University of Virginia Library

OLD BOOKS.

I LOVE old books. It is to get below the transitory
surface of the present, the alluvial stratum of literature,
to stand upon the primitive rock, the gray, and ancient
granite of the early world. It is to commune with the
Spirit of the Past, to roll back the universe through cycle
and epicycle. The haze of antiquity hangs over a collection
of old books, in which the shapes of the departed are
reflected, like the gigantic shadows on the Brocken. Reprints
have none of it—you lose the vital elixir in the
transmutation. Here lies great Hollingshead!—black-letter
edition of 1569 (so the colophon tells us), dog's-eared
with the weight of three centuries. Did William Cecil,
Lord Burleigh, ever bend his sagacious head over these
clear pages? Did Raleigh?—Bacon?—Essex?—Spenser?

Or did Elizabeth, with tears of pity, read the touching
story of Lady Jane Grey, here painted with such
minute fidelity, and turn again to marble when the death-warrant
was brought for her signature that was to consign
to the block, her kinswoman of Scotland—the lovely, royal,
Mary Stuart? Yonder “standard library edition” is a
faithful copy, but this book was cotemporary with Shakspeare;
this was extant before the Armada. This volume
was read, these identical leaves turned over, ere the first
spiral of tobacco smoke wound upward in the clear English
air, or Ireland was conscious of its chief national blessing
—the potato!

I trust it will not be considered pedantic if I aver I
love old books because of their quaintness in typography
and orthography. Who would like to see sweet, silvery
Spenser, or scholastic Burton (great finger-post of antiquity,
pointing to all manner of shady lanes and forgotten
by-paths of learning), shorn of their exuberance?
Who feel not, when reading these tawny pages of Tattlers
and Spectators (printed in Queen Anne's time) something
that recalls vividly Will's Coffee House, and taciturn Addison,
and great, little Alexander Pope, and the inexorable
satirist of St. Patrick's, and skeptical Bolingbroke, and
Richard Steele, hiding from a dirty bailiff in an obscure

room, to pen a paragraph—haply to pay for his dinner,
haply to be admired by all posterity.

Whatsoever belongs to Latin and Greek, interested me
most at an earlier period of life. As a boy, I looked up
to “large-handed Achilles,” and Livy's beautiful narrations,
with unfeigned delight. Later in youth, I found
new worlds in German literature, in Spanish, Italian; but
never affected much the French. As a man now, in this
autumnal season of life, I love best our mother tongue.

Poor Tom Churchyard composed these verses before
Shakspeare was born! Spenser's Fairy Queen was published
nineteen years after his death. Almost all we know
of English poetry (except Chaucer's) is limited to that
written between his time and ours. What was there before
that period to merit such encomiums? Surely it is
well to inquire. Poor Tom Churchyard!—

I love old books. Here lies a folio copy in three volumes,
of Congreve, a matchless specimen of typography;
every letter distinct and delicate, “and poured round all”
a broad, creamy margin of immaculate purity. What a
commentary upon the text! Licentious Congreve in the
vestments of chastity!—There is a sturdy quarto. Run
it over. Blackstone! with marginal pen and ink notes by
Aaron Burr. What is this underscored?

On the title-page is inscribed,
Aaron Burr
1797
The Blennerhassett conspiracy transpired nine years after,
in 1806. Did those little sentences suggest that, or was

the thought latent before? It seems to me the history
of Aaron Burr is written in that scratch of his pen.

Here, resting against Strangford's Camoens, is a Review
of the text of Milton, “by Dr. Zachary Pearce, Bp. of
Rochester.” So we are informed by an autograph in pale
ink, in Elia's clerkly hand. How carefully this book was
read by him! Not an error of the printer (and there are
many) but what is corrected; not a wrong point, comma,
or semicolon (and there are many) but what is amended.
Incomparable Elia! Gentle Charles Lamb! That book
is dearer to me than the most sumptuous edition of modern
days—even including mine own!

Methinks D'Israeli, in his Chapter on Prefaces, might
have noticed those two which stand, like a forlorn hope, in
front of yonder towering volumes. Sylvester is one—his
commentator wrote the other. “And who is Sylvester?”
Gentle reader (I take it you are a lady), doubtless you
have read Macaulay's Battle of Ivry? Du Bartas, a
French knight who fought under Henry of Navarre in that
battle, laid aside his sword, after the fray, to tell the tale
of Ivry with his pen. He also wrote “The Divine Week,”
both of which were translated by Joshua Sylvester, a
famous English poet, whose works were thought worthy
of encomiastic verses by Ben Jonson, Daniel, Davis of

Hereford, and many other eminent writers of the time of
King James. I. The Divine Week is the first rude sketch
of Paradise Lost. Yonder book was published when Milton
was thirteen years old, and printed in the very street
in which he lived.
forsooth! and the prefaces, full of touching appeals to a
posterity which, as yet, has scarcely recognized either poet
or commentator.

This little old Bible was in my grandfather's knapsack
at the battle of Bunker Hill. It looks as though it had
stood the brunt of the fight. Printed in 1741, by Thomas
Watkins, one of his Majesty's printers, to which is added
“a collection of Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, for
the use, edification and comfort of the saints, in publick
and private, especially in New England.” The Saints of
King George the Second were canonized by King George
the Third. Methinks I can see the dissolute soldiery landing
at Moulton's Point, with havoc in their eyes and curses
in their hearts, marching toward that redoubt, to be swept
down by the steady fire of the New England saints, who,
had they been as well provided with powder, as with bibles,
might have written the first and last chapter of the revolution
on the bloody page of Bunker Hill, June 17th,

1775. Beside it, clasped in a kind of reverential awe, is
“Nathaniel Morton's New England's Memorial, 1669!”
of Bradford and Winslow, and Capt. Miles Standish, as he
is always called, and the rest, touch us more nearly when
we know that book was handled by their compeers. Is it
not like rolling back the curtain of a great drama, to think
those pages were lifted from the first printing-press that
crossed the Atlantic?

“Sonnets, To Sundry Notes of Musicke, by Mr. William
Shakespeare,” in shattered sheepskin! What can
be said of Mr. William Shakspeare? If his commentators
(including Mr. Verplanck, the most learned, as
well as the most philosophical) had left any thing to be
said, that stripling volume might suggest there were some
things of Shakspeare which had not yet found their way
in modern editions. Perhaps my short-sightedness never
discovered them therein? Nevertheless, I have searched
diligently.

Red-letter title-pages! Rubrics of the past century!
Twelve volumes by Dr. Swift, Dr. Arbuthnot, Mr. Pope,
and Mr. Gay! What was young America doing when
these were being discussed in the boxes of Will's Coffee-House?
For these books saw the light three-quarters of

an age after “The Memorial of Nathaniel Morton, Secre-tary
to the Court for the Jurisdiction of New Plymouth.”
What was young America doing, while Pope was writing
the Dunciad? and the Mayflower (the ark of a new cove-nant)
had rotted to the keelson, perhaps an hundred years
before. Settling Georgia! Suffering from the Choctaws!
Receiving that distinguished metaphysician, Dr. George
Berkely, afterward Bishop of Cloyne! And Swift—great
political economist, amid the parturient throes of a new
world writes—“The Power of Time.”

I cannot help turning to this old volume of tracts by
the Lord Bishop of Cloyne, containing “Odes,” “Thoughts
on Tar Water,” “Essays to prevent the ruin of Great
Britain,” etc., to quote part of these prophetic lines on
“the prospect of planting arts and learning in America.”

I love old books. Those nine volumes of Tristram
Shandy, which stand in tarnished gold, like the slender
pipes of some Lilliputian organ, are a legend and a mystery.
Some thirty years since an old English gentleman came
to this country with a choice collection of curious books,
among which (it was darkly whispered) there were many
from Sterne's library. These were part of that collection,
(gift of the gifted C. L. E.) whose various dates indicate,
year after year, the progress of the work. Illustrated too
by Hogarth's own hand! Thus should kindred genius go
down in loving companionship to posterity. “Fragmenta
Aurea” of Sir John Suckling helps fill the niche, with
Cotton, Sedley, Dorset, Etherege, Halifax, and Dr. Donne.
Rare companions, mad wags, airy, pathetic, gay, tender,
witty, and ludicrous; jostling, pious John Selden, with his
mouth full of aphorisms.

sings Sir John; and his neighbors, lay and clerical,
respond—
Samuel Daniel clasps his brown wings below in mute
sympathy with the melancholy Cowley. “Samuel—Daniel,”
why should he not bear the names of two prophets?

I love old books. The yellow leaves spread out before
me as a ripened field, and I go along—gleaning—like
Ruth in the sunny fields of Bethlehem. Yet I would not
have too many. Large libraries, from the huge folios at
the base (grim Titans), rearing aloft, to the small volumes
on the upper shelves, a ponderous pyramid of lore, oppress
the brain. When I look round upon my shining cohorts—
the old imperial guard of English literature (with sundry

conscripts, promoted to the front ranks)—I feel, with
honest pride, how jealous I am that none appear unworthy
of such company. So is it with friends. We like a
small and choice collection. After these come books. A
friend is worth twenty libraries, yet I hate to lose one
book with whom I have been familiar many years. I
have not yet forgiven the Curate, Master Barber, and the
Housekeeper, for destroying
that choice little anthology of rare flowers.

New books (unbending vestals) require too much labor
in the wooing; and to go armed with an ivory spatula,
like a short, Roman sword, piercing one's way through
the spongy leaves of an uncut volume, is an abomination.
An old book opens generously; spreading out its arms, as
it were, “wi' a Highland welcome;” giving

Yet a young book, at times, is worth the wooing. I
have seen such, growing up under mine own eyes; which
reminds me of a friend of mine, who once dandled that
upon his knee which afterward became his wife.

I have an ancient manuscript—. But I forbear.

When I open an old volume, and hear the words of
wisdom from the lips of age; listening, as it were, to “a
voice crying from the ground,” methinks it is as the sound
of a midnight wind sighing through the branches of an
oak—a hoary centenarian! Ah, reader! keep to thy
books; especially old books! They are like the pool of
Bethesda, healing and comforting. In the words of quaint
Burton, I take leave of thee;