.'

This quotation is from Ferriar's Illustrations of Sterne, which was published in 1798. He seemed, Sir Walter Scott wrote, 'born to trace and detect the various mazes through which Sterne carried on his depredations upon ancient and dusty authors.' Ferriar wrote the following lines addressed to Sterne:—

P. 315. Scott.—The modern poet is Crabbe, and the context will be found on p. 340; Thalaba is the name of Southey's hero.

P. 319. Montaigne.—In another essay Montaigne tells us that his library for a country library could pass for a very fair one.

P. 320. Southey.—This extract is from Southey's Sir Thomas More; a book of colloquies between Southey himself, under the name of Montesinos, and the apparition of Sir T. More: who tells him that 'it is your lot, as it was mine, to live during one of the grand climacterics of the world', and that, 'I come to you, rather than to any other person, because you have been led to meditate upon the corresponding changes whereby your age and mine are distinguished, and because ... there are certain points of sympathy and resemblance which bring us into contact.' The colloquies are upon such subjects as the feudal and manufacturing systems, the Reformation, prospects of Europe, infidelity, trade.

Chartier was the French poet whose 'eternal glory' it was 'to have announced the mission of Jeanne d'Arc'.

'Here are God's conduits,' &c., is from the first of Donne's Satires.

P. 324. Barton.—The Rev. John Mitford (1781-1859) formed a large library at Benham, where he also devoted himself to gardening.

P. 325. Bale.—'I was called to London to wait upon the Duke of Norfolk, who having at my sole request bestowed the Arundelian Library on the Royal Society, sent to me to take charge of the books and remove them.... I procured for our Society, besides printed books, near 100 MSS., some in Greek, of great concernment. The printed books being of the oldest impressions are not the less valuable; I esteem them almost equal to MSS. Amongst them are most of the Fathers printed at Basle, before the Jesuits abused them with their expurgatory Indexes; there is a noble MS. of Vitruvius. Many of these books had been presented by Popes, Cardinals, and great persons, to the Earls of Arundel and Dukes of Norfolk; and the late magnificent Earl of Arundel bought a noble library in Germany, which is in this collection. I should not, for the honour I bear the family, have persuaded the Duke to part with these, had I not seen how negligent he was of them, suffering the priests and everybody to carry away and dispose of what they pleased, so that abundance of rare things are irrecoverably gone.'—J. Evelyn (Diary, August 29, 1678.)

P. 326. Whittier.—Sung at the opening of the library at Haverhill, Mass.

P. 334. Helps.—Pope's Essay on Man:

The other allusions are to Johnson, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

P. 337. Crabbe.—It is explained by Crabbe that while composing 'The Library' he 'was honoured with the notice and assisted by the advice of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: part of it was written in his presence, and the whole submitted to his judgement; receiving, in its progress, the benefit of his correction'. The poem was published in 1781.

P. 354. Saxe.—Aristophanes' The Clouds, ridiculing Socrates.

P. 355. Drummond.—Of Sir Thomas Bodley old Anthony Wood says: 'Though no writer, worth the remembrance, yet hath he been the greatest promoter of learning that hath yet appeared in our nation.'

It may be recalled that R. de Bury had a fine idea, although it did not fructify, to wit:—'We have for a long time held a rooted purpose in the inmost recesses of our mind, looking forward to a favourable time and divine aid, to found, in perpetual alms, and enrich with the necessary gifts, a certain Hall in the revered University of Oxford, the first nurse of all the liberal Arts; and further to enrich the same, when occupied by numerous scholars, with deposits of our books, so that the books themselves and every one of them may be made common as to use and study, not only to the scholars of the said Hall, but through them to all the students of the aforesaid University for ever.'

P. 357. Cowper.—'This ode,' Cowper states, 'is rendered without rhime, that it might more adequately represent the original, which, as Milton himself informs us, is of no certain measure. It may possibly for this reason disappoint the reader, though it cost the writer more labour than the translation of any other piece in the whole collection.'

P. 360. Cowley.—

P. 368. J. M.—It cannot escape observation that Bodley and his library has been a much more fruitful theme than the University of Cambridge. This is the only poem on the latter subject which I have been able to find; it is quoted in Edwards's Memoirs of Libraries. Leigh Hunt has related his experiences in the library of Trinity College 'when the keeper of it was from home'; see p. 279.

P. 368. Whitelocke.—The authorship of this fine testimony is attributed to Whitelocke, but I have not traced it, by J. K. Hoyt and Anna L. Ward.

---